When young Charles Dickens was commissioned to write the text for a series of sporting illustrations in 1836, no one could have suspected that this journeyman task was to turn in to one of the great comic novels in English literature.  Meer

Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace.  Meer