This is an unusual and disparate collection of essays directed at John Gay's city poem, Trivia. Its four aims are to provide “a window on” eighteenth-century London, to invite students to walk the city's streets, to give experts the opportunity of writing “accessibly and imaginatively across the disciplines,” and to recover the poem (1). Embedded in these somewhat overlapping objectives are three distinct challenges. First, invitations for readers to walk bygone streets and for historians of literature and culture to write imaginatively presuppose different kinds of audience and book from the run of academic productions. Some of the contributors respond to that by adopting a slightly demotic style, such as Susan E. Whyman's opening address to readers warning them to “beware” (43). But despite such moments and the promises of the introduction and the dust jacket, this remains predominantly a volume written by scholars for scholars, and it is unlikely to find much of an audience among general readers. Second, the essays’ foci move between London and Trivia. This is one of the successes of the collection, since readers are given a clear sense of how a literary text might properly be used to illuminate social and cultural history and vice versa. Finally, and perhaps most ambitiously, the bringing together of scholars from different backgrounds attempts an interdisciplinary understanding of both city and poem.

The nine essays cover a range of topics and approaches. Philip Carter is aware that the poem cannot be treated as a simple historical record, “representative of the city,” but argues that it can still show how London “appeared to one, and conceivably many more, of its citizens” (33). Building upon this, he reconstructs a view of the early modern city as a place—for some, at least—of anonymity and crowds. Mark Jenner adopts a similar historical emphasis for a different topic and puts aside Trivia's “intertextual nature” to concentrate on how it “responds to, and even springs from, the actual mire of the city” (91). Alison Stenton's interest is quite different. Taking a cultural geographical perspective, she looks at the kind of imagination of the shifting spaces of the city the poem assumes and reproduces. Her focus on the “kinetic” nature of the walker and his glimpses of city life reveals how this offers no “complete view” but “only representations of spaces that change by the hour” (71). More straightforward literary critical readings are presented by Aileen Ribiero and Clare Brant. Ribiero identifies and discusses sartorial references, and Brant analyzes the way in which the poem's ingenious mixed genre turns “the art of walking into a dynamic topographical joke about the artfulness of literature” (115).

Trivia is in some ways a problematic poem, and two of the essays respond to that. Margaret R. Hunt dissects its attitudes toward women, demonstrating that “oversexed proletarian women both personify and mediate the noxious, excremental effusions of the city” and that “even trivial encounters with apparently harmless women can be hazardous” (121–22). In doing this, she exposes a significant vein of misogyny. Tim Hitchcock's subject is the poor and Gay's representation of them. He argues that Gay portrays beggars as powerful and cunning, that this portrait belonged to a contemporary literary trend, that it was unreflective of real conditions, and that it influenced public opinion and “helped fuel the creation of a malformed system of relief that was ill-suited to the actual needs of poor Londoners” (79–81, quote on 86). Both are powerful essays, but neither deals with the question of style. Gay writes of women and the poor in an allusive, showily educated style that was unavailable to them, or at least to the vast majority of them. It is a style that embodies an attitude of distance and superiority. In her essay on Gay's appropriations of ancient literature, Susanna Morton Braund explores “how he uses classical material to structure his poem and bolster his voice of authority” (149). That voice is a problem when directed in a condescending manner at people with no access to its origins, sources, or power.

Walking the Streets is a bold attempt at an interdisciplinary approach to a significant poem aimed at a mixed audience. The editors have succeeded in gathering together scholars from disparate disciplines capable of offering varied insights. But there is still the question of how great a contribution the volume as a whole makes. As the introduction concedes, the assembling of “a group of writers does not ensure that their thought processes will interact” (20). The qualification is apposite. Walking the Streets presents a series of readings, some more interesting than others, and in doing so, it adds to our knowledge and understanding of Gay's poem. However, the collection does not add up to a great deal more than its parts, and although we have new insights from it, we do not have a major reassessment.