 However, as he told his mother, Thackeray developed a "sneaking kindness" for his heroine, and the novel that was supposed to present criminals as totally vile, without any redeeming characteristics, instead made Catherine and her roguish companions seem rather appealing.Thackeray felt the result was a failure, and did not republish it in his lifetime.Thackeray himself, in the last installment of the novel, has his narrator say that the newspapers, reporting on earlier installments, had abused "Catherine" by calling it "one of the dullest, most vulgar and immoral works extant."