SOURCE: "Anthony Trollope: Baking Tarts for Readers of Periodicals," in The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 79-95.

In the essay below, Orel discusses Trollope's short stories as examples of finely crafted moral tales tailored to the tastes of middle-class Victorian readers.

Trollope, like Dickens, earned his bread and butter from his novels, and thought his short stories commercially viable, but on the whole marginal material for the making of a reputation. It is precisely this ordinariness, or casualness about the genre, which makes Trollope's case at mid-century so useful as an index to attitudes widely shared by professional authors. What Trollope wanted to do—and what he wanted every author to do—was observe the world around him, and record, in fiction, what he had seen and heard. He believed that he had done as much in his novels...