This multi-disciplinary collection of essays about Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, the long 1716 poem by John Gay (1685–1732), is an exercise in historical interpretation. The principal aim is to shed light on the poem's meanings and technique and on its relation to the London that it describes. A subsidiary aim is to demonstrate the value of just such an exercise in which scholars from different disciplines write from a common literary point of departure.

While Gay's Trivia is a highly significant representation of early eighteenth-century London, it has perhaps received less attention than it might. (The volume helpfully includes, along with an introduction and nine essays, a complete text of the poem with a very useful array of explanatory notes.) One reason for neglect is the complexity of a poem which, while presenting itself as a guide to pedestrian survival on the streets of London, is simultaneously, as Aileen Ribeiro puts it, ‘a practical guide, a lively description, a literary discourse, and a moral homily’ (p. 144). The poem combines different genres, draws on a wide array of reference to classical and English literary precedent, speaks in the voice of an ambiguous persona and varies in its tone. Like other eighteenth-century writing, it combines the high and the low, the polite and the scatological, the immediately topical and the abstractly metaphorical. The poem's very open-endedness invites the array of positions adopted by the contributors to this volume.

Another reason for the relative neglect of the poem is its proximity in time and place to another massively influential literary construction, namely, the representation of London in the Tatler and the Spectator. Given the dominance of the model of the ‘urban renaissance’ in recent scholarship of the eighteenth-century British city, it is not surprising that scholars have been drawn more frequently to Addison's refined and refining London than to Gay's tricky and menacing one. Though the Tatler is barely mentioned, the Spectator is often present as an object of explicit and implicit comparison with Trivia. Contrasting the benevolent Mr Spectator with Trivia's rather unsociable persona, Philip Carter explains, among other things, how such unsociability was a reasonable response to contemporary urban conditions.

Clare Brant captures some of the challenge this volume poses when she asks in her essay, ‘Are we reading to form an understanding of Gay as a writer, the poem as a poem, or the text as a representation of London?’ (p. 105). What emerges about Gay, in several essays, is that, for all the poem's high-minded criticism of luxury, he was personally rather drawn to genial pleasures including those of the coach, the proliferation of which his poem excoriates. As for the poem itself, Susanna Morton Braund demonstrates with intricate elegance the degree to which Gay's extensive classical knowledge shaped its operations. Meanwhile, Clare Brant shows how the poem's use of ‘mire’ as master metaphor opens up contexts beyond the classical and is central in accomplishing the poem's poetic and intellectual work. These two essays, the most ‘literary’ in their approach within the volume, agree that, whatever the poem demonstrates about the art of surviving on the streets of London, it allows Gay to show off his own self-conscious brilliance in the art of poetry.

However, the volume's centre of gravity is historical, and the majority of the essays focus on the poem's relation to contemporary London. A number of the essays use the poem to suggest its usefulness as a source on extra-literary realities. Aileen Ribeiro finds in it a fairly accurate catalogue of contemporary dress. (Having initially come from his home in Barnstaple to London in 1704 as an apprentice to a silk mercer, Gay knew his clothing.) On a different level, Margaret Hunt reads the poem as a register of masculinity's anxiety in the face of perceived female threat, both literal and metaphorical. Susan Whyman interweaves the evidence of contemporary letters about the London experience with that of the poem in order to achieve ‘a more holistic understanding of Gay's London’ (p. 45). At the same time, she notes dissonances between epistolary and literary evidence, asserting that letters rarely share the sense of menace that is a principal strand in Trivia's representation of London. Such dissonances are central to two other essays. Tim Hitchcock demonstrates the discrepancy between Gay's literary representation of beggars and their actual status and conditions, while Mark Jenner shows just how selective Gay was in representing the threats of contemporary urban life: ‘the hazards of urban life are rendered not as dangers which can lead to general social catastrophe, but as inconveniences which spatter the walker's clothes’ (p. 97). Jenner argues that, for all the grittiness of Gay's construction of London compared to Addison's, the poem is nonetheless aligned with the perspective of polite persons and with the polite ambition of creating an urban design free of inconvenience for the better-off.

The volume assembles a diversity of talent and expertise; the essays are uniformly brisk and interesting (though much of the contextual material is familiar from work published elsewhere by the authors). Different disciplines are set in play: classics, literary criticism, cultural geography, the history of dress as well as varieties of social and cultural history. It is not obvious that ‘a more holistic understanding of Gay's London’ emerges. Rather, the volume suggests an obvious point: sources refract realities in numerous and unpredictable ways, and a literary work of such unpedestrian richness as Trivia is bound to misguide as often as it guides the student of historical London.