The collection features essays, diaries, letters, travelogues, aphorisms, pamphlets, biographies, memoirs, and sketches by the best English satirists of the 18th century. Russian readers will already be familiar with the correspondence between Swift and Sterne, the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the parodic novels of seventeen-year-old Jane Austen, and excerpts from James Boswell's biography of the leading English educator Samuel Johnson. However, the essays of Daniel Defoe and Oliver Goldsmith, the essays of Edmund Burke, the pamphlets and parodies of Fielding, the travel essays of Smollett, the memoirs of Fanny Burney, and the farces of Robert Brinsley Sheridan will be new to the collection. In this anthology of 18th-century English documentary prose, published in our country for the first time, readers will find literary critical essays dedicated to each author, as well as detailed commentary.