The Romance of a Rascal

You can find an essay by Chesterton on Thackeray in The Common Man; one of Chesterton's works that tends to get fewer readers than it deserves. The essay is called "The Romance of a Rascal." Like most of Chesterton's essays on literary subjects (of which The Common Man is chock-full), it is thought-provoking and quirky. (Chesterton famously wrote a book-length biography of Charles Dickens without any dates at all.) "The Romance of the Rascal" isn't quite devoted to Thackeray, since it spends most of its time talking about Scott's Waverley novels; but it isn't quite not devoted to Thackeray, either. Here's the paragraph on Vanity Fair:

When Thackeray called Vanity Fair "a novel without a hero", or even when he made the relatively realistic Pendennis a novel with a rather unheroic hero, he was doubtless by that time so accustomed to Victorian fiction as to feel that he was doing something new, and even "cynical". For Victorian fiction had already returned to the old romantic idea that the hero should be heroic, even if it did not understand him so well as did the old romances. Nicholas Nickleby vanquishes Squeers as St. George vanquishes the dragon; and John Ridd is a knight without fear or reproach, like Ivanhoe. But in fact Thackeray was only slightly reacting towards what had been universal in the time of that sly old boy, his papa.