SOURCE: Introduction to Anthony Trollope: Later Short Stories, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. vii-xxii.

In the following essay, Sutherland surveys the stories that were originally collected in An Editor's Tales and Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices and Other Sories, placing them in the context of Trollope's overall literary and editorial career.

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...