Chapter 1 - Mobility and Spectatorship in the Early Eighteenth-Century City

Summary

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.