During the time before the century reached its middle, in which Bulwer and Dickens were the most popular of novelists, while Thackeray was slowly making his way to the place that was properly his, the demand for novels, thoroughly implanted in the public by the success of Scott, was constantly met by work of all sorts, very little of which survives except in country circulating libraries and on the shelves of houses the ownership of which has not changed hands for some considerable time. Very little of it, indeed, much deserved to survive. Lockhart, an exceedingly judicious critic, thought it necessary not long after the appearance of _Vanity Fair_ to apologise for the apparent extravagance of the praise which he had given to his friend Theodore Hook by observing that, except Dickens, there was no novelist of the first class between the death of Scott and the rise of Thackeray himself. But about the time of that rise, and for a good many years after it, what may be called the third generation of the novelists of the century began to make its appearance, and, as has been partly observed above, to devote itself to a somewhat different description of work, which will be noticed in a future chapter.
The historical novel, though some of its very best representatives were still to make their appearance, ceased to occupy the first place in popular esteem; and the later varieties of the novel of more or less humorous adventure, whether in the rather commonplace form of Hook or in the highly individual and eccentric form of Dickens, also ceased to be much cultivated, save by Dickens himself and his direct imitators. The vogue set in for a novel of more or less ordinary life of the upper middle class, and this vogue lasted during the whole of the third quarter, if not of the second half, of the century, though about 1870 the historical novel revived, and, after some years of uncertain popular taste, seems in the last decade to have acquired almost as great popularity (with its companion study of purely fantastic adventure) as ever. Yet we must, before passing to other departments, and interrupting the account of fiction, notice not a few other writers of the time previous to 1850.