If they had a “soundtrack of the summer” back in 1726, it might have been the Ballad of Sweet Molly Mogg, said to have been composed in an English pub earlier that year by three infatuated customers.
That the customers were Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay later added to the fame of the ditty.
But the authors were initially anonymous and, it seems, surprised by the ballad’s enormous popularity, after it was published first in a London magazine and then as a broadsheet in Dublin.
Soon everyone was reciting the tale of unrequited desire for the eponymous barmaid, in 10 verses including this: “I feel I’m in love to distraction/My senses are lost in a fog/And in nothing can find satisfaction/But in thoughts of my sweet Molly Mogg.”
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A later verse hints that Molly is romantically unavailable, being promised to a local “vicar”. But there may indeed have been some fog present, perhaps arising from inebriation. Because according to the Victorian almanac Chambers Book of Days, the ballad involved a case of mistaken identity.
The scene of its composition was the Rose Tavern in Wokingham, near where Pope lived, which history records was run by a John Mogg and his two daughters Mary (aka Molly) and Sally.
Alas, it seems poor Mary was immortalised accidentally. When she died in her mid-60s – 260 years ago this weekend on March 7th, 1766 – she was still a “spinster”. And it turned out the song was supposed to have been about Sally, except that, as Chambers puts it, “the wits were too far gone to distinguish”.
Oh well, they may have had other things on their minds too. Swift was about to publish a book called Gulliver’s Travels, which will be 300 years old this October. As for Gay – credited as chief writer of the ballad, with the others just chipping in – it may have served as a dry run for The Beggar’s Opera, his vastly successful musical of 1728.
In the meantime, there was at least one shameless Irish attempt to replicate the big hit of 1726. A year later, a mysterious composer under the name Shane Bawne MacDermott similarly eulogised a barmaid, said to be located somewhere in Munster, with the preposterous surname of “Jugg”.
She sounds more like a Samuel Beckett character now, but in 1727 she was an Irish bartending equivalent of Master McGrath, putting manners on the English in 16 verses including this:
“What a pother you keep about Molly,/That impudent Bar-keeping trug*/You soon wou’d be cured of your folly/If once you but saw my sweet Jugg.” (*a rude word meaning “wench” or worse)
The prolific Swift could claim some of the credit for The Beggar’s Opera too. He it was who first suggested that Gay write a “Newgate pastoral [set] among the thieves and whores” in that part of London.
The finished work was a kind of anti-opera, satirising the fashion for Italian opera then in a long series of ballads, with no recitative. Most of the verses were written to existing folk airs, many of them Irish and Scottish.
The show was produced by John Rich, a leading theatre manager of the time. And in its commercial and critical success, it was said to have “made Gay rich and Rich gay*” (*in the 18th-century meaning of the term).
Its opening run lasted 62 days, the second-longest in theatre history then, behind only a Parisian opera of 1671. It has been restaged and reinterpreted many times since. A 1920 revival in London ran for 1,463 performances.
The most famous reworking was Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), an accidental bicentenary celebration of the original, which it updated for the jazz age
The anti-hero of Gay’s work had Captain Macheath, a womanising but chivalrous highwayman probably based on the real-life Jack Sheppard (1702–24), the first and short-lived “Jack the Lad”.
But, among other developments, Brecht turned him into Mac the Knife, a much more sinister figure, who kills in cold blood. Hence one of the more unlikely hit songs of the 20th century, sung jauntily by Louis Armstrong and others:
“Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear/And he shows them pearly white/Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear/And he keeps it out of sight.”
The longevity of Gay’s anti-opera may derive in part from one of its central messages: that the vices of the poor were no different from those of the rich, just more likely to be punished. But it was controversial at the time and, like TV, cinema and the internet since, blamed for corrupting the young.
In any case it was still being readapted for stage as recently as last year, when a New York production moved the setting to the notorious Five Points district of 1850s Manhattan.
And of course, its many indirect legacies include inspiring the nickname of a former Irish finance minister, Ray McSharry, whose swingeing budget cuts of the late 1980s earned him redesignation as a latter-day “Mac the Knife”.
