He did not know the
way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian
epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news. In
one of his delightful asides he imagines two little clerks commenting
erroneously on the appearance of Lady Kew or Sir Brian Newcome in the
Park, and says: "How should Jones and Brown, who are not, _vous
comprenez, du monde_, understand these mysteries?" But I think Thackeray
knew quite as little about Jones and Brown as they knew about Newcome
and Kew; his world was _le monde_. Hence he seemed to take it for
granted that the Victorian compromise would last; while Dickens (who
knew his Jones and Brown) had already guessed that it would not.
Thackeray did not realise that the Victorian platform was a moving
platform. To take but one instance, he was a Radical like Dickens; all
really representative Victorians, except perhaps Tennyson, were
Radicals. But he seems to have thought of all reform as simple and
straightforward and all of a piece; as if Catholic Emancipation, the New
Poor Law, Free Trade and the Factory Acts and Popular Education were all
parts of one almost self-evident evolution of enlightenment.
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