What he gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm.
But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--as much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.
With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite.

It is a testimony no doubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers' perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state of society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given it.

But Thackeray intended it and gave it.

His is a "state of society" always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth, early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his persons are persons who lived or might have lived.

And it is the discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.
Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it.