Grub Street is a
literary term used to describe an
underworld of literary
penury and its products. Now renamed
Milton Street, Grub Street was a street in
London off
Chiswell Street by
Finsbury Square, which was occupied in the 18th century by
impoverished writers reduced to turning to third-rate poems, reference books and histories
to make a living. Grub Street writers are known as
hacks: an abbreviation of
hackney, which means a
hired horse.
The term is covered as such in George Gissing's Victorian novel New Grub Street (1891), a story of men and women forced to make their living by writing. In 1726, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) wrote his poem Advice to the Grub Street verse-writers addressing them as follows:
Ye poets ragged and forlorn
Down from your garrets haste
Ye rhymers, dead as soon as born
Not yet consign'd to paste