George Lillo was born in London on 4 February 1693. By 1730, he began writing plays such as George Barnwell (also known as The London Merchant), Fatal Curiosity, Silvia, and The Country Burial.
George Lillo based The London Merchant on a seventeenth-century ballad about a murder in Shropshire. The ballad follows the adventures of George Barnwell, who engages in an affair with the prostitute Sarah Millwood. After stealing money from his employer to fund his relationship, Barnwell robs and murders his uncle. Both Barnwell and Millwood are arrested and executed for their crimes. Lillo's plays usually resembled drames, or mixed toned Bourgeois Tragedies revolving around the middle-class.[1]
According to Lillo's preface to the play, he was drawn to the subject matter for its moral instruction. Lillo states, "If tragic poetry be. . .the most excellent and most useful kind of writing, the more excellent that piece must be of its kind." He validates his use of middle class characters in "that tragedy is so far from losing its dignity by being accommodated to the circumstances of the generality of mankind that it is more truly August in proportion to the extent of its influence and the numbers that are properly affected by it, as it is more truly great to be the instrument of good to many who stand in need of our assistance than to a very small part of that number."[2]
Lillo may have taken his title The London Merchant as a twist to make real the fictional play featured in Francis Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle.[3] The reuse of the name acknowledges that both plays elevate common citizens as subjects worthy of a play.
