Introduction

John Gay was born June 30th, 1685, in Barnstaple, Devon, where he was educated at a free grammar school. Unlike other family members, due to financial constraints he did not go to university. Instead, he left Barnstaple for the New Exchange, London, to become involved in the family drapery business, where he was apprenticed to the silk mercer John Willet. However, Gay did not thrive in this trade and in 1706 he went back to Barnstaple where he was educated by his uncle the Reverend John Hanmer, a non-conformist minister.

Sometime between 1706 and 1708, Gay returned to London and began writing journalistic pamphlets such as The Present State of Wit (1711). Upon this return, Gay also contributed a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Bernard Lintot’s Miscellany (1712), which established his reputation as a poet and his longstanding professional relationship with Lintot. Gay also produced various skits and plays, including Rural Sports (1713) and The Shepherd’s Week (1714). His most notable play from this time was The Wife of Bath (1713), performed at the Drury Lane Theatre.

In 1714, Gay, alongside friends and fellow Tory wits Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, formed the Scriblerus Club. The club quickly became a key social unit for Gay, as members of the group honed their satiric skills by skewering the pretensions common to their fellow writers. This club also played a significant role in Gay’s career: Trivia, a product of this endeavour, was published on January 26, 1716, by Lintot. The first edition was published in two impressions: first, 200 copies of a large paper impression intended for subscribers, printed on fine paper with wide margins; and second, a trade impression of 2000 copies. The same year Lintot published a second London edition and, with partners Stephen Powell and George Risk, a Dublin edition. Gay was to be paid a guinea a book for the subscriptions and Lintot paid £43 for the copyright. Pope believed the total paid to Gay would probably amount to £150. Trivia was immensely popular upon publication: in February 1715/16, Gay, Jervas, Arbuthnot and Pope wrote to Parnell, “Gay has gott so much money by his art of walking the streets, that he is ready to sett up his equipage: he is just going to the bank to negotiate some exchequer Bills” (George Sherburn, ed., The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, vol. 1). Modern critics, however, largely neglect the poem in favour of some of Gay’s more famous works. Perhaps most familiar to 21st-century readers is The Beggar’s Opera, first produced in 1728 and later used as the basis for Bertold Brecht’s play The Threepenny Opera in 1928. Gay continued to write plays, including a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera—Polly—which Walpole, acting through the Lord Chamberlain, suppressed from the stage. Although it was published in 1729, it was not publicly performed until 1777. A notable achievement in Gay’s late career was his 1730 revival of his adaptation of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath, which met with some success. Following his financial triumph with The Beggar’s Opera, however, Gay was disappointed with the profits from the later production, which he referred to as his “damned play” (David Nokes, ODNB).

Frequently ill during his later career, Gay was once falsely rumoured to have died: “We hear that John Gay Esq; … who was reported to be dead, is on the mending hand,” reported The Craftsman on January 11, 1729. Gay died of a bout of fever on December 4th, 1732. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The Poem

Trivia is a mock-Georgic poem, a satire based on Virgil’s Georgics. Virgil’s poem details instructions on Agricultural seasons and labour; Gay, on the other hand, uses heroic couplets, much like Virgil, to make a satirical presentation of the urban landscape and its dangers. Part of the satirical intention is to compare benign, daily occurrences with great mythological and classical characters and events. Here, Gay treads the path of preceding mock epics, particularly Garth’s Dispensary (1699) and Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), both of which he directly references. Yet, moralistically, the satire is somewhat sparse. The main takeaway from his tale of meandering through town is that it might be of use if readers heed his cautions when they themselves wander through the streets.

The poem is separated into three books. The first leads the reader through the city of London as a visitor, the second focuses on Gay’s speaker walking the streets by day, and the third details him walking the streets by night. All satire aside, the city comes alive through Gay’s sprawling depictions of urban life. From Thames Street to Cheapside, from Billingsgate to St. Giles, Gay transforms the trivial aspects of the urban pedestrian into classical extravagance. The poem follows the changing of the seasons, weaving through the different days of the week, and highlighting the effects of different weather. In winter, the muddy stagecoaches and their stiff horses move slowly through town, schoolboys throw snowballs at unsuspecting coach drivers, and the frozen Thames brings both danger and delight through its temporary market fair. When the weather is nicer, the drivers doze, workers crowd the tavern doors, and springtime carries the scent of flowers on the breeze. Along the way, he meets every kind of person, from various social backgrounds and trades: barbers, criers, chandlers, butchers, runners, coachmen, and thieves are all abound in the busy streets.

Copy-text and Markup

We have chosen the first edition of Trivia for the copy-text. We have made silent changes to typesetting choices in the first printing, such as removing spaces before colons and semicolons. Additionally, the long-s has been modernized for the sake of usability and readability. Otherwise, we have attempted to replicate the appearance and spelling of the 1716 text as closely as possible, retaining all capitalization, italicization, and punctuation as they appear in the original document. Head- and tail-pieces, printer numbers, catchwords, drop caps, decorated initials, and marginalia are given both semantic and presentation markup. HTML markup rules are derived from Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines: for example, <DIV1 TYPE="index"> (TEI) becomes <section data-text="Index"> (Grub Street Project HTML). Schema.org markup identifies places and persons as unique entities for use in text analysis and visualizations.

Works Consulted

Annotations are indebted to W.H. Williams’s Trivia: or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (London: D. O’Connor, 1922) and Vinton A. Dearing’s John Gay: Poetry and Prose vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 1975), in addition to the Oxford English Dictionary and Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. Also consulted were Arthur Sherbo, “Virgil, Dryden, Gay, and Matters Trivial,” PMLA 85, No. 5 (October 1970): 1063–1071; and Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman, eds., Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716) (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Context and Rationale

This edition was edited collectively in the context of a graduate seminar (ENG 801: Introduction to Textual Scholarship) at the University of Saskatchewan under the supervision of Dr. Allison Muri in spring 2025.

Editors