For this the reason may simply be told.

Thackeray, not long before his death, had had his taste offended by some fulsome biography.

Paragraphs, of which the eulogy seemed to have been the produce rather of personal love than of inquiry or judgment, disgusted him, and he begged of his girls that when he should have gone there should nothing of the sort be done with his name.
We can imagine how his mind had worked, how he had declared to himself that, as by those loving hands into which his letters, his notes, his little details,--his literary remains, as such documents used to be called,--might naturally fall, truth of his foibles and of his shortcomings could not be told, so should not his praises be written, or that flattering portrait be limned which biographers are wont to produce.

Acting upon these instructions, his daughters,--while there were two living, and since that the one surviving,--have carried out the order which has appeared to them to be sacred.

Such being the case, it certainly is not my purpose now to write what may be called a life of Thackeray.