Edited by David Starkey

Ecco. 157 pp. $16.95

Since the authors of these highly opinionated surveys rank as the two greatest English novelists of the 19th century, it is both fascinating and entertaining to see what consummate masters of fiction do with the facts. In both cases, those facts never get too much in the way of a good story or a sharply honed flash of wit.

In this slim volume, David Starkey, a Cambridge don and popular historian in his own right, brings us paired surveys of England's bloody past that came about for different reasons and produced even more distinct results.

Austen's history is by far the more obscure and no less interesting for that. She wrote it in 1791, but it was not published until 1922 and may be new to even her most obsessive and completist fans. Grandly titled The History of England From the Reign of Henry IV to the Death of Charles I, it is the work of a remarkably precocious 16-year-old and, in its mordant observations, is full of harbingers of the mature novelist.

Austen wrote her version of events as a diversion to be read aloud in the parlor of her father's rectory. Here we meet a priceless satirist in the making as she lays into the then-prevailing idea that history should be selectively taught to proper young ladies to confer moral lessons and lure them away from the kind of frothy and unseemly romantic novels Austen sent up in Northanger Abbey.

With tongue firmly in cheek, the scandal-prone and impetuous Mary Queen of Scots is praised to the heavens and the iconic Elizabeth I disdained as "that disgrace to humanity, that pest to society." The sly cynicism of tone and grace of style, along with her cuttingly offhand asides, gives us the first signs of the brilliant narrative voice of her novels.

Unlike Austen, Dickens was a well-established and widely admired novelist by the time he finished A Child's History of England in 1853. This delightful book only added to his popularity. His initial intent was to pen something for his own children, but when he published the history in installments in his own magazine, the vivid parade of heroes and scoundrels soon found a large and ready audience. It was used as a textbook in English schools until well after World War II.

Starkey has chosen excerpts that cover some of the same ground as Austen, but the contrast in approach and purpose is startling and the thrust more mainstream. The events Dickens chose to highlight were quirkily selective, and he had an opinion on everything. In marrying Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots chose "a tall idiot," Dickens insists. Puritans, he informs the youngsters, "dress in a hideous manner, talk though their noses and oppose all harmless enjoyments."

Dickens devotes pages to excoriating James I as a pompous and dangerous twit, and his descriptions of the king's many other shortcomings are as droll as his more memorable fictional portraits.

Throughout his entertaining march through England's story, Dickens' judgments are very much of his own time and absolute. As in the novels, he is a compassionate champion of the underdog and the downtrodden and scornful of the abuses of power. He writes in the voice of a man who knew poverty in his own childhood. No one comes off worse than Charles I, whose obstinacy and arrogance helped precipitate the Civil War.

Lovers of Dickens will also relish the way he rises to the opportunity for memorable set pieces, such as the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. It is rendered with such incomparable flair that more correct and conventional histories pale beside it.