The books of snobs: Thackeray, Dickens, and the class polemics of Victorian fiction

William Makepeace Thackeray's personal relationship with Charles Dickens was constantly breaking down, largely because the two novelists' very different social backgrounds gave them diametrically opposed views about the social status of their profession. Thackeray, the son of a wealthy nabob, had begun his career as a writer only after squandering an inheritance which should have ensured him the life of a gentleman. It was natural that he would think differently about many of the issues facing literary London than did Dickens, a man who, as the son of a not-quite-respectable pay clerk, owed his fortune and his place in society entirely to his pen. This dissertation argues that in their fiction of the late 1840s (Novels by Eminent Hands, Dombey and Son, Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and David Copperfield) Thackeray and Dickens used parody and what Jerome Meckier calls "parodic revaluation" to continue their acrimonious debate about the social status of the literary profession---and that they extended that debate to the status of literary genres. It unearths a complex system of class-coding which attributed certain forms and techniques to certain classes, and shows that what authors wrote could determine which social circles they were allowed to join and how far in their profession they were able to rise. Established modes, such as parody, were sometimes coded in several different ways, meaning an author who understood and accepted the class implications of a given form could still be misread, with serious social consequences, by someone for whom that form held other connotations. Emerging modes, such as realism, were subjects of conflict between writers of different classes, with each trying to claim the form as the peculiar province of his own social group and attempting to identify qualities in it which would support that claim. Thackeray's and Dickens's mutual revaluations eventually began a rift between gentlemanly and bohemian authors that remained an important part of the literary landscape for more than a decade; after 1850, what authors wrote could identify them as members not only of a particular class, but also of one of two parties that were often at open war.