Short stories, as this anthology demonstrates, can help just as much, if not more, than novels and poems, to get a sense of the 18th century. They feature the same adventures of the body, the mind, or the soul that one finds in Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or Tristram Shandy. The first collection of its kind: forty-seven 18th-century British short stories, some of which have never before been anthologized, in an annotated and illustrated edition.