Victorian gossip: The rivalry between Dickens and W.M. Thackeray

Most Victorian readers would have agreed that Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray were the supreme male novelists of the mid-century. Some would have gone so far as to agree with Jane Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle’s wife) that Thackeray ‘beats Dickens out of the world’. And, although Dickens, even in their lifetimes, outsold Thackeray by as much as five to one, Thackeray got a more thoughtful respect from the critics than Dickens. He received his fair share of personal criticism and insult (e.g. that in his later years he was a ‘mountain of blubber’), but no-one ever accused him, or his works, of being ‘low’.

The writers were polite about and to each other. And sometimes more. Dickens actually saved Thackeray’s life in 1849, when his rival succumbed to the cholera epidemic sweeping through London. Dickens sent his friend John Elliotson, the best doctor in London, to treat Thackeray. He dedicated his interrupted serial in progress, Pendennis, to Elliotson (‘I never should have risen, but for your constant watchfulness and skill’). Indirectly it was Dickens he was thanking.

Dickens delivered, a week or so after Thackeray’s death, a bittersweet obituary comment in the Cornhill: ‘We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of under-valuing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust. But, when we fell upon these topics, it was never very gravely, and I have a lively image of him in my mind, twisting both his hands in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to make an end of the discussion.’

Enjoy Thackeray’s versatile genius with our collection of incidental pieces and cartoons, A Roundabout Manner: Sketches of Life by W. M. Thackeray, with an introduction by John Sutherland.

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