ABSTRACT
By the start of the eighteenth century Guy of Warwick belonged to the children. In The Taller #95, for Thursday, November 17, 1709, Isaac Bickerstaff describes a visit to friends that centered on the entry of his godson, who “alarmed with the Noise of a drum” but in conversation established “excellent Parts, and was a great master of all the Learning on t’other Side Eight Years Old.” Children’s literature is a recent phenomenon, and its history is a crucial context for Guy’s legend. Since it overtly expresses values the society tries to keep, children’s literature offers a way of understanding cultural history. Recognizing children’s delight in chapbooks, the enterprising publisher John Newbery saw a special market and developed it. Dedication to an older ideal that is to inform the present is only part of a fascination with the past. The upheavals—social, economic, political, and religious—of the nineteenth century resulted in many changes.
