‘Nauceious and Abominable’? Pollution, Plague, and Poetics in John Gay's Trivia

Abstract

Critics have often noted how John Gay's poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London repeatedly draws attention to the multifarious hazards of urban pollution. This chapter ranges across a remarkable range of sources, such as Dorothy George's London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925), Daniel Defoe's Due Preparations for the Plague (1722), pamphlets of the 1720s, classical accounts of plague, Virgil's Georgics, and Acts concerning sanitation. Their factual and fictional elements are compared with those in Trivia and its engravings, revealing a shift in attitudes about passing through London's streets during the eighteenth century. The chapter examines the language of pollution to construct a history of filth that flows through Trivia's attitudes to streets and waterways — and vice versa, since the poem's language also flows into historical discourses of hygiene.