SOURCE: Introduction to The Works of Thomas Deloney, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1912, pp. vii–xxxi.

In the excerpt below, Mann provides an overview of Deloney's career, calling attention to his straightforward style and his depiction of working-class men and women. The critic asserts that Deloney's prose fiction represents "the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel."

The recorded facts of Deloney's life are very scanty. His earliest venture appears to have been A Declaration made by the Archbishop of Cullen upon the Deede of his Mariage (1583), and Kempe in April, 1600, refers to him as having just died. Thus his working literary life lasted about seventeen years, but it is impossible to give even a rough guess at the date of his birth, although Ebbsworth suggests (apparently capriciously) 1543.¹ He appears to have drifted into literature from the more substantial occupation of silk-weaving, and his novels show the most intimate acquaintance...