Throughout William Makepeace Thackeray’s professional life, he was plagued by explicit and implied comparisons with his great contemporary, Charles Dickens. Thackeray was born in 1811, Dickens a year later. By the mid-1830s, when the callow young Thackeray was knocking at the doors of literary London, Dickens was already in possession of the stage, the established star of the coming generation and very much the man to be measured against. As the two men aged, their relationship, cordial on the surface, would remain uneasy: they found it impossible to be friends. Thackeray, despite occasional spasms of confidence in himself and his way of writing, too often felt himself the inferior artist, while Dickens, though he never lost his position at the head of the pack, was uneasily aware of the challenge. As Thackeray was to claim late in their careers, “He [Dickens] knows that my books are a protest against his—that if one set are true, the oth ...

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