Trollope wrote short stories from 1859 (just before the publication of Framley Parsonage in the Cornhill Magazine made his name) until the last year of his life, producing them rapidly and apparently without effort—eighteen stories, for instance, between 1859 and 1861. In all, Trollope's 'pile' comprises forty-two stories, the bulk of them assembled into five book-length collections. Nearly all of them remain eminently readable today. They are the work of a craftsman, rarely suggesting that their materials might have been better treated at novel-length, or that their origins lie in otherwise unusable fragments rescued from the novelist's workshop floor. If they are the by-products of Trollope's creative life, they are by no means its waste products. The average quality of the stories is surprisingly high—only the clanking pre-Raphaelite trappings of Trollope's 'fairy-tale', 'The Gentle Euphemia', seem to me to lie beyond critical defence—and the range of themes and subjects treated is considerable.

Trollope explains that each of his first stories is intended to be redolent of some different country—but they apply only to localities with which I myself am conversant, [letter to W. M. Thackeray, October 23, 1859, in The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. N. John Hall, 1983]. These Tales of All Countries (many of them first published in New York) remind us what a 'tireless traveller' Trollope was in his prime. Some of them dramatise the vicissitudes of Victorian tourist-life: the hazard of picking up harridan spinsters whom etiquette will not permit to travel alone ('An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids'); problems with the luggage on Lake Como ('The Man Who Kept His Money in a Box'); an Indian Civil Service widow seduced by a debonair French tailor ('The Château of Prince Polignac'); a would-be Mrs. Leo Hunter coming in for some unexpected Love Among the Artists when she sets up Bohemian open-house in Rome ('Mrs. General Talboys'). There are also plenty of complaints about the ill-maintained and often over-hyped sights the mid-Victorians scrambled to see. In 'The Château of Prince Polignac', the celebrated chateau turns out to be no more than a ruined wall and 'an enormous kitchen chimney'; in 'An Unprotected Female', mixed company is obliged to crawl into the dirty, smelly, stuffy interior of a pyramid. Nor are the locals particularly prepossessing: in 'A Ride Across Palestine' the way into the Tomb of the Virgin is blocked by a crowd of 'dirty, fierce-looking, uncouth' orthodox Christians. Throughout these stories there are echoes of Trollope the business-like tourist, who once advised a Post Office colleague: 'Hear the howling dervishes of Cairo at one on Friday. They howl but once a week' [letter to Edmund Yates, March 11, 1858]; and of Trollope the crusty xenophobe who refused to believe until he got there 'that in these days there should be a living village called Minneapolis by living men, [North America].

Trollope's stories of foreign parts are apt to feature this undertow of grumble and consumer-guide. But they offer much more: canny dramatic meditations on foreign customs and far-off happenings, underpinned by the novelist's solid knowledge of the human heart. Background materials are thoroughly assimilated, and settings squarely convincing, regardless of whether the stories derive from the Trollope family's persistent sorties to continental Europe (his mother and brother settled in Tuscany), one of Anthony's four extended visits to the United States, or his more exotic sojourns in the Middle East, Central America and the Caribbean. Among Trollope's less Anglocentric European narratives (barely a tourist in sight in these), he depicts the Austrian occupation of Venice, the love-life of two Viennese shop-girls, and the eccentricities of an ultramontane Tyrolean landlady who will not put up her prices despite the changing times (one of the sketches of uncompromising Toryism Trollope delighted in throughout his career). The stories with an American setting are just as varied. Here Trollope strays over Jamesian territory to dramatise an array of topics and effects. In two works from the early 1860s Trollope previews James's beloved 'International Theme'. The first of these, 'The Widow's Mite', features a transatlantic marriage; the second, 'Miss Ophelia Gledd', centres upon a breezy Boston sleigh-girl who, like James's Daisy Miller, may or may not 'pass muster' in comparatively straitlaced European society. 'The Two Generals', the tragedy of two brothers who ride away to fight on opposite sides in the American Civil War, matches James's early short stories; whereas the reader of 'The Courtship of Susan Bell', with its institutionally repressed passions, is likely to recall The Europeans.

Rich and varied as these records of Trollope's globe-trotting (from Suez to South Island, New Zealand) are, theoretically even more compelling are his stories of literary life. Many of these were written during Trollope's period as editor of St. Paul's Magazine, and they deal with what Thackeray termed the 'thorns' in an editor's otherwise cushioned existence. It requires tact and fortitude to deal with madmen ('The Turkish Bath'), pushy thickskinned talentless ladies ('Mrs. Brumby') who won't take 'no' for an answer, and pretty deserving girls with families to support ('Mary Gresley') whose manuscripts are almost equally hopeless. Trollope is in an altogether tougher mood in an earlier tale for Argosy magazine, 'The Adventures of Fred Pickering', where an obstinately ambitious (and again talentless) young writer brings himself and his family to the edge of starvation before returning to a steady day-job as an attorney's clerk. The story seems designed to reinforce the passages in An Autobiography that emphasise the precariousness of living by one's pen.

Courtship and marriage (Trollope liked to surprise his guests with a tally of the fictional proposals of marriage he had written up) form another staple theme of the short stories. Outwardly crusty relations hiding hearts of gold put temporary obstacles in the way of the juvenile leads in a variety of settings, from Patmore-like Somersetshire mansions to Hawthornian Saratoga Springs, from trim Munich counting-houses to desiccated Spanish Town, Jamaica. Trollope even returns to the 'dear forty-first' county, Barsetshire, to bring off the double wedding of his 'Two Heroines of Plumplington'. Closer to home in a different way, Trollope the ex-Post Office Official returns to St. Martin's Le Grand to investigate the love-lives of the young women at the London Telegraph Office in 'The Telegraph Girl'.

Indeed in some ways Trollope's short stories represent this rather private author's closest approaches to autobiographical fiction. There are wry Wodehousian (or perhaps more accurately Charles Lever-ish) adventures from his earliest days in Ireland, featuring misplaced dancing-pumps ('The O'Conors of Castle Conor') and squeaky-clean bedroom farce (Trollope in bed with a Catholic priest in 'Father Giles of Ballymoy'). In An Autobiography Trollope refuses to 'swear to every detail' in these stories, but confesses that 'the main purport' of them 'is true'. From a later period 'John Bull on the Guadalquivir' offers an interesting glimpse of, in Sadleir's words, Trollope 'laughing a little heavily at his own heaviness' [Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary, 1927]. Here the central character (who stands for the author) mistakes a Spanish nobleman for a bullfighter and vulgarly patronises him for what he takes to be his gimcrack attire. But perhaps the most charming and revealing of these 'autobiographical fragments' is 'The Panjandrum', a glimpse of Trollope the would-be novelist as he might have been in his 'Hobbledehoy' days in the Post Office, getting together with a bunch of greenhorn Bohemians to found the 'best' literary magazine 'ever done'. This is a longer story, full of the vaulting ambition and the looking-over-the-shoulder pretentiousness of youth.

Some of the stories are unashamed comic anecdotes which may, like the humour of some of the sub-plots of Trollope's novels, be judged broad and coarse by modern taste, and perhaps brought a blush in Victorian times to the cheek of Mr. Podsnap's 'young person': the hero of 'Relics of General Chassé' is forced to creep home in his long-johns under cover of darkness, when a group of predatory women tourists mistakenly cut up his trousers for souvenirs, while 'A Ride Across Palestine' features a dishy principal 'boy' not all that keen to hide her disguised femininity from a rather obtuse leading man. Other tales show Trollope in more familiar light as an agreeable farceur, for instance the painful domestic slapstick of the misapplied mustard-plaster in 'Christmas at Thompson Hall'. This is one of the more memorable of Trollope's Christmas Stories—like all Victorian novelists, he felt honour bound to supply them occasionally, delivering his copy months in advance, and ringing the changes on the theme of the young man who develops Scrooge-like scruples about the commercialism of the Victorian Christmas, or decides to be unseasonably bad-tempered among the seasonal trimmings, until shown the error of his ways by a bright-eyed fiancée or loving sister. 'Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage' and 'Not If I Know It' will still pass a few minutes agreeably on Boxing Day afternoon.

But the most memorable of Trollope's short stories are those with a frisson of Gothicism and grimness, much as the most striking character-studies in his novels are often of the psychologically disturbed. Some present lean balladic tragedies, reminiscent of short spare novels such as Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite or An Eye for an Eye. 'La Mère Bauche' demonstrates how easily a domineering mother persuades her cagey son to give up the 'charity girl' who loves him. The girl slips away to the summit of a high rock, and at the end of the story the villagers pick up her broken body. 'Returning Home' is almost equally stark. An exiled Englishman who has had enough of his bleak Costa Rican farmstead loses wife and family in a canoeing accident soon after he begins his long trip home. Other stories, though less lugubriously eventful, fix elementary passions in an elemental landscape. 'Aaron Trow' is a gaunt melodrama about an escaped Bermudan convict. 'Malachi's Cove', probably Trollope's best-known short story, is a taut tale of love and selflessness by the angry Cornish Atlantic, where the young and beautiful Mahala Tringlos gathers seaweed to claw a precarious living. The spare vernacular passion and churning ocean winds of 'Malachi's Cove' have put one critic in mind of D.H. Lawrence [N. John Hall, Anthony Trollope: A Biography, 1991]. Though the average Trollope love-story is more domesticated, its emotional complexities may nevertheless be thrown into relief by the roughness of the chosen setting. Bare Lakeland hills, for instance, frame the scruples of crossgrained Elizabeth Garrow in 'The Mistletoe Bough'. 'The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne' is set on the broken edges of Dartmoor—a striking objective correlative for the imposing inner life of its heroine, whose determination to 'succumb forever' to her conventional suitor thoroughly unnerves him before the match is mercifully broken off.

Trollope handles the central situation in 'The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne' much as he handles comparable relationships in his great novels (for instance, Adolphus Crosbie's inability to come to terms with Lily Dale's self-contained passion in The Small House at Allington (1864)). But at a length of a few thousand words Trollope is denied his habitual elbow-room. Some of the most memorable stories in the present collection seem for this reason 'courageously "unfinished" '(Michael Sadleir's phrase), as they dwindle into agonising ellipses. 'Catherine Carmichael', a bitter study of the solitude of a female heart that seems destined to 'go with the property' in underpopulated New Zealand, teases in this way, as does 'The Journey to Panama'. Here Miss Viner's case-hardened integrity, her powerful but unfocussed hatred of her prospective husband Mr. Gorloch and the mounting impetuosity of the hero Forrest's devotion to her as the voyage draws to its close all deserve more space, and perhaps a sequel, beyond the irresponsible glamour of shipboard romance. But Miss Viner goes her way, and Mr. Forrest his, and the story simply stops—refusing to embellish the bare (if evocative) details of the autobiographical anecdote on which it is based.

This is not to say that Trollope is incapable of cutting short story material to length. Most of the time he does so with notable skill. Yet he remains a distance-runner among great English writers, and it is no accident, therefore, that one of the most penetrating of his tales should be among his longest (and simplest). This is 'The Spotted Dog', the study of the decline of a feckless freelance author and his alcoholic wife. Here the plot amounts to nothing more than a sequence of vignettes of progressive human dereliction; the setting is nothing more than the interior of a homely London pub. But Trollope has time to get to work on the bitter baffled courage of his anti-hero, and the result is an evocation of vibrant grimness and quiet despair more than a little reminiscent of Gissing.

Trollope is not a great short story writer. The form had not fully evolved—at least in England—in Trollope's heyday. Occasionally it seems to cramp him. Moreover Trollope's writing, though often highly evocative, lacks the poetic infusion that comes in the mid 1880s with Stevenson and Kipling. And yet Trollope's short stories are fit to be compared with those of the array of great English novelists born between 1810 and 1819. He took the form more seriously than Thackeray, out-produced Mrs. Gaskell and (by a huge margin) George Eliot, and if he failed (even in his best story, 'The Spotted Dog') to rival Dickens's best (perhaps 'The Signal Man'), his average quality of production was higher than Dickens's. Only occasionally does one feel in the presence of a novelist deliberately cramping his hand to work on a smaller canvas. Otherwise Trollope's short stories are lucid, sinewy exercises in their chosen form: professional miniatures, worthy of a place on any bookshelf that features a cross-section of his novels.