Grub Street in Amsterdam? Jacobus (I) van Egmont, the Devil’s Corner and the literary underground in the eighteenth century

In this article I explore the possibilities of using the concept of Grub Street for the Dutch literary market, or more specifically, for the literary underground in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. First I sketch a more detailed picture of the contours of the London Grub Street. Secondly, I compare the London Grub Street with the Amsterdam ‘Duivelshoek’ [‘Devil’s Corner’], that can be considered as the Dutch equivalent of this English concept. I will especially focus on the typical ‘Grub Street’ publisher and bookseller Jacobus (I) van Egmont and on his network of authors and street hawkers. Thirdly, I analyse the function of a Dutch ‘Grub Street’ in the literary imagination of some Dutch satirists like Pieter Langendijk and Jacob Campo Weyerman