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  • Grub Street in Albion:or, Scriblerian Satire in the Romantic Metropolis
  • Judith Hawley

The Mighty Mother, and her Son who bringsThe Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings,I sing.

Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), I. 1–3.

This metromania reigns in all alike:Both wit and dunce the restless muse inspiresWith equal rage, though not with equal fires

George Daniel, The Modern Dunciad (1814), 41.

. . . all Grub Street (that is to say, all London and Westminster)

James and Horace Smith, Preface, Rejected Addresses (1812).

Romanticism used to be thought of as an essentially anti-metropolitan movement in which poets turned their back on the urban and urbane poetry of the Augustan era to write poetry celebrating the natural life of a particular provincial place. So much has changed that we can now speak of 'the urban scene of British Culture, 1780–1840'.1 Despite the extension of the field of analysis to include the metropolitan as well as the rural (and the relations between them), studies of 'Romantic London' have so far tended to revolve around a familiar set of texts such as Wordsworth's 'Westminster Bridge' and the London sections of the Prelude, to analyse Blake's visionary critique of the city, or to argue back and forth about how much of a debt Byron owed to Pope.2 But there are some notable exceptions that have expanded our sense of both the subjects and genres of Romantic period literature and helped us to reassess the relationship between tradition and innovation. Coupled with studies of the physical expansion and the cultural geography of the capital, these more eclectic investigations open new avenues of research and make possible a more detailed mapping of literary life in London.3

This article is concerned with the survival and adaptation of Augustan modes of viewing the city. London changed greatly over the eighteenth century and so did poetry. But to some extent, poems about the city tend to be written in an Augustan mode, that is, in a mode of urban satire drawn ultimately from Horace and Juvenal and naturalised in England in the early modern period by Dryden, Pope and Johnson. Despite the changing architectural and human face of the city – London's population doubled to one million over the course of the eighteenth century and this population enjoyed increasingly salubrious surroundings – Grub Street survived in all its dingy glory as a symbol of the conjunction of art and commerce.

I will focus on poems written in an essentially Scriblerian vein, that is, those that hark back to the urban poetry of Pope and his ilk and borrow the iconography of Hogarth's 'Distrest Poet' of 1737. Such works view the modern scene through the lense of classical [End Page 81] satire and find it wanting. Because of the vastness of the poetic and the metropolitan material in this style, I will pursue a rat-run down Grub Street and ask what happens to this iconic street as a cultural construct in the Romantic period. The term Grub Street, first used as a shorthand for hack-writing at the end of the seventeenth century, was frequently bandied about in the 1720s and 1730s. And it remained apt and convenient in the Romantic era at a time when the spirit of party was infecting literature almost as strongly as in the early 1700s. Its power derives from the fact that the metaphor was constructed on a real foundation.4 It is a metonym as well as a metaphor. The street, which ran north-south between White Cross Street and Finsbury Square, was part of a warren of alleyways and dingy courts just north of the city and thus outside its jurisdiction. The writers who lived in the garrets of Grub Street could boast the lunatics of Bedlam and the prostitutes and rioters of Moorfields as their neighbours. Pope locates his 'Cave of Poverty and Poetry' – his laureate's cell – 'Close to those walls where Folly holds her throne', that is, Bedlam (Dunciad, I, 34, 29). The moral meaning of the term is contained in its etymological origin in the Old English 'grube': drain or refuse ditch. It...

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