Portraits of the Sixties Author:Justin McCarthy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III W. M. THACKEBAY We cannot think long over Charles Dickens and the place he held in English literature without finding our thoughts turn to his ... more »great contemporary and, according to common acceptation, his great rival, W. M. Thackeray. There was at one time a school of Thackeray and a school of Dickens. Thackeray was born about a year earlier than Dickens, but Dickens made his mark in the Sketches by Boz some four years before the publication of Thackeray's Paris Sketch Book. Thackeray was becoming known to readers as a brilliant and original writer of magazine articles before Dickens had made his sudden uprising to the front rank in literature. Dickens must have still been a reporter in the House of Commons press-gallery while Thackeray was beginning to make a certain reputation for himself among the readers of magazines. But did Thackeray achieve, even by his first published book, anything like the reputation instantaneously accomplished by Dickens on his first venture in the form of a volume? My own recollections of my boyish days make it clear to me that Dickens was recognized as a great author before those of us who lived far away from the centre of England's literary life had come to know anything about the rising genius of Thackeray. I can even remember that we were all in those days so completely possessed by our admiration for Dickensas to feel a kind of resentment when we read in London papers that a new man was coming to the front who threatened a possible rivalry with the author of Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby. I had the great good fortune at a later period of meeting both men several times in London and the honor of some slight acquaintanceship with each of them. My life holds no clearer memories than those which it treasures of Dickens and Thackeray...« less