That Dickens, on the other hand, had, any more than Bunyan, any _arrière-pensée_ at all should never for a moment be thought. His was an agonized soul shuddering at the tortures that, as a poor child, he had seen inflicted on the sufferings of non-comfortable humanity in the horrible days--for the under-dog!--of the last years of the reigns of the Georges and of the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria. All the horrors of insanitation, filth, child-labour, imprisonment for debt, the gallows for petty theft, the hulks and the rest he had himself witnessed or endured and at these horrors he lashed with the mad enthusiasm of a wolf that snaps at the insupportable whip of the trainer. His novels were probably--at least in the beginning--relatively nothing to him; if he could have found any other way he would have poured out his feelings as readily in that. But, happening on the novel and having a matchless command of English, he took the simple course of presenting you with villains all black, heroes all white and ringletted heroines all pink. He had to see--though that is to reverse the colours--the world in terms of Legrees, Uncle Toms, or Amelia Osbornes. That, in effect, was the beginning of the end, the novel becoming _the_ vehicle for the reform of abuses. And it is astonishing how short has been the career of the novel as an art compared with that of pottery-moulding, baking, weaving, or any other human avocation. You may say that it began with Richardson and ended--for the time being and as far as Anglo-Saxondom is concerned--with _Oliver Twist_, which, significantly enough, appeared in the first year of Victoria’s spacious reign. Richardson, that is to say, did have an artistic convention of sorts, did try in some way to render life, did deal almost exclusively in neither very moral nor very immoral personages, but there almost all attempts at rendering life or the normal almost came to an end. _The Vicar of Wakefield_, “noted for purity and optimism,” says my official guide to dates, was an obviously Richardsonian _pastiche_; Henry Mackenzie’s _Man of Feeling_ may be said to have exaggerated Richardson’s tearful sentimentality; and Smollett (“marked by coarseness and brutality”) whose first book was published eight years after the publication of _Pamela_ and in the same year as _Clarissa_, undoubtedly had a shot at rendering the same world that Richardson rendered. It is not as absurd as it may seem to say that _Pamela_ suggested _Roderick Random_; it certainly suggested _Madame Bovary_--and _Babbitt_!