page_title: Grub Street
section_title: Hacks
hierarchical_section_title: Grub Street / History / Hacks
caption_attribution_description: English: The Coffeehous Mob, frontispiece to Ned Ward, Vulgus Brittanicus, or the British Hudibras part iv (1710)
context_page_description: Until the early 19th century, Grub Street was a street close to London's impoverished Moorfields district that ran from Fore Street east of St Giles-without-Cripplegate north to Chiswell Street. It was pierced along its length with narrow entrances to alleys and courts, many of which retained the names of early signboards. Its bohemian society was set amidst the impoverished neighbourhood's low-rent dosshouses, brothels and coffeehouses.
  Famous for its concentration of impoverished "hack writers", aspiring poets, and low-end publishers and booksellers, Grub Street existed on the margins of London's journalistic and literary scene.
  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". Johnson himself had lived and worked on Grub Street early in his career. The contemporary image of Grub Street was popularised by Alexander Pope in his Dunciad.
  The street was later renamed Milton Street, which was partly swallowed up by the Barbican Estate development, but still survives in part.
context_section_description: Publishing houses proliferated in Grub Street, and this, combined with the number of local garrets, meant that the area was an ideal home for hack writers.  In The Preface, when describing the harsh conditions a writer suffered, Tom Brown's  self-parody referred to being "Block'd up in a Garret".  Such contemporary views of the writer, in his inexpensive Ivory Tower high above the noise of the city, were immortalised by William Hogarth in his 1736 illustration The Distrest Poet.  The street name became a synonym for a hack writer; in a literary context, 'hack' is derived from Hackney—a person whose services may be for hire, especially a literary drudge.  In this framework, hack was popularised by authors such as Andrew Marvell, Oliver Goldsmith, John Wolcot, and Anthony Trollope.  Ned Ward's late 17th-century description reinforces a common view of Grub Street authors, as little more than prostitutes:
  The condition of an Author, is much like that of a Strumpet, ...and if the Reason by requir'd, Why we betake our selves to so Scandalous a Profession as Whoring or Pamphleteering, the same exusive [sic] Answer will serve us both, viz.  That the unhappy circumstances of a Narrow Fortune, hath forc'd us to do that for our Subsistence, which we are much asham'd of.
  — Ned Ward (1698), 
  One such author was Samuel Boyse.  Contemporary accounts picture him as a dishonest and disreputable rogue, paid for each individual line of prose as a Jack of all trades, master of none.  He apparently lived in squalor, often drunk, and on one occasion after pawning his shirt, he fashioned a replacement out of paper.  To be a called a 'Grub Street author' was therefore often viewed as an insult, however Grub Street hack James Ralph defended the trade of the journalist, contrasting it with the supposed hypocrisy of more esteemed professions:
  A Man may plead for Money, prescribe for or quack for Money, preach and pray for Money, marry for Money, fight for Money, do anything within the Law for Money, provided the Expedient answers, without the least imputation.  But if he writes like one inspired from Heaven, and writes for Money, the Man of Touch, in the right of Midas his great Ancestor, enters his caveat against him as a man of Taste; declares the two Provinces to be incompatible; that he who aims at Praise ought to be starved...[The author] is laugh'd at if poor; if to avoid that curse, he endeavours to turn his Wit to Profit, he is branded as a Mercenary.
  — James Ralph (1758),
caption: The Coffeehous Mob, frontispiece to Ned Ward's Vulgus Britannicus (1710).  The fruits of the Grub Street publishers were read and debated in houses like this.[32]
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