study of the
mid-century English novelists who were too early to be affected
by him to any perceptible degree.

CHAPTER VIII

DICKENS

By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had
conquered. Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful
gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we said, it was the
romance with a difference: the romance with its feet firmly
planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the
romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and
women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker.
In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern
realism along, because he handled his material more truthfully
than it had been handled before. And his great contemporary,
Jane Austen, with her strict adherence to the present and to her
own locale, threw all her influence in the same direction,
justifying Mr. Howell's assertion that she leads all English
novelists in that same truthful handling.

Moreover, that occult but imperative thing, the spirit of the
Time, was on the side of Realism: and all bend to its dictation.
Then, in the mid-century, Dickens and Thackeray, with George
Eliot a little later on their heels, and Trollope too, came to
give a deeper set to the current which was to flow in similar
channels for the remainder of the period. In brief, this is the
story, whatever modifications of the main current are to be
noted: the work of Bulwer and Disraeli, of Reade, Kingsley and
Collins.

A decade before Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame
and mighty influence. It was in the eighteen thirties that the
self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in
vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of
the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting
which means the fiction of manners and humors. All the gods had
prepared him for his destiny. Sympathy he had for the poor, the
oppressed, the physically and morally unfit, for he had suffered
in his own person, or in his imagination, for them all. His gift
of observation had been sharpened in the grim school of
necessity: he had learned to write by writing under the pressure
of newspaper needs. And he had in his blood, while still hardly
more than a lad, a feeling for idiomatic English which, so far
as it was not a boon straight from heaven, had been fostered
when the very young Charles had battened, as we saw, upon the
eight