Gay was born in Barnstaple, a village on the North Devon coast, about 30 June 1685 and attended the local, excellent grammar school. After the early death of his parents, William and Katherine Hanmer Gay, he was apprenticed to a silk merchant in London. In later life Gay did not choose to speak either of his rural origins or his urban apprenticeship, but they were both important to his development as an artist. Barnstaple gave him a knowledge of the English countryside-with its accents, customs, and folklore-which was unusual among writers of his time and which he was to employ here and there in his plays; and London provided that total understanding of the seamy, even criminal, side of life which is the essence of The Beggar's Opera.
Gay negotiated an end to his apprenticeship before he had completed his articles and returned to Barnstaple. Rather soon after that he made his way back to the metropolis; from about 1707 he was essentially a Londoner for the rest of his life. This time he came to London as a member of the gentry, barely.
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