Bob Clarke - From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899

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FROM GRUB STREET TO FLEET STREET

This book is dedicated to the memory of Lucille Bogan (18971948), who recorded a gloriously filthy blues in 1935

From Grub Street to Fleet Street

An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899

Bob Clarke

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2004 Bob Clarke

Bob Clarke has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Clarke, Bob
From Grub Street to Fleet Street: an illustrated history
of the English newspaper to 1899
1. Newspapers Great Britain History
I. Title
072'.09

US Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clarke, Bob, 1949
From Grub Street to Fleet Street: an illustrated history
of English newspapers to 1899 / Bob Clarke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. (alk. paper)
1. English newspapers History. 2. Journalism England History.
I. Title.
PN5114.C58 2004
072dc22
2004001782

ISBN 0 7546 5007 3

Typeset in Garamond by Bournemouth Colour Press, Parkstone, Poole.

ISBN 9780754650072 (hbk)

Contents

Guide

PART ONE
Grub Street

Chapter 1
Grub Street: an Introduction

Grub-street: a street near Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet.

Johnsons Dictionary , 1755

Grub Street () was a real place, as real as Fleet Street. Its name came from the refuse ditch (grub) that ran alongside. Built on marshy ground, Grub Street was a notoriously unhealthy place, prone to epidemics. Cripplegate had the highest death rate during the 1665 Plague, with over 6,000 killed by the plague in three months alone. As the land commanded a poor price, cheap lodgings were easy to find. It was an area of poverty and vice, teeming with disreputable tenements, mean courts, low alehouses and dark alleys, that Fielding could have been describing when he wrote:

Whoever indeed considers the great irregularity of their buildings; the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts, and bye-places; must think, that, had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could scarce have been better contrived. Upon such a view, the whole appears as a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbour with as great security, as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia; for by wandering from one part to another, and often shifting his quarters, he may almost avoid the possibility of being discovered.

Jonathan Wild set up his first thieving den just round the corner

Grub Street also had a crude sense of humour. Ned Ward reported the existence of a Farting Club in Grub Street, established by a Parcell of empty Sparkes about thirty years since in a Publick House in Cripplegate Parish and

Grub Street

Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support the picturesque myth that the garrets of Grub Street played host to a colony of impoverished writers. It is known that some of the more destitute writers and printers of mean publications lived in the area around Grub Street. Journalists too: Defoe was born just round the corner in Fore Street and died in Ropemakers Alley, one of the many dark passages that fed into Grub Street; and John Dunton lived not far away in Jewen Street. Little Britain, the book-publishing centre of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was only half a mile away. In the 1640s and 1650s, with the explosion of newsbooks and other unlicensed publications, the warrens surrounding Grub Street were the hiding places of fugitive printers lugging their moonshine presses from one garret to the next, trying to keep one step ahead of the authorities.

Grub Street Hacks

The term Grub Street was first recorded in its non-geographical sense in 1630. It became more prevalent during the Civil War when both sides paid the authors of newsbooks to fight a paper war on their behalf. With the formation of political parties after the Restoration, the term became established to describe journalists, political pamphleteers and other writers of ephemeral publications who, with neither a private income nor a wealthy patron, wrote for money.

Grub Street is a metaphor for the hack writer. The word hack derives from Hackney, originally meaning a horse for hire and later a prostitute, a woman for hire. Finally, it was applied to a writer for hire, a newspaper writer or a literary drudge. Paid by the line, scratching a precarious living from the lower reaches of literature, including journalism, the Grub Street hack received no public acclaim, other than the sneers and jibes of his more successful contemporaries who, by a mixture of ability and sycophancy, had found the security of a patron. His life was pictured by Hogarth in the Distrest Poet (). His condition was described by Ned Ward as

very much like that of a Strumpet and if the reason be requird, why we betake our selves to be so Scandalous a Profession as Whoring or Pamphleteering, the same excusive Answer will serve us both, viz. that the unhappy circumstances of a Narrow Fortune, hath forced us to do that for our Subsistence.

And his fate was described by Macaulay:

To lodge in a garret up four pairs of stairs to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be haunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St Georges Fields, and from St Georges Fields to the alleys behind St Martins Church, to sleep in a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital, and to be buried in a parish vault.

The Distrest Poet : Hogarths portrait of the Grub Street hack

The traditional view of the Grub Street hack as feckless, living in a garret, and scribbling furiously by rush-light to earn the next bottle of gin and to get his belongings out of pawn the eighteenth-century equivalent of the jazz musician is exemplified by Samuel Boyse, who wrote for the Gentlemans Magazine . Boyse, by all accounts a thoroughly dishonest and disreputable rogue, was generally paid by the line for his efforts as a poet, translator and literary jack-of-all-trades. He was said to be intoxicated whenever he had the means to avoid starving and, after squandering away in a dirty manner any money which he had acquired, was known to pawn all his apparel. On at least one occasion he was found shivering in his garret, naked in bed with two holes cut in his blanket so that he could write. Whenever he pawned his shirt, he fell upon an artificial method of supplying one. He cut some white paper in slips, which he tyed round his wrists, and in the same method supplied his neck. In this plight he frequently appeared abroad, with the added inconvenience of want of breeches.

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