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 other must be false.”

In this he was wrong, of course, for felt truth can be as powerful, or more so, than the intellectual variety. In any case the comparison is unfair and pointless, for the two authors were as unlike as chalk and cheese. But the final score must be decisive: Thackeray only produced one entirely successful novel, Vanity Fair, while Dickens never wrote a bad book; his was an extraordinary, almost superhuman achievement. There is a case to be made for Vanity Fairas the best English novel of