Daily Inspiration Quote by Goldwin Smith

A neatly double-edged compliment like this is how Victorian literary culture policed its own reputation while pretending it was only expressing gratitude. Goldwin Smith stages a tiny morality play: Thackeray praises Dickens for his "purity" (code for a public cleanliness that kept fiction respectable for family parlors), and Smith instantly escalates the piety, thanking Heaven for Thackeray's purity as something even rarer. The point isn’t devotional. It’s social positioning.

The line works because it weaponizes deference. Smith sounds like he’s simply echoing Thackeray’s reverent tone, but the echo is an act of judgment: he ranks Thackeray above Dickens and does it under cover of moral language, as if aesthetic preference were a matter of virtue. "Purity" becomes a proxy metric for greatness, the kind that reassures gatekeepers that literature isn’t a corrosive force. In a culture anxious about the novel’s influence, praising "purity" is a way of saying: these men can be admitted into the national canon without embarrassing the nation.

There’s also a sly reclamation happening. Dickens was often criticized for sentimentality and theatricality; Thackeray, for worldly cynicism. Smith flips the expected script by canonizing Thackeray not just as sharper, but as morally intact. It’s a historian’s move: turning taste into a verdict about character, and character into a credential for permanence.