Few writers of Elizabethan prose fiction can have been so consistently viewed in as retrospective a light as Thomas Deloney; few can so reliably have had their subject matter cast in a representative role. Although Deloney is a rare author from the period whose historical interests have received significant attention, the tendency of Deloney criticism has overwhelmingly been to look towards the future of the past in which he wrote. Deloney's work is seen as adumbrating a historical world that had yet fully to come into being in the late sixteenth century, and its ability to do so is thought to derive from the way the events and characters he depicts stand in for the movement of some wider social or economic process through time. On the one hand, we have a framework that reads his fiction in relation to a narrative about the development of capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie or the middle classes, and, on the other, one that stresses his status as a pioneer in the development of literary realism or of the novel form. In each case it is Deloney's interest in the representation of artisan lives that is felt to speak to these broader themes.

This approach can find its sanction in contemporary responses to Deloney's writing. When, in Have With You to Saffron Walden, Thomas Nashe refers to him as a ‘Balletting silke-weauer’, we are presented in miniature with the same alignment between class position and a career in print that later literary criticism develops at greater length.