Henry Carey (writer) - Early Musical and Literary Work

Early Musical and Literary Work

Scholars have trouble identifying Carey's first works, because he was probably writing anonymously. According to Laetitia Pilkington, friend of Jonathan Swift's and other Tory wits, Carey worked as a "subaltern" to James Worsdale later in his life, in 1734, when he was best paid and most famous. Since he was writing for pay when he had theatrical successes, it seems reasonable that he had been hiring his pen for quite some time. In the 18th century, he appears to have done hack work for the periodicals of the day. His first accredited work was a weekly publication of a set of serialized romance fictions entitled Records of Love in January through March 1710. This work was aimed at a female readership and was written with a clear expectation of an intelligent, educated, and populous set of readers. He also appears as a singer of Italian and English entre-acte songs at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane around 1710 (Gillespie 127). His first poetry publication came in 1713, the year of the height of the Tory ministry under Queen Anne with Poems on Several Occasions.

In 1714, Carey had a job as a psalmist at Lincoln's Inn church and also at Drury Lane. He performed there with his music students. Critically, the Tory ministry fell with the death of Anne, and Robert Walpole's Whigs were on the rise. The leaders of the former government, Robert Harley and Henry St. John, were accused of treason over the coming months, and, while St. John fled, Harley was imprisoned in the Tower of London. In 1715, Carey wrote his first play, an afterpiece entitled The Contrivances. On 13 July 1717, Carey lost both of his jobs, at Drury Lane and at Lincoln's Inn, for a singular political statement. Harley had just been freed from the Tower and had attended Lincoln's Inn Church, and Carey set Psalm 124 to a jaunty, celebratory tune and sang it. The Psalm concerns the Exodus of the Israelites, announcing that

"If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us:

Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us:

Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our soul."

It concludes with "Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped."

Even though Carey lost those two jobs, he was soon back at Drury Lane, and he married Elizabeth Pearks in September. He produced his second play, Hanging and Marriage, in 1722. The theatrical seasons of 1723 and 1724 were dominated by pantomime and spectacle plays in London (inducing a young William Hogarth to satirize the abandonment of drama for puppets), and Carey worked providing the music to some of these productions. In 1723, he wrote the music for Harlequin Dr. Faustus (text, such as it was, by Barton Booth) at Drury Lane. From 1723 to 1733, Carey was the "unofficial composer in residence" for Drury Lane, and he wrote and performed much of the music between acts, preludes, and epilogue music, as well as the music called for by dances and other entertainments in the plays (Gillespie 127).

Henry Carey never ceased to be a composer nor to work as a singer and musician. Even as he began to have greater success as a poet and playwright, he continued to work in music. Furthermore, Carey worked in a theatre that was associated with the Whig party. Colley Cibber, Robert Wilks, and Barton Booth were patronized first by Joseph Addison and his circle and then by Robert Walpole and his circle, and yet Carey appears to have been an unambiguous supporter of the Tory ministry of Henry St. John and Harley and the literary circle of Alexander Pope. When, therefore, Pope satirized the theatrical vacuity of the pantomime stage in The Dunciad, he was aiming not at the musicians and composers, but rather at the replacement of drama with spectacle.