The term ‘Grub Street’ has entered the English language as a general pejorative for tabloid muckraking and lowbrow commercial literature—the words suggest a sort of writing one does only for money—but not for art’s sake. The latest blockbuster you pick up at the airport and leave abandoned on the beach, and all those e-books featuring that shirtless werewolf. Candy we consume, but not exactly serious literature.

But Grub Street was also a real place, an insalubrious London strip, optimistically renamed Milton Street in the 1830s, and now largely buried behind the Barbican Estate. And it played quite an important role in the history of publishing and the British press. Lying just outside the city walls (and the effective reach of the Guild of Stationers), Grub Street had long attracted a motley assortment of outlaws and political dissidents who used their relative security to publish unlicensed pamphlets and incendiary diatribes against the rich and famous. Both Milton and Cromwell found refuge in the area.

With the gradual relaxation of press restrictions that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Grub Street became, the natural home of a thriving publishing industry. The periodical was born, along with the world’s first advice column. Daniel Defoe’s Review and Jonathan Swift’s Examiner offered wry criticisms of contemporary society. Samuel Johnson despaired at the lack of journalistic standards. And amongst them all lurked a countless number of unlicensed presses and unscrupulous publishers looking to make it rich off the public’s insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip and cheap fiction, along with an army of ‘hack writers’ who supplied their written content dutifully, sequestered away in their bohemian garrets above the oily rags and clanking machinery.

This was nothing new of course, making a living as a scribe dates back to the ancient world: ghostwriters have existed as long as the written word. But by the 1700s, the traditional model of ingratiating oneself with a wealthy patron willing to fund one’s literary pursuits was starting to yield diminishing returns. The real action was now found with a rapidly growing reading public, and with an increasingly literate middle-class all looking to satisfy a desire for cheap and accessible content. Thus a new generation of working writers emerged to meet the market demand—hardworking tradesmen willing to put aside their own creative aspirations to give the public what it wanted. Grub and smut. And many of them made their home on this dirty street, arguing in the coffeehouses, pestering publishers for work, and all the while quietly shaping the public’s reading habits with each commission.

Needless to say, not everyone was happy with the changes. The great writers of the day in particular did not enjoy having to compete with such lowly hacks, whose work they saw as only devaluing their own endeavours. Alexander Pope even wrote one of his most famous poems, The Dunciad, mocking the “Kingdom of Dulness” that was busy corrupting the country with its endless flood of second-rate trash. Pope had also found himself the victim of this brave new literary world when bookseller Edmund Curll tried to publish a book of Pope’s poetry without his consent. Unfortunately, the lack of regulation that had first helped to create the flourishing Grub Street industry also left its authors with rather limited legal recourse against those seeking to expropriate their labours. Much like the generative AI of today, men like Curll were able to exploit the lack of copyright enforcement to publish other authors’ work as their own (save a few minor adjustments), or hire struggling hacks to produce low-quality forgeries under the names of more famous writers. And all the while cannibalising existing literary fragments to produce a constant deluge of conspiracy theory, fake medical advice, and soft-core porn. Curll was eventually imprisoned for writing an unauthorised biography of a Member of the House of Lords, only to use the opportunity to solicit fresh material from his fellow inmates.

It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that by the 1750s, Grub Street had also produced one of the first written records of a professional writer complaining about how hard it was to make a living in pen and ink. In a short pamphlet entitled The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade Stated (which also failed to earn its author much income), disillusioned scribbler James Ralph bemoans how financial success is seen as somehow incompatible with creative talent; when it comes to writing, one must either be an impoverished genius or a mercenary hack. Having seen his own somewhat turgid poetry disappear without critical reception (he had the distinct dishonour of being one of the few Grub Street hacks to be mentioned by name in Pope’s Dunciad), Ralph concludes there to be only three viable options for the professional writer: “To write for Booksellers. To write for the Stage. To write for Factions in the Name of the Community.” He chose the community, producing strident political pamphlets for any side of any controversy. He died in 1762, his writing career having been severely hampered by gout, whilst vainly attempting to keep his two wives from finding out about the other.

Yet if James Ralph offers a rather extreme example, it is nevertheless the same dilemma that confronts the jobbing writer today. Granted, many of our literary giants worked as hacks to make ends meet—Anton Chekhov wrote short newspaper articles, Samuel Beckett translated for the French edition of Reader’s Digest, William Faulkner dashed off Hollywood scripts in his spare time—and many are grateful for the anonymity (and the financial compensation) it provides. But the stigma still remains. If you are writing for money, it cannot be serious literature. Go back to Grub Street! Yet when so much of our literary history is rooted in that squalid place, we risk losing something important if we think of it as nothing more than a pejorative for bad writing. And when so many of the issues facing us today are just a rehash of its own battles over copyright and fair use, we might all benefit from revisiting its garrets and backrooms. Alexander Pope eventually tried to poison Edmund Curll; Curll published a salacious account of the incident and both men saw an increase in sales.

Samuel Johnson—who was very keen to stress that he was not a resident himself—once described Grub Street as “a street near Moorfields, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.” True enough. And where would we be without them? Isn’t the publishing industry but an outgrowth, a macrocosm of this unpleasant parade of rogues? of coffeehouse mobs? Getting back to Grub Street might be our way of understanding the publishing world today, and the hack writer who keeps something in it alive.