Grub Street
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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After Grub Street in London, England now named Milton Street, a haunt of and home to impoverished writers.
- the home or state of impoverished writers and literary hacks
- Upon the occaision of his first publication he quit his day job, only to find that Grub Street wasn't lined with manors and villas but hovels and slums.
History
Until the early 19th century, Grub Street was the name of a street in London's impoverished Moorfields district. In the 1700s and 1800s, the street was famous for its concentration of mediocre, impoverished 'hack writers', aspiring poets, and low-end publishers and booksellers, who existed on the margins of the journalistic and literary scene. Grub Street's bohemian, impoverished literary scene was set amidst the poor neighbourhood's low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses.
According to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the term was "originally the name of a street...much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet."
See also
- Grub Street: studies in a subculture (1972) by Pat Rogers
- Pulp fiction
