ect in his first attempt to rise out
of a world of small literary contributions, into the more assured
position of the author of a work of importance. We are aware that the
monthly nurses of periodical literature did not at first smile on the
effort. The proprietors of magazines did not see their way to undertake
_Vanity Fair_, and the publishers are said to have generally looked shy
upon it. At last it was brought out in numbers,--twenty-four numbers
instead of twenty, as with those by Dickens,--under the guardian hands
of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans. This was completed in 1848, and then it
was that, at the age of thirty-seven, Thackeray first achieved for
himself a name and reputation through the country. Before this he had
been known at _Fraser's_ and at the _Punch_ office. He was known at the
Garrick Club, and had become individually popular among literary men in
London. He had made many fast friends, and had been, as it were, found
out by persons of distinction. But Jones, and Smith, and Robinson, in
Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, did not know him as they knew
Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Macaulay,--not as they knew Landseer, or
Stansfeld, or Turner; not as they knew Macready, Charles Kean, or Miss
Faucit. In that year, 1848, his name became common in the memoirs of the
time. On the 5th of June I find him dining with Macready, to meet Sir J.
Wilson, Panizzi, Landseer, and others. A few days afterwards Macready
dined with him. "Dined with Thackeray, met the Gordons, Kenyons,
Procters, Reeve, Villiers, Evans, Stansfeld, and saw Mrs. Sartoris and
S. C. Dance, White, H. Goldsmid, in the evening." Again; "Dined with
Forster, having called and taken up Brookfield, met Rintoul, Kenyon,
Procter, Kinglake, Alfred Tennyson, Thackeray." Macready was very
accurate in jotting down the names of those he entertained, who
entertained him, or were entertained with him. _Vanity Fair_ was coming
out, and Thackeray had become one of the personages in literary
society. In the January number of 1848 the _Edinburgh Review_ had an
article on Thackeray's works generally as they were then known. It
purports to combine the _Irish Sketch Book_, the _Journey from Cornhill
to Grand Cairo_, and _Vanity Fair_ as far as it had then gone; but it
does in truth deal chiefly with the literary merits of the latter. I
will quote a passage from the article, as proving in regard to
Thackeray's work an opinion which was well founded, and as telling