ABSTRACT
The Grub Street of PINKUS is that of late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century London; but it is also “a metaphor, evoking the eternal spirit of the hack writer”. Much of the material he discusses had not been in print since the eighteenth century, and the generous space devoted to the hacks’ writing makes for a book “substantially more Grub Street than commentary”. These selections, however, are usefully contextualised and the broad divisions-into “Publishers” (including Abel Roper, Edmund Curll, and John Dunton), “Authors” (Tom Brown, Ned Ward), “Political Pamphleteers” (focusing on the controversies surrounding Defoe), “Broadsheets”, and “Trivia”—make for a lively account of authorship and publishing. It also has a good bibliography.
