Book Reviews
Abstract
the london journal, vol. 33, No. 2, July 2008, 187–197 Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716). Edited by C. BRANT and S. E. WHYMAN. Pp. xii + 256, 11 illustrations, indexes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. £50.00. ISBN 9780199280490. Hardback. The publication of Trivia represented, in the words of Pat Rogers (1974), ‘a crucial moment in the history of urban literature’. However, Alvin Kernan’s description of the poem as ‘a much-neglected and in many ways puzzling work’ (1965) remained valid for the rest of the twentieth century. This fi rst-ever collection of essays devoted to the poem should help to bring Trivia out of semi-obscurity, especially since the volume also contains the complete text, including signifi cant 1720 additions, together with the author’s prefatory ‘Advertisement’, his mock-serious apparatus of side-headings, footnotes and index, and modern annotations. The poem’s generic mix, its tonal shifts and ambiguities, and the semi-ironised persona of the walker continue to puzzle critics. But, as the editors remark, to a large extent it is ‘Gay’s contradictions and complexities that make him attractive to readers now’ (p. 10). There is thus no attempt to resolve the puzzles by means of a grand narrative