e on the Continent.
_The Gamester_ was first presented at the Drury Lane Theatre February 7,
1753 with Garrick in the leading role, and ran for ten successive
nights. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century it remained a popular
stock piece--John Philip Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Barry, the Keans,
Macready, and others having distinguished themselves in it--and in
America from 1754 to 1875 it enjoyed even more performances than in
England. (J.H. Caskey, _The Life and Works of Edward Moore_, 96-99).
Moore's middle-class tragedy is the only really successful attempt
to follow Lillo's decisive break with tradition in England in the
eighteenth century. His background, like Lillo's, was humble, religious,
and mercantile. The son of a dissenting pastor, Moore received his early
education in dissenters' academies, and then served an apprenticeship to
a London linen-draper. After a few years in Ireland as an agent for a
merchant, Moore returned to London to join a partnership in the linen
trade. The partnership was soon dissolved, and Moore turned to letters
for a livelihood. Among his works are _Fables for the Female Sex_ (1744)
which went through three editions, _The Foundling_ (1748), a successful
comedy, and _Gil Blas_ (1751), an unsuccessful comedy. In 1753, with
encouragement and some assistance from Garrick, he produced _The
Gamester_, upon which his reputation as a writer depends.

It is impossible, of course, to review here all the factors involved in
the development of middle-class tragedy in England in the eighteenth
century. However, certain aspects of that movement which concern Moore's
immediate predecessors and which have not been adequately recognized
might be mentioned briefly. Aside from Elizabethan and Jacobean attempts
to give tragic expression to everyday human experience, historians have
noted the efforts of Otway, Southerne, and Rowe to lower the social
level of tragedy; but in this period middle-class problems and
sentiments and domestic situations appear in numerous tragedies,
long-since forgotten, which in form, setting, and social level present
no startling deviations from traditional standards. Little or no
attention has been given to some of these obscure dramatists who in the
midst of the Collier controversy attempted to illustrate in tragedy the
arguments advanced in the third part of John Dennis's _The Usefulness of
the Stage, to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and to Religion_
(1698).