SOURCE: "Design in Deloney's Jack of Newbury," in PMLA, Vol. 88, No. 2, March, 1973, pp. 233–39.

Powys on Deloney as a neglected genius:

In all English literature no writer has been more neglected than has Thomas Deloney. His three prose works, "Jack of Newberie," "The Gentle Craft," and "Thomas of Reading," have been familiar enough to academic critics concerned to trace the origin and development of English prose fiction, but in their learned disquisitions full justice has seldom been given to the astonishing genius of this great Elizabethan novelist.

His zest for life displays itself in every sentence, in every word that he writes. His realism has never been equalled. The characters he invents are no book characters, but actual shop-door, street-corner people who eat possets, drink sack, cry, sneeze, and stand upon every-day shoe-leather. His three works might have been written by Sancho Panza, with such shrewd aplomb do they...