SOURCE: “Introduction: Why Read Chapbooks,” in Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances, edited by John Simons, University of Exeter Press, 1998, pp. 1-18.

In the following excerpt, Simons discusses how broadsides were created and produced and illustrates how they slowly changed the social aspirations of English commoners.

[Chapbooks were] the flimsy and often poorly printed booklets which were a major source of literature for the English poor in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.¹ There is a full discussion of the nature and form of chapbooks below as well as some analysis of their history and readership, but here I wish to set out some of the reasons for being interested in such apparently ephemeral objects and to comment on some aspects of the relationship between work on popular literature and culture and more mainline literary-historical studies.

Chapbook readers left few records of their tastes or opinions...