New Grub Street

'There are no cheery verbal pen pictures to soften issues arising from the poverty of the protagonists'

- George Gissing & Jack Watkins

SELDOM has a novel dealt with the task of writing for a living more convincingly than New Grub Street. Although the book- and magazine-publishing industries are much changed today, the literary types who populate the novel remain recognisable more than 130 years later. Modern hacks complain about the impact of the internet and declining print sales on work security and income, but Gissing's uncompromising tale reminds us that the trade has long been in a state of flux.

Grub Street (once a London street, now in the area of Milton Street, north of the Barbican) became synonymous in the 17th century with impoverished scribblers. Some 100 years later, Dr Johnson described it as a place 'much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems'. However, Gissing's revival of the phrase refers to the altered circumstances of the later 19th century, when writers struggled to adapt to the increasing commodification of literature, the rise of the bestseller market and the demand for lighter articles catering for higher literacy rates resulting from the Elementary Education Act of 1870.