However, it was not until Addison and Steele, in the "Spectator" essays, had shown such skill in drawing characters and depicting manners and customs that the time was ripe for the true novel to appear. For one of the chief duties of the novel is to criticize life, to furnish comment on the social conditions and tendencies of the day. Among the earliest and also the greatest of the English novelists, Fielding, whose work appeared about thirty years after the "Spectator," not only draws sturdy and truthful pictures of the life of his day, but also makes the reader see the true value of that life and estimate its good and its bad qualities. In the same way Dickens and Thackeray, not very long after, supplied unending amusement and fun for the world and at the same time did far more by making the nations sit up and think, pointing out with almost brutal clearness the need of unselfish action and the love of truth and simplicity. There is not a novel of high rank but contains more than meets the eye at first glance. It is the readiest means of putting a critical estimate of history, of life and society, directly before the world. NOVELS AND GENERAL FICTION Austen Balzac Beaconsfield Blackmore Borrow Brontë Bunyan Caine Cervantes Chateaubriand Cooper Daudet Defoe Dickens Doyle Dumas Fénelon Feuillet Fielding Gaskell Goldsmith Hugo Kingsley Le Sage Lever Lytton Macdonald Manzoni Meredith Reade Richardson Scott Shorthouse Sienkiewicz Stowe Thackeray Turgenieff Zola =The short story=, as distinct from a story that is short, is a nineteenth-century development in fiction. During the last hundred years the magazines grew so rapidly in numbers and circulation that they could not depend entirely on continued stories; they had to have tales that would be complete in one number, which could be read at one sitting. The demand brought the needed solution, a story which instead of length, with intricate action and complex studies of personality, supplied rapid action, brilliantly imaginative description, and a terse portrayal of character. Scenes, persons, and events were stamped immediately on the reader's mind; the effect desired by the writer was attained by force and bold decision. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to excel in this field, utilizing his critical powers as well as sheer inspiration to meet the situation.