Henry Carey (writer)

Henry Carey (c. 26 August 1687 – 5 October 1743) was an English poet, dramatist and song-writer. He is remembered as an anti-Walpolean satirist and also as a patriot. Several of his melodies continue to be sung today, and he was widely praised in the generation after his death. Because he worked in anonymity, selling his own compositions to others to pass off as their own, contemporary scholarship can only be certain of some of his poetry, and a great deal of the music he composed was written for theatrical incidental music. However, under his own name and hand, he was a prolific song writer and balladeer, and he wrote the lyrics for almost all of these songs. Further, he wrote numerous operas and plays. His life is illustrative of the professional author in the early 18th century. Without inheritance or title or governmental position, he wrote for all of the remunerative venues, and yet he also kept his own political point of view and was able to score significant points against the ministry of the day. Further, he was one of the leading lights of the new "Patriotic" movement in drama.

Henry Carey was born in London and was the illegitimate son of George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax. Carey did not make the claim himself, but he did use "Savile" as the name of three of his male children, and these corresponded to the births of Halifax's own three sons. Furthermore, he dedicated all of his major works to Halifax (Gillespie 127). His biography in The Gentleman's Magazine also stated that Carey received a "generous annuity" from the Savile family, but that seems less likely and remains unconfirmed. The fact that, even when his most popular plays were on the boards, Carey would write for pay argues against such an annuity.

Aside from rumor, it is impossible to be sure of Carey's parents. It is possible that a Henry and a Mary Carey, both school teachers, were his parents. Indeed his first profession, according to Richard Hawkins, was as a music teacher in a boarding school for the middle gentry, a position he held while also working as an author, so these two Careys are the most likely candidates for at least his surrogate, if not his biological, parents.

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.

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