This is Anthony Trollope's first collection of short stories, and it announces a novelist who would become one of Victorian England's most acute observers of human nature. The eight tales span an extraordinary range: a stern hotelier in the Pyrenees wrestles with family duty and social expectation, an Irish family confronts the humiliations of poverty and pride, and English tourists navigate the hazards of foreign lands. Trollope's eye for the comedy and tragedy of cultural collision sparkles throughout. Whether depicting a young woman's precarious position at the Egyptian pyramids or the political maneuverings of a French provincial nobleman, these stories find universal human concerns, love, money, status, belonging, in every corner of the globe. The collection lacks the sprawling ambition of his later novels, but it offers something they cannot: the pleasure of watching a major talent find his voice across eight distinct settings, each story a small gem of social observation and narrative craft.
