Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs on the artist.

He puts his scene a little though not very far back; he borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though by no means outside of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is slightly exceptional.

But on the whole the problem of "reality, the whole reality, and nothing but reality" is faced and grasped and solved--with, of course, the addition to the "nothing but" of "except art." He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as in _Esmond_ (1852) and _The Virginians_ (1858-1859) actually, and in _Denis Duval_ prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety.
_Pendennis_ (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary experience; _The Newcomes_ (1854-1855) very little; _Philip_ (1861-1862) only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the best sense of the term--the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and relying on these only.
There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint position of Scott and Miss Austen.

They _overlap_ more than their great forerunners of the preceding generation.

Both wrote historical novels: it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that he was equally master of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost uneventful.