It was towards the end of his tenure [as editor of St Pauls Magazine] in October 1869 that Trollope began his series of editor's tales. In general they portray the wretchedness and the pettiness of authorial existence as it is perceived by the godlike figure who has it in his power to accept or reject his subjects' literary offerings. Trollope's principal inspiration for the sequence was one of Thackeray's finest 'Roundabout Essays', 'Thorns in the Cushion' (first published in Cornhill, July 1860). The editorial cushion, Thackeray meant. In his years at Cornhill Thackeray had been particularly pained by the multitudinous unsolicited submissions from desperate genteel ladies which he received as editor of the magazine. He transcribes one from a governess supporting a sick and widowed mother and numerous brothers and sisters. Will Mr Thackeray accept her poem and preserve her siblings from starvation? No, Mr Thackeray will not; the poem is no good. He has a duty to his publisher and his readers. But his heart aches at the poor lady's grief:

Now you see what I mean by a thorn. Here is the case put with true female logic. 'I am poor; I am good; I am ill; I work hard; I have a sick mother and hungry brothers and sisters dependent on me. You can help us if you will.' And then I look at the paper, with the thousandth part of a faint hope that it may be suitable, and I find it won't do: and I knew it wouldn't do: and why is this poor lady to appeal to my pity and bring her poor little ones kneeling to my bedside, and calling for bread which I can give them if I choose?

Trollope's stories further investigate the power, pains, and pathos of being an editor. And they add to Thackeray's observations another perspective—that of comedy and intermittent comic editorial rage (in the example of the preposterously litigant Mrs Brumby, for instance). Trollope describes the collection in Chapter 18 of An Autobiography, stressing the tales' truth to literary life:

The Editor's Tales was a volume republished from the St Paul's Magazine, and professed to give an editor's experience of his dealings with contributors. I do not think that there is a single incident in the book which could bring back to any one concerned the memory of a past event. And yet there is not an incident in it the outline of which was not presented to my mind by the remembrance of some fact:—how an ingenious gentleman got into a conversation with me, I not knowing that he knew me to be an editor, and pressed his little article on my notice; how I was addressed by a lady with a becoming pseudonyme and with much equally becoming audacity; how I was appealed to by the dearest of little women whom here I have called Mary Gresley; how in my own early days there was a struggle over an abortive periodical which was intended to be the best thing ever done; how terrible was the tragedy of a poor drunkard, who with infinite learning at his command made one sad final effort to reclaim himself, and perished while he was making it; and lastly how a poor weak editor was driven nearly to madness by threatened litigation from a rejected contributor. Of these stories "The Spotted Dog" with the struggles of the drunkard scholar, is the best.

Trollope took the artist's privilege of embellishing some of these editorial trials. The Savoy Turkish bath in Jermyn Street (with Trollope stark-naked) is made the setting in which the 'ingenious gentleman' presses his little article on him. It is unlikely, one feels, that anyone quite as outrageous as Mrs Brumby or as preposterous as Josephine de Montmorenci can ever have existed. But in general the tales impress the reader as authentic shavings from the editorial floor. They also stand as a memorial to the unknown soldiers of Victorian authorship: the maniacs and drunks, the genteel women (some of them not without talent), the hopeless pretenders who yearn vainly to emulate the legendary success of Currer Bell. We are shown the pathetic disabled spinster hiding behind the glamorous nom de plume. Even more moving is the pretty and moderately talented Mary Gresley, whose doomed career makes up one of the most moving tales Trollope wrote and is a classic anatomization of Platonic middle-aged love.

If there is a high plateau in Trollope's career as a short-story writer, it is to be found in these editor's tales. And what comes across most strongly in almost all of them (with the exception of the majestically vexed 'Mrs Brumby') is Trollope's good heart. Having watched his mother write novels to bury his consumptive siblings and his father waste his last years and his sanity on an unpublishable Ecclesiastical Encyclopaedia, Anthony had been sensitized from childhood to the woes of authorship. Thackeray's thorn was never out of his flesh. And although the characteristic pose in the tales is one of impotent sympathy (like Thackeray, he would help if he could, but he cannot) Trollope was in fact a discreetly and imprudently charitable man where his less fortunate fellow writers were concerned. He did much more than merely observe their suffering. Nigel Cross [in The Common Writer, 1985] recalls the notably humane treatment of Robert Bell, a broken-down veteran who had known better days, whom Trollope took on as his assistant editor at St Pauls. The appointment was clearly designed as a charitable hand-out. Alas, Bell died in April 1867 before he could start work. 'His unpensioned widow was obliged to auction his library of 4,000 volumes,' Cross tells us, 'and with typical generosity Trollope stepped in and brought the entire collection above the market price. "We all know" he said, "the difference in value between buying and selling of books." Trollope also drafted a memorial for a Civil List pension and got Dickens and Wilkie Collins, among others, to sign it at the offices of the Royal Literary Fund. It was unsuccessful. It was not a period in which Trollope had money to throw away (his son Fred's expensive sheep-farming venture belongs to this time). Buried beyond the reach of biography there must have been innumerable other acts of his kindness to his fellow writers.

Reading these stories is to be amused, touched, occasionally moved to tears, and above all given to understand why so many of his contemporaries loved Anthony Trollope—a man who, in his later years, was superficially unlovable in the highest degree. Edmund Yates, a colleague in the Post Office, recorded the awfulness of Trollope in a spiteful pen portrait, a decade after the novelist's death:

A man with worse or more offensive manners than Trollope I have rarely met. He was coarse, boorish, rough, noisy, overbearing, insolent; he adopted the Johnsonian tactics of trying to outroar his adversary in argument; he sputtered and shouted, and glared through his spectacles, and waved his arms about, a sight for gods and men.

And yet even Yates was forced to add that 'I have heard of several instances, and I know of one, to prove he had a kind heart.' The Johnsonian boor Anthony Trollope is found, mockingly self-depicted, in stories like 'John Bull on the Guadalquivir', or 'Father Giles of Ballymoy'. The kind heart is to be seen in the editor's tales.

There are other illuminations to be found in this collection. The long double-instalment piece called 'The Panjandrum' is infused with an old man's tolerant amusement as he looks back at his own youthful literary enthusiasm in the early 1840s (another tantalizingly unchronicled period in Trollope's life). The story also contains what we may take as a Preludian recollection of Trollope's birth as a novelist. As he walks in a wet Regent's Park the hero sees a stout middle-aged servant with a pretty young girl in tow. 'As I went by them I distinctly heard the words, "Oh, Anne, I do so wonder what he's like!" "You'll see, miss", said Anne'. Who were they going to see? why had they not taken a cab in the rain? Out of these fragments a story emerges, and the story writer whom we apprehend to be the young Anthony Trollope.

In An Autobiography Trollope, with gruff modesty, identifies 'The Spotted Dog' as the best of his short fictions. One agrees. The story dramatizes the fear that remained with Anthony from those traumatic scenes of his childhood when his feckless parents were dunned, their chattels seized by bailiffs, and the family driven to ignominious exile in Belgium. 'The Spotted Dog' is a cogitation on the horrors of 'falling in the world'—sinking, that is, from middle-class respectability into the hideous abyss inhabited by the 'lower orders'. The central character, Julius Mackenzie, is a scholar, well-born and Cambridge-educated, who has—by a fatal mixture of emotional quixotism, free-thinking, obstinacy, and a weakness for drink—sunk as low as it is possible for a gentleman to sink. He has married a woman who is a degenerate dipsomaniac. He ekes out a wretched existence writing trash for the 'penny dreadfuls'—depraved fiction for the semi-literate working man. Trollope wrote nothing more horrifying than the editor's expedition into the filthy midden where Mackenzie lies dead drunk, surrounded by his hungry, naked children. His wife has been arrested for disorderly behaviour by the police, having meanwhile maliciously burned the manuscript which the editor has entrusted to Mackenzie to edit:

there was a smell of damp, rotting nastiness, amidst which it seemed to us to be almost impossible that life should be continued . . . Grimes, taking the candle in his hand, passed at once into the other room, and we followed him. Holding the bottle something over his head, he contrived to throw a gleam of light upon one of the two beds with which the room was fitted, and there we saw the body of Julius Mackenzie stretched in the torpor of dead intoxication. His head lay against the wall, his body was across the bed, and his feet dangled on to the floor. He still wore his dirty boots, and his clothes as he had worn them in the morning. No sight so piteous, so wretched, and at the same time so eloquent had we ever seen before. His eyes were closed and the light of his face was therefore quenched. His mouth was open, and the slaver had fallen upon his beard. His dark, clotted hair had been pulled over his face by the unconscious movement of his hands. There came from him a stertorous sound of breathing, as though he were being choked by the attitude in which he lay; and even in his drunkenn ess there was an uneasy twitching as of pain about his face.

Show the passage to someone who does not know the story, and 'Trollope' is not the name which will automatically spring to mind. Yet, we apprehend, this was the nightmare that lay at the root of Trollope's pathological need to work. It was Trollope that Trollope saw lying there in the filth—a lazier, unluckier Trollope who had never gone to Ireland in 1841 and mended his ways. The set ends on an anticlimactic comic note with Mrs Brumby. She joins Mrs Proudie as one of Trollope's gallery of magnificent female monsters.

Over the period January to July 1870, Trollope was eased out of the editorship of St Pauls. St Pauls' woes cast a miasma of further melancholy over the editor's tales. The editor who surveys this catalogue of authorial wretchedness is, if less desperately than Julius Mackenzie, a failure himself. Three of the stories had appeared in the magazine when in December 1869 Strahan offered Trollope £150 for the right to republish them. An Editor's Tales duly appeared as a swansong in July 1870. Most commentators agree with N. John Hall [in Trollope: A Biography, 1991] in finding them 'the best thing to come out of Saint Pauls and the best of Trollope's five volumes of collected fiction'.

After his departure from St Pauls, Trollope's short fiction became more miscellaneous and rarer, although there was to be more than enough produced in the years between 1870 and 1882 to make up a last volume (Why Frau Frohmann Raised her Prices and Other Stories, 1882). It seems that Trollope himself rather lost interest in the form as anything other than an occasional activity. He was positively off-putting when Edmund Routledge in 1869 asked him for a Christmas story, even offering a top price of £100 for anything he could provide. There is a long gap, from 1870 to 1876, during which Trollope apparently wrote no short fiction whatsoever. And yet this was a period when much of the great fiction of his last phase was written: Ralph the Heir (1871), Phineas Redux (1874), The Way We Live Now (1875), The Prime Minister (1876).

Possibly Trollope had priced himself out of the market with his inflexible six-guineas-a-page fee. It is, however, more likely that his invention in his last years was—if no less powerful than in the past—somewhat less fluent. In chapter 20 of An Autobiography (written in 1876) Trollope records himself as 'cudgelling his brain for a whole month' to write a Christmas story. In his younger days (as in the Pyrenees in autumn 1859) he could write six stories in a month and still call it a holiday from real work. On the other hand, it is worth noting that what Trollope cudgelled out of his brain in 1876 ('Christmas at Thompson Hall') was—as Victoria Glendinning notes—'the funniest short story he ever wrote' [Anthony Trollope, 1992]. A story of intricate misadventure one night in a Paris hotel, it pivots on the magnificently improbable line: 'she had put the mustard plaster on the wrong man'. Unlike Dickens, Trollope is rarely a writer who induces the reader to laugh out loud, but this story is positively side-splitting.

Seven of Trollope's last nine stories are 'Christmas stories'—designed for the generously proportioned December supplements with which magazines tried to win new readers. And four of the seven take Christmas itself as their subject matter. Typically these seasonal stories allowed Trollope a larger canvas than the standard magazine article ('The Two Heroines of Plumplington' is almost novella-length) and the architecture of the late short stories is that much more complex. Trollope was still interested in such matters. While on St Pauls he began to experiment with what one might call the 'serial short story'—works which spread over more than one issue of a magazine or paper and which were consciously written to two dimensions, that of the instalment and the whole. This kind of segmentation reached a virtuosic pitch in 'The Lady of Launay', which appeared in six consecutive weekly instalments for which Trollope devised a twelve-chapter structure with the requisite half-dozen closing climaxes. The achievement is the more impressive since the whole narrative revolves around a single question: will the proud (but essentially good-hearted) Lady of Launay relent and allow her son Philip to marry the good but humble orphan, Bessy Pryor? No one with any acquaintance of Trollope's thirty years' worth of fiction can have much doubt as to the outcome. But it is a tribute to his late mastery as a story-teller that he keeps one eagerly turning the pages as Bessy undergoes the necessary maidenly trials.

Trollope's art as a short-story teller had developed significantly over the years. This can be seen if we compare two of his Christmas stories, 'The Mistletoe Bough' (1861) and 'Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage' (1876). Both depict with charming depth of detail the domestic bustle that accompanied the great Victorian holiday (Victorian in every sense, since the Queen and her German consort had personally made it a national institution in the 1840s). Both stories are set in the North of England—the region where Trollope evidently had his own happiest childhood Christmas experiences, and which he associated most fondly with the festival. But in the 1876 effort there is a palpably better control of pace and contrast. Beneath the surface jollity of dressing the church and the excitement of the young people (particularly the delightful adolescent Mabel Lowndes, whom Christmas reduces to uncontrollable girlish excitement) there is underlying tension. The lovers whom everyone expects to get engaged over the holiday are at odds. Maurice Archer has made a careless remark that 'After all, Christmas is a bore'. Isabel, daughter of the clergyman in whose house Maurice is spending Christmas, is mortally offended. There is the added offence that Maurice has refused ordination at Oxford (and thus disbarred himself from the fellowships which his intellect would otherwise earn him). The young couple's match is apparently running off the rails while the Christmas revelries unwind relentlessly around them. Trollope weaves a narrative through all the difficulties with extraordinary deftness.

There are two stories from this last batch which are unusually interesting, in that they show Trollope bravely confronting 'the way we live now'. 'Why Frau Frohmann Raised her Prices' is one of the many short stories that he set in a hotel. This, his last in the genre, is an allegory on the need for old people to accept change, to 'swim with the stream'. Why, the proud old hotelier wonders, cannot things be as they used to be? Why must her prices go up? Why must rich, alien tourists invade the Tyrol? Why are tradesmen no longer the friends they used to be, but impersonal 'business people'? Above all, 'Why should there be any change?' Painful as it is, Frau Frohmann compromises with the present age, 'still feeling that she had many a struggle to make before she could understand the matter'. Trollope told his publisher William Isbister (who in 1881 gave £150 for the volume rights for the collection of which it was the title story), 'The Frau Frohmann' is a good story, though I say it who ought not.'

'The Telegraph Girl' is unique in being the only story of Trollope's to deal directly with the Post Office (he felt free to describe the workings of his former place of employment because the Post Office monopoly on telegraphy was set up in 1868, after he had left the service). It was with the keen eye of a former employee that he undertook his research at St Martin's-le-Grand where the 800 'telegraph girls' worked in one large room. The plot of 'The Telegraph Girl' is staple Trollope, Pretty and clever Lucy Graham has achieved a precarious but proud independence with her three shillings a day (and an impressive range of benefits, which Trollope specifies) from the Post Office. Will she sacrifice it to marry a pleasant but by no means Adonis-like older widower, Abraham Hall? We have encountered the dilemma many times in Trollope's fiction. What is striking about this story, however, is its depiction of how new technology was disrupting old artisan life-styles. In a Trollope story of the 1860s, Lucy would have been a servant and Abraham a farmer or a clerk. In this story, she is a 'telegraph girl'—a breed which only came into existence with the (controversial) Telegraph Bill of 1868. It is her dexterity with needle-punch codes that has got her a place among the 800 other bright young ladies in the department. But—child of the new technology that she is—she is none the less being displaced by newer technology. She is not as adept as some of her colleagues in adapting to the new acoustic 'sounder' system that is now coming in:

the little dots and pricks which even in Lucy's time had been changed more than once, had quickly become familiar to her. No one could read and use her telegraphic literature more rapidly or correctly than Lucy Graham. But now that this system of little tinkling sounds was coming up,—a system which seemed to be very pleasant to those females who were gifted with musical aptitudes,—she found herself to be less quick, less expert, less useful than her neighbours. This was very sad.

Sad to be too old at 25. Abraham Hall, on his part, is a printer employed at one of the 'great printing places' in the City Road—working on one of the new steam-driven rotary presses needed to turn out magazines, newspapers, and cheap reading matter for the millions brought into literacy by the 1870 Universal Education Act. (We can locate the premises where Abraham works precisely as those of James Virtue, the former publisher and printer of St Pauls.) It is unquestionably progress that Abraham earns the magnificent sum of £4 a week—enough to raise a family in near middle-class respectability. But as part of that progress he must relocate at a day's notice to a new factory at Wye, in the Forest of Dean, if his employers so wish. A love story of the kind Trollope had been unashamedly writing for thirty years, 'The Telegraph Girl' also catches perfectly the rushing pace of industrial change in the 1870s, and its repercussions for the skilled workers whose lives it was simultaneously enriching and turning topsy-turvy.

Of the remaining stories, 'Alice Dugdale' is a Lily Dale for whom things turn out rather more happily and 'Catherine Carmichael' is a portrait of pioneer life in New Zealand so grim as to have served as a warning for any young Victorian thinking of emigration. The story also contains a depiction of marital rape worthy of Hardy. The fragmentary 'Not if I Know It' is noteworthy as being the last thing Trollope wrote, and a further indication if any were needed that his narrative skills survived intact until his last disabling stroke. Typically, it is a study of violent irascibility, eventually melted by the more generous instincts induced by a family Christmas.

Pride of place in the last short stories goes to 'The Two Heroines of Plumplington'—Trollope's very last chronicle of Barset. The two heroines are young girls of different classes. One is a bank manager's daughter (like Trollope's wife, Rose, whose premarital circumstances may well be recalled in the narrative). The other is a brewery manager's daughter. Both heroines boldly and comically defy their fathers' marital ambitions for them. With the virtuous maiden's innate good sense and domestic wiles they choose their own mates and—ultimately—bring their would-be tyrannical fathers into line. The story aligns itself with some of Trollope's anti-feminist tracts in his later career (Is He Popenjoy?, 1878, for example). As is clear from the depiction of Georgiana Wanless in 'Alice Dugdale'—the young woman who rides like a man, and is proficient in archery and lawn tennis—Trollope did not like the new-fangled 'girl of the period'. He preferred girls (like Alice) who were domestic and traditionally feminine angels of the house. Women, Trollope intimates, can quite happily hold their own in the world without votes, 'rights', seats in Parliament, or unwomanly outdoor activities. The nostalgic and unrepentantly reactionary Barchesterian geniality of 'The Two Heroines of Plumplington' is a happy note for Trollope to have ended on as a short-story writer.