Grub Street

Related to Grub Street: eater, New Grub Street

Grub Street

1. Literally, the street in London that was home to impoverished writers with little talent in the 17th century. Although this course will certainly focus on the classics, we will also read several works from the authors of Grub Street, to get a better sense of the time period as a whole.
2. A derisive term used to describe impoverished writers with little talent. Don't read trash written by Grub Street hacks—enrich your mind with the classics instead!
See also: grub, street
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • scavenge
  • scavenge (around) for (something)
  • scavenge for
  • literally
  • piss-poor
  • from the wrong side of the tracks
  • from/on the wrong side of the tracks
  • on the wrong side of the tracks
  • ghetto
  • ghetto bird
References in periodicals archive
Five Fat Hens - The Chicken and Egg Cookbook, by Tim Halket, is published by Grub Street, priced pounds 18.99
In fact, New Grub Street has nothing to say on the subject of the English aesthetic movement, on its proponents in general, or on the ridicule they faced in contemporary periodicals (most notoriously in Punch) for their avant-garde practices--only on the conflict that some realist novelists of the 1880s experienced between their desire to emulate the "Zola" school of French naturalism and the British public's hostility toward such tastes.
Kenneth Baker is the author of George Washington's War in Caricature and Print (Grub Street, 2009).
New Grub Street (1891) is an unforgettable account of a novelist struggling to write when inspiration fails (Orwell found dais "the most impressive" of Gissing's novels, "also an upsetting and demoralizing book").
Published by: Grub Street, London, 2001 (new edition), 301pp, 12.99 [pounds sterling].
The present paper attempts to read Gissing's New Grub Street as the product of a crisis in the British literary system towards the end of the nineteenth century.
It could be that Stanley was being paid by the word--a not uncommon arrangement on Grub Street, where, lo these many years, he has made his residence.
In dealing with Religio Bibliopolae, Havenstein examines traces of Religio Medici in the 1691 work, only to lament the depredations of Grub Street on its source materials.
Vegetarianism: A History, by Colin Spencer (Grub Street, pounds 16.99).
They then formed Grub Street Prods., creating the comedy "Wings," which spent seven years on NBC.
Grab a copy of his eponymous book (pounds 25, Grub Street) and check out his fab fusion of traditional French techniques and Pacific Rim flavours.
It is fascinating to read about eighteenth century Georgian London with its Grub Street, gin craze, streetwalkers, literary and theatrical stars, scams, scandals, disorder, and death.
Their ruthless treatment of writers was often appalling; they set writers to work in the literary sweatshops of Grub Street, paying them as little as possible while retaining publishing rights for as long as possible.
He proposed `digging downward', viewing the Enlightenment from the bottom where a motley crew of Grub Street hacks had once toiled in obscurity, only to be subsequently buried in the accumulated dust of the French national archives.(2) By blowing carefully, and so raising these men and women from the dead, Darnton not only reanimated a lost world, but also changed fundamentally certain conceptions of the Enlightenment and of its perennially vexing relationship to the French Revolution.
In Fielding's early play The Author's Farce, a Grub Street subculture of phoney learning is brilliantly sent up: while the publisher Book-weight hurriedly commissions from one seedy freelance 'two Latin sedition motto and one Greek moral motto for pamphlets by tomorrow morning', a second hack brings in a new version of Virgil's Aeneid 'translated .