There was an anecdote that Samuel Johnson used to tell of his early days in London where he visited a bookseller called Wilcox. When Wilcox asked him how he intended to earn money, Johnson said he’d earn it with his literary labours. Wilcox looked at the tall, muscled and (at this point, not-fat) Johnson and said he’d do better-off buying a porter’s knot.
The anecdote seems to have been one that Johnson told in both a self-congratulatory and self-deprecating way. Look how far he’d come, how well his literary labours had served him but also how unlikely it had seemed at the beginning. But why didn’t Johnson become a porter? It was heavy work, but it was steady. All that physical work in the outdoors among the people of London may have been more beneficial to his mental health than the locked in struggles of writing - a task he never really enjoyed. Why did people join the denizens of Grub Street?
It seems that Samuel Johnson didn’t particularly. When someone approached him and later life and told him he’d have been a feted lawyer, Johnson mourned how his financial and social situation had blocked that path from him, and that he would have enjoyed that life very much. He tried to get other jobs than hack writer, applying to work in schools and even setting up a school of his own. What’s more, after he’d been a writer for a few years, editing The Gentleman’s Magazine, he tried again to get a job at a school.
In many ways, he really wasn’t cut out to be a Grub Street writer. He was dreadful at meeting deadlines, bristled under any editorship or management and while he’d write prefaces and articles for other people, he was a dreadful collaborator. What’s more, he really does seem to have found the act of writing to be incredibly displeasurable. It’s very noticeable that most of what he wrote was commissioned and that his output fell after his pension meant he didn’t need to write for money. He was always coming up with ideas of things he could write and projects he could carry out - and he never saw any of those projects through.
It seems that Samuel Johnson joined Grub Street because he’d run out of any options. He could have bought a porter’s knot and carried items for other people, or perhaps have used the skills he learnt in his father’s bookshop and entered the printing trade - but he had more education than that, and seemed to think it his duty to use his education to educate others, even if he found it dull drudgery.
Oliver Goldsmith is a different story. While it seems Johnson had some clear ideas about the kind of figure he wanted to be, Goldsmith seems to have drifted. He drifted from Ireland to Scotland, from Scotland around Europe and from Europe to London. He claims to have obtained a medical degree in that time but it seems unlikely. What’s more, even if he had the skill (I mean, he did essentially kill himself through self-malpractice), he didn’t have the demeanour. People may have enjoyed his company but he didn’t give off the air of authority.
He also worked in a school, where he was an usher. There he was dreadfully offended when a pupil was surprised that he considered himself a gentleman. It seems he fell into Grub Street because he wanted to elevate himself and make himself known. His first book, An Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe seems to be more about inflating his position as a learned man than any real inquiry. The way he chased trends in The Bee and The Citizen of the World seem to show a man who wanted fame an notoriety - which fits well with his complaint about readers going out there way to not know he had a new book out.
Unlike Johnson, he was good with a deadline and worked well with, and for, others. Most of his output consisted of compiling and retelling others work in readable ways. If he didn’t exactly love the task, Goldsmith does seem to find pleasure in doing something well. Although he describes the difficulties of writing, especially the absurdity of his walking about with a serious face, trying to write funny lines - he seems to enjoy writing. Eventually, of course, this brought him the fame and fortune he’d always wanted, for a time at least.
Then there’s George Psalmanazar, who worked steadily in Grub Street for the last half of his life. He wrote careful histories and parts of encyclopaedias, where he even taught himself Hebrew so he could fact-check. For him, Grub Street drudgery was the penance for putting all his ludicrous fantasies and misinformation about Formosa into the world.
Finally, I want to talk about Christopher Smart, who’s different from the others because he actively chose Grub Street, rather than fall or be pushed into it. He had a sweet deal in Cambridge, he’d gained a fellowship where he could live comfortably and convivially, gaining praise for winning the Seatonian Prize every year. Yet he gave this all up to move to London, write silly poems for daft magazines and run cabarets dressed as an old woman.
It could be that he gave it up for love, the reason he was eventually kicked out of Cambridge was his marriage to Anna-Maria Carnan, although he met her through his Grub Street connections, so it seems she was part of the package. Perhaps he saw it as freedom, but he signed such restrictive (and ludicrous) business contracts that he was rarely free. Perhaps he felt he could have more fun among the hack writers.
If anything, Christopher Smart seemed to really enjoy writing. When he was writing silly copy for daft magazines, it’s really enthusiastically silly copy. After he was incarcerated in a private asylum, he still wrote. Some of those texts were for publication, but much of it wasn’t - no one would publish Jubilate Agno. It seems that Smart was one of those people who needed to write.
All this leads to another question, why do people write now? There’s not even the camaraderie of Grub Street to keep us going, only the slow grind of words. I may try and answer that for myself next week.
