CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (February 13, 2025): When, in his 1716 poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay announced he would instruct his readers on “How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night”, he firmly positioned his account between two different modes of representing the city. Like Ned Ward’s The London Spy, Gay’s poem acknowledges the chaotic energy – and the dirt and odours – the pedestrian is likely to encounter. At the same time, it offers an account of good conduct and urban sociability like that found in Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator, albeit adapted to the busy streets of the commercial city. In so doing, Gay’s generically playful poem – which borrows from epic, georgic, and pastoral to produce a commentary on modern urban life – raises fascinating and still pertinent questions about what it means to be a walker of the city’s streets.
Taking its cue from Trivia, my book The Art of Walking in London: Representing the Eighteenth-Century City, 1700-1830 considers what representations of pedestrianism can tell us about how the metropolis was imagined and experienced – by writers and artists, visitors and inhabitants – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the popular imagination, the idea of eighteenth-century London evokes a Hogarthian underworld of dirty streets, daring pickpockets, and chaotic scenes in which new arrivals trace well-worn routes to poverty and prostitution, criminality and death. This image of eighteenth-century London as dark and dangerous has helped to shape a common misconception that only criminals and the poor walked the streets, while Romantic-period poems like William Blake’s “London” and Book VII of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude suggest that the early nineteenth-century was defined by a sense of alienation, as captured in the latter’s pronouncement that “‘The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery’”.
