George Lillo

• Born: February 4, 1693
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 4, 1739
• Place of death: London, England

Other Literary Forms

George Lillo is known only for his plays.

Achievements

Of George Lillo’s seven plays, only The London Merchant was both a popular and critical success when first presented, and only it and Fatal Curiosity continued to be performed long after most plays of their period had been forgotten. These homiletic domestic tragedies, which reflect their author’s creed as a Dissenter, had a profound effect on the Continental drama of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.

During a playwriting career that spanned less than a decade, Lillo tried his hand at most popular dramatic forms: ballad opera, heroic drama, masque, prose tragedy, blank-verse tragedy, even adaptations of Elizabethan domestic tragedy (Arden of Feversham) and Shakespearean romance (Marina, a reworking of the last two acts of William Shakespeare’s Pericles). Lillo worked within the bounds of tradition but at the same time went beyond past practice. For example, his first play, Silvia, is a ballad opera of the sort that had become popular in the wake of John Gay’s success with The Beggar’s Opera in 1728. In it, Lillo follows Gay’s pattern of punctuating the action with dozens of familiar tunes, and he includes burlesque and seriocomic elements. The pastoral motif dominates, however, and Lillo’s announced intention—“to inculcate the love of truth and virtue and a hatred of vice and falsehood”—foreshadows the strong didacticism and sentimentalism of his two major plays that were to follow.

Lillo was a relatively inexperienced playwright when he offered The London Merchant to Theophilus Cibber, manager of a summer company acting at the Drury Lane. Though the famous actor David Garrick credited Lillo with “the invention of a new species of dramatic poetry, which may properly be termed the inferior or lesser tragedy,” the drama of hapless George Barnwell is actually in the tradition of such Elizabethan domestic tragedies as the anonymously authored Arden of Feversham (1592) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (c. 1606). Further, earlier in the eighteenth century there were such middle-class forebears as Lewis Theobald’s The Perfidious Brothers (pb. 1715) and Aaron Hill’s The Fatal Extravagance (pb. 1720), the latter based on A Yorkshire Tragedy. Thomas Otway during the Restoration and Nicholas Rowe early in the eighteenth century also wrote plays whose sentimentalism and pathos verged on the melodramatic. Despite these predecessors, Lillo’s achievement in The London Merchant is notable, for it is a realistic prose drama that consciously celebrates the virtues of middle-class life. It offered theatergoers (in its day, and for more than a century thereafter, as a Christmas and Easter entertainment for London apprentices) not a tale of “prinses distrest and scenes of royal woe,” but the story of an honest merchant, his errant apprentice, and a conniving woman, characters with whom middle-class Londoners could identify and whose emotions they could share. Eschewing blank verse, Lillo chose to write in “artless strains,” which emphasized both the realism and the bourgeois subject matter of the play and successfully accommodated his work “to the circumstances of the generality of mankind.” Young men about town came to the first performance ready to scoff (having purchased from street hawkers copies of the Elizabethan ballad on which the play was based), but they soon “were drawn in to drop their ballads and pull out their handkerchiefs.” Alexander Pope was at the first performance and reacted favorably. Queen Caroline asked for a copy of the play, and the royal family went to see it. Both The Weekly Register and The Gentleman’s Magazine defended it enthusiastically against charges that its characters, “so low and familiar in Life,” were therefore “too low for the Stage.”

Enduringly popular as the play was, it did not start a trend on the London stage. There were some imitations, but only Edward Moore’s The Gamester (pr. 1753) is noteworthy. On the Continent, however, it was both popular and influential. It was translated into French, German, and Dutch, and it was praised by Denis Diderot and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the latter of whom wrote, “I should infinitely prefer to be the creator of The London Merchant than the creator of Der sterbende Cato.” Indeed, Lillo’s play is a clear ancestor of Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (pr. 1755), an early Schicksaltragödie, or German domestic drama.

Fatal Curiosity, another mercantile domestic drama but in blank verse, has been described by Allardyce Nicoll as the only tragic masterpiece produced between 1700 and 1750 and by William H. McBurney as a landmark play: “at once a climax to Restoration tragedy written according to ‘the rules,’ and a dramatic protest against the ‘frigid caution’ of an age in which ‘Declamation roar’d whilst Passion slept.’” When first presented in 1736 at Henry Fielding’s theater, it ran only seven nights, but when it was revived the following March as a curtain raiser for Fielding’s The Historical Register for the Year 1736, it lasted for eleven nights. The play was revived again in 1741, 1742, and 1755. George Colman’s pre-Romantic version was done in 1782, and Henry MacKenzie’s reworking (called The Shipwreck) was presented in 1784. Fatal Curiosity clearly had continuing appeal to eighteenth century audiences, and its characterizations, moral sentiments, and theatricality withstood changing dramatic fashions. (Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald, in The British Theatre, 1808, described a performance of Colman’s version at which “a certain horror seized the audience, and was manifested by a kind of stifled scream.”) In addition to its continuing presence on the English stage, the play was widely read, particularly in the aftermath of James Harris’s enthusiastic comparison (in Philological Inquiries, 1781) of it to Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), to William Shakespeare’s Othello (pr. 1604) and King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606), and to John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), and his description of it as “the model of a Perfect Fable.” As in the case of The London Merchant, however, the enduring popularity of the play had very little effect on subsequent English tragedy. In Germany, however, where imitations, adaptations, and translations abounded between 1781 and 1817, it was as influential a forerunner of the Schicksaltragödie as was The London Merchant.

Though Lillo’s other works were failures on the stage, and even though The London Merchant and Fatal Curiosity sometimes are dismissed as little more than sentimental melodramas, both are of lasting interest not only because they obviously addressed a need felt by audiences in England and on the Continent but also because they significantly influenced the course of German tragic drama.

Biography

George Lillo was born in London near Moorgate on February 4, 1693. His father was Dutch, his mother English. He was reared as a Puritan Dissenter. Lillo learned his father’s trade as a jeweler, and the two were partners in London for some years until the son decided to become a playwright. Little else is known about Lillo’s life; contemporary accounts by Thomas Davies and Theophilus Cibber are still the primary sources.

Davies says that though Lillo was a Dissenter, he was “not of that sour cast which distinguishes some of our sectaries.” He further describes him as being “lusty, but not tall, of a pleasing aspect, though unhappily deprived of the sight of one eye.” Of a meeting with Lillo during a rehearsal of Fatal Curiosity in 1736, Davies recalls:

Plain and simple as he was in his address, his manner of conversing was modest, affable and engaging. When invited to give his opinion of how a particular sentiment should be uttered by the actor, he exprest himself in the gentlest and most obliging terms, and conveyed instruction and conviction with good nature and good manners.

Soon after the death of Lillo, Fielding wrote in tribute to him the following words of eulogy:

He had the gentlest and honestest Manners, and, at the same Time, the most friendly and obliging. He had a perfect Knowledge of Human Nature, though his Contempt for all base Means of Application, which are the necessary Steps to great Acquaintance, restrained his Conversation within very narrow Bounds. He had the Spirit of an old Roman, joined to the Innocence of a primitive Christian.

On the evidence of these statements, one can conclude that Lillo patterned the character Thorowgood in The London Merchant after himself.

The prologue to Elmerick, his last completed play, suggests that near the close of his life Lillo was “Deprest by want, afflicted by disease . . . ,” and the third performance of the play, at Drury Lane on February 26, 1740, was said to be “for the benefit of the author’s poor relations. . . .” The evidence of his will, however, indicates otherwise (his primary beneficiary was a nephew, John Underwood, also a jeweler), and Davies reports that Lillo had accumulated a considerable estate from productions of his plays (The London Merchant alone was done seventy times between 1731 and his death) and through their publication by his friend John Gray, a London bookseller to whom Lillo sold the rights to all of his works.

Lillo died on September 3, 1739, and was buried three days later in the vault of St. Leonard’s Church, in London’s Shoreditch.

Analysis

Largely because of The London Merchant, George Lillo is a playwright to be reckoned with in any consideration of middle-class or domestic tragedy, not only in England but also on the Continent, where his influence was more generally felt. He demonstrated once and for all that tragedy was not the exclusive province of princes, but that middle-class men and women possessed the necessary stature for tragic action. Although his plays are not of the first rank, they are worthy progenitors of a large body of later drama.

The London Merchant

“The Ballad of George Barnwell” (which was sung to the tune of “The Merchant”), the late Elizabethan song which became the source of Lillo’s masterpiece, The London Merchant, was said to have been inspired by an actual murder case in Shropshire. The case concerned an apprentice who was seduced by an unscrupulous woman, embezzled funds from his master and gave them to the seductress, and then murdered an uncle in order to rob him. The authors of Elizabethan domestic tragedies often turned to accounts of murder cases for their sources, and Lillo was familiar with these sixteenth and seventeenth century middle-class plays (he wrote his own version of one, Arden of Feversham), so it is easy to understand the appeal of such a moralistic ballad to a young playwright who had been a shopkeeper and was a Calvinist Dissenter. It provided him with a substantive basis for a dramatized sermon on loyalty, honor, greed, and sexual morality—all of which he had touched on in his first play, Silvia.

Allusions early in The London Merchant date the action before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, but there is nothing else to detract from its contemporary realism (its original title included the words “A True History”), and Lillo’s addition of the characters of Maria, Trueman, and Millwood’s servants to the four in his source increased the possibilities for thematic development as well as dramatic conflict. He also made Millwood, the seductress, into a tragic figure through passages that recall Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth and by focusing on the reasons for her misanthropy.

The play opens with a dialogue between Thorowgood, the merchant, and Trueman, an apprentice, in which the master praises his country, its queen, and his fellow merchants, who “sometimes contribute to the safety of their country as they do at all times to its happiness.” Thorowgood warns Trueman that if he “should be tempted to any action that has the appearance of vice or meanness in it,” he should reflect “on the dignity of our profession,” and then “may with honest scorn reject whatever is unworthy of it.” When his only child, Maria, enters, the merchant recalls her many suitors, but she discounts “high birth and titles”; her melancholia, one suspects, is the result of unrequited love (for Barnwell, as it turns out).

The scene shifts to the home of Millwood, a malcontent who labels men “selfish hypocrites,” hates other women, and supports herself by taking advantage “only of the young and innocent part of the sex who, having never injured women, apprehend no injury from them.” Eighteen-year-old Barnwell, whom she has observed in financial transactions, is her latest intended victim, and Lillo prepares the audience well for his naïveté and easy distraction in the face of her advances. When she asks what he thinks about love, he talks about “the general love we owe to mankind” and his attachment for his uncle, master, and fellow apprentices. First addled and then smitten, Barnwell almost as quickly is miserable, having bought “a moment’s pleasure with an age of pain.” Conscience-stricken, he returns home, unable to reveal his transgression even to Trueman, his fellow apprentice and closest friend, but he is convinced that Millwood loves him. Thorowgood confronts but quickly pardons Barnwell for his unexplained absence (“That modest blush, the confusion so visible in your face, speak grief and shame”) and then warns his charge: “Now, when the sense of pleasure’s quick and passion high, the voluptuous appetites, raging and fierce, demand the strongest curb.” Barnwell, though, is tempted anew, this time by Millwood’s story of poverty. He seals his fate by giving her money taken from Thorowgood, but again is immediately tormented by remorse.

Asides and soliloquies are the means by which Lillo reveals Barnwell’s recurring bouts of conscience, and they serve not only to develop his character but also to advance Lillo’s didactic purposes, for almost all such speeches are brief exempla, parts of a play that scholar Stephen L. Trainor, Jr., describes as structured “according to the prescribed format for a Dissenting sermon.”

Trueman, not present in Lillo’s source, is a moral counterpart of the fallen Barnwell. He remains Thorowgood’s willing student and loyal apprentice and illustrates the highest ideals of lasting friendship. Shaken as he is by Barnwell’s flight and confession of embezzlement in a letter to him, Trueman plans with Maria to make up the losses and thus conceal all from her father. During their plotting, Maria turns to the audience: “In attempting to save from shame one whom we hope may yet return to virtue, to Heaven and you, the judges of this action, I appeal whether I have done anything misbecoming my sex and character.” Lillo apparently wanted theatergoers to wrestle with the moral implications of the action not only after a play but also during it. Millwood’s servants, like Trueman and Maria creations of Lillo, are the traditional helpmates and coconspirators of their mistress at the start, but they quickly become disillusioned and decide that “’Tis time the world was rid of such a monster” when Millwood convinces Barnwell to kill his uncle, for “there is something so horrid in murder that all other crimes seem nothing when compared to that.” They resolve, therefore, to prevent the crime. The four characters Lillo has created thus dedicate themselves to saving a soul and eradicating evil. Representing several walks of life—apprentice, servants, daughter of a well-to-do merchant—they are role models for Lillo’s audience, a substantial portion of which had been sent to the theater by masters and elders for edification as well as for entertainment.

The longest speech in the play is Barnwell’s third-act soliloquy before the murder. Aware as he is of the “impiety” of his “bloody purpose” and sensing that nature itself trembles because of his “accursed design,” he cannot fail to do Millwood’s bidding: “She’s got such firm possession of my heart and governs there with such despotic sway. . . . In vain does nature, reason, conscience, all oppose it.” Hesitant to act, he finally stabs his uncle, who in his dying words asks the “choicest blessings” for his “dearest nephew” and forgiveness for his murderer. Barnwell’s self-serving laments over the body have led many to echo Millwood’s characterization of him as a “whining, preposterous, canting villain” who fails to evoke sympathy and lacks tragic stature. Lillo, however, was not influenced solely by classical tradition; his Calvinistic background also was probably a determining force in Barnwell’s course of action. When he is seized as a result of Millwood’s treachery, Barnwell complains: “The hand of Heaven is in it. . . . Yet Heaven, that justly cuts me off, still suffers her to live, perhaps to punish others. Tremendous mercy!” On the other hand, he recognizes the heinous nature of his crime (“This execrable act of mine’s without a parallel”) and accepts responsibility for what he has done: “I now am—what I’ve made myself.” He also warns youths in the audience to “Avoid lewd women, false as they are fair. . . . By my example, learn to shun my fate.” Such statements support Trainor’s thesis that “Lillo seeks to bring the theatregoer to a sentient realization of the evil that exists within him for the purposes of confession and correction of that evil” and that this tragic concept evolved “from Puritan homiletic theory, which also seeks to achieve reformation by affective means.”

The play as first presented and published has Millwood make her final appearance at the end of the fourth act as she is taken to prison, having been denounced by her servants. She lashes out at “men of all degrees and all professions . . . alike wicked to the utmost of their power,” and as for religion, “War, plague, and famine have not destroyed so many of the human race as this pretended piety has done.” Warped though her self-justification may be, she sees herself as a victim of society and is utterly unrepentant, as bitterly and uncompromisingly defiant as she was earlier in the play. There is not even a last expression of despair in the manner of Macbeth or Faustus.

Lillo originally had reunited Barnwell and Millwood at the gallows in a closing scene, “but by the advice of some friends it was left out in the representation,” and not until the fifth edition (1735) was it included with the rest of the text. In addition to the highly charged drama of a meeting at the scaffold, the scene also softens a bit the sharp edges of Millwood’s character because she laments the end of her “flattering hopes,” admits to having “sinned beyond the reach of mercy,” echoes Barnwell’s Calvinism with her statement “And I was doomed before the world began to endless pains . . . ,” and tells Barnwell that his prayers for her “are lost in air, or else returned perhaps with double blessing to your bosom, but they help me not.” Her plaintive final cry recalls Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus: “Encompassed with horror, whither must I go? I would not live—nor die! That I could cease to be—or ne’er had been!” These expressed doubts notwithstanding, Millwood remains unrepentant at the end, and as McBurney notes, “Millwood, rather than Barnwell, enacts the ‘tragic’ role of the Christian drama by dying in blasphemous despair.”

The London Merchant is a play that must be considered from several vantage points. While the primary reason for its contemporary success was its middle-class realism and bourgeois morality, its newness was primarily a matter of degree and style, for Elizabethan domestic tragedies were equally homiletic and journalistically true to life. Lillo’s occasional rhetorical excesses, however, tie it to the classical tradition, and his background as a Dissenter also is apparent.

Guilt Its Own Punishment

His only other noteworthy play is Guilt Its Own Punishment: Or, Fatal Curiosity, which was first presented in 1736 (when printed by Gray in 1737, its title was given as Fatal Curiosity: A True Tragedy). On this occasion as in 1731, Lillo based his domestic tragedy on an Elizabethan crime. Originally reported in a 1618 pamphlet, News from Perin in Cornwall of a most Bloody and un-exampled Murther very lately committed by a Father on his owne Sonne (who was lately returned from the Indyes) at the Instigation of a mercilesse Step-mother . . . , the event was later recounted in Sir William Sanderson’s Compleat History of the Lives and Reigns of Mary Queen of Scotland, and of Her Son and Successor, James the Sixth, King of Scotland . . . (1656), and this condensation of the pamphlet was included in The Annals of King James and King Charles the First (1681), known as Frankland’s Annals. Lillo probably did not use the pamphlet as his source; he likely was familiar with one or both of the compendiums. In each of them, the wicked stepmother of the original has become the real mother of the victim, and preceding the murder account in each there is a discussion of Sir Walter Raleigh’s fall from grace. In Fatal Curiosity, the real mother is the murderer, and early in the play, Old Wilmot and Randal, his young servant, discuss Raleigh’s arrest.

Fielding’s prologue spoken at the first performance was intended to justify this tragedy of “lower life,” which also stood apart from most other plays of the period in that it had only three acts. Its pervasive didacticism, with love for country and the honorable nature of commerce again expressed, recalls The London Merchant. Loyalty to one’s master and selfless love are also portrayed.

The action opens at the Cornwall home of Old Wilmot. Ruined by poverty and saddened by his son’s failure to return from a voyage to India, the old man moves to discharge his loyal servant Randal from his “unprofitable service.” Randal objects, but to no avail, and Old Wilmot suggests that he renounce “books and the unprofitable search/ Of wisdom there, and study humankind,” for doing so will teach him how to “wear the face of probity and honor” as he proceeds to deceive people in order to take advantage of them for his own ends. The old man cynically instructs Randal: “Be a knave and prosper!” His own ruin, he says, has come about through his failure to treat humankind as they deserve. The world, he claims, “is all a scene of deep deceit,” and the man “who deals with mankind on the square/ Is his own bubble and undoes himself.” The lesson in villainy concluded, Randal bemoans the fall of his “High-minded . . . pitiful and generous” master, who once had honor as his idol. At the same time, though, Randal refers to Wilmot as improvident and pleasure-loving, the first of several such inconsistent and conflicting views of the protagonist of the play, whose tragic flaw is his misguided and untempered reason.

The scene shifts to the home of Charlot, who is engaged to the missing Young Wilmot. Charlot rejects overtures by other men and supports his parents, whom Maria, Charlot’s maid, describes as gloomy, proud, and impatient. When Agnes, the mother, enters, Maria says that the old lady’s “pride seems to increase with her misfortunes” and also refers to “her haughty, swelling heart.” Thus, one is prepared for the emergence of Agnes as a villain who is destroyed by hubris and greed. Further, in conversation with Charlot, Agnes is scornful of “the common herd,” to whose level she has been reduced by poverty. She is equally disdainful of her “wretched husband,” whose “fixed love for me” is all that “withholds his hand” from “foul self-murder,” a blasphemous desire that reveals the old man’s loss of faith. Charlot attempts to counter Agnes’s miseries by telling of a possibly prescient dream she had the night before in which Patience and Contemplation were joined by Young Wilmot and his parents. In the first two scenes, then, Lillo sets the stage for the return of the long-lost son and sows the seeds of the catastrophes to come.

Young Wilmot’s appearance in the next scene is punctuated by a patriotic paean to England and a tedious speech of devotion to Charlot, to whose home he then repairs. Their reunion is marked by rhetorical bombast that the blank verse fails to ameliorate. Charlot, though a sentimental heroine in the tradition of Otway’s Belvidera, is the most fully realized and believable person in Fatal Curiosity.

Soon after his reunion with Charlot, Young Wilmot has a chance meeting with Randal, and they scheme to hide the son’s identity from his parents (his features having sufficiently changed during his long absence so they would not recognize him) to enable him to satisfy his curiosity by first meeting with them as a stranger. Lillo thus portrays him not only as a virtuous, loving, brave, and successful merchant but also as a self-indulgent adventurer who is very much his parents’ son and is as much his own victim as he is Agnes’s. He arrives at their home just as Agnes is leaving to sell a volume of Seneca to get money for bread. He gives them a letter of introduction ostensibly from Charlot, and they welcome him, talking of their lost son and listening to an account of his adventures. Fearful that his emotions will betray him into revealing his identity before Charlot arrives, he feigns a need for sleep and retires, giving into Agnes’s care a casket with “contents of value.” Alone, she is overtaken by curiosity and opens the box, which is filled with jewels, treasures that would end their “Base poverty and all its abject train. . . .” Old Wilmot enters; she shows him the jewels; and he senses her purpose: “Th’ inhospitable murder of our guest!” What ensues is the most exciting dialogue in the play, as wife urges husband on, first gaining his tacit assent and eventually convincing him to commit the act. Her determination, persistence, and success are reminiscent of Lady Macbeth, while his reluctance and malleability recall Macbeth himself. No sooner is the deed committed than Agnes reacts in a manner that also recalls Shakespeare’s play: “Inconstant, wretched woman!/ What, doth my heart recoil and bleed with him/ Whose murder you contrived?”

When Charlot and Randal arrive in the wake of the stabbing, the parents learn the full horror of their act, and Old Wilmot resolves that “Our guilt and desolation must be told/ From age to age to teach desponding mortals/ How far beyond the reach of human thought/ Heaven, when incensed, can punish.” He then stabs Agnes, who asks forgiveness from her son and vows: “Had I ten thousand lives/ I’d give them all to speak my penitence,/ Deep, and sincere, and equal to my crime.” Old Wilmot stabs himself, and before he dies proclaims that he and Agnes brought their ruin on themselves with their pride and impatience. “Mankind may learn . . . ,” he says as he dies.

However serious the weaknesses of the first two acts may be, the tragic intensity of the third is overwhelming. Although the action of the entire play spans a period no greater than the time of presentation, there is a startling rapidity to the final progression toward the terrible catastrophes. This classical compression of time is as important to the effect as is Lillo’s decision to have the murder done offstage, with Young Wilmot’s muted “Oh, Father! Father!” and Agnes’s reports and urgings providing all the immediacy that is needed. To avoid diluting the emotional impact, Lillo wisely brings the play to a rapid close after the father dies, while Randal delivers a choruslike coda: “Let us at least be wiser, nor complain/ Of Heaven’s mysterious ways and awful reign.”

Bibliography

Burke, Helen. “The London Merchant and Eighteenth Century British Law.” Philological Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Summer, 1994): 347. Burke presents an argument surrounding the final gallows scene of The London Merchant and relates the play to contemporary life.

Canfield, J. Douglas. Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Canfield examines many Restoration tragedies, including Lillo’s The London Merchant.

Faller, Lincoln B. The Popularity of Addison’s “Cato” and Lillo’s “The London Merchant,” 1700-1776. New York: Garland, 1988. Faller attempts to explain why The London Merchant, which seems awkward and didactic to modern readers, achieved such success in the eighteenth century. He finds that the balance of sentimentalism, realism, and tragedy that went into establishing this domestic drama appealed to its contemporary audience.

Fields, Polly Stevens. “George Lillo and the Victims of Economics Theory.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 (Fall, 1999): 77-88. Fields theorizes that Lillo meant The London Merchant to be an argument against the dominant economic trend represented by John Law as well as a presentation of mercantile theory.

Haggerty, George. Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Haggerty uses Lillo’s The London Merchant to discuss the eroticized bonds of male friendship.