Published 130 years ago, George Gissing’s New Grub Street is set against the magazine boom of the late-Victorian era, a world dominated by the commoditisation of the written word. Gissing’s cast of writers must adapt to the middlebrow tastes of a mass reading public that is emerging as a commercial force for the first time.
The earnest Edward Reardon, who has aspirations to high art and reads the classics in his spare time, is crushed by penury and critical neglect, while the cynically opportunistic Jasper Milvain writes whatever he is paid to write, and spends his leisure hobnobbing with publishers and editors.
Itself written at a rate of 4,000 words a day, New Grub Street uniquely details the nuts and bolts of hackwork and the economics of the deadline. We live today in a new digital Grub Street, and if Milvain were alive and writing now, he would of course be a content strategist and CEO of a ‘brand storytelling’ consultancy.
Milvain is a hack for our times – the man for whom the word ‘content’ might have been coined. Like ‘art’ or the ‘S’ in S Club Seven, the term ‘content’ can mean pretty much anything you want it to mean. Everyone’s an author these days, and the act of publishing (so lamentably accessible now!) bestows a spurious gravitas: ‘If it’s just a cluster of words you have gathered to “engage” an unsuspecting reader with your brand or your persona, it’s almost certainly a piece of shit,’ writes Bob Hoffman in a notorious blog post. ‘But when you upload it to the web, it automatically gets promoted to content.’
I mean, I tend to agree with all this. Content is padding, filler, guff. But having been working at the commercial content coalface for the best part of 30 years, I feel an urge to find something good to say about it, or at least the people who create the stuff. (Though I may not go quite as far as Accenture, which once described content as ‘to business what water is to life: an essential element for health and growth’.)
The classic content piece is a form of contextualised retail – getting a business to provide some kind of information that aligns with its expertise.
Home insurance provider? Top 10 home security tips.
Retail bank? First-time mortgage guide.
