They were themselves of the Victorian Age. Each one might say _Pars fui_, if not _magna_. None therefore had a detached point of view, nor a long perspective. But though their vision was microscopic rather than telescopic, it was searching and enthusiastic, and the report it made was honest if not always dispassionate. It could hardly be otherwise for those who were alive and awake at a time when new information was creating new ideas, and these in turn were becoming dynamic in new movements, political, religious, educational, social. All these things were too tremendous and important to be taken otherwise than seriously. The dominant feeling was grave and earnest, as one of its interpreters has said:[72] “In the Victorian era, which we have found so neglectful of literary standards, Literature has been of greater social and ethical stimulus than ever before. * * * It throbs with a new sympathy for those who toil unceasingly in poverty, and a new bewilderment upon the realization that the world which is changing so rapidly is still so full of misery and hopelessness. * * * But, as the world went, the main impulse and the main characteristic of Victorian Literature became this great sense of pity for things as they are and of an imperious duty to make them better.” But the sense of pity was sometimes voiced with wit, and one of the sharpest weapons at the service of duty was the shaft of ridicule. With nothing to satirize, society would be a paradise. With no satirists, it would be rather a dull inferno. But it is our human world that is purgatorial. Since the purpose of our present study is to discover the proportion and nature of the satiric element in Victorian fiction, to note its relation to the rest of the work, and to reach some conclusion as to the total effect of its presence and use, it might aid in clearness to subjoin a table of names and dates of the novelists with whom we are concerned. _Name_ _Birth_ _Period of Publication_[73] _Death_ Peacock 1785 1816–1861 1866 Lytton 1803 1827–1873 1873 Disraeli 1804 1826–1880 1881 Gaskell 1810 1848–1865 1865 Thackeray 1811 1844–1862 1863 Dickens 1812 1837–1870 1870 Reade 1814 1853–1884 1884 Trollope 1815 1855–1880 1882 Brontë 1816 1847–1853 1855 Kingsley 1819 1848–1871 1875 Eliot 1819 1859–1876 1880 Meredith 1828 1859–1895 1909 Butler 1835 1872–1901 1902