Why was he called Dobbin, except to make him ridiculous?
Why is he so shamefully ugly, so shy, so awkward?
Why was he the son of a grocer?
Thackeray in so depicting him was determined to run counter to the recognised taste of novel readers.

And then again there was the feeling of another great fault.

Let there be the virtuous in a novel and let there be the vicious, the dignified and the undignified, the sublime and the ridiculous,--only let the virtuous, the dignified, and the sublime be in the ascendant.

Edith Bellenden, and Lord Evandale, and Morton himself would be too stilted, were they not enlivened by Mause, and Cuddie, and Poundtext.

But here, in this novel, the vicious and the absurd have been made to be of more importance than the good and the noble.