George Barnwell's Long, Brief Life

In various forms across the long eighteenth century, the story of George Barnwell was used often for a didactic message of how young apprentices could best use their time to live as virtuous subjects. Tracing the changes in how the Barnwell story was mediated across this period in ballads, prose works, and dramas, "George Barnwell's Long, Brief Life" argues that an emphasis on the temporal demands of morality in each version of the story, or how time is conceived and lived within specific moral frameworks, can be employed to question the formal limits of mediating didactic projects to the wider public.