Page:The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray Vol.20.pdf/15

 INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

have referred more than once in these notes to the relation subsisting between Thackeray and Dickens. To the superficial eye, the two figures always seem contrasted: they were of the same generation, of the same race, of the same city; they both wrote fiction, and yet appeared to be at opposite poles. If one brought out a serial novel in green covers, the other followed with one in yellow covers; if one set the fashion of Christmas books, the other was prompt to trim his sails to the same breeze. On the other hand, the admirer of Thackeray is apt to resent any suggestion that his hero was in any way indebted to Dickens, and to be impatient of the kind of comparison which bids two authors stand back to back that critical friends may see which is the taller.

Certainly it is more interesting to take a survey of the two authors from a point which permits each to be triangulated by himself, but the relation between the two is not one of merely accidental contemporaneousness. Thackeray with his profound self-consciousness had also, no doubt, an uneasy surface consciousness which made him keep an eye pretty constantly on this dangerous and surely more prosperous rival. In the beginning of his career, when the pencil seemed a little readier to his hand than the pen, he even had the notion of playing up to the rising young author in