Its state may or may not have advanced in grace _pari passu_ with the advance in effort and in dignity: but this later advance is at least there.
Fielding himself took novel-writing by no means lightly, and Richardson still less so: but imagine either, imagine Scott or even Miss Austen, going through the preliminary processes which seemed necessary, in different ways, to Charles Reade and to Mary Ann Evans! In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all: and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him.
Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly _orageuse_, but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in _The Three Clerks_ (1858) and _The Small House at Allington_ (1864), attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist.

For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought.

But he made his mark first with _The Warden_ (1855), and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel _Barchester Towers_ (1857).

When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had "come to his own" for nearly ten.

_The Warden_ might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray.
An "abuse"-- the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men--is its main avowed subject.