SOURCE: "The Languages of Gay's Trivia," Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. X, No. 3, October, 1986, pp. 27-43.

In the following essay, Beckwith considers the classical antecedents of Gay's Trivia, including Virgil's Georgics, to explicate Gay's "mock" effects. Beckwith finds that despite its pointed satire, the poem's mock tone makes possible an overall sense of positivity about the dynamic nature of city life.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Johan Huizinga

In Gay's Trivia (1716; II, 99-220 added in Poems on Several Occasions, 1720) a number of possible "meanings"—mock georgic, satire, moral didacticism, straight reportage of journalism, pastoral yearnings, apocalyptic vision—have attracted one reader or another;' but I think it might better be read as a game of languages, that is a game with meaning itself. Such a way of reading has the initial advantage...