Topographies of Literature & Culture in Eighteenth-Century London

The Grub Street Project is a digital edition of eighteenth-century London. By mapping its print culture, literature, and trades, it aims to create both a historically accurate visualization of the city's commerce and communications, and a record of how its authors and artists portrayed it.

Grub Street, now subsumed by Milton Street, was both a real place and an abstract idea. For authors such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, it represented base commercialization, hack writing, and the prostitution of literary ideals. Its historical record, however obscure, presents a more complex scene, and one that is difficult to trace. Where, exactly, was "over against the lower Pump in Grub-street" (where one might find the printer John Clowes) or "in Grub-street neer the upper pump" (Bernard Alsop) or "near the Upper-Pump in Grubstreet" (Elizabeth Alsop)? What is left to us are the traces of this topography in maps (Strype, Horwood), in texts (The Dunciad), and in images.

Both location and metaphor, this now-vanished street represents what is largely invisible to us now, the print culture of eighteenth-century London (both high and low), and the construction of eighteenth-century London as a network of textual representations. The Grub Street Project will examine new possibilities that digital mapping provides to better understand the city as topography and as "social text."

Map and Image Gallery

Map and Image Gallery (click on "File" to open maps and illustrations):

Horwood's map of London (1799)
Strype's maps of London and its wards (1720)
Strype's illustrations of London's buildings and gates
...& more to come

Some Experiments in Mapping

The Dunciad (1729 Variorum text) — this text will eventually be charted on Strype's 1720 maps of London rather than Horwood's 1799 map, which does not accurately reflect Pope's city
Ned Ward's publications: this map shows where the works of Grubstreet author Edward Ward were sold in London (experimental: viewing this page in Safari is still somewhat glitchy)
Mapping Feminist Publications
English 803 Mapping Projects: Examining the Topographies of 18th-century literature

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The Grubstreet Project has received funding from the University of Saskatchewan, CFI, SSHRC, and the Innovation and Science Fund.