0.4 The grub street project: a cautionary tale

image -->

Allison Muri offers a cogent account of her experience as a scholarly editor working in a digital environment. It is a cautionary tale, and it gives cause for alarm. A young scholar with a bright idea about how to make the most of the latest technology will encounter formidable obstacles—legal, economic, institutional, and even cultural—for she must overcome deeply entrenched views about scholarly communication. What is it to edit a text in the digital era? Ms. Muri argues that such editing goes far beyond the bibliographical rigor required in a printed edition, for it opens up endless possibilities of relating text to context—that is, to the entire world in which a work came into being. In her case, she aspires to recreate the world of Grub Street in eighteenth-century London, a subculture shaped by the physical structure of the city, by the conditions in the printing and publishing trades, by the corpus of contemporary literature, and by the boundaries of the collective imagination. Allison Muri’s Grub Street Project epitomizes editing of the kind that can fire the imagination of “digital natives” familiar with texts “born digital.” But they exist in a subculture of their own, composed of uncomprehending older colleagues, limited resources, and institutional obstacles—above all, tenure.

The great strength of The Grub Street Project is its appeal to the sense of sight. It is intensely visual. By helping readers to imagine eighteenth-century London in their mind’s eye, it will permit them to roam around in its literature with a keener sensitivity. At its base, it consists of a palimpsest of maps. Beginning with Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster from 1799, it will use geographical coordinates to impose map upon map and show how the cultural topography evolved over time. Then it will permit the user to zoom in on particular neighborhoods, and it will populate the entire urban landscape with contemporary images of public spaces, buildings, streets, and street life. Detailed contemporary directories will make it possible to locate activities at precise addresses, especially in areas where the book trades proliferated and writers congregated—Cripplegate, Moorfields, Fleet Street, Covent Garden. The most familiar names—Bedlam, Billingsgate, Grub Street itself—light up associations in the modern reader’s mind, but to embed them in an eighteenth-century setting, one must navigate through the digitized material provided by the website. To the inhabitants of the eighteenth century, that topography also had a metaphorical character created by the authors who made it come to life: Defoe, Pope, Johnson, Swift, Fielding, Gay, and the lesser writers of The Grub Street Journal . Allison Muri’s project will therefore include links to their works. In editing them, with rigorous respect for the original editions, she will edit London itself. The result should be not only a magnificent work of literary scholarship but something close to what the historians of the Annales school idealized as “ histoire totale .”