ABSTRACT
Thackeray (1811–63) did not emerge as Dickens’s rival or peer until the publication of Vanity Fair (January 1847 – July 1848). A prolific reviewer and miscellaneous contributor to journals in his earlier years, he often commented on Dickens, usually with admiration. When he became a leading novelist he continued to write generously about him, though in private letters he was more candid about what he saw as Dickens’s defects, and was constantly measuring himself for size beside the acknowledged king of the profession. He preferred Dickens’s humour to his serious characterization or his social reformism. Predicting ‘a brilliant future’ for him, in July 1840, and noting that he showed no sign of flagging or sense of fatigue, he exclaimed: ‘Long mayest thou, O Boz! reign over thy comic kingdom… Mighty prince! at thy imperial feet, Titmarsh, humblest of thy servants, offers his vows of loyalty and his humble tribute of praise’ (‘A Pictorial Rhapsody’, Fraser’s Magazine, xxii, 113; Works, xiii, 342). See Charles Mauskopf, ‘Thackeray’s attitude towards Dickens’s writings’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, xxi (1966), 21–34. See also below, Nos. 12, 40, 74, 101.
