New Grub Street is set in the literary and journalistic circles of 1880s London. In the 18th century, Grub Street became synonymous with hack literature, and though the street no longer existed in 1880s, hack-writing certainly did. The two central characters are a sharply contrasted pair of writers: Edwin Reardon, a novelist of some talent but limited commercial prospects, and a shy, cerebral man; and Jasper Milvain, a young journalist, hard-working and capable of generosity, but cynical and only semi-scrupulous about writing and its purpose in the late Victorian world.