Crime was rampant, and the “Gin Craze” made them worse: after new policies made gin extremely cheap, production and consumption started doubling every decade from the 1680s to the 1730s. The city was crowded, filthy, and deeply unequal city leaders didn’t provide basic services like streetlights, sewers, and a police force until the second half of the century. Colonial trade and finance enriched the elite, but the Industrial Revolution hadn’t yet occurred, so most Londoners-like those depicted in The Beggar’s Opera-were poor and desperate. London had just become the center of a global empire and would soon become Europe’s largest city. The Beggar’s Opera was largely a response to the fast-changing political, social, and economic conditions of London in the early 18th century. In 1728 he wrote and staged The Beggar’s Opera, which remains his best-known work. In the mid-1720s, he finally decided to start writing for the broader public, instead of the nobility. His 1720 book Poems on Several Occasions made him a small fortune, but he promptly lost it all in the stock market. 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).

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. 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. Fortunately, the Duchess of Monmouth, Earl of Clarendon, and Earl of Burlington were happy to employ him for most of his early career. 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. Soon, Gay stared writing comic poems and plays for Hill’s newspaper The British Apollo. Instead, he went to work for his former schoolmate Aaron Hill, a London writer, publisher, and theater producer. 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. After becoming an orphan on his 10th birthday, Gay went to live with his uncle, a local minister. John Gay was born to a prominent merchant family in the southwestern English town of Barnstaple.

The Beggar's Opera by John Gay