BOOK REVIEW / Travels round human oddity: The collected shorter fiction - Anthony Trollope, Ed. Julian Thompson: Robinson Publishing, pounds 25

THIS HANDSOME volume, neatly edited by Julian Thompson, assembles for the first time each of Anthony Trollope's 42 short stories. Chronologically, they range from 'Relics of General Chasse', written in 1859, shortly before Framley Parsonage made Trollope's name, to 'Not If I Know It', completed a few months before his death in December 1882. The whole, occupying nearly a thousand closely printed pages, can be added to the 47 novels, the travel books and the sheaves of miscellaneous journalism as a testimony to Trollope's unflagging industry. He was the least defatigable of Victorian authors.

While the themes of Trollope's short fiction do not differ very greatly from those of his novels, the collection's strongest characteristic is perhaps its autobiographical flavour. More so than in his full-length works, Trollope tended to use the short story as a way of rendering down his experience of travel and human oddity into print. His time as a Post Office surveyor in Ireland, for example, produced pieces such as 'The O'Conors of Castle Conor' and 'Father Giles of Ballymony', Middle Eastern tourism 'An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids', and journeys in America 'Miss Ophelia Gledd', an early example of his fascination with American women that was to culminate in the final Palliser novel, The Duke's Children (1881).

It would be idle to pretend that Trollope was one of the great Victorian short story writers, and he showed no inspired interest in the form. He shares Thackeray's discursiveness but not his delight in the superfluous; he lacks Dickens' imaginative touch; the absorption in a single milieu of a late Victorian such as Mary Mann is necessarily beyond him. But for all that, there are not many better short stories than 'The Spotted Dog', in which the occasionally stifling geniality is redeemed by some genuine and unvarnished horrors and a rare glimpse into the seedy, Penny Dreadful writing side of Victorian journalism.

Trollope's stories come in clusters: American, Irish, Continental. Among the best are the six or so which he contributed to Saint Paul's Magazine during the three-year period of his editorship from 1867 to 1870. The world which they outline - dusty sanctums populated by madmen, impoverished lady novelists and vain litigants married to invalid lieutenants on half-pay - may be remote from Trollope's usual stalking ground, nearer to Gissing than Barsetshire or the grand houses of Mayfair, but it is no less authentic.