Trivia: Or, the Art of Walkg the Streets of London | Walkg the Streets of Eighteenth-Century LondonJohn Gay's Trivia (1716) | Oxford Amic

Contents:

• TRIVIA (GAY)
• JOHN GAY AND TRIVIA
• JOHN GAY
• JOHN GAY SUMMARY

TRIVIA (GAY)

A handful of lyrics om The Beggar's Opera is all that many people know of John Gay's poetry. Compared wh his fellow Scriblerians, Gay receiv short shrift om most anthologists.

Yet his longer poems are not hard to excerpt and, whout begdgg the central achievement of that much-loved and evergreen "ballad opera", would be good to see a revaluatn of Gay, and more acknowledgment of his poetic (1685-1732) molled his poem, Trivia: or, The Art of Walkg the Streets of London, on Virgil's Geics, transportg the celebratory poetic handbook of farmg practice to the rougher occupatns and teemg, miry streets of Hanoverian heroics may strike morn rears as lean their humour, but Gay's poem mov vigoroly and un-stiltedly on the page. Acrdg to his iend Jonathan Swift, the portly Gay preferred to ri a ach-and-six, but his early stt as a draper's apprentice mt have given the young man om Devon plenty of opportuni for walkg and observg London's streets. In classil style, the boy is nceived when the godss Cloaca (intified wh that nox open sewer, the Fleet Dch) falls love wh a mortal, scribed merely as a "Svenger" boy grows up an orphan (Gay himself had been orphaned at the age of 10), but the godss offers him protectn, and this part of the tale she guis him to the tra that will allow him to survive, cleang the grime om the fashnable boots of a cy thrivg on wastefulns and gbby polics.

Gay's scriptive art is never doubt, but here, the send sectn, Cloaca's materialisatn allows the poet to take off on a particularly enjoyable flight of, om Book II: Of Walkg the Streets by DayNow dawns the Morn, the sturdy Lad awak, Leaps om his Stall, his tangled Hair he shak, Then leang o'er the Rails, he mg stood, And view'd below the black Canal of Mud, Where mon Sewers a lullg murmur keep, Whose Torrents sh om Holborn's fatal Steep:Pensive through Idlens, Tears flow'd apace, Which eas'd his load Heart, and wash'd his Face;At length he sighg cry'd; That Boy was blt, Whose Infant Lips have dra'd a Mother's Breast;But happier far are those, (if such be known)Whom both a Father and a Mother own:But I, alas! Trivia, or The Art of Walkg the Streets of London (1716) is a poem by John Gay.

JOHN GAY AND TRIVIA

SynonymsDefnIn his poem Trivia, John Gay (1685–1732) sts himself as a “bold Traveller” (Gay 1974: 171; III. ”IntroductnJohn Gay was born Barnstaple but by the age of 10 he was orphaned (Nok 2009), and he slipped his Devon anchor when his late teens he ma his way to London.

JOHN GAY

Gay me to a cy still unrgog renstctn after the Great Fire of 1666, where wh the pullg down went a prodig puttg up. The associatn wh Pope and Swift was part of what empowered Gay to wre Trivia, which was posed 1714 and 1715 for publitn January 1716 and then aga (wh an expand send Book) 1720. It was wh the stagg of The Beggar’s Opera 1728, however, that Gay the satirist would e most forcefully forward.

JOHN GAY SUMMARY

As if he were emulatg the wonr-workg svenger of Trivia who “bids Kennels gli/Wh their bounds” (Gay 1974: 135; I. 15–16), Gay giv both the poem and the play the salubr flotsam of London life smoothly ntaed and stylishly prented.

“Of Ways There Are Three Sorts”: Trivia as a TleTrivia is the godss to whom the Walker – the poet’s alter ego for the purpos of the work – ow allegiance, and whom he asks to “aid [his] song” (Gay 1974: 135; I. It was on that basis that Gay appoted Trivia “the Godss of Streets and High-Ways, ” as his Inx terms her (Gay 1974: 179) – which by extensn, sce down those streets a man mt go, would also make her the patrons of pestrians – and then scribed triparte divisn as a repeated pattern upon the poem that he dited to her.

Wh Book I voted to the preparatn that the Walker mt make, and Books II and III alg, rpectively, wh the experience of walkg the streets of London by day and by night, Gay approach his subject om three different angl; and that g together of three “ways” is punngly ntaed the poem’s tle.

Jt as one of the Books of Gay’s poem may be twice the length of the prev one, so some of London’s lan and thoroughfar are broar than others – or better mataed, or ls “nvenient … to Walkers” (Gay 1974: 150). Trivia’s Poetic PrecursorsWh the first ten l of Trivia’s openg Book, Gay has not only troduced a Walker who is open to diversns, “Where wdg Alleys lead the doubtful Way” (135; I.

As poetry tak an urban turn, so Gay impli that he is enterg h lerary terrory.

It had taken a particular batn of circumstanc, however, to ensure that the lan existed for Gay to tread them. Already by the begng of the eighteenth century, therefore, the ndns were right for the posn of a work like Gay’s ’s prefixed Advertisement acknowledg one specific stimul for the poem: “I owe several Hts of to Dr.

Swift” (Gay 1974: 134). Gay learns om Swift the satirist’s knack of nnectg the ntemporary to the classil, so that a morn “Dcriptn” n reach back through alln to Roman antecents and by dog so n reveal eighteenth-century London as a travty of the.

In Trivia, the field of alln is very wi, sce through all the poem’s layers n Gay’s “refully bungled or splendidly mangled imatns of the English Augtan non of Lat poets, ” prisg Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal (Am 1978: 200); but the most important reference pot is Virgil.