ABSTRACT
On the threshold of ‘ Vanity Fair’ the attention of the student is arrested by a work not so remarkable in itself as in its subject and the time selected for its publication. It is a collection of parodies, and bore the title of ‘ Punch’s Prize Novelists.’ These sketches have received all the praise which it is possible to bestow on this species of composition. They have been called the best of parodies, and where there were no serious competitors it was easy for a man of Thackeray’s eminence to distance what competition there was, but they appeared simultaneously with the production of his own bid for success. They are characterized by little of the rudeness of the earlier ‘ Epistle to the Literati,’ but he was engaged in satirizing his great contemporaries at the moment when he was clamouring to be admitted of their company. Mr. Arnold combined the functions of poet and critic, and a serious estimate of Tennyson or Browning would have been welcome from his pen, but he never could be induced to refer, except in the conventional language of compliment, to any original writer of his time. This was, perhaps, to err on the other side ; but Byron’s references to “ Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey,” and Shelley’s ‘ Peter Bell the Third,’ are blots upon their fame. The one /however, was but an occasional burst of irritation, the other a solitary lapse. But that Thackeray should sit down whenever he was tired of ‘ Vanity Fair,’ to laugh at the other travellers who had brought back different accounts of that city, forms an instructive commentary on his character.
