Life & Wisdom Quote by George Saintsbury

Canon-building is always sold as neutral bookkeeping, but Saintsbury lets you see the scaffolding. His sentence is a miniature of late-Victorian literary criticism at work: confident, taxonomic, and quietly imperial in its sense that English fiction can be surveyed like acreage. The name-drops do the heavy lifting. Scott is positioned as a geological layer - “on the earlier side” - while Dickens and Thackeray function as boundary stones. Between these landmarks sits an “immense production” that Saintsbury treats less as a wild ecosystem than as a crowded marketplace to be graded.

The key phrase is “second class,” a label that pretends to be modest while enforcing hierarchy. He’s not arguing that the mid-century novel boom was mediocre; he’s arguing it was professionally robust, packed with talent, but still in need of sorting. That’s the critic’s real job here: converting abundance into order. “Illustrated by not a few names” carries a faintly patronizing charm, as if authors are examples in a lecture rather than voices with claims of their own.

The slyest move is the conditional generosity at the end: “some would promote more than one of them to the first.” Saintsbury casts himself as fair-minded - open to reevaluation - while keeping the power of promotion in the critic’s hands. It’s a reminder that “greatness” often arrives through committees of taste, not just through readers, and that the Victorian novel’s explosive diversity made gatekeeping feel like cultural stewardship.