SOURCE: Introduction to Anthony Trollope: The Complete Shorter Fiction, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1992, pp. ix-xiii.

In the following essay, Thompson observes that, although the short story form was not amenable to Trollope's talents as a writer, his tales are nevertheless "lucid, sinewy exercises in their chosen form."

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...