George Gissing [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

BOSTON

January 9, 2015

Grub Street

Grub Street doesn’t exist any more — as an actual street — and it hasn’t done so for well over a century. But Grub Street has, and still does, exist as a certain kind of ethos. By the time George Gissing wrote New Grub Street  in the early 1890s, “Grub Street” stood for “hack writing” — in other words, writing for pay, or writing “to get one’s bread,” as they used to say. Gissing’s novel dramatizes the cultural split between “high culture” and “mass culture” as it tells the story of two very different writers: an idealistic novelist who writes for art’s sake, with very little success, and a cynical journalist who writes for money and as the market dictates. It’s a good novel — and a great example of British naturalism — though I like The Odd Women