Definition
In his poem Trivia, John Gay (1685–1732) casts himself as a “bold Traveller” (Gay 1974: 171; III.399). This is metropolitan travelling, however, which does not require the poet to “wander from [his] native Home/And (tempting Perils) foreign Cities roam” (137; I.83–84). Rather, his roaming abroad is limited to London: “Now venture, Muse, from Home to range the Town” (143; II.5). Three books of verse, amounting to more than 1000 lines, describe his itinerary and expound the “art” (as the poem’s subtitle terms it) of “walking the streets of London.”
Introduction
John Gay was born in Barnstaple but by the age of 10 he was orphaned (Nokes 2009), and he slipped his Devon anchor when in his late teens he made his way to London. Thereafter, but for brief periods of absence, London was his home. These were boom years for London, bringing an extraordinary spurt in growth. Gay came to a city still undergoing reconstruction...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ames, Dianne S. 1978. Gay’s “Trivia” and the art of allusion. Studies in Philology 75 (2): 199–222.
Beaumont, Matthew. 2016. Nightwalking: A nocturnal history of London, Chaucer to Dickens. London/New York: Verso.
Brant, Clare. 2008. Seduced by the city: Gay’s Trivia and Hogarth. Literary London 6 (1): n.p.
Brant, Clare, and Susan E. Whyman, eds. 2007. Walking the streets of eighteenth-century London: John Gay’s “Trivia” (1716). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Defoe, Daniel. 1971. A tour through the whole island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gay, John. 1974. Poetry and prose, vol. 1, ed. Vinton A. Dearing with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Griffin, Dustin. 2010. Swift and Pope: Satirists in dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holder, Heidi J. 2007. Nation and neighbourhood, Jews and Englishmen: Location and theatrical ideology in Victorian London. In The performing century: Nineteenth-century theatre’s history, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland, 105–120. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
James, Louis. 2010. From Egan to Reynolds. European Journal of English Studies 14 (2): 95–106.
Keulen, Atze J., ed. 2001. L. Annaeus Seneca: “Troades”. Leiden/Boston/Koln: Brill.
Löffler, Catharina. 2017. Walking in the city: Urban experience and literary psychogeography in eighteenth-century London. Wiesbaden: Springer.
McMinn, Joseph. 1991. Jonathan Swift: A literary life. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
McWhir, Anne. 1983. The wolf in the fold: John Gay in The shepherd’s week and Trivia. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 23 (3): 413–423.
Nokes, David. 2009. John Gay (1685–1732), poet and playwright. Oxford dictionary of national biography. Retrieved 11 May 2020, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-10473
Pope, Alexander. 1968. The poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt. London: Methuen.
Power, Henry. 2007. Street-talk. Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 2007: 22. Review of Clare Brant, and Susan E. Whyman (eds.), Walking the streets of eighteenth-century London: John Gay’s “Trivia” (1716).
Roberts, Gary. 1999. London here and now: Walking, streets, and urban environments in English poetry from Donne to Gay. In The nature of cities: Ecocriticism and urban environments, ed. Michael Bennett and David Warfield Teague, 35–54. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Rogers, Pat. 2005. Why “Trivia?” Myth, etymology, and topography. Arion 12 (3): 19–31.
The freemen of London’s necessary and useful companion. 1706. London: W. Pearson for J. Baker.
Wordsworth, William. 1972. “The prelude”: A parallel text, ed. J.C. Maxwell. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Merchant, P. (2022). John Gay and Trivia. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62419-8_265
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62419-8_265
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62418-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62419-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities