Until the early 1800s, Grub Street was the name of a street in London’s impoverished Moorfields district. In the 1700s and 1800s, the street was famous for its concentration of mediocre, impoverished ‘hack writers’, aspiring poets, and low-end publishers and booksellers, who existed on the margins of the journalistic and literary scene. Grub Street’s bohemian, impoverished literary scene was set amidst the poor neighbourhood’s low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses.

- wikipedia.org

“…most of us were about the idlest young dogs that squandered away their time on the pavements of Paris or London. We would not work. I declare in all candour that…the average number of hours per week which I devoted to literary production did not exceed four.”

- George Augustus Sala