ABSTRACT
The word ‘novel’ is scarcely applicable to anything written during the Elizabethan period, but it was from the prose fiction of the period that the English novel was born. The exploits to Thomas Deloney’s heroes are centred in the homelier field of industry. Deloney directed his stories at the Elizabethan tradesmen, telling how hardworking apprentices get to the top. The pamphlets of the Elizabethan period which gave first-hand pictures of low life, and satirically portrayed the follies and vices of the day, fed a taste which later the novel satisfied. Greene, in his Cony-Catching pamphlets, Dekker, in his Gull’s Hornbook, and Nashe, in works like Pierce Penniless, have an indirect importance in the story of the development of the novel, just as later the journalism of Addison and Steele does.
