Who Was the Imitator,--Dickens or Thackeray?

— Was it mere coincidence? Was it the result of unconscious imitation ? Was it the influence of what the Germans call the Zeitgeist ? Was it intentional on the part of one or the other ? These questions are suggested by two books which first appeared as serials, starting at about the same time, and but for the illness of one author would have been concluded at about the same date. The authors are William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens. The books are Pendennis and David Copperfield.

Of course the first step in the inquiry is to point out the similarity. These books are the histories of two young men of the upper middle class. They start from childhood, and go on to manhood. Copperfield is told autobiographically, Pendennis in the third person ; but this is a very slight difference, since Arthur’s moods and fancies are depicted with as great freedom as the confidences of David are given. In fact, with a very little change of phrasing either serial might have been written in the manner of the other, at least so far as their two heroes are concerned. Both begin life in a country home, both find their career in London life. Both are half-orphans, and their fathers play little or no part in the management of the children. Pendennis is influenced largely by his uncle, Copperfield by his aunt. Both have their early love-affairs, but each finds the true partaker of his heart at the close of the story. While Pendennis has his passion for the Fotheringay, and then for Blanche Amory, but finally discovers that Laura Bell is really dear to him, David marries Dora only to find her unfitted for any real companionship, and turns to Agnes at the last. Laura and Agnes are both interested in the heroes, but guard the secret of their preference. Each receives the confidences of the man she is in love with, — confidences poured out in all the unconsciousness of masculine selfishness and preoccupation.

If the novels are alike in their love-story, they are alike also in their presentment of friendship. Each hero derived two friends from school or college days, — the elder a mentor, the younger a foil. Stecrforth and Traddles are to Copperfield what Warrington and Harry Foker are to Pendennis. The characters are as diverse as can be well imatnued, but their relative distance, attitude, and grouping are much the same.

The comic element in both stories is founded on the same type of impecunious conviviality. Costigan is the fellow of Micawber, — an Irish Micawber as Micawber is an English Costigan. The villainous element is represented in both by two valets, Mr. James Morgan and Littimer the imperturbable ; also by Amory in the one, and Uriah Heep in the other.

Both Arthur and David make their way by literary success, after a nominal apprenticeship to the law.

But one of the most striking features, and that which first arrested my attention, is the similarity in the two episodes of Steerforth and little Emily, and Pendennis and Fanny Bolton. Each is the case of a young man in a gentleman’s rank in life attracted by the beauty of a girl of a lower order. The one yields to the temptation and ruins his victim ; the other resists, and while he is temporarily weak is not wicked. As I reread the two situations side by side, it seemed impossible not to feel that the treatment of the one was advisedly based on the treatment of the other, and that here was the keynote of the likeness of the novels. In both stories these portions are episodical ; that is, they could be cut out without impairing the continuity of the fiction, though they are most skillfully interwoven into the fabric. Each has its implied moral. Steerforth should have kept away from the girl who attracted him, or else have married her. He is dramatically drowned in retributive justice, and melodramatically Ham Peggotty sacrifices his own life to save him. Arthur, on the other hand, after he has quite conquered his passion for Fanny, is deeply stirred by a strong impulse of generous remorse for having touched Fanny’s heart, and angry at what he feels to be the gross injustice of his mother and Laura. He is on the point of rushing back to London and marrying her instantly, when be is restrained by Warrington’s story of his own unfortunate marriage. Dickens looks at the matter from the popular and democratic side, Thackeray from the aristocratic and society point of view ; he feels that by the canon of noblesse oblige the prince of Fairoaks should respect the innocence of the porter’s daughter, yet if it compelled him to make her his partner for life, it would condemn him to misery should she persist in misplacing her aspirates and eating peas with her knife. Thackeray understood, probably far better than Dickens ever did, that these vulgarisms in the British woman, albeit slight in themselves, are the signs and concomitants of a coarseness of fibre and an incapacity of culture. Whatever may be the case now, when Thackeray wrote, the distinctions between class and class in British society were almost as marked as the stratifications of geology, and would suffer no mixing.

There is a fact which bears upon this. The incident of Fanny Bolton and all that part of the story which turns upon it belong to the portion of Pendennis which appeared after the illness which Thackeray underwent while writing it. There is hardly a doubt, from various allusions, that it was written after convalescence. By that time Dickens had put forth his chapters in which the story of little Emily is told, and in all probability Thackeray had read them. My theory is that Thackeray seized the idea of recasting the whole situation on what he considered a truer and fairer model. Whether the entire novel was intended as a rival to that of Dickens, worked out with a difference, yet on the same ground plan, — even as two architects might each design a cathedral, eager to emulate, but careful not to copy, — it is impossible now to say.

Another explanation has been already suggested, namely, that of the Zeitgeist, — that the impulse dominating these two stories was in the air, so to speak, of the times. There is no question but that there was borne into the English mind at that period a strong tidal movement toward better views of life. The accession of Victoria, a maiden queen, her happy marriage, the purity of her court, the religious awakening of the Oxford Revival, the political emancipation following on the Reform Bill, — all combined to lift the tone of English social life for a season. The reprobates who figure in Thackeray’s pages are the men of a bygone age, the Steynes and Colchicums of the regency and reign of George IV.

Dickens, while always perfectly clean, did not rise to the full conception of the new order. His is purely an outside view of the course of Steerforth, modeled on the stage tradition of the dissolute patrician and the wronged plebeian maiden. On the other band, the portrait of Pendennis in this affair, his vanity and his principle contending, is a work of far higher art ; but it is higher art because built Upon a foundation of deeper insight into social problems, of juster judgment and a manlier ethical standard. Therefore, my view is that, so far as one story is a following of the other, in no sense can it be called an imitation.

Another kind of evidence is to be found in the fact that the variations and contrasts strike one as express rather than incidental. They are such as would suggest themselves to writers aware that they were treading in the same path, and therefore sedulous not to step in the footprints of each other. The illustration of this is found in the two very marked pairs of Helen Pendennis and Laura Bell in the one story, and Mrs. Steerforth and Rosa Dartle in the other. There are the same relations toward an only and petted son, the same situation of mistress and companion, the same feeling on the part of the dependent as to the son’s conduct toward his mother. But while the two run almost absolutely parallel, the one is in the light and the other in the shade ; or rather, one may say that the two studies of the same subject are made with the manifest intent to offer opposed conceptions. Take two historical portraits of Mary Queen of Scots, of Oliver Cromwell, or of the first Napoleon, such as one may easily find, and the differences will hardly be greater. One cannot help feeling that the purpose of the one writer was to reverse the judgment of the other. Especially does this seem true of Rosa Dartle and Laura Bell, both in the same state of dependence, both clear-sighted and watchful observers of the bearing of mother and son ; and yet one the most vicious and odious of vixens, and the other the truly lovely girl whom: Arthur feels himself hardly worthy to mate with. The contrast is one obtained in either case by artistic power ; but as Rosa is wholly unnecessary to the unfolding of the story, and Mrs. Steerforth hardly less so, the thought will occur, Why are they brought in at all, unless for a special purpose ?

The question then arises, Who was the follower and who the followed ? I think that without question the follower was Thackeray. Dickens made his reputation early, before any sense of rivalry could have arisen, — that feeling which makes a man say, in looking at another’s work, “ I could do that better than he.” Thackeray was a skillful imitator. Passages in his Esmond and Virginians are masterly in their reproduction of old styles. No one else has so succeeded in presenting a Frenchman’s English, its Gallic idioms literally rendered in English words. He did not hesitate at following Disraeli in introducing the Marquis of Hertford, Theodore Hook, and Croker, and his portraits are felt to be equally good likenesses. Dickens, on the other hand, drew from what he saw from street to street and shop to shop, from his own home circle, and ever with the strong instinct of caricature, so that he felt unwilling to risk his reputation as a painter of portraits, but sought to be a composer of scenes so ideally amusing as to make one overlook the exaggeration of the art. Dickens never distrusted himself, Thackeray often did.

If then there was a designed attempt at comparison, it was on the part of Thackeray, the one whom I consider far the greater artist, and personally the more admirable man. There was no plagiarism, no attempt to win credit by adopting another’s ideas. It was simply the conceded right of rowing over the same course, of sailing in the same regatta, of playing at the same chessboard. Perhaps this last metaphor may express what was the real effort. Each man has his own pieces and moves them in his own way, but of necessity the white and the red have the same aspect and semblance ; their power depends upon the way in which they are handled. A pawn has a pawn’s capacity, but it may become a queen. Let the chessplaying reader work out this illustration to suit himself.