Show I THACKERAY DICKENS TROLIi OPE Dickens was essentially a caricaturist caricatur-ist Trollope was an admirable portrait por-trait painter Thackeray was 8 clairvoyant clair-voyant Or t put it differently Dick nes depicted his fellow men a they were not Trollope presented them a they appeared to the world Thack eray read them through and through A a humorist pure and simple Dickens has m rival in English fiction and It is as a humorist that he will hold his place in the literature of i country I fear that we must admit I that his pathos is stagey and that his sketches of society are grossly exaggerated exag-gerated But the immortality of the Iliad is not more assured than that of Pickwick In this triumvirate Dickens Trol I lope Thackeray would assign a very prominent place to the author of Framley Parsonage He was himself him-self a typical Englishman bluff i hearty straightforward passionately fond o field sports yet at the same time a thorough man of business and a thorough Londoner He was Intimately I mately conversant with the life and haunts of the upper and upper middle II classes and he had a very considerable knowledge of parliamentary life and parliamentary men Also he made an exhaustive and affectionate study of the British parson till Anthony Trol lope took him in hand was an unexplored unex-plored field of research notwithstanding notwithstand-ing that Parson Adams and Dr Primrose Prim-rose are dear to us Now the British parson plays i very important part in English national life especially in country parishes and provincial towns and until the publication of Barches ter Towers he had been treated by our novelists as a mere lay figure But in Anthony Trollopes hands he became one of the most lifelike characters char-acters in fiction The meek domestic chaplain the starving curate the hunting rector the courtly archdeacon the henpecked bishop and a hundred others throng thick and fast upon our memory The late Amelia B Edwards Ed-wards in the Contemporary Review |