SOURCE: “The Publishing History of ‘The Three Bears,’” in Book Collector, Vol. 44, No. 3, Autumn, 1995, pp. 318-38.

In the following essay, Bruce traces the history of Southey's famous children's story and how it metamorphosed over time from a story of three brother bears and a villainous old woman into a story of a family of bears and a foolish little girl.

‘The Story of the Three Bears’ first appeared in printed form in Volume IV (1837) of the ‘Doctor’, a miscellany of episodes and essays written anonymously by Robert Southey of which five volumes had appeared by the time of Southey's death in 1843. Two further volumes, edited and published by his son-in-law John Wood Warter, completed the series in 1847. Southey's essays are linked by the history of the imaginary Dr Daniel Dove of Doncaster, and the story of the three bears appears in Chapter CXXIX of Volume IV, the heading...