THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL At about the very middle of the nineteenth century--say from 1845 to 1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly towards the actual dividing line of 1850--there came upon the English novel a very remarkable wind of refreshment and new endeavour.

Thackeray and Dickens themselves are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this dividing line: many others yet come to join them.

A list of books written out just as they occur to the memory, and without any attempt to marshal them in strict chronological order, would show this beyond all reasonable possibility of gainsaying.

Thackeray's own best accomplished work from _Vanity Fair_ (1846) itself through _Pendennis_ (1849) and _Esmond_ (1852) to _The Newcomes_ (1854); the brilliant centre of Dickens's work in _David Copperfield_ (1850)--stand at the head and have been already noticed by anticipation or implication, while Lever had almost completed the first division of his work, which began with _Harry Lorrequer_ as early as the year of _Pickwick_.

But such books as _Yeast_ (1848), _Westward Ho!_ (1855); as _The Warden_ (1855); as _Jane Eyre_ (1847) and its too few successors; as _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1857); as _Mary Barton_ (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among the bones, such as is not common in literature.