Thackeray does not give the same opportunities for the identification of
his scenes as Dickens. The elaboration with which the latter localizes
his characters, and the descriptive minutiæ with which he makes their
haunts no less memorable than themselves, are not to be found in the
works of the author of _Vanity Fair_. No faculty was stronger in
Dickens, or of more service to him, than his power of word-painting. He
reproduces the objects by which the persons he describes are surrounded
with a fidelity which would be tedious, if it were not relieved by the
humor which humanizes bricks, and imparts a grotesque sort of sensibility
to articles of furniture; and it is not easy to think of any of his
leading characters without being reminded of the neighborhoods in which
they played their parts.
Thackeray, on the contrary, is not topographical. The briefest mention
of a street suffices with him, and it is the character, not the locality,
which has permanence in the reader’s mind. Every feature of Becky Sharp
is remembered with a vividness which disassociates her with fiction; but
the situation of the little house in which the unfortunate Rawdon finally
discovers her duplicity, in the famous scene with the Marquis of Steyne,
escapes the memory. When the book is no longer fresh to him, the reader
may recollect that after her marriage she went to live in Mayfair, and
may picture to himself a small, fashionable dwelling in that aristocratic
neighbourhood; but he cannot remember that the author places it in Curzon
street, nor that the Sedleys lived in Russell Square, Philip in Old Parr
street, and Colonel Newcome in Fitzroy Square.
We have one example in Thackeray of the grotesquely humorous descriptive
power of which Dickens was a master. It hits at the absurd nomenclature
of modern London suburbs, where every box of a house has some
high-sounding name of the sort which ornaments the fiction of the
“Chambermaid’s Companion,” and it describes the neighbourhood into which
the Sedleys moved after their failure—“St. Adelaide Villa, Anna Maria
Road, West, where the houses look like baby houses; where the people
looking out of the first floor windows must infallibly, as you think, sit
with their feet in the parlors below; where the shrubs in the little
gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children’s
pinafores, little red socks, caps, etc. (_polyandria polygenia_); whence
you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women singing; and whither, of
an evening, you see city clerks plodding wearily.”
The fanciful supposition that persons in the upper stories must have
their legs on the lower floor is richly characteristic of the manner in
which Dickens would have indicated the smallness of the houses. It is a
touch of that kind of humour which distinguishes all the work of that
author, and which was one of his most serviceable resources; it gives
facial expression to inanimate objects, and, as we have said, it
individualizes the haunts of his characters no less than the characters
themselves. But it is so rare in Thackeray that the exhibition of it in
this fragment strikes us, as the lurid style of the earlier writings of
Lord Lytton would do if we were to find a passage from them interpolated
among the confiding garrulities of _Vanity Fair_.
It was not that Thackeray lacked the power of observation in the
direction of externals,—though he certainly did not possess it in the
same degree as Dickens—nor that his characters were airy visions to him,
requiring no other habitation than the chambers of his brain; they were
indeed flesh and blood to him, and Miss Thackeray has told a friend of
the writer’s, {5} how, in her walks with her father, he would point out
the very houses in which they lived. The difference was principally one
of method. Thackeray’s was the classic stage—a dais with a drapery of
green baize, before the time of scenery. Dickens’s was the modern stage,
with lime-lights, trap-doors, and elaborate “sets.”