ABSTRACT
Thackeray and Edmund Yates were both members of the Garrick Club. In 1858 Yates was appointed editor of Town Talk, a new venture of Maxwell the publisher; and having written a pen-and-ink sketch of Dickens, which was a great success, he followed on with a portrait of Thackeray. Anyway, Thackeray took the strange step of sending the correspondence to committee of the Garrick Club. Yates protested that the committee was incompetent to enter into the matter, since there was no mention of Club in the article; but objection was overruled. Dr. Cookesley, who attended Thackeray professionally, formed a strong personal liking for him, while he appears to have regarded Dickens as wanting in gentlemanly consideration for the feelings of others. Thackeray, he declared, was neither cynic nor pessimist, but naturally generous-minded, kind-hearted man, whom he frequently dubbed ‘the gentle giant’; while Dickens, for all his pathos and sentimentality in print, was an infinitely harder, more commercially minded, and selfish, character.
