Grub Street

“ Dear to me, every one of them, as clean-cut blazes by a sincere workman along a trail full of perplexity and struggle, as Grub Street always will be for the man who dips an honest pen that will not stoop to conquer. ”

“ To Portugal Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, come also the anxious dramatists from Grub Street, some with a cheap swagger that Mr. Rich quells on the instant, some with lank cheeks and threadbare cuffs and an entreaty for a hearing which is apt to provoke the great man’s ire and contempt as he sits to receive his courtiers in a velvet coat and breeches, sober enough, but with a good bit of lace at the throat, and a wig handsomely curled about his shoulders. For whatever may be the standing of player-folk, and God knows it is none too high, Mr. Rich is minded that their manager shall win respect. ”

“ They have all grown, in one mood or another, out of the various life of Grub Street, suggested by adventures with publishers, booksellers, magazine editors, newspaper men, theatrical producers, commuters, and poets major and minor. If they have any appeal at all, it must be as an honest (though perhaps sometimes too jocular) picture of the excitements that gratify the career of young men who embark upon the ocean of ink, and (let us not forget) those much-enduring Titanias who consent to share their vicissitudes. ”

“ Thus it came about that the despondent young man was torn between varying emotions, and by the time he was within hail of Grub Street he was without will of his own and at the mercy of any who chose to exercise influence over him. ”

“ O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, Whose graceless children scorn to own thee! ”

“ A thoroughfare of ill-repute traverses it from west to east. This street was at first called March Street; and under that appellation acquired an evil report. It was hoped that a nobler designation would perhaps elevate the character of the place, as the name "Milton Street" had helped to do for the ignoble Grub Street in London. But the purlieus of the neighbourhood continue, unhappily, to be the Alsatia of the town. The filling up of the old breezy field with dwellings, for the most part of a wretched class, has driven "the schoolmaster" away from the region. ”

“ Every one knows Grub street is a market for small ware in wit, and as necessary, considering the usual purgings of the human brain, as the nose is upon a man's face: and for the same reason we have here a court, a college, a playhouse, and beautiful ladies, and fine gentlemen, and good claret, and abundance of pens, ink, and paper, clear of taxes, and every other circumstance to provoke wit ”

“ The earliest quotation of the slang use of the word in the sense of food in the New English Dictionary is dated 1659 from Ancient Poems, Ballads, &c., Percy Society Publications. “Grub-street,” as a collective term for needy hack-writers, dates from the 17th century and is due to the name of a street near Moorfields, London, now Milton Street, which was as Johnson says “much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems.” ”

“ The author never fails to make interesting use of the driest of charters. Thus in the reign of King John a person with the pleasant name of Adam Pepercorn grants to the hospital ten shillings quit-rent for some land in Grub Street, a region full of unhappy memories. Dr Moore quotes passages from Johnson, Swift, and Goldsmith to show that the name Grub Street should have been protected by such associations from any change ”

“ Grub Street sees only the one man and goes straightway after him with a snickersnee. To use the language of Judge Gaynor, "This artistic Jacques of the second part protects the great and tender soul of the party of the first part." ”

“ Then have ye a fair pool of sweet water near to the church of St. Giles, wherein Anne of Lodbery was drowned, as I have before declared.
In the east end of Fore street is More lane: then next is Grub street; of late years inhabited, for the most part, by bowyers, fletchers, bow-string makers, and such like occupations, now little occupied; archery giving place to a number of bowling- [383] alleys and dicing-houses, which in all places are increased, and too much frequented.
This street stretcheth north to Guerades Well street, which thwarteth it to White cross street ”

“ Grose, Vulg. Tongue, s.v. A Grub-street writer means a hackney author, who manufactures books for the booksellers.
1813. J. and H. Smith, Horace in London, ‘The Classic Villa.’ Grub-street, ’tis called.
1821. Egan, Life in London, i. Few, if any, writers, out of the great mass of living scribblers, whether of Grub-Street fabrication, or of University passport ... possess souls above buttons.
1892. Hume Nisbet, Bushranger’s Sweetheart, p. 119. We are going it, have got our agents in Grub Street.
Gruel, subs. (common) .—1. A beating; punishment (q.v.) . For synonyms, see Tanning. ”

“ He looked down upon the surging and shouting crowd in Clipstone Street, but could see it only at intervals, owing to the smoke that rolled from the front windows below him.
What he had now to do he understood perfectly. This roof was divided from those on either hand by a stack of chimneys; to get round the end of these stacks was impossible, or at all events too dangerous a feat unless it were the last resource, but by climbing to the apex of the slates he would be able to reach the chimney-pots, to drag himself up to them, and somehow to tumble over on to the safer side. ”

“ And as to living up at the very top, why, there were distinct advantages—as so many people of moderate income are nowadays hastening to discover. The noise from the street was diminished at this height; no possible tramplers could establish themselves above your head ”

“ In the end he was invited to break his fast, which he did right willingly. Then, with assurances that he would return before nightfall, he left the house. His steps were naturally first directed to Clipstone Street; the familiar abode was a gruesome ruin, still smoking. Neighbours informed him that Mr Briggs's body had been brought forth in a horrible condition; but this was the only loss of life that had happened.
Thence he struck eastward, and at eleven came to Manville Street, Islington. He found Reardon by the fireside, looking very ill, and speaking with hoarseness. ”

“ The firm of Grubb & Smallways, formerly Grubb, had indeed been singularly unlucky in the last year or so. For many years the business had struggled along with a flavour of romantic insecurity in a small, dissolute-looking shop in the High Street, adorned with brilliantly coloured advertisements of cycles, a display of bells, trouser-clips, oil-cans, pump-clips, frame-cases, wallets, and other accessories, and the announcement of “Bicycles on Hire,” “Repairs,” “Free inflation,” “Petrol,” and similar attractions. ”

“ This Nancy trudged for hours through straight and terrible streets called avenues, with a dismal husband and a tired baby at her side. Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue, then quickly across Fifth Avenue, which had nothing to do with us, and again across to Sixth Avenue ... and everywhere dirty shops, screaming children, jostling girls, rude men, trains rushing overhead, street-cars screeching and clanging. Then, at last, Seventh Avenue, where there were streets full of quiet, squalid boarding-houses, fewer screaming children, fewer dirty shops, and no trains. ”

“ No longer were the pedestrians well dressed or apparently prosperous. Instead, poverty and squalor and filth were rampant. More loth even than the well-to-do of the suburbs to go within doors, the swarming mass of humanity covered the steps of the houses, and overflowed upon the sidewalk, even upon the street itself. ”

“ Roger said, “I like you in brown.”
I love going down Fifth Avenue in the dark of a winter evening. The traffic of business is over. Motors and carriages go spinning by, carrying people [Pg 61] to dinners. The big glistening street is like an artery with the joyous blood of the city racing through it, coursing along with the throb, throb, throb of a deathless vitality. ”

“ The true suburbs lie farther out. You have to go well beyond the Brixton Bon Marché before you can find such a place as Streatham, with its endless, well-kept, villa streets of red brick houses, nearly all alike, creeper and grass plot complete. Those suburbs outline a new social order; with a little experience you can easily tell the thirty-five-pounds-a-year street from the fifty-two-pounds-a-year street; you come with a feeling of familiarity upon the corner house, where lives the doctor or the surgeon. ”

“ These streets of London, where the poor do their marketing, are, on Saturday night, gay with light and thronged with people. Because of the next day's rest, there is, until past midnight, an open market, which invades the pavement with costers' barrows heaped with fruit, butchers' stalls, booths of incongruous articles, kitchen utensils, old tools, all the bric-à-brac of the second-hand suburban shop; vehicular traffic is suspended; all barriers are encroached upon; everyone walks in the middle of the street. ”

“ We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree-lined, sunlit boulevards and avenues, all sluiced down with an air that forbade any thought of fatigue, and talked of city government and municipal taxation, till, in a certain silence, we were shown a suburb of uncared-for houses, shops, and banks, whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the shoulders of loafers. Dirt and tin cans lay about the street. ”

“ Its multifarious business bursts through the narrow shop doors, and overruns the basements, the sidewalk, the street itself, in pushcarts and open-air stands. Its multitudinous population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, the side streets, pushing in and out among the pushcarts, all day long and half the night besides.
Rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat. ”

“ To those who really understand them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing membership—those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material development. ”

“ He preferred the more plebeian trails, the department-store infested thoroughfare to the west, with the clattering "El" road overhead; or Fourth Avenue to the east, beginning at the statue of "George the Veracious," running between the silent and terrible mountains, finally, with a shriek and a crash, to dive headlong into the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street, and never to be seen again; or even some purlieu of the great East Side, where he could sit listening at ease in the humble shop of Fitbad the Tailor. ”

“ PART II—THE TEST I BEGINNINGS It was in that red gash of crosstown brick—West Tenth Street—that the new life began. The neighborhood was quaint and poor, a part of that old Greenwich Village which at one time was a center of quiet and chaste respectability, with its winding streets, its old-fashioned low brick houses, its trees, its general air of detachment and hushed life. Now it was a scene of slovenliness and dust, of miserable lives huddled thickly in inadequate houses, of cheap roomers and boarders, of squalid poverty—a mix of many nations well-sprinkled with saloons. ”

“ You come to streets where all the bakers' shops are "panneterias," and you know you are among the Italians. One Hundred and Thirteenth Street as it goes down from Second Avenue to First Avenue is full of Greeks and Italians, and is extraordinarily dark and wild; men of murderous aspect are prowling about, there is howling across the street from tenement to tenement. Dark, plump women stand at doorways and stare at you, and occasionally a negress in finery trapes past. ”

“ Uptown life seemed on its surface to be lighter, and the curse of Adam to rest more easily on the shoulders of his children.
Of Fifth Avenue this was especially true. It was not a canyon of brick and stone in those days. Trade had just begun its invasion and had gained a foothold only in the few blocks above and below Twenty-third Street, and for the rest it was still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. ”

“ When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.
Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. ”

“ People going and coming through the arches are silhouettes. Overhead it is like the grumbling of a thunder storm. Wagons going over the stones rattle tremendously, and they carry lanterns swung beneath to be lighted at night. The streets have fine names: there is Gold Street, and then Jacob Street. Frankfort Street widens out and becomes a generous thoroughfare, all in sunlight. There is a huge, gay hoarding to the right as you go down. ”

“ Take a look into this Roosevelt Street alley; just about one step wide, with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air--God help us for pitiful mockery!--from this slit between brick walls. There are no windows in the wall on the other side; it is perfectly blank. The fire-escapes of the long tenement fairly touch it; but the rays of the sun, rising, setting, or at high noon, never do. It never shone into the alley from the day the devil planned and man built it. ”