s and correspondence as soon as possible after
his funeral. Nevertheless the generation of those who knew Thackeray,
for whom and among whom he wrote, is now rapidly vanishing; so that it
would have been a kind of national misfortune if posterity had been
left without some authentic record of his personal history, his
earlier experiences, his characteristic sayings and doings, and the
general environment in which he worked.

For the biographical introductions, therefore, which are appended to
each volume of this new edition,[10] we owe gratitude to his daughter,
Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.[11] No more than seven volumes have been
actually published up to this date, but since these include a large
proportion of Thackeray's most important and characteristic work, we
make no apology for anticipating the completion of the series by an
attempt to make a critical examination of the salient points which
distinguish his genius, and mark his place in general literature. Mrs.
Ritchie tells us in a brief prefatory note that although her father's
wishes have prevented her from writing his complete biography she has
at last determined to publish memories which chiefly concern his
books. Her desire has also been 'to mark down some of the truer chords
to which his life was habitually set'; and accordingly we have in
every volume an instalment, too brief and intermittent for such
interesting matter, of the incidents and vicissitudes belonging to
successive stages of his life and work, with glimpses of his mind and
tastes, of the friendships that he made, and the society in which he
moved. The form in which these reminiscences and _reliquiae_ appear has
necessarily disconnected them, since they have been evidently chosen
on the plan of connecting each novel with the circumstances or
particular field of observation which may have suggested the plot, the
scenery, or the characters. One can thus see that Thackeray's mind,
like his sketch-book, was constantly taking down vivid impressions of
people and places, and in some of his notes of travel can be easily
traced the sources whence he took hints for elaborate studies. But
under this arrangement the chronology becomes here and there somewhat
entangled. _Pendennis_, for example, was finished in 1850, but as the
hero's life at Oxbridge is described in the novel, its introduction
takes us back to the period when the writer himself was at Cambridge
in 1829. _Vanity Fair_, again, written in 1845, co