It is best to be candid about this volume. Trollope seems to have been somewhat contradictory in his attitude toward Christmas stories. In his autobiography he expressed a certain dislike for them, yet near the end of his career many of the short stories he wrote were Christmas stories. So whether Trollope himself would approve such a collection is open to question. But it is a question that can be answered perhaps only in the context of his whole artistic career.

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) is perhaps best known for his novels of clerical life set in Barsetshire, that county which he added forever to the map of England. His novels with their stable and solid world have become a benchmark of the Victorian age. Even at the time of his death in 1882 his work was hailed by one of his most perceptive critics, R. H. Hutton, as "helping us to revive the past." In part his gift for faithfully recreating his world comes from what Henry James in Partial Portraits called his "complete understanding of the usual." In part it comes from the fact that Trollope was himself a thoroughly Victorian man. Bustling, energetic, inquisitive, and incredibly industrious, he was bluff in his public manner, hearty and generous-spirited in his private life, and indefatigable in his duty to his career as a novelist and his career as a postal official. For James Russell Lowell, whom he met in Boston, he was "a big, red-faced, rather underbred Englishman of the bald-with-spectacles type." But Julian Hawthorne, more observant than his fellow American, paints a slightly different picture in his Confessions and Criticisms: "He was a quick-tempered man, and the ardour and hurry of his temperament made him seem more so than he really was: but he was never more angry than he was forgiving and generous. He was hurt by little things, and little things pleased him; he was suspicious and perverse, but in a manner that rather endeared him to you than otherwise."

If Troll ope had a private credo, it must have been these words he wrote in Rachel Ray: ". . . ease of spirit come from action only, and the world's dignity is given to those who do the world's work. Let no man put his neck from out of the collar till in truth he can no longer draw the weight attached to it." His own capacity for work seemed almost limitless. His career as a postal official lasted twenty-five years and sent him trudging along muddy Wiltshire lanes, walking through Irish hamlets, riding across Central America on a donkey, and sailing off to Egypt, Jamaica, and the United States. In addition to working and travelling for the GPO, he travelled the length and breadth of Europe on holidays, to South America to write a travel book, to Ceylon, to Australia, and twice across the United States. Such a career is enough to make any man's life a full and active one, but for almost forty years Trollope was also working at another career. From 1843 to 1882 he wrote forty-seven novels, five travel books, numerous magazine articles, and forty-two short stories. He once wrote with broad humor to his friend Alfred Austin, later poet laureate: "I cannot believe the Old Testament because labour is spoken of as the evil consequence of the Fall of Man. My only doubt as to finding a heaven for myself at last arises from the fear that the disembodied and beatified spirits will not want novels."

Trollope had already written eight novels including The Warden, Barchester Towers, Dr. Thorne, and The Three Clerks when he began writing short stories in 1859, and in 1860, when the first of his stories was published, his novel Framley Parsonage was making him one of the most popular novelists in England. Though he continued to publish short stories during the rest of his life, most of them were written between 1860 and 1870. Many of the stories written during these ten years were based on his own experiences and observations while "banging about the world" (as one observer called it) and while editing St. Paul's Magazine. These stories reflect his insatiable curiosity about life and his shrewd, but amused, observations of himself and others. As Michael Sadleir has pointed out in his Anthony Trollope: A Commentary, Trollope relished the "small calamities of life and often recorded them in his stories with the understanding of a man who has witnessed and experienced such dilemmas."

After 1870, although Trollope still travelled extensively and continued to write at least one novel every year as well as travel books and magazine articles, he wrote only eight short stories. Four of the eight are Christmas stories included in this volume. Gradually he began to curtail his working schedule, and by 1880, two years before his death, he answered a request for a magazine article by saying: "I am accustomed to write Christmas stories for magazines, but not to do other literary work." At sixty-five he at last had resigned himself to the fact that he could no longer work as he had before. But still he wrote his novels with that workmanlike precision and pace that he had ever used, dictating them to his niece as his health began to fail. On November 3, 1882, he suffered a stroke at the home of his brother-in-law and died on the evening of December 6. His last short stories, "Not If I Know It" and "The Two Heroines of Plumplington," were published posthumously. About these stories Trollope has left no comment, but it is interesting to note that one of them is set in Barsetshire and that both of them are Christmas stories.

The formal Christmas story was a Victorian invention. The Victorians added many of their own trappings to the celebration of Christmas. The older, more sedate trimming of Christmas—the feast, the pudding, the holly—were augmented by tinsel, tapers, "that pretty German toy—a Christmas tree" as Dickens called it, and the Christmas story. Gaily illustrated annuals were published for the Christmas season, authors liked-nothing better than to have their books come out for the Christmas market, and journals and magazines printed supplements and special Christmas editions with pictures, holiday poems, and Christmas stories. The nineteenth century middle class, the magazine-reading public, learned to demand year after year fare with a Christmas flavor. Christmas, after all, was that time of year in which the rigors of progressive pragmatism could be laid aside briefly for the softness of sentimentalism and the high celebration of the Family, that most hallowed of all Victorian traditions. And Dickens, who popularized the Christmas story with A Christmas Carol written in 1843 (the year Trollope began writing his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran), was successful because his story was not only a sentimental celebration of Christian virtues but a sentimental celebration of the Family as well.

Dickens's Christmas stories, as might be expected, are very different from those of Trollope. Some of his shorter pieces are little more than impressionistic sketches which evoke mood, scene, and emotional response. His more formal Christmas stories are only slightly disguised parables held together with fantasy, symbolism, and sentimentality. There is little effort to develop character beyond the delineation of a single quality which can become part of the symbolism. There is little effort to develop the action beyond the demands of the moral exegesis. For Dickens the purpose of the Christmas story was to teach a moral lesson and instruct his readers (often young readers) in the values of those virtues of generousity, compassion, and love which the season taught. While he succeeded in telling a captivating and appealing tale in A Christmas Carol, he failed in, for example, The Battle of Life because that story lacks the straightforward appeal to sentiment and precise categorization of virtues and sins which is substituted for characterization and plot in A Christmas Carol and because it lacks the moral focus which unifies his more successful story The Chimes. Dickens appears to have regarded the stories in something of the same light as the morality play, and where he achieves that unity of intent that is characteristic of a morality play he has been successful.

In An Autobiography (written in 1875-6 and published after his death), Trollope comments on Dickens's and his own Christmas stories: "Nothing can be more distasteful to me than to have to give a relish of Christmas to what I write. I feel the humbug implied by the nature of the order. A Christmas story, in the proper sense, should be the ebullition of some mind anxious to instil others with a desire for Christmas religious thought, or Christmas festivities,—or, better still with Christmas charity. Such was the case with Dickens when he wrote his two first Christmas stories. But since that the things written annually—all of which have been fixed to Christmas like children's toys to a Christmas tree—have had no real savour of Christmas about them. I had done two or three before. Alas! at this very moment I have one to write, which I have promised to supply within three weeks of this time,—the picture-makers always require a long interval,—as to which I have in vain been cudgelling my brain for the last month. I can't send away the order to another shop, but I do not know how I shall ever get the coffin made."

Although there is a great deal of satirical self-deprecating humor in this passage, it does tell us something about Trollope's evaluation of Dickens's Christmas stories and about his attitude toward his own. About Dickens's stories Trollope recognized that they were not all successful because all of them were not written with that necessary honesty of purpose and unity of intent of which he speaks in his autobiography. The "real savour of Christmas" requires something more than a Christmas setting, kind hearts, and sentiments. The writer, as he said often, must write because he "has a story to tell, not because he has to tell a story." The Christmas story, if its writer is not honestly concerned with the values of the Christmas message, becomes just another piece of humbug—a decoration attached to Christmas by the slenderest thread.

It is clear that he disliked Christmas stories that were meant to decorate magazines and journals like Christmas ornaments. On the other hand, he was sometimes asked to write stories with "the relish of Christmas." He was quite certain that he could not write the kind of story that Dickens produced—those stories full of spirits, ghosts, and small children of incongruous virtues. The reluctance to write Christmas stories that he expresses in the passage above, though it is exaggerated for effect, is nonetheless genuine. Trollope's concern was how to avoid the humbug and have an honest story to tell. In order to do so he turned to the world he knew best. He relied on a familiar, tangible reality—that beef and ale world Hawthorne talked about in his novels—where men and women must live with the knowledge that good and evil are not abstractions for speculation, but necessary elements of their daily life. He recorded with both comedy and pathos those conflicts of men and women which arise from the human condition. And in his Christmas stories that spirit of Christmas charity of which he spoke was translated into the attempt of ordinary people to live as best they could in an imperfect world by a perfect law. Although these stories are set at Christmas time, their claim on Christmas comes not from the setting but from the characters themselves and their awareness that the season imposes a special demand upon them to be charitable beyond the usual and at peace with those around them, not only in the great conflicts, but in the small dilemmas as well.

For Trollope it was the seemingly small, daily dilemmas that often went as far as anything else in defining man's life. He tells us in his essay "A Walk in a Wood": "It is not the sorrows but the annoyances of life which impede. Were I told that the bank had broken in which my little all was kept for me I could sit down and write my love story with almost a sublimated vision of love; but to discover that I had given half a sovereign instead of sixpence to a cabman would render a great effort necessary before I could find the fitting words for a lover. These little lacerations of the spirit, not the deep wounds, make the difficulty." Like the other side of Wordworth's "little unremembered acts of kindness," Trollope's "little lacerations of the spirit" can be the better or worse part of a good man's life. From the little "annoyances of life" come the situations he creates to test the moral and social codes of his generation. He saw in the small and trivial matters of life the measure by which man is most often taken. Small and trivial matters are, indeed, important because in the final analysis they determine how a man lives his life. Moreover, Trollope's concern was to show how men and women cope with being human and fallible in a world whose rules presuppose perfection and infallibility. His talent for the interpretation of the commonplace rests on a balance between a perfect world of abstract rules and a real world in which as he said "things are always very far from being perfect." Man, after all, must live in this balance. It is there, between fallibility and infallibility, that he must seek to reconcile himself, and it is this balance that Trollope captures in his stories.

"The Mistletoe Bough," "The Widow's Mite," and "The Two Generals" come from the first period of his short stories and were included in the two volumes of Tales of All Countries. The stories are set in Westmoreland, Cheshire, and Frankfort, Kentucky, respectively. Trollope made it a point of pride that he was acquainted with the settings of these stories. Westmoreland and Cheshire he knew from his work as a postal surveyor and Frankfort, Kentucky, he had visited in 1860 when he toured the United States for his travel book North America. Both "The Mistletoe Bough" and "The Two Generals," in very different ways, show his perceptive handling of the complexities of human relationships, but among all his stories there is no finer study of the nature of true Christian charity than "The Widow's Mite." Here he wrote with delicacy and humor of the difficulties and rewards of practicing that perfect rule of giving taught by the parable of the widow's mite.

Among the Christmas stories of his later period, there is much variety of setting, tone, and theme. But each in its way portrays ordinary men and women caught between the demands of conscience and human imperfections. It is part of Trollope's charm and talent that he could make the commonplace exceptional and interesting, that he could be accurate in his details without making those details tedious, and that he could handle themes that would not have been tolerated from another pen. "Catherine Carmichael," published here for the first time since its original publication in 1878, is such a story as only Trollope could have written. Taut with emotional and sexual tensions, it tells the story of a young woman trapped between her hatred of her husband and her love for another man. It is one of the few stories whose grim and demanding world is not relieved by that touch of satire of which he was so fond. Its mood and tone might give credence to the theory of his increasingly dark vision of the world if it were not for the last of his short stories, "The Two Heroines of Plumplington." Published posthumously in Good Cheer, the Christmas issue of Good Words in 1882, it is both unique and representative of his work. It is unique because it is the only one of his short stories set in Barsetshire; it is representative because it expounds his favorite theme, the politics of love and society. The story comes after a lifetime spent observing and recording with keenly accurate details the habits of men and women in the ways of the world. He was, as Sadleir has said, socially speaking the wisest of English novelists, and it is that social wisdom which makes "The Two Heroines of Plumplington" the culmination of the comic war waged in the name of social politics.

Trollope's style is for the most part plain and unadorned, seldom relying on the figurative, but sensitive to the cadence of his characters—compact or expansive as the action or mood demands. His characters are always recognizable. He never allowed himself the luxury of forgetting human nature, nor did he allow his characters to falsify the humanity he gave them. He made their vanities accessible to all men and their virtues within reach. His tone was ever that of the human apologist, of one who knew that man is neither very good nor very bad, but a compendium of common desires, practical emotions, obvious failings, and winsome virtues. And he preached his sermon, even to the last, that he should make "virtue alluring and vice ugly, while he charmed his readers instead of wearying them."