George Lillo, from The London Merchant: Or, The History of George Barnwell (1731)

George Lillo (1693–1739) was a dramatist whose play The London Merchant, with its depiction of the merchant-as-hero, instigated a strand of domestic middle-class tragedy (other plays include The Christian Hero, 1735, and The Fatal Curiosity, 1736). The play’s origin was in the popular ballad ‘George Barnwell’, and concerns the story of Barnwell, an apprentice to the merchant Thorowgood, and his corruption by the seductress Millwood, who persuades him first to rob his employer and then to rob and murder his uncle. Millwood and Barnwell’s capture and hanging provides the play’s moral coda. The play attempts to mythologise the merchant as the vanguard and mainstay of British virtue. In the following extract Thorowgood talks to Trueman, one of his apprentices. The listing of the ‘Blessings’ of imperial produce that are disposed by ‘Heaven’ and the hymn to commerce as promoting ‘mutual Love’, exemplify a typically British ideology of empire.1