David Copperfield and Pendennis: Answering Back

In early January 1848, Thackeray wrote a letter to Dickens (which has not survived) praising Dombey and Son, then nearing its completion in serial form. Dickens responded warmly on 9 January, saying how delighted and touched he was by the “generous letter.” But he went on to press a broader issue, saying “I am always possessed with the hope of leaving the position of literary men in England, something better and more independent than I found it” (Letters 5: 227). It is a somewhat stuffy declaration, and Dickens tries to soften its tone by describing it as “a wild and egotistical fancy.” None the less, he turns to what had prompted the avowal, the set of parodies of contemporary writers which Thackeray had produced from April 1847 onwards under the title “Punch’s Prize Novelists.” Thackeray’s targets in these pieces had included Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli, but seemingly on the advice of the publishers Bradbury and Evans he had held back from including a parody of Dickens.¹ Adverting to this in his letter, Dickens plays along, jocularly regretting “the absurdity and injustice” of being omitted from the series. Undeterred though, he also presses his point, insisting reproachfully that he does “not admire the design” of the parodies, and describing Thackeray’s “depreciating or vulgarizing” of fellow writers as harmful to the “honour and dignity” of “our calling.”

For all the seriousness of Dickens’s insistence that literature is a calling, rather than simply a trade or even a profession, his protest has a personal edge, for in earlier Punch series which Thackeray had produced between February 1846 and February 1847 on his favorite subject, “Snobs,” several sharp pricks in the essay “On Literary Snobs” had been clearly directed at him. In it Thackeray maintains, with heavy irony, “above all, I never knew a man of letters ashamed of his profession;” and he caps this with the very pointed protest that some writers,

are such favourites with the public, that they are continually obliged to have their pictures taken and published; and one or two could be pointed out, of whom the nation insists upon having a fresh portrait every year. Nothing can be more gratifying than this proof of the affectionate regard with which the people has for its instructors

(The Book of Snobs; 84; ch. 16).

Thackeray had praised the famous portrait of Dickens by Daniel Maclise (1806–70), done in 1839 and engraved for the frontispiece to Nicholas Nickleby but he clearly felt it was a bit much when this was followed by a marble bust by Angus Fletcher later in the year, a profile portrait by Richard James Lane within a year or so, a portrait by the American artist Francis Alexander and a marble bust by Henry Dexter in 1842, and then a miniature portrait on ivory by Margaret Gillies, engraved for A New Spirit of the Age in 1843.² Incorrigibly, in the “Prefatory Remarks” to the collection of the Punch essays in book form which appeared later in 1848, Thackeray, who associated the social conscience novel with sham sentiments, would continue to sneer pointedly, with Dickens the social reformer in mind, at those with a sense of “a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy” (The Book of Snobs 12).

With the “Snobs” series Thackeray had got under Dickens’s skin and the tension went deep for it had impugned what he saw as his literary raison d’être. Seven months earlier than Thackeray’s letter to Dickens praising Dombey and Son, back in May 1847, Forster, had been so irritated, both by caricatures Thackeray had done of himself and by the parodies, that he had remarked to Tom Taylor, like Thackeray a writer for Punch, that Thackeray was “false as hell” (L. P. P. 2: 295). Forster probably knew full well that this was likely to be reported (though in a letter to Thackeray he later denied any memory of having used the words). When Thackeray did hear of it, he refused to shake Forster’s hand, and it was Dickens who had had to patch things up...