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.

This chapter studies small things that were neither expensive nor finely crafted, but were cherished by their owners, drawing on trials for theft at the Old Bailey and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Small items such as buttons, thimbles, needles, and handkerchiefs were easily pilfered by thieves, and appear frequently as stolen goods that women and men sought to recover through the courts. In both the courthouse and the playhouse, thieves and victims agreed that small things could be recognized by their original owners. Trial testimony shows how owners recalled “remarkable” details about their possessions, describing tiny marks known only to them and discerned via repeated handling and viewing over time. In this way, these remarkable details, through their emphasis on sight, offer alternative ways to comprehend the affordance of things in the eighteenth century. Such personal marks prove troublesome to the thieves of Gay’s ballad opera, whose operations depend on small things being made unfamiliar in order to circulate in the secondhand marketplace. Nothing was too small or too commonplace to be reclaimed by someone. Remarkable details held out the promise that small things could be returned and that no thing was too commonplace to be missed by someone.

Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) combines the reforming strategies of satire, conduct writing, and fable. The collision of these forms creates a fabular hybrid, a text in which fabular elements are folded into the generic markers of the conduct book, resulting in an intensification of the satire of conduct writing and infusing it with a moral claim. In the preface to her excoriating exposure of the abuses of power in domestic life, Collier applauds Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants for its “ingenuity,” the descriptor she applies to her own manual, and the text bears comparison to the Scriblerian project with its satire of both medium and message. The three sections into which Ingeniously Tormenting is divided emphasize the satire of the conduct book. The concluding fable of the Lion, the Leopard, the Lynx, and the Lamb, however, forces a rereading of Ingeniously Tormenting and points to John Gay’s fables. When references to animals, teeth, and claws to describe human behavior are echoed in the real teeth and claws of the animals in the fable, the essay’s tone darkens. The fable’s placement at the end of the book reflects the ironic inversion characteristic of satire.