David Copperfield and Pendennis in Prospective Review

Without implying any comparison of merit, it is certain that the same turn of mind which placed Homer among minstrels, Shakespeare among playwrights, and Scott among the writers of three-volume novels, has led Dickens and Thackeray to employ themselves in writing serial tales. In all, the predominant tendency is to exhibit an endless variety of men and women with all their environments about them, and in the stir of complicated action;—to exhibit them, not by abstract description, and not in masses, but by giving their very words and gestures as used in practical life, and therefore necessarily to present them as individuals any one of whom might have been made the center of the infinite universe around.