The success of these stories encouraged Corvo to write twenty-six more Toto stories, which were published with the original ones as
In His Own Image (1901). (A twenty-six-story edition culled from both sets of stories was published in 1969 as
Stories Toto Told Me.) In his preface to this later edition, Christopher Sykes comments that "One should perhaps think of the stories as being greatly extended and greatly sophisticated versions, contrived by a writer who had something of real genius in him, of those tales which are the subject of demure merriment among pious people, and have for long been commonplace in clergy houses and behind convent walls." Indeed, the mixture of legend, theology, and myth produces a certain buoyancy among the interrelated stories. "Each is a fraction of a large and colourful panorama of saints and sinners, the pagan past intermingled with the reverent present," Donald Weeks suggests. All of the stories are fashioned around Toto--"an uneducated peasant," as Corvo called him--as the storyteller.
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