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A History of English Prose Fiction by Bayard Tuckerman
page 300 of 338 (88%)
Thackeray's delicate pencillings. After dwelling on the worldliness,
the hypocrisy, the self-seeking of the inmates of Queen's Crawley, how
softly but how terribly he scourges them! "These honest folks at the
Hall, whose simplicity and sweet rural purity surely show the advantage
of a country life over a town one." His praise is the severest cut of
all. "Dear Rebecca," "the dear creature," and we wince for Becky. "What
a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker's! How
tenderly we look at her faults, if she be a relative." "These money
transactions, these speculations in life and death--these silent
battles for reversionary spoil--make brothers very loving toward each
other in Vanity Fair."

Thackeray is the novelist whose works depend in the least degree on
narrative interest. The characters are so clearly drawn and so
interesting, the manner of Thackeray's writing is so uniformly
entertaining, that his books can always be opened at random and read
with pleasure. "Henry Esmond" is the only novel in which the plot is
carefully constructed. The others are a string of consecutive chapters,
each one of which possesses its individual interest.[208]

The novel of English life and manners includes many subdivisions. Among
the writings of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, Bulwer Lytton, Mr.
Anthony Trollope, and others, are novels which deal to a greater or
less extent with fashionable life. A number of novelists, principally
female, have confined their studies to the aristocratic classes.[209]
But the so called fashionable novel is most often the composition of
adventurers whose catch-penny productions aim at affording, to the
middle or lower ranks, information concerning the habits of the
aristocracy. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that
fashionable life in these novels is such as it might appear to an
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