But Thackeray said to himself as he looked out on the world, that
humanity was not made up of heroes and villains. He had never met with
the truly heroic, nor with the utterly depraved. It seemed to him that
human nature lay between the two extremes. In "Vanity Fair," in
"Pendennis" and in "The Newcomes" he resolved to describe man as he
was, with virtues and failings, with occasional glimpses of the noble,
and more common exhibitions of the mean and the little. Young men were
to appear in his pages with their weakness and selfishness; young girls
with their silliness and affectation. Thackeray, in a word, was to be
more realistic than his predecessors in fiction had dared to be. He was
to show his readers what they really were, and not what they would wish
to be.

But in Thackeray's novels is evident the difficulty of establishing any
generally accepted standard of realism. If this quality consists in
representing a character as speaking and acting just as we should
expect such a character to speak and act, Thackeray succeeded as
perhaps no novelist, except Fielding, had done before him. Becky Sharp,
Sir Pitt Crawley, Pendennis, Clive Newcome, all use such words as the
reader would expect from them. Their actions are the natural results of
the trains of thought into which the author has given us an insight.
When the old reprobate, Lord Steyne, discovers that Becky Sharp had
appropriated to herself the money which he had given her to restore
poor Miss Briggs' stolen property, he is not indignant at the
deception. The admiration of the noble rogue is only increased for the
woman who has shown herself to be possessed of a more astute roguery
than his own:--

"What an accomplished little devil it is!" thought he. "What a
splendid actress and manager! She had almost got a second supply