The story of the Three Bears is first recorded in narrative form by the author Robert Southey (1774-1843). The story appears in The Doctor, a rambling collection of miscellaneous articles and essays threaded together by episodes in the life of a Yorkshire doctor. The work was published in seven volumes from 1834 to 1847, and the edition displayed here is Southey’s own proof copy from the early 1840s, showing corrections and additions in the hands of Southey himself, as well as his son-in-law John Wood Warter.