John Gay

John Gay was born to a prominent merchant family in the southwestern English town of Barnstaple. After becoming an orphan on his 10th birthday, Gay went to live with his uncle, a local minister. He couldn’t afford university, so he became a silk merchant’s apprentice in London, but he found the profession uninteresting and quit after four years. Instead, he went to work for his former schoolmate Aaron Hill, a London writer, publisher, and theater producer. Soon, Gay stared writing comic poems and plays for Hill’s newspaper The British Apollo. He quickly realized that, whether he liked it or not, he could only make a living as a writer if he found a wealthy patron. Fortunately, the Duchess of Monmouth, Earl of Clarendon, and Earl of Burlington were happy to employ him for most of his early career. Thanks to his connections with the nobility, he even got to live rent-free in central London and become the Commissioner of the State Lottery. But he was always ashamed to have survived through these connections rather than on literary merit alone, and he frequently mocked himself to this effect in his work. Still, he began receiving modest recognition for his writing the mid-1710s, particularly with the long poem Trivia; or the Art of Walking the Streets of London and the racy 1717 play Three Hours after Marriage (which raised a brief moral panic in London). His 1720 book Poems on Several Occasions made him a small fortune, but he promptly lost it all in the stock market. In the mid-1720s, he finally decided to start writing for the broader public, instead of the nobility. In 1728 he wrote and staged The Beggar’s Opera, which remains his best-known work.