Page:The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray Vol.20.pdf/17

Rh what as a goad to the somewhat more slothful writer. It seems a little ironical to speak of Thackeray as slothful, when we are upon the nineteenth volume of his collected writings, and have three more to consider, but there is a sloth which masters one and a sloth which is native to the man but subject to a stronger will, and Thackeray, though slothful, felt the outward goad of circumstance as well as the inward prick of a literary conscience and that more subtle, more enduring influence which is the irrepressible breaking forth of the fountains of genius. If to these forces we add the superficial but still effective impulse of literary rivalry, we are not leaving Thackeray less human. We cannot say that A Christmas Carol was necessary to Mrs. Perkins's Ball, but it is quite evident that the four or five Christmas books with which Thackeray delighted his contemporaries were generated in an atmosphere which had already been prepared by Dickens.

Mrs. Perkins's Ball, a little pink glazed quarto volume, was published at Christmas, 1846. It is far enough away from A Christmas Carol, and so is Our Street, published in the same style the year following. It would seem as though after these two experiments, in which the fact of a Christmas publication was almost all they had in common with Dickens's ventures, that Thackeray struck upon a cleverer notion, for when at Christmas, 1848, he published Dr. Birch and his Young Friends, he showed himself in his own sphere, and yet with a Christmas audience clearly in mind. He was no longer avoiding the Dickens trail, but was striking out in a path of his own, and he pursued the way even more surely when he wrote, a few seasons later, The Ring and the Rose. These two books are not children's books in the paltry sense which attaches to the