Edmund Curll, Bookseller

EDMUND CURLL, BOOKSELLER

MAP. Map: from John Rocque, A Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, and Borough of Southwark; with the Contiguous Buildings; from an Actual Survey (1747), detail of sheet C2, reproduced by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library and Historic Urban Plans, Inc. Curll’s first shop was near Temple Bar, just beyond the east end of the Strand. The bookseller’s progress can be charted through his other premises around Catherine Street, Burleigh Street, Bow Street, and Rose Street. He stood in the pillory at Charing Cross, at the west end of the Strand.

Edmund Curll, Bookseller PAU L B AIN ES AN D PAT ROG ER S

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Paul Baines and Pat Rogers 2007

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–927898–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Niall Rudd

Acknowledgements Research for this book was carried out in several British and American libraries and repositories. These include the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles; the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, and the University of South Florida Library; the National Archives; the House of Lords Record Office; London Metropolitan Archives; Leicester Record Office; the British Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Chetham’s Library; the library of St Deiniol’s College; and the university libraries of Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester. Unique material has been provided by Hertfordshire Record Office; the Society of Genealogists; and the University of Guelph library. To the staff of all these institutions we extend our thanks; we are especially grateful to Richard Clement, Special Collections librarian at the University of Kansas, and the staff in Special Collections and Archives in the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. Valuable information was provided by Dr David Stoker and Professor Alan Harrison. In addition, we acknowledge with gratitude permission to reproduce material from collections at the National Archives; the British Library; the Bodleian Library; and Cambridge University Library. We are grateful to the British Academy in London for the award to Paul Baines of a Research Readership to work on this project, and to the same institution for a further small research grant. The British Academy and the Henry E. Huntington Library also supported the research for this book through their fellowship scheme. Support from the Bibliographical Society is also gratefully acknowledged. We should also like to thank our colleagues, above all Julian Ferraro and Jill Rudd, for their help and encouragement. On a personal level, we owe an immense debt for support and, all too often, self-sacrifice to our families, most particularly to Katy Hooper and Adrienne Condon. P.B.; P.R.

Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction

viii ix 1

1. Beginnings (1683–1706)

10

2. In Business (1707–1710)

24

3. The Four Last Years of Queen Anne (1710–1714)

43

4. Trading Blows (1714–1716)

63

5. The Devil’s Scout (1716–1718)

91

6. Curlicism Displayed (1717–1720)

111

7. Antiquities and Politics (1717–1722)

132

8. Trials (1722–1728)

149

9. Tribulations (1726–1728)

170

10. The Dunciad (1728–1730)

187

11. Going it Alone (1728–1732)

204

12. Covent Garden Drollery (1732–1734)

226

13. Mr Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1734–1736)

246

14. Gold from Dirt (1737–1742)

277

15. Closing the Books (1741–1747)

296

Afterword

314

Appendix 1. Curll’s Will

320

Appendix 2. Curll’s Payments to Authors

322

Notes Index of Curll’s Publication General Index

324 371 379

List of Illustrations Map: from John Rocque, A Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, and Borough of Southwark; with the Contiguous Buildings; from an Actual Survey (1747), detail of sheet C2, reproduced by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library and Historic Urban Plans, Inc.

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Figure 1. The Compleat Auctioneer, c.1700, reproduced courtesy of the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings (print no. 1415).

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Figure 2. [Edward Holdsworth], Muscipula (1709), reproduced from a private copy.

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Figure 3. [Samuel Wesley], Neck or Nothing (1716), reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

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Figure 4. The Art and Mystery of Printing, from the Grub-street Journal, no. 147, 26 October 1732, reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

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Figure 5. The Art of Trimming emblematically displayed, from the Grubstreet Journal, no. 200, 25 October 1733, reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

240

Figure 6. Curll’s catalogue, 1 December 1735, reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

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Figure 7. Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, volume 1 (1735), reproduced from a private copy.

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Figure 8. Detail from William Hogarth, The Distrest Poet, second state (1737), reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

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Abbreviations BL Corr ESTC Foxon Griffith GM Guerinot JTS LA Madan–Speck Prose Works Remarks and Collections Straus Swift, Corr

The British Library The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) The English Short Title Catalogue D. F. Foxon, English Verse, 1701–1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). The reference number is cited. Reginald Harvey Griffith, Alexander Pope: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1922–7). The reference number is cited. The Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Monthly Intelligencer J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope 1711–1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (London: Methuen, 1969) Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. H. Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948) John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London, 1812–15) F. F. Madan, A Critical Bibliography of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, ed. W. A. Speck (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Libraries, 1978) The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, vol. 1, ed. N. Ault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936); vol. 2, ed. R. Cowler (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986) Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C. E. Doble and D. W. Rannie, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1885–1918) Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll: Being some Account of Edmund Curll, Bookseller; to which is added a Full List of his Books (London: Chapman and Hall, 1927) The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. D. Woolley, 3 vols., in progress (Frankfurt-am Main: Peter Lang, 1999–)

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Abbreviations TE Teerink

The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1938–68) Herman Teerink, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jonathan Swift, 2nd edn., ed. A. H. Scouten (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963)

Newspapers are cited in references as follows: AWJ BJ DC DJ DP EP FP GEP

Applebee’s Weekly Journal British Journal Daily Courant Daily Journal Daily Post Evening Post Flying Post General Evening Post

LEP LG MWJ PB PM RWJ WEP

London Evening Post London Gazette Mist’s Weekly Journal Post Boy Post Man Read’s Weekly Journal Whitehall Evening Post

Introduction Obscene with filth the Miscreant lies bewray’d

So Alexander Pope depicts Edmund Curll in The Dunciad (1728/9), his mockepic vision of cultural decline. In many ways, the first half of eighteenth-century British culture is typified by the dramatic clash between Pope, the uncrowned laureate of his age, representative of high classical culture and urbane values, and Curll, a self-made bookseller with a reputation for piracy, deviousness, and obscenity. Curll became the most visible and unrepentant exponent of a new art of publicity in the early eighteenth century, which for Pope and his circle represented the absence of civilized discrimination between high and low culture, an intrusive interest in the private lives of the famous, and a mechanization of the art of writing. Curll had the knack of getting hold of private papers and publishing them, feeding a new public appetite for scandal; Pope’s close friend Dr John Arbuthnot joked that Curll had managed to add a new terror to death by his practice of rushing out cheap and inaccurate biographies of recently-dead celebrities. The rumour spread abroad that he kept hack writers in a garret, working piecemeal for a few pence a line, a potent image of the debased cultural productions of Grub Street. During his long and ‘dauntless’ career, as The Dunciad describes it, Curll was attacked in his person and in print, poisoned by Pope for publishing poems from his circle, beaten by the boys of Westminster School, sent to the pillory for publishing politically sensitive material, and sued for infringement of copyright on a number of occasions, most notably by Pope once again. When Pope needed a corrupt bookseller to publish a surreptitious edition of his letters in order to give him an excuse to bring out an ‘authorized’ edition, it was Curll who was offered, and took the bait. Curll meanwhile responded with unabashed bravado to Pope’s taunts, writing replies and attacks whenever Pope published any major works, and gleefully publishing any scandal that could be attached to the poet’s name. Just as there were other rogue booksellers, so there were other authors with whom Curll engaged in fierce disputes. To name only a few, Jonathan Swift, Edward Young, Daniel Defoe, Matthew Prior, and Henry Fielding absorbed war with Curll into the material of their literary output. He occupied a key position in early eighteenth-century literary culture, and he acquired a quasi-mythological

2

Introduction

presence in novels, plays, and poems. But the antagonism with Pope played the most formative role. Pope defined his own literary career as that of an independent, virtuous author, precisely against ‘Curl’s chaste press’, his ironic tag for the muck-raking, scandalous, sex-obsessed rogue bookseller and his business. And his line was, broadly, endorsed by his contemporaries, who recognized Curll as the most resourceful and persistent of offenders. ‘All Booksellers I fear’, wrote Dr George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson in 1738, ‘are Curls by Profession.’ Richardson, a printer–novelist who had done work for Curll, knew what this meant. Curll was a near contemporary of his opponent, living from 1683 to 1747, while Pope’s dates are 1688–1744. After his death Pope’s satire would seal Curll’s insalubrious reputation, though a few new details appeared, such as the completely false assertion that he ‘lost his ears in the pillory’ for printing The Nun in Her Smock, a ‘fact’ routinely included in nineteenth-century accounts. Literary history always told the story from Pope’s superior point of view. In 1927, however, Ralph Straus published The Unspeakable Curll, the first attempt at some sort of full account of the bookseller, complete with a handlist of his output. Despite a certain flippancy of tone and understandable reserve on matters of pornography, this has served scholars well over the past seventy-five years. But Straus himself acknowledged that his book provided neither a full biography nor a scientific bibliography. Scholarship on early modern and eighteenth-century cultures of print has moved on a long way since 1927, to the extent that commercial publishers are no longer seen simply as the subordinate commercial intermediaries (malign or otherwise) of literary genius. Studies of the book trade, based on newly-available ledgers and Stationers Company archives, have given us a far deeper understanding of the economics of authorship and publishing: the long-running series of book trade studies set up by Robin Myers and Michael Harris is a case in point. The ongoing Cambridge History of the Book project and the forthcoming Oxford Companion to the Book also testify to this enhanced focus. New interests have emerged in the print culture of the period and its influence on the development of a ‘public sphere’ of literary and cultural debate, particularly in the wake of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s controversial The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979): Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998) sets out a new case about the construction of knowledge through print culture, and has much to say about the making of books, legitimate and otherwise, in and before the Curll era. Two outstanding studies of authorship in Curll’s period, David Foxon’s Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (1991) and James McLaverty’s Pope, Print and Meaning (2001), have shown how bibliographical study can produce interesting new angles on the literary text as well as forming useful cultural history in its own right. Alvin Kernan’s Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (1987) studies the career of one canonical author of a slightly post-Curll era from this standpoint. Theorists of textual editing now debate the ‘sociological’ or ‘intentional’ nature of texts partly

Introduction

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on the ground cleared by early eighteenth-century squabbles for control between writers like Pope and booksellers like Curll. The present biography is designed to revisit the Pope–Curll vendetta and to enter the various kinds of debate engendered by this resurgent interest in the history of the book with a factual, archive-based account of Curll’s activities. There is considerably more material available to the modern research than there was to Straus. Union catalogues of newspapers and periodicals, and electronic projects such as the English Short Title Catalogue, have made it very much easier to assess the extent of particular bookseller’s contributions to the book trade. New materials have been found in repositories round the world, including unique copies, as well as items thought to be lost. We have been able to identify a considerable number of books in which Curll took an active publishing role, even though he concealed his involvement. The ESTC files had revealed several cases of this sort, but we have discovered many more which those files overlooked. Cataloguing projects and recently-developed electronic finding aids offer increased access to archival collections including manuscripts and other papers connected with Curll. A good deal of material relating to Curll’s activities as a government informer survives among the state papers and Treasury papers in the National Archives. More about Curll’s legal problems can be found among Chancery records at the same repository, and we have been able to discover several new documents here which disclose some unsuspected forays into court. The House of Lords Records Office preserves unexplored information on a major case, including the bookseller’s petition for clemency: also held is a unique surviving copy of the publication which resulted in his kneeling at the bar of the House for the first time. In addition Curll has surfaced in the Old Bailey records, while many new pieces of information have been gleaned from contemporary newspapers, such as the Weekly Journals run by Mist, Applebee and Read, and even in provincial newspapers. (This allows us to date many publications more accurately than has been possible up to now.) The bookseller’s will has been transcribed from the National Archives. The British Library possesses letters from Curll to various notable figures, and two volumes of copyright assignments, including many of Curll’s; Cambridge University Library holds further letters from Curll to government officials; the Bodleian manuscript collection has an assortment of his correspondence, much of it throwing fresh light on his activity in antiquarian studies. The John Johnson collection at Oxford has yielded what seems to be the lone surviving copy of a broadsheet Curll dispersed to the crowd when he stood in the pillory. A scattering of items survive in county record offices, and one lost item has shown up in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London. We have also been able to track down records of Curll’s two marriages from applications for licences and other sources. Straus did not have access to most of these documents, and explorations of new material since he wrote his book have tended to be rather localized.

4

Introduction

However, interest has grown steadily: several doctoral studies of Curll have appeared recently, along with a number of influential articles and a marked development in general awareness of the history of the book. It thus appears an opportune moment to produce a major archive-based biography and a full bibliography of this intriguing man, and to examine the history of the war with Pope from Curll’s position as a bookseller on the fringes of legality. Since he lived constantly on the edge of what was permissible, the bookseller helped to define what was transgressive in the literary production of his era. His conviction in the King’s Bench Court was responsible for establishing obscene libel as a misdemeanour in common law rather than an offence in civil law to be tried in a spiritual court. (With little exaggeration, it has been claimed that the law concerning obscene publication was invented for Curll.) Equally, his Chancery suit with Pope about property in personal letters elicited a judgment from the Lord Chancellor which laid down a precedent still respected by the courts in the English speaking world. His appearance before the Lords prompted a ruling that it was a breach of parliamentary privilege to publish the ‘Works, Life, or last Will’ of any member of the House without consent of his heirs or executors. Remarkably, this ruling stood until 1845, although it was never stringently policed: if it had been observed to the letter, Curll would not have been the only publisher to find his wings clipped. As one more indication, Curll seems to have been among the last figures in the literary world to stand in the pillory—perhaps the very last of all. Modern studies of individual bookseller businesses are still fairly rare, and have tended to concentrate on the more obviously respectable members of the trade or those with strong literary connections such as Samuel Richardson. Fine printers such as Bowyer and Baskerville have been well served in this respect. Curll was not, like the Tonson portrayed in K. M. Lynch’s Jacob Tonson: Kit-Cat Publisher (1971), a publishing supremo whose activities were partly responsible for creating an English literary canon. He was not, like William Strahan, the subject of J. A. Cochrane’s Dr Johnson’s Printer (1964), closely associated with a particular author, except in the negative sense of his feud with Pope. William Zachs’s The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade (1998) offers an exemplary archival study of the founder of a long-running business from after Curll’s day; Curll bequeathed nothing to his successors. Harry Solomon’s The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (1996) presents an Eisensteinian reading of an author-bookseller who was advancing to centre stage as Curll was beginning to fade: the bookseller, in effect, who unites Pope and Johnson in the development of a literary canon. Curll was unlike all of these figures, and no one could describe him as a wholly representative figure in the commerce of his day. Perhaps the closest comparison would be with John Dunton, whose indiscreet Life and Errors (1705) we use as a source in our early chapters. But Curll was even more of an eccentric outsider than Dunton, who was at least formally bred up within the trade. It is from that marginal

Introduction

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perspective that Curll can tell us a good deal about the practice of bookselling in the early eighteenth century. This is, first, because the atypical often serves to define and establish the typical. Second, the sheer visibility of Curll in the literary market-place means that he left more traces of his activity than any other publisher, Jacob Tonson not excluded. Third, the range and density of his ventures help to show the multifarious ways in which the trade operated. Finally, Curll sometimes did orthodox things and carried through routine publishing work. Detailed attention to his career should thus illuminate some forgotten and misunderstood episodes in the history of the book. The basic aim of this study is to tell the story of Curll’s life, and we have not attempted to explore exhaustively the nature of operations within the book trade more generally. Nevertheless, the materials assembled here reveal quite a lot about the way bookselling went on in his day. Eccentric as his methods sometimes were, they demonstrate the increasing importance of advertising as a medium for retailing. Curll’s various informal arrangements with his colleagues in the business of publishing, which usually stopped well short of outright partnership, illustrate the flexible nature of collective book production. His payments, if they sometimes fell below those paid by grander operators such as Jacob Tonson and Bernard Lintot, provide a bench-mark for the sums commanded by authors on the lowest rungs of the profession. When Curll found himself summoned to the law court, either in criminal prosecutions or civil suits, the case he presented both in attack and defence shows how legal aspects of the trade were managed in the aftermath of the Copyright Act of 1709/10. His catalogues display the longevity of Curllian editions: books were kept in print for as long as it took to sell them (up to twenty years or more), even if this meant re-packaging them with a fresh title-page every so often. A great deal has been written about Curll, and continues to be written in print and in cyberspace. Much of this makes for highly coloured and fanciful reading, as it stresses the most salacious aspects of his career in a way that distorts its overall shape. In the general imagination Curll survives as a negative icon, a purveyor of scandalous and obscene material, and as an antagonist of Pope. These were of course salient features of his life as a publisher; but on a day to-day level his activities covered a comparatively mundane spread of topics, which we have tried to chart. Our aim is to present a more sober record of his activities, in the belief that the most pressing need is for a reliable account of factual matters—what precisely he published, for instance, and what form his encounters with major players in the book trade and literary world took. A direct look at his relationships with professional authors, as satirized by Pope, gives us a better hold on the corps of authors used in The Dunciad and elsewhere. But as a result, we must ruefully acknowledge that readers may find this book less entertaining than the biography Straus wrote in the 1920s. We hope that the greater reliability and fuller detail of our account will provide some compensation, along with a more up-to-date appraisal of Curll’s place in the history of the book. Gaps inevitably

6

Introduction

remain: little has come to light about the daily workings of his shop with regard to issues like the staff he employed; and for the most part his intimate family life eludes the gaze of a modern researcher, though we have a little more about his marriages, his son, his lodgers and his servants. We know he employed a great many separate printers, but cannot always say which ones. We can say little about the circulation of his various ‘editions’, although it gives pause to find that he intended to print one thousand copies of a run-of-the-mill pamphlet like The Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham (see Chapter 5). But we hope to have provided a fuller picture of Curll as a working bookseller, and to have dispelled some of the mythology surrounding his name. CONFIDING IN CURLL If Pope, whose fame and genius, from the first, Have foil’d the best of critics, needs the worst, Do thou essay: each fault, each falling scan; The first of poets was, alas! but man. Rake from each ancient dunghill every pearl, Consult Lord Fanny, and confide in Curll; Let all the scandals of a former age Perch on thy pen, and flutter o’er thy page. Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

There is a kind of alternative reputation attached to Curll, which also needs some close examination. Under various kinds of scholarly and theoretical pressure, the tidy opposition that Pope designed between himself and Curll has come to seem more like a symbiosis, with Curll acting as an essential prompt, fear and shadow against which Pope seeks to present his own mission as a writer in society; the dividing line has come to appear less watertight when subjected to detailed scrutiny and various kinds of pressure both scholarly and theoretical. Pope never scrupled to use Curll-like manoeuvres when it suited him, and much of Curll’s output took an innocuous, if not respectable, turn: it included medical, antiquarian, and historical studies, as well as a high proportion of fiction by women authors, currently enjoying renewed popularity. Pope’s image of himself was carefully constructed and promoted; Curll’s scandal-mongering offers some interesting counterpoint. Pope was as much a businessman as his adversary, taking advantage of new copyright legislation to secure professional rewards, and his relationship with Bernard Lintot, the bookseller through whom he made his fortune, and with whom Curll sometimes did business, also suffered from economic competition presented as cultural difference. Curll’s interest in the darker side of Pope’s imagination keeps in view those elements which Pope would filter out. Curll has thus become a more sympathetic figure in recent years.

Introduction

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Mythologized by himself, and turned into a figure of fable by Pope, Curll has for some commentators become a legendary hero in the history of the book. This has its paradoxical side, because he displayed little by way of principled support for the free flow of ideas, except where his own freedom was at stake. He appealed to the Copyright Act when forced into court to defend illegal publications, but ignored its provisions when these strengthened the hand of his rivals in the publishing industry or when they boosted the rights of authors. Almost every time he himself initiated court proceedings, he went there with the aim of imposing some kind of check on the activities of a competitor in the business. Occasionally writers have tried to inflate his moral standing by pointing to the manipulations of his leading adversary; but this is sophistical, because the essential trajectory of his career was set long before he ever locked horns with Pope. For some people, Curll has seemed more of a loveable rogue than a scandalous opportunist. It is true that even Pope harboured some grudging respect for ‘that Rascal Curl’, if only because he was able to use the bookseller to publicize his works, and like all satirists Pope needed enemies. Nonetheless, there is no need to try to whitewash Curll; he would not have made a reliable purveyor of second-hand carriages. David Schroeder has written a fascinating study of Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception (1999). Judged by these standards, Curll scores very highly on mischief and deception. Some of his publishing strategies could also be seen as a form of resistance to authority; but at the same time he sought the protection and endorsement of those in power. Those who seek to depict him as a tribune of the under-class, or the promoter of an open market in ideas, have chosen to ignore the fact that he almost always sought to advance his own interests at the expense of his brothers in the trade and the hacks he employed. He wrote to the prime minister of his hopes that he might be in line for ‘something in the Post-Office’—he did not mean a job delivering mail, but some kind of position as a censor. On one occasion he submitted an unsolicited proposal to the government to tighten up the stamp duty on publications such as ballads, which had managed to evade the current law, suggesting to Robert Walpole that an inspector should be appointed who would ‘advance the revenue above 10,000 l. per annum’; his own candidacy sprang to mind. Always ready to inform on booksellers suspected of seditious publications, he seldom showed any reluctance when hauled up before the authorities to name authors and printers who, he felt, deserved to take the blame in his place. Once he described a book emanating from his shop as ‘printed for’ another bookseller—someone who had unwisely taken the liberty to print some poems which were Curll’s property. ‘I here return him the Compliment, in part, as I always will, whoever attacks me, by way of lex talionis, i.e. the just Law of Retaliation—E.C.’ Fellow-feeling, not to say mercy, seldom entered into his collegial relations. Doubtless, writers such as Fielding exaggerated the squalor in which he forced his authors to work, but Curll was primarily a businessman, and scarcely the generous agent of patronage that Johnson would acknowledge the booksellers of

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Introduction

his own day to be; sometimes he would bid high in order to poach an author, but the evidence as a whole suggests he gave people the going rate for the job and no more. He aimed to pay as little as he could for what he published (and this was often nothing at all, since gentleman authorship was still alive and well), and to sell as many copies as he could. We can show that Pope had plenty of real information to back up his picture of Curll’s stable of authors as they survived on a pittance in some of the nastier back-alleys in St Giles’s. Missing from the annals is any record of a writer who got rich through his labours for Curll. Besides, he preferred to lay his hands on the work of established names in the literary world whenever possible. If he had been able to pilfer enough writings by Swift, Prior, or Rochester to make a good living, he would scarcely have bothered to employ men like Asgill, Bezaleel Morris, or Oldmixon. Bradford K. Mudge has recently argued that a reading of ‘the enmity between Pope and Curll moves beyond the personal conflict to some of the larger issues facing the literary market-place’. He further suggests that the confrontation of Pope’s emissary P.T. with the bookseller constitutes a dramatic allegory of the tendencies of the age: ‘Nowhere else can we see the tensions and conflicts of the early eighteenth-century literary marketplace so dramatically illuminated.’ Mudge provides an interesting summary of some key episodes in the contest, although we might wonder about his characterization of Pope as ‘the expensive call girl who pretended to be a lady of fortune’ and of Curll as a ‘seasoned streetwalker’. The publisher was ‘arguably one of history’s greatest spin doctors’ when he ‘masterminded the solution’ to his dilemma in the pillory. Some may find this uncomfortably close to the accents of Curllian rhetoric. Mudge seeks to show what no one doubts, that Pope ‘proved himself—repeatedly—as deceitful and manipulative as he maintained Curll to be’.1 But as W. H. Auden pointed out, time pardons Kipling and Paul Claudel, whether or not we agree with their views, ‘for writing well’; Pope was a great writer and Curll, despite repeated efforts to break into verse, was not. Pope’s assessment of the quarrel with Curll has its self-serving inaccuracies, which we try to present impartially, but because the primary evidence lies in the masterly comedy of the Account, the Dunciad and the letters, Curll’s excitable replies will always seem unconvincing and self-defeating by comparison. In another work, Mudge has described how he enlisted graduate students in a class on research methods to assist him in a project involving an anthology of eighteenth-century libertine literature, subsequently published as When Flesh Becomes Word (2004). He reports that members of the class ‘eagerly transcribed Venus in the Cloister as a way to sharpen their knowledge of textual criticism’, perhaps the first time this motive has led anyone to peruse the work in question. After this, we are told, the students, ‘enthusiastic about justifying the ways of Edmund Curll to man, planned an edition that would appeal to the modern reader’.2 Curll would surely have approved of this project, since he craved respectability along with success. It suggests a touchingly innocent view of what the bookseller was up to.

Introduction

9

With these contrasting perspectives in mind, our aim in this work has been to look as dispassionately as possible at the facts. We hope that Edmund Curll, Bookseller will show that it is possible to relish Curll’s activities as a gadfly in the literary market-place, and yet to acknowledge him as a man of few scruples. In 2001 Paul Baines began a two-year British Academy Research Readership awarded for the purpose of researching a new biography and bibliography of Edmund Curll. The British Academy has awarded two additional travel grants to facilitate research in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and some American libraries, and further funding has come from the Bibliographical Society. During those two years all the known archival material was transcribed and copies of nearly all the known or suspected printed material have been examined. London newspapers for the period from 1706, when Curll began publishing, to 1747, have been searched for advertisements relating to his publications and news of his appearances in court and elsewhere. This work has proceeded alongside independent and long-standing research by Pat Rogers, who began to gather archival material on the subject in the 1960s, and has published several specialist articles on Curll over the last thirty years. For the present book, both research and writing have been shared by the authors. The eventual end in view of our research involves publication in two parts. The first is this biographical study, which attempts to pay serious and detailed attention to Curll’s publishing career, his literary productions, his business activities, and his political involvement. In this book we explore the fortunes of Curll as a symptomatic but dynamic figure of the developing public sphere in early eighteenth-century Britain. A full analytic bibliography of more than 1,000 books associated with Curll will follow in due course. This will list all items actually written by Curll, items largely promoted by him, where he is the sole or main proprietor, and items where he is just one of many booksellers with a financial interest in the publication. The listings will be arranged chronologically, and will include details of author, title, date, format, pagination, and imprint, as well as external references to the publications in journals and newspapers, which often give more exact publication dates and details of pricing. The continuing life of titles in Curll’s catalogues and advertisements will be analysed for the light this throws on publishing practices generally. Because of the nature of his working methods, the bibliography of Curll has been a messy one, despite the valiant pioneering work of Ralph Straus. We are conscious that many questions remain unanswered, but we hope that a more orderly picture of his business will now start to emerge.

1 Beginnings (1683–1706) On 23 January 1728, The Evening Post advertised Proposals for a Subscription to Memoirs of the Life of Edmund Curll, Bookseller and Citizen of London. Ralph Straus comments ‘But the idiots refused to subscribe. I would give much to see a copy of the Proposals, but doubt whether many will have survived’ (284). Nothing corresponding to this desirable title, still less the book it proposes, has been found, and it may not have been intended seriously. Curll however was only recently out of prison, and nursing a grievance, so it would have given him an opportunity for an apologia, or self-display. In the event, he was forestalled by his appearance in the pillory at Charing Cross on 23 February 1728, and he channelled his autobiographical instincts into the narrow focus of an exercise in damage-limitation—a paper of self-defence, aimed at winning sympathy from the crowd. Shortly afterwards his starring role in Pope’s The Dunciad (published 18 May) redirected his sense of injustice towards his old antagonist. As we shall see, he responded liberally to Pope’s provocation, eventually, at the end of April 1729, producing The Curliad. A Hypercritick upon the Dunciad Variorum. In this 38-page pamphlet, Pope was charged with vanity, indecency, and blasphemy in a familiar litany of biographical slander. But unlike most attacks on Pope, Curll’s was signed; and it does include a few useful details about the bookseller’s own life as part of the assault. It is from The Curliad that we learn that ‘the Year of my Nativity’ was 1683 (p.14). We also have a birthday: in the second volume of Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1735), a further onslaught against his favourite poet, Curll notes that the section ‘To the Reader’ was written on ‘14 Julii, Die Natali’. These details are confirmed by amendments made in Curll’s will on 14 July 1742, where he notes that he is ‘Entg my 50th Year’. Specifying one’s birthday in a will was an unusual practice, and Curll also referred to it in a contractual memorandum in 1728, indicating at least some sense of interest in his origins.1 Publicly, however, he was more evasive, and certain basic facts about Curll’s start in life remain undisclosed. No neutral effort to record Curll’s life in its own terms, rather than simply as an aspect of Pope’s life, was made until 1798, when the New and General Biographical Dictionary included a brief account of him. In this, we are told that Curll was born in the west of England, but since the same source also tells us that he died in 1748 (it was 1747) and that he lost his ears for publishing The Nun in Her Smock (he did not), its evidence about the more remote question of his birth

Beginnings (1683–1706)

11

may not count for much. Raymond Mackenzie suggests that Curll could have been born near Maidenhead, but cites no source.2 In volume two of Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, Curll notes: ‘Mr. Pope is the son of a Trader and so is Mr. Curll —par nobile’. This sounds like an attempt to equate Pope’s status, as the son of a merchant of some eminence, with his own perhaps less prestigious origins. Unfortunately, no record of the birth or baptism of Edmund Curll has so far come to light, though the name is far more common than we might suppose. Certainly there were Curlls in the West of England, especially Somerset, during the seventeenth century; at High Ham, at West Hatch, at North Petherton; one Anne Curle married at Crewkerne in July 1697. In the seventeenth century there were also Curlls, or Curls, or Curles, in Scotland. Curlls abounded in Sussex, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Kent (where an Edmund De Kerle is recorded in 1273), Norfolk, Herefordshire, Lincolnshire, and for that matter, in Virginia. When Curll came to London (assuming he was not born there) he may have found family: an Edmund Curle was christened on 22 March 1639 at St Martin in the Fields, Westminster, and another of the same name was christened 14 February 1646 at St Olave, Southwark. A Henry Curll (the name of his own son) was christened on 27 October 1647 at St Stephens Walbrook and others of that name were baptised in 1660 and 1663 (both at St Martin in the Fields) and 1683 (St Paul’s, Covent Garden); Ann Curll was christened 13 July 1679 at St Margaret’s, Westminster, daughter of Thomas Curll; Alexander Nodder Curle was christened 27 May 1683 at St Martin in the Fields, Westminster, the son of Godfrey Curle. An Elizabeth Curle was living in the city in 1695.3 Anna Curle’s will was proved in November 1707.4 Again, little evidence of a clear link to the bookseller exists. Several other Curlls, of one spelling or another, and various forenames, appear in the lists of those matriculating at Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century; and an Edmund Curle was appointed commander of the Little Mary in 1661.5 Curll does not help us as much as we might expect: in 1712 he published a life of Walter Curll (1575–1647), bishop of Winchester from 1632 to 1645, when he was deprived for his monarchist sympathies. This was a figure of some eminence, mentioned in Walton’s Life of George Herbert; and though the publication largely consisted of one of the bishop’s sermons, the pamphlet is substantial enough to figure as a source for the biography of the prelate in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and other reference works. Several other Curlls from the late seventeenth century are noted in it, and Curll must have troubled to research the material somewhere, perhaps after coming across the sermon on one of his regular forays into the available literature of the past. But beyond the clear placing of ‘Walter Curll’ the subject over ‘Edmund Curll’ the bookseller on the title page, no connection is made. The obscurity of Curll’s origins is in striking contrast to the flamboyance of his life, and he appears to have wanted it that way. We also know little of Curll’s education, though educated he clearly was. Like Shakespeare, he acquired small Latin and less Greek, enough to adopt the

12

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pseudonym ‘Philalethes’ (‘Lover of truth’) or to quote the sort of tag or motto that turned up on title pages, and enough to make unwise challenges to the scholarship of others.6 In 1745, irked by the Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. Pope, ascribed to ‘William Ayre’, one ‘J. H.’ issued some Remarks on the biography, protesting that it was by Curll himself and including some ‘Authentic MEMOIRS of the Life and Writings of the said E C l’. According to this pamphlet, which regarded his birth and parentage as irrecoverably obscure, Curll shew’d an early Inclination to Letters, and Plagiarism; insomuch, that he was no sooner taught to read, than getting into his Grandmother’s Closet, he there would shut himself up whole Hours together, reading the ingenious Histories of Mother Shipton, Jack-the Giant-Killer, and such others; the most surprizing Incidents in which he would get by heart, and at his Return to School vent them among his Fellow Students there, as Matters that had happened within his own Knowledge; nay, so harden’d did he at length grow in this Practice; that, having gained by it, the Name of an ingenious Lad at School, he proceeded to recount these Things, among the Wonders he had seen; even to his before-mentioned Grandmother: And this the indulgent old Woman looking upon as a greater Proof of his Wit than his Lying, would never suffer him to be corrected for.7

The validity of these anecdotes is, naturally, open to question; ‘J.H.’ claims considerable inwardness with Curll, and some personal knowledge of Pope, which may or may not be true: John Henley and John Hill have been suggested as possible authors, but there is no guarantee that even the initials are accurate.8 Many of the stories that are quoted are from Pope’s own notes, or the satirical pamphlets he wrote about Curll in 1716; a story about his botched circumcision, for example (obviously Pope’s invention) is told with equal gravity. Those that do not come from Pope could quite easily be made up as the sort of thing which ought to have happened in the early life of so notorious a figure, and this is the entirely plausible view taken by Straus (197). The most that can be said is that the early anecdotes are not as extreme as one would expect if they were wholly fabricated. The Remarks give the origin of Curll’s trade as a natural development of his interests in bawdy and ‘secret history’: About the Age of fourteen, his Grandmother beginning to think it Time he should be put to some Trade or other, and advising with the before-mentioned Parson, who had been himself an Author in his Youth; and consequently knew the Profits his Works had brought to other People, however little himself had shared in them; told her, she could but one way give him an Opportunity of making the best of his natural Qualifications; and that was, by making him a Bookseller. This then was agreed upon, and to one of that Trade our Youngster was sent, where he soon found he had been but a paultry Dabbler in his juvenile Performances; and in the Time of his Apprenticeship laid the Plan of that Conduct, by which he has since carried on that Trade as . . . Mr. Pope observes, to Lengths beyond what it ever before arrived at. (p. 45)

Suspiciously neat as this is, fourteen was a standard age for apprenticeship and it would appear likely that Curll joined the London book trade some time around 1697–9.

Beginnings (1683–1706)

13

The New Biographical Dictionary gives a slighting account of Curll’s progress: ‘after passing through several menial capacities’, he ‘arrived at the degree of a bookseller’s man’. Thereafter he ‘kept a stall, and then took a shop in the purlieus of Covent Garden’. If these existed, they must have been purely retail operations. It is normally stated that in 1698 or 1699 Curll was apprenticed to a bookseller, Richard Smith, one of a daunting number of Smiths (not all of them real) operating in the London book trade over the years 1690–1720. We know from a letter written by Curll in 1703 that he was living with ‘Mr. Smith Bookseller in the Strand’, and Richard Smith appears to be the only bookseller of that surname operating there at the relevant period. Smith himself did assert that Curll had been his apprentice until about 1706.9 In fact, there is no record in Curll’s case of a formal apprenticeship having taken place under the auspices of the Stationers Company, a body to which Curll never seems to have belonged. An apprenticeship might have taken place within some other company, since the Stationers had failed in their repeated attempts to concentrate book trade personnel under their own banner and several practising booksellers were, technically, ironmongers or drapers.10 Some were formally apprenticed to one master while actually working for another. But it has proved impossible to locate any record of such an arrangement in Curll’s case, and the arrangement may never have been fully legitimate. THE BOOK TRADE The book trade that Curll entered in the late seventeenth century scarcely resembled the publishing industry of today, though Curll’s importance lies partly in his innovative exploitation of now familiar techniques of publicity.11 The functions of printer and bookseller, once more or less united in the same individual, had for some time become separated into specialized professions, though there were individuals who continued both to print and to sell. The booksellers, to the annoyance of the printers, had long since gained the upper hand in all economic aspects of the trade as a whole. And just as there were specialisms within the mechanical processes of book-production—typefounders, compositors, press-men, correctors, printer’s devils, engravers, and bookbinders—so there were different kinds of bookseller, from the ‘mercuries’ and hawkers who sold ballads on the street, through the auctioneers and the keepers of bookstalls in St Paul’s Churchyard and elsewhere, to those with retail premises and those who operated wholesale businesses. Many booksellers had sidelines: patent medicines were a favourite secondary product. At the top were those who owned the copyrights of books and whose names appeared in imprints at the foot of title pages; somewhat lower down were the ‘trade publishers’ whose names also appear in imprints as distributors or as fronts for those who had actually caused books to be published. Large firms of the modern kind did

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not really exist, though there were powerful individuals, the most notable being Jacob Tonson, who in addition to establishing himself as publisher of various official documents, had bought up the copyrights of Shakespeare and Milton and made exclusive arrangements with leading authors such as Dryden, Congreve, and Prior. Some of these powerful businessmen were part of associations known as ‘congers’. For the most part, however, the trade consisted of individual businesses and small-scale, short-term local partnerships sharing the printing and publication costs of particular books in return for often complex fractions of the copyright. John Dunton gives us something of the size of the trade that he knew up to 1705 by giving biographical characters of 135 booksellers, 35 printers, and 21 binders as the individuals he traded with; there may, of course, have been many more.12 These were all, by Dunton’s account, members of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, the body which had in theory regulated the trade since its incorporation in 1557. Given a trading monopoly in return for responsibility for seeking out and destroying ‘seditious’ presses, it had endeavoured to protect the interests of its members by decree and petition; it recorded the ownership of copyrights and administered book-trade apprenticeships. Its position by 1700, however, was changing; while its theoretical power remained large, its actual presence in the book trade became less important as the trade grew. The Company had always sought to limit the number of printing presses available, and had generally failed; it had never had much success in limiting the number of booksellers, and there was less and less to stop anyone setting up a retail business. The Company was also losing its role in censorship. After the propaganda explosion of the civil wars and their aftermath in the seventeenth century, successive governments had attempted to regulate the press through the office of a licenser, who was supposed to read books before publication in order to weed out unacceptable material. In 1695 these laws finally lapsed and control of printing reverted to the hit-and-miss process of government prosecution for libel once books were published: Curll would find himself a target of such attentions on a number of occasions. The Company retained many of its lucrative monopoly rights to certain books into the eighteenth century, and exerted a ceremonial function, but under pressure of economic growth it gave up trying to control the general book trade. There was an underlying shift, so far as the bulk of what was published is concerned, towards the independent economic power of a fairly small group of individual bookseller-publishers such as Tonson and Awnsham Churchill. These men protected their economic power through the establishment of valuable copyrights, rather than by attempting to limit publishing as such, and though the Company was part of the machinery by which copyright was protected it was not given any actual executive power when copyright was defined by statute in 1710. Nonetheless, it remains the case that most booksellers of eminence did have a formal relationship with the Company. In the late seventeenth century even

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15

those of somewhat dubious reputation, such as Abel Roper, often in trouble with the messenger of the press, and Henry Hills, a notorious book pirate, could rise to be Master of the Company, while John Morphew and James Roberts, who often acted as fronts or distributors for books on which Curll did not put his name, retained close links with the Company. Roberts was Master four times. So it bears emphasis that Curll was never a member, though he occasionally entered books in the Register to secure his copyright; and that the Company made no attempt to stop him from operating. He was, perhaps, a beneficiary of the paradoxes and confusions which characterized the trade between 1695 and the first true copyright statute of 1710; certainly, he was an outsider as few of his later associates were.13 The reputation of the book trade was already suffering from the kind of problems later exploited by Pope against Curll. Dryden’s relationship with his bookseller, Tonson, was notoriously prickly; he wrote to him over a dispute over payment in 1695: ‘Upon triall, I find all of your trade are Sharpers & you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you.’14 In An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704), Daniel Defoe resisted the return of politicallymotivated licensing but also identified problems with the unlicensed press in its tendency to detach economic reward from inventive genius: abridgements and piracies of original books took the reward away from high-minded authors and their liberal publishers and gave it to plagiarists and pirates. In the same year, Jonathan Swift published A Tale of a Tub, which among other targets included the illiteracy, plagiarism and materialism of contemporary hack authors and their venal publishers; one of Richard Smith’s books, Advertisements from Parnassus . . . by the Famous Trajano Boccalini (1704) was among those glanced at, and Swift included several adept parodies of the ‘Cant, or Jargon of the Trade’.15 Curll would make his own contributions to the dialect. The view put by the booksellers in their petitions to parliament is naturally rather different, and John Dunton in particular eloquently defends his profession. Dunton agrees with Defoe that abridgements, piracy and plagiarism are major problems, though he also accuses Defoe on occasion of committing exactly these crimes.16 But he sees the bookseller’s profession as essentially liberal, and his own role as ‘at least a friend to Learning and the Muses’. All his books, he claimed, ‘had a just end in the publication’.17 It was writers who caused the problem: a ‘whole army of Hackney Authors’ were always ready to produce a cheap abridgement of someone else’s book; they plied him with specimens, exaggerated their scholarship, borrowed money on account and disappeared, and in general ‘their great concern lay more in how much a Sheet, than in any generous respect . . . to the Commonwealth of Learning’. Not the booksellers but the authors constituted the ‘most wretched scandal’ of ‘the Trade in general’.18 At any rate, money had become a crucial point of contention in the relationship between author and bookseller and would remain so for the duration of Curll’s career.

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CURLL AND HIS MASTER Richard Smith attained much less eminence than Jacob Tonson, but he was in a small way the same kind of bookseller: a copyright owner, who engaged in small-scale partnerships for the publication of particular books, and exchanged books through the trade in order to fill a retail shop. Smith was a fairly obscure figure even in his day, and research is complicated by the presence of at least one Ralph Smith and several Robert Smiths across the same period; the appearance of ‘R. Smith’ in an imprint does not necessarily indicate Richard. There may, additionally, be more than one Richard Smith.19 Our reconstruction of Curll’s training in the book trade must therefore be somewhat conjectural. If Richard Smith had ever been a printer, he appears to have given this up by the time Curll can be assumed to have joined him; Curll was joining the entrepreneurial rather than the artisanal side of the business, though he gained at least a working knowledge of the processes of setting up type, printing off copy, and the stitching and binding of sheets. One possible Richard Smith was bound to Dixey Page in 1666 and freed in 1674; another bound apprentices in 1676. A further Richard Smith was apprenticed to the printer John Redmayne in 1681 and freed by Henry Harefinch in 1689.20 In 1692 this Smith was working in the house of, and ‘printing for’, George Croom, at the Blew Ball at the bottom of Addle Hill, near Baynard’s Castle, in Thames Street. Here he printed for Croom a variety of popular theological works and some sensationalist literature. From 1690 the imprint ‘For’ rather than ‘by’ R[ichard] Smith had begun to appear, though it is unclear whether this represents a different individual. From 1695 the ‘bookselling’ Richard Smith, clearly the individual who was Curll’s master, operated from ‘the Angel near Lincolns-Inn Back-Gate, going into the fields’, an address found until 1699 when he moved to ‘the Angel and Bible near the May-Pole in the Strand’ (sometimes ‘without Temple Bar’), where he continued to issue books in partnership with Daniel Brown or Browne and where, it is assumed, Curll worked for him. By 1700 Smith appears in the imprints of many theological and political works, often as sole proprietor. He published sermons, law books, the Royalist Sir Philip Warwick’s A Discourse of Government (1701); there was a little science in John Jones, The Mysteries of Opium reveal’d (1700) and the same author’s Practical Phonography (1701). The Mysteries of Opium contained, opposite the title page, a letter of recommendation from a doctor at the College of Physicians, a technique of authentication later adopted by Curll. Smith began to borrow money heavily in 1702 to finance his business operations. From 1703 he put out a number of high-profile theological works by George Bull, in Latin, edited by Dr Johann Ernest Grabe, ‘impensis Richardi Smith’.21 Some were available separately, but all were included in Georgii Bulli.

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S. Theologiæ Professoris & Presbyteri Anglicani, Opera Omnia, a folio volume, published by subscription, of very wide circulation. Smith also began publishing a series of works by the learned and eccentric non-juror, Henry Dodwell, later a Curll author; and by Bishop Ken, one of the bishops deprived of office for refusing to swear the oaths of allegiance. Some of this non-juring flavour imparts itself to Curll’s early output, despite his later Whig credentials, and it is not hard to link Smith’s business dealings with some of Curll’s later practices. Curll’s employer was probably the ‘R. Smith’ named in the imprint, with Daniel Brown, of John Beaumont’s An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts, and other Magical Practices, another subject of interest to Curll. He was certainly the publisher of Captain Martin Bladen’s Solon: or, Philosophy no Defence against Love. A Tragi-Comedy, since Bladen was, it appears from the title page of an aborted five-volume edition, the translator of works ascribed to Boccalini and published by Smith. It was also Bladen who translated C. Julius Caesar’s Commentaries of his Wars in Gaul, and Civil War with Pompey (1705), the first and last book in which Smith and Curll shared an imprint. The formation of fairly regular partnerships with translators was a notable feature of Curll’s own business. In partnership with Brown and others, Smith issued John Bowack’s The Antiquities of Middlesex; local antiquities formed a significant part of Curll’s stock in trade. Smith, along with James Knapton, is said to have promoted the advertising of fixed retail prices, a practice very prominent in Curll’s own advertising.22 Another aspect of Smith’s business picked up by Curll was the book auction. Dunton singled out two Mr. Smiths as eminent booksellers and Nichols asserts that one of them (he was not sure which) was Richard Smith (LA i. 219). But it must be the one in the Strand, of whom Dunton—over-optimistically, as it turned out—declares: ‘He was born with auspicious Stars, has made several auctions with good success, and increases daily both in fame and riches.’ The other, to whom considerable praise is given, was the son of Ralph Smith, and probably also called Ralph; Dunton locates him near the Royal Exchange, the address of Ralph Smith in some imprints. Curll’s mentor was, then, a parttime auctioneer at this period. During the restoration sales of the libraries of deceased gentlemen had become increasingly common, to the extent that some booksellers, like Edward Millington and Thomas Ballard, derived the majority of their income from them.23 Though Smith was not in that category, records of four auctions in which he was involved have survived. With Daniel Brown, one of his associates and a regular auctioneer, he sold the library of the Chaplain-general of her Majesty’s fleet on 23 February 1703, in the ‘Lower-Walk of Exeter-Exchange’, and on 13 November 1704 he sold the library of the late Reverend Dr. Skelton (as Bibliotheca Skeltoniana) from the same place. With Edward Young he sold the library of ‘a gentleman late of the Temple’ on 25 February 1707, at the Oxford Coffee House. He dressed up the libraries of two deceased owners as Bibliotheca

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Figure 1. The Compleat Auctioneer, reproduced by courtesy of the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings (print no. 1415).

Plucknettiana & Everardiana for sale in Exeter Exchange.24 The Latinization of some of the libraries is perhaps an attempt to add class to what was perceived as being a fairly low-level profession (see Figure 1). Tom Brown’s ‘Elegy to Edward Millington’ recounts with irony the ‘strain’d Eloquence’ and flamboyant gestures the auctioneer utilized to stimulate interest in and raise the price of random

Beginnings (1683–1706)

19

second-hand books; Ned Ward gives a similar account in prose of an auctioneer at Cambridge who ‘sells books by the hammer, and gives the scholars as merry an entertainment, as a mountebank and his Andrew’.25 John Dunton, however, rates the auction as a highly successful mode of sale, from the bookseller’s point of view, and he praises Millington’s quick wit and ‘wonderful fluency of speech’.26 The business was clearly later worth Curll’s while, at least as a means of making himself known across the capital in his early years; it is likely that his regular unearthing of the literature of the past (out of copyright and available for reprint) was stimulated by perusal of the many book collections he sold this way. Even though Smith as a publisher had relatively narrow interests and published little that one would now identify as important, he would probably have held retail stock and would thus have handled at least some of the literary output of the day. Curll was considerably more literary than Smith in his interests, and in his independent career he picked up on many of those authors who had already started to become eminent. Defoe, for example, began drawing attention with his Essay on Projects (1697), and found himself in deep trouble with The True-Born Englishman (1701) and The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), the latter an exercise in irony which resulted in Defoe’s standing in the pillory, later Curll’s own fate. Dryden translated Virgil at the behest of Jacob Tonson, and then produced a volume of Fables from various classical authors in the year of his death, 1700, having contracted with the hard-nosed Tonson to produce 10,000 verses for 250 guineas. Congreve, perhaps the most prominent author between Dryden and Pope, was producing his late plays, The Mourning Bride (1697) and The Way of the World (1700), and there were also notable plays from Colley Cibber, the future poet laureate and butt of Pope’s animus, and from George Farquhar and Richard Steele; Curll would make use of all these established names, in one way or another. Swift made a small stir with The Contests in Athens and Rome (1701), and a very large one with A Tale of a Tub (1704), on which Curll would later capitalize. William Wycherley, fading but still alive, would later incur the opposing attentions of both Pope and Curll. There were notable publications from Nicholas Rowe, the dramatist and poet, the critics John Dennis and Charles Gildon, the essayist Joseph Addison, the historian and poet John Oldmixon, the dramatist Susanna Centlivre, and the poets Sir Richard Blackmore, Ned Ward, William King, John Philips, and Elizabeth Rowe—all later Curll authors, whether they liked it or not. Literature was, moreover, permanently embroiled in controversy. Curll’s apprentice years coincided with the ‘Collier controversy’ about the morality of the stage in 1698, which engaged the attentions of Dryden, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Dennis over the next decade. At the same time the scholar Richard Bentley had ignited a debate about classical literature by impugning the authenticity of the letters attributed to Phalaris; Swift, and Pope’s future friend Atterbury, with other High Church figures, were drawn into this acrimonious dispute. In a century which was still to settle the dynastic fallout from the civil wars and revolutions of the 1600s, literature often had inescapable political force:

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the publication of the Earl of Clarendon’s History in 1702 brought charges of interference with the manuscript from the Whig historian (and Curll author) John Oldmixon; Laurence Echard’s General Ecclesiastical History of 1702 was similarly a political talking point. John Toland caused trouble with his ‘deist’ tract Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) and his defence of the republican Milton in Amyntor (1699). None of these authors escaped Curll’s clutches over the years. Though Curll made himself a controversial figure, we should remember that literature was already mired in antagonism during his early years: indeed the book trade offered a kind of training in oppositional attitudes.

BRANCHING OUT We know little of how Curll and Smith interacted during these years; Curll might have been anything from a servant or messenger to a near-partner. Dunton’s apprenticeship to Thomas Parkhurst in the 1670s appears to have been an ‘easy and agreeable’ one, though Dunton held an extravagant mock-funeral to celebrate the conclusion of it, and regrets not having given more time and diligence to the business.27 There are some signs that Curll’s relationship with Smith was somewhat less cordial; John Spinke later suggested that it would be ‘for the Satisfaction of the Publick’ if Curll could procure ‘a Certificate under the hand of Mr. Smith, by Exeter-Change, his Master, signifying, that he serv’d him honestly during the whole of the Time for which he was bound ‘Prentice to him’, with the clear implication that this would not be the case.28 One thing we do know is that Curll lived in Smith’s house for at least some of the time. In 1703, at the age of 19, Curll wrote to Hans Sloane, eminent physician, collector, and secretary of the Royal Society: Sr . I make bold to trouble you with a Line or two Concerning a Letter wch . was Sent by a Gentleman from Scotland to Another in our House of A Wonderfull production in Nature Viz The aforesaid Gentleman had A Little Bitch which Whelp’d two Puppies one of them was Whelp’d dead and the other yt . was whelpd alive being a Male in 24 hours after voided from the fundamt . another Little Creature w.ch Liv’d 10 Hours and is now preserv’d in spirits of Wine wch . if desired my be produced Sr . if you please to give your Self the trouble you may See the originall Letter. Sr . I rest your humble Servt . tho’ unknown Edm: Curll Liveing with Mr . Smith Bookseller in the Strand. Janry ye 18th 1702/329

This is Curll’s earliest known letter and shows him working on his relations with famous men: from the obsequious direction (‘To ye much honoured Dr Hans

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21

Sloane’) to the deferential close, this is an attempt to turn a handy minor ‘wonder’ of a kind popular at the time into a serious connection with a powerful figure. Already Curll appears to be trying to act on his own account, and ‘unknown’ is the word that rankles: Curll wanted get noticed. To an extent, it worked, since there are further letters to Sloane from Curll, the last of them dated 1740, and there is some evidence from Curll’s publications that Sloane permitted his name to be used. If Curll was apprenticed, formally or otherwise, to Smith in 1698 or 1689 he would have been approaching one possible term for freedom in 1705 or 1706. Almost certainly he was married by this time, for on 12 August 1704: personally appeared John Isted of the parish of the parish of St. Dunstan in the West Lond Bookseller and alleged that there is a Marriage intended to be Solemnized between Edmund Curl of the parish of St . Clement Danes in the County of Midd aged 22 years and a Batchelor and Anne Rowell of the same parish Spinster aged 2[5?] years and she at her own disgressing (sic, i.e. discretion)

The age is nearly correct, and Smith’s shop would have lain in the parish of St Clement Danes; the presence of a bookseller as witness confirms that this must be our Curll. The marriage is recorded as taking place, by licence, at St Martin Outwich, at the junction of Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate in the City of London.30 Isted operated from the Golden Ball, between St Dunstan’s church and Chancery Lane end in Fleet Street, across the road from Curll’s later base, though evidence of ongoing connection with Curll is slight.31 The date of birth of Curll’s only known child, Henry, has again not been established, but since his role as a semi-independent bookseller appears to date from around 1726, he was probably born around 1705. Curll was perhaps running his stall or shop ‘in the purlieus of Covent Garden’ at this point, for Smith was in trouble: by May 1706 he owed over £700 which he could not repay, and he absconded, leaving a commission of bankruptcy to be declared in his absence. Later he was allowed to continue to trade and to pay off the debt in stages. But two of his creditors had seized hundreds of copies of Bull’s Opera Omnia and Bladen’s Caesar against the debts, using Curll to appraise their value. Smith accused Curll and another bookseller, Robert Halsey, of deliberately undervaluing the stock, exhibiting a bill in Chancery on 3 June 1708 against the two creditors and Curll, accusing them of fraud and profiteering; Curll was alleged to have been bribed to give a low value to the stock by the creditors, who then allowed him to buy it up at his own low price. This would explain the sequence whereby Bladen’s translation of Caesar’s Commentaries, originally published in 1705 with the imprint ‘for Richard Smith, at the Angel and Bible without Temple-Bar’, was reissued a year later as a ‘second edition . . . Printed for R. Smith without Temple Bar; and sold by Cha. Smith at the Buck between the Two Temple Gates in Fleetstreet, and E. Curll at the Peacock near St. Clement’s Church in the Strand ’.32

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Whatever the truth of Smith’s allegations, he went on publishing without apparent interruption, and we will have occasional cause to revert to his output. But it is clear that Curll had begun to operate as an independent bookseller by the start of 1706; Smith’s bill says that at the time of appraisal Curll was ‘but lately out of his service and apprenticeship’. The first certain fact that we can adduce for Curll’s adult career is an auction which began under his direction on 7 January 1706, at Tom’s Coffee-House, adjoining Ludgate.33 Curll outdid his master in this as in other respects, and his catalogue was grandly called: Bibliotheca Linguarum: Being a Catalogue of Books. Containing an Extraordinary Collection of the Most Celebrated Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Dutch, and English Authors, on all Subjects, Arts, and Sciences, as well Ancient as Modern; and for the Generality neatly Bound and Gilt on the Back. The catalogue gives brief author-title references, arranged as usual by language and format, for nearly 1,000 books. Curll tried to give this somewhat miscellaneous assortment a marketable identity: prospective customers were advised that the un-named collector has not only made Choice of the most Valuable Authors themselves in their own Original Language, but most if not all the different Translations that have been made of them, a Curiosity which has never yet appear’d in any Public Catalogue, and therefore I hope it will be gratefully Received by all Lovers of Learning.

A second, smaller auction followed on 31 January at the Temple Coffee-House, Devereux Court off the Strand, which Curll announced as Bibliotheca Legalis . . . Containing a Collection of the Most Scarce and Valuable Authors in the Statute and Common Law, though it further offered ‘a Curious Miscellany of the most Eminent English authors in Divinity, History, Voyages, Travels, Poetry, Physick, Anatomy, &c’ as well as prints, all left by ‘a Gentleman late of the Temple’.34 Curll sold the library of Dr Harrison of Colchester (Bibliotheca Harrisoniana) at the Temple-Change Coffee-House in Fleet Street from 28 February.35 These places of sale suggest a bookseller of no very fixed abode; they are all along the main axis out of the City towards Westminster. Curll’s services were also required in Birchin Lane, Cornhill, in the City, for a long-running miscellaneous book auction at the Marine Coffee-House from 24 October.36 The optimisticallytitled Bibliotheca Selecta (already a hackneyed label among auctioneers) began at the same coffee-house on 27 November and was still going on 19 December; this was again for an auction of about 900 books.37 Advertisements suggest that these auctions regularly took over a week to complete, taking place normally in the evening from 4 to 8 or from 5 to 9. The first of these sale catalogues was distributed by six booksellers and three coffee-houses; the second by the bookseller Charles Smith, perhaps a relative of Richard. Bibliotheca Selecta announces Curll’s business as a ‘Bookseller, at the Peacock without Temple-Bar’ and advertises his own publications on the final page. This marks Curll’s establishment as an independent bookseller with premises down the road from Smith’s: his shop was ‘near Devereux-Court’ and

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23

‘near St. Clement’s Church’, which locates it fairly precisely in the section of the Strand immediately outside Temple Bar. From this shop, during his first year in business, Curll sold five items in which he had a direct publishing interest, not counting auction catalogues. There was the ‘second edition’ of Bladen’s translation of Caesar’s Commentaries, a work significant for more than its connection with Richard Smith. The title page states that the book has been overhauled and in some way ‘improv’d’, but the only alterations are on the title page itself, and the book is a reissue of the sheets of Smith’s 1705 edition. This was a fairly common bookseller’s trick, which Curll used many times on his own account.38 Curll was the third bookseller named, after Robert Halsey (his ‘partner . . . in buying and selling of books’, according to Smith’s complaint) and John Baker, a well-known trade publisher, in the imprint of the second edition of John Dunton’s The Athenian Spy: Discovering the Secret Letters which were sent to the Athenian Society by Several Ingenious Ladies, Relating to the Management of their Affections, which appeared on 9 March. This book was also supposed to contain ‘The Way of a Man with a Maid: or, the Whole Art of Amour; with all its Intrigues and Amusements, till its Consummation in Enjoyment’, leading Straus, who had not seen it, to suspect it of being a ‘top-shelf book’; the actual contents are a good deal milder than the title is interested in suggesting. Curll made an early gesture towards Whig panegyric (and a major poet’s name) on his own account in the anonymous A Letter to Mr. Prior, Occasion’d by the Duke of Marlborough’s Late Victory at Ramilly, and Glorious Successes in Brabant, ‘printed by W. D. for Edmund Curll; and sold by Benj. Bragge’, published on 22 June with an advertisement for the Caesar and for a prospective edition of the poems of Rochester and Roscommon. The poem was partly trading on Prior’s own Letter to M. Boileau Despreaux, Occasioned by the Victory at Blenheim (1704). Curll followed this up with another anonymous poem, now attributed to J. Bolton: Prince Eugene: an Heroic Poem on the Victorious Progress of the Confederate Arms in Italy, ‘printed for Edmund Curll; and Egbert Sanger’, dated 1707 but actually issued 19 October 1706—the forward dating kept a book looking fresh for longer. And with Charles Smith, the other bookseller from the ‘Caesar’ imprint, he issued The Devout Christian’s Companion, a compilation of pious extracts from the works of Archbishop Tillotson, Bishop Taylor and other clerics, which appeared with the date 1707 but was actually issued on 4 November 1706. A schoolboy classic, a slightly racy title, two poems cashing in on national military success and a cheap theological handbook: these were Curll’s first experiments, and such material did not disappear from his later stock in trade. But Curll had now made a start, and was not to be content with such minor pickings. Over the next few years he would expand his output industriously, enter into useful partnerships, gain access (by a variety of means) to the texts of major authors, and set up his publicity machine. He would also turn himself into a substantial antagonist for Alexander Pope.

2 In Business (1707–1710) For the next few years, Curll worked to develop this modest toehold in the business into something like a brand name, using energy and initiative to surf the wave of literary and political events, inciting and profiting from controversies political and local, packaging every kind of textual scrap into what he hoped would prove desirable commodities. His political allegiances were challenged during the Sacheverell crisis of 1710; his distinctive tastes for scandal emerged, amid considerable noise, at the same time. He ran through a series of partners and emerged better known than any of them. Above all, he became a public figure, if not necessarily a respected or popular one. Curll continued his practice as auctioneer intermittently until 1711, selling the libraries of William Dormer in March 1707, of the politician Sir Cyrill Wyche (Bibliotheca Wichiana) on 20 February 1710, part of Sir Henry Spelman’s collection (Bibliotheca Selectissima) in the same year, and the library of Sir Charles Cotterell in January 1711. He conducted at least five general auctions between 1707 and 1710, selling miscellaneous or anonymous collections under attractive titles like Bibliotheca Celeberrima (‘the library of a late learned countrygentleman’, 10 October 1710). Some of these auctions took place in coffee-houses around Cornhill and Fleet Street, but some gave the place of sale as Exeter Exchange in the Strand, where Richard Smith had premises. Early in 1707 Curll began to supplement auction work with fixed-price sales of libraries and collections. Gentlemen of the law were notified by the Daily Courant of 19 March 1707 that he would be selling off the library of ‘an Eminent Lawyer’, constituting ‘an extraordinary Collection of all the most valuable Reports, &c.’, with prices marked on the first leaf. These sales were like auctions in that they were based on purchases of entire libraries, and ran for one or two weeks; they were unlike auctions in that they stayed open from morning to night and there was no bidding process, at least in theory, since prices were specified. Curll himself, moreover, was spared the effort of producing auctioneer’s patter. In this way he sold the libraries of figures high and low: the Reverend Mr Kingston, John Rawlins, Peter Hume, the Reverend Cooper of Epping, Richard Fitz-Gerald, Dr Humphrey Ridley, William Peirce A.M., and Walter Needham, as well as several miscellaneous collections. He offered ‘ready Money for any Library of Books in what Language soever’ to fuel this part of his business.1 He announced

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collections of books imported from Holland, and celebrated his removal to ‘the Dial and Bible’ by selling ‘a Set of Classicks, very fair’.2 PA RT N E R S For a bookseller with no established list behind him, auctions were a way of raising both profile and cash. But Curll was not content with the second-hand trade. At the end of the auction catalogue Bibliotheca Selecta (1706) Curll had advertised two of his published books, for his future lay in the acquisition of copyrights and the publication of new (or apparently new) books. He could not venture into this kind of bookselling alone: few booksellers could afford to act as a one-man band. Of the sixty or so books thought to be associated with Curll over the period 1706–9, only fifteen have his name alone in the imprint; twelve do not bear his name at all, and the others are shared with a variety of booksellers in a series of temporary and local partnerships made for the purposes of financing the initial outlay on particular books, and sometimes in order to disguise responsibility for these. Though Curll was never a member of any of the congers, he had links with several booksellers during the time he was becoming established. Many of them were new on the scene, and most of them were members of the Stationers’ Company, who had been through official apprenticeships. The evidence of Curll-related imprints over the period 1710–14 suggests that Curll had an increasingly wide range of book-trade associates, that for big books in particular he still tended to rely on a small number of these, and that he had less absolute reliance on partners and was more able to go it alone. Over these five years, Curll was involved in the publication of about 250 items. The proportion of these which bore his own name only rises from a quarter of output over the years 1706–9 to 40 per cent (about 105 items); the proportion without his name in the imprint at all also rises, from a fifth to a third (80-odd items), partly because of the amount of political material coming out over this crucial period. Consequently the proportion of books coming out in some sort of Curll partnership falls, from over half in the earlier period to a quarter in the later (65 items). These are crude figures and measures, but they suggest that Curll was becoming increasingly his own man, especially by 1714. Curll never shared an imprint with Richard Smith again. In 1709 Smith petitioned for, and obtained, a Royal Patent granting him exclusive rights to an immense stock of theological work by William Beveridge, bishop of St Asaph, who had died in 1708. A stream of sermons and other works, amounting eventually to 12 volumes containing 146 sermons, as well as several other Beveridge tracts, came out over the period 1709–18; Smith took ‘Bishop Beveridge’s Head’ as the sign over his new shop in Pater-noster-row, Cheapside.3 Beveridge was under a slight cloud of suspicion, having succumbed to Jacobite pressure under William, and Smith’s theological list was fairly High Tory: he printed letters between

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the non-juror Henry Dodwell and the Whig bishop of Salisbury concerning Dodwell’s secession from the Church of England, and a life of Dodwell by another non-juror, Francis Brokesby. He invested in a huge edition of George Bull’s Some Important Points of Primitive Christianity Maintained and Defended, with a life of Bull by Robert Nelson. Publication of the Bull material was delayed by the fire in the warehouse of Smith’s regular printer, William Bowyer.4 Smith died in about 1718, though his widow Mary seems to have gone on publishing until about 1730.5 Some of Curll’s later publications appear to have been Smith’s originally, and were no doubt acquired during Smith’s bankruptcy case. Others were even more evanescent. Robert Halsey disappears from Curll’s story after including the bookseller in the imprint of Dunton’s Athenian Spy (which he had issued on his own account in 1704) and using Curll as auctioneer for a booksale (1706), even though he carried on publishing until at least 1723.6 Charles Smith, teamed with Curll in the imprint of the Caesar, appears to join forces with Curll for issues of The Devout Christian’s Companion (1706, 1707, 1708, and 1709); but Smith’s name has gone from the imprint of the fourth edition of 1710.7 Benjamin Bragge, active from 1694 to 1710, and publisher of many of Defoe’s works, was an agent for Curll’s Letter to Mr. Prior (1706), and for a number of other books which may, or may not, have a Curll connection, over the period 1706–8. Thus, Curll’s august-sounding The Works of the Right Honourable the late Earls of Rochester and Roscommon (1707 and 1709) included work by the Earl of Dorset, Tom Brown, Prior, Otway, and Pope’s friend William Walsh; but it was largely a reissue of a previous volume ‘printed for B. Bragge’ in 1707, and the advertisements within the book include a number of items of ‘secret history’ which bear Bragge’s but not Curll’s name on the title page. Curll’s role was in part a public attempt to to ‘improve’ the Rochester canon: in the Post Boy of 17 March 1709 he announced that he had delayed the ‘third’ edition after receiving several new papers, including a ‘Perfect Copy of my Lord Rochester’s Mountebank Speech’ and two new songs. Furthermore, he continued in optimistic vein, Those Gentlemen that have any Papers by them of the Earl of Rochester’s, or Roscommon’s, if they please to send ’em so soon as possible, they shall have as many of the Books neatly bound as is proportionable to what they communicate, or any other Gratification of the undertaker E. Curll.8

He did not give the gentlemen much time: the edition was announced nine days later. Curll had evidently decided that contemporary literature was to feature far more prominently in his list than it had in Smith’s; where his master had concentrated mostly on theology and politics, Curll cast his net much wider. Swift and Defoe were beginning to publish on a grand scale, and Pope opened his account in 1709 with the Pastorals, in Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies. Addison was writing as a poet, and began the successful periodical The Tatler with Steele

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in 1709. Curll would later exploit these names, alongside John Philips, Ambrose Philips, Susanna Centlivre, Nicholas Rowe, and Delarivier Manley, who were all rising authors at this point. He was not yet in a position to compete for such names. However, using an association with two trade publishers engaged in a sort of equivocal partnership, John Baker and Richard Burrough or Burroughs, he showed he was capable of some bold moves. In the Daily Courant of 24 January 1707, Jacob Tonson issued a warning: Whereas it is Reported that there is now Printing a Collection of Poems which the Publishers intend to call Mr. Prior’s, This is therefore to inform the World, that all the Genuine Copys of what Mr. Prior has hitherto written, do of right belong, and are now in the hands of Jacob Tonson, who intends very speedily to publish a correct edition of them.

Undeterred, the booksellers issued it on 31 January, and though they held back from announcing Prior’s authorship directly on the title page, his name was prominent in the advertisements. Poems on Several Occasions: Consisting of Odes, Satyrs and Epistles; with some Select Translations and Imitations appeared over the imprint of Burrough and Baker, with Curll’s name third in the list; the earliest newspaper advertisements list also E. Place and E. Sanger, the later ones dropping everyone but Curll and Baker, and adding Charles Smith. The ‘Advertisement from the Publisher’ announced obliquely: The Name of Mr. Prior, is a more Satisfactory Recommendation of the following Sheets to those Gentlemen who are Judges of Poetry, than whatever can be offer’d in their behalf. All that I have endeavour’d, (and which by the Assistance of some Friends, I have accomplish’d) is, that the several Pieces herein contain’d, should appear more Perfect and Correct by this Publication, than they have hitherto done elsewhere; and that no Copy should be inserted, ’till I was assur’d of its being Genuine.

The volume contained seventeen poems, all of them previously published in miscellanies such as Poems on Affairs of State or in separate issues, and all of them genuine. In one case, ‘An Ode to the Returning Sun’, the edition proudly claimed that although the poem dated from 1694, it was ‘here Printed with Alterations; as it was Perform’d lately at a Consort of Music, by the most Eminent Masters’. Curll’s version also substituted the names of Anne and Marlborough for those of William and Mary, giving it some contemporary edge. Prior, who had recently lost his post at the Board of Trade and needed support to regain a position, was evidently worried by the possible effects of the republication of poems containing attacks on John Sheffield and jokes at Lord Halifax’s expense. He wrote a jittery letter of self-exculpation to Halifax on 4 February 1707: Some rogue of a bookseller has made a very Improper Collection of what He calls my writings, the whole is mutilated, Names printed at length and things written near Twenty years since, mingled with some written the other Day; in such a Manner as may do Me harm, part of the Mouse is likewise inserted, which I had little to say to otherwise than

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as I held the pen to what Mr. Montague dictated; I mention this, my Lord, desiring you Lordship to believe this book was printed without my knowledge or consent’.9

Many later authors would find themselves in a similar position. More publicly, he denounced the collection in the Daily Courant for 6 February, alleging without complete justification that some of the pieces in it were not genuine. Tonson was in a position of some power, and certainly held legal copyrights over some of these texts. But he did not take legal action, choosing instead to issue his own edition of the poems, late in 1708 (dated 1709); this was a much classier and much bigger affair, with a frontispiece, a dedication, and three times the number of poems, though it omitted some of the embarrassing pieces in Curll’s volume. Prior himself, in the Preface, inveighed against Curll’s edition. But it had given Tonson a reason for the ‘authorized’ edition, and by this time he and Curll had begun slightly more regular, if still uneasy, business dealings.10 Baker and Burrough joined with Curll in a number of other fairly substantial books. They were the named publishers of A Collection of Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Occasions (1707), with work ascribed to Roscommon, Dryden, John Dennis, Katherine Philips, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe; this had been previously issued in 1704 and again appeared with Burrough and Baker in the imprint. It was advertised as Curll’s in the Prior volume, along with several already published works that Curll may have bought into. The three shared the imprint of The Memoirs of the Marquess de Langallerie (1707), a text of very uncertain authorship which promised an insider view of the war with France, and issued in a similar manner Secret Memoirs of the Duke and Duchess of O::::: (1708), ‘intermix’d with the amorous intrigues and adventures of the most eminent princes of the court of France’. An edition of Du Pin’s Universal Library of Historians was confidently advertised as ‘in press’, but appears to have run into the sand.11 In a more austere vein, with Samuel Briscoe, they issued in 1708 a two-volume abridgement of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s 1702 translation of Josephus as The Jewish History, with maps, illustrations, a dedication to Robert Harley and a continuation by Jodocus Crull, later a regular Curll historian.12 This was frankly designed to undercut L’Estrange’s full version, and was priced at 12 shillings, ‘being but near one third of the price of Josephus without the Continuation’, according to Curll’s advertisement.13 Baker is found with Curll in an imprint of 1715, but the connection was latterly a very sporadic one; Burrough appears linked with Curll only in 1707–8, the years in which he published extensively with Baker.14 With Jeffrey Wale, who had published Defoe’s Review and was very active in literary, scientific and theological publishing from 1703, Curll published an edition of Petronius’s Satyricon, apparently the first such edition in England. This included the fragments ‘discovered’ by Franc¸ois Nodot at Belgrade in 1688 (and thus freely available). The fragments had already been denounced by Richard Bentley as ‘that Scandal to all Forgeries’ in his assault on the letters of Phalaris,

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which may have somewhat undermined the Latinate elegance of the ‘neat pocket edition’.15 Wale went bankrupt in November of 1707, but Curll, catching the slipstream of the Petronius text, was probably involved in The Satyrical Works of Titus Petronius Arbiter, printed for Samuel Briscoe and Benjamin Bragge (1708).16 Other booksellers may have had fleeting dealings with Curll. The Diverting Works of the Famous Miguel de Cervantes, a translation by Edward Ward not from Cervantes but from Juan Perez de Montalban, ‘sold by J. Round; E. Sanger; A. Collins; T. Atkinson; and T. Baker’, was also advertised as available at Curll’s in Daily Courant, 18 March 1709. We find John Chantry, Nathaniel Cliffe, and a great many others in occasional alignments of this kind. A big three-volume translation of The Works of Monsieur De St. Evremond (1713) was printed for J. Churchill, J. Darby, J. Round, Curll, Gosling, and T. Baker; Curll was still getting value from ‘the conger’ for his sixth share in this in 1728.17 In all, we can count about forty members of the London book trade, not counting printers, that Curll dealt with up to 1714. Of these, half appear only once or twice in a shared imprint, and many of the others were trade publishers: John Morphew, John Baker, and Abigail Baldwin (widow of Richard Baldwin and a regular publisher of potentially awkward material), and, after her death, James Roberts, her son-in-law, one of the most prolific trade publishers of the period. In John Stephens, Curll had an Oxford agent for Holdsworth’s Muscipula (1709), though he appears to have gone bankrupt almost immediately.18 SANGER’S CALL Undoubtedly the most important of Curll’s early associates in the book trade was Egbert Sanger, with whom he seems to have had something approaching a regular partnership; several of the items which appear over their joint imprint were small-scale and cannot have absolutely required co-financing. Sanger was christened at St Paul’s Covent Garden on 2 July 1684. His father Edward, a tailor, apprenticed him to Mary Tonson,19 widow of Richard Tonson, on 6 March 1699; he was freed on 3 March 1707, by which time he had already begun publishing poems in praise of Marlborough. He operated out of the Post House, Middle Temple Gate, in Fleet Street, a shop once occupied by Bernard Lintot. Curll’s association with him began in late 1706 when he and Curll published a patriotic poem, Prince Eugene. Six of the seven items advertised by Curll in the Term Catalogues for 1708–9, when their connection was at its height, were in partnership with Sanger, and many advertisements imply the holding of joint stock.20 Their joint publications were fairly miscellaneous. They issued A General History of All Voyages and Travels throughout the Old and New World, ascribed to ‘Monsr. Du Perier of the Royal Academy’ and adorned with five engravings of exotic scenes. Issued in parts, a rarity for Curll, it was evidently truncated from its original expansive intention.21 Sir Richard Blackmore’s The

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Kit-Cats, an anonymous attack on Jacob Tonson and his club of wits who considered Blackmore dull, was perhaps given to Curll to disguise authorship, or perhaps acquired from manuscript circulation. Curll and Sanger reissued Henry Dodwell’s Natural Mortality of Humane Souls Clearly Demonstrated, from the Holy Scriptures (1708), a book once published by Smith, and published John Gerhard, The Christian’s Support Under all Afflictions (1709), in a new translation by Thomas Rowell, rector of Great Cressingham in Norfolk.22 Sanger joins Charles Smith with Curll in the imprints of the Devout Christian’s Companion, and A Paraphrase and Annotations upon all the Epistles of St. Paul (1708). This last was twice salvaged: it was a reprint, with very brief biographical notes, of a text by a trio of High Church divines, Abraham Woodhead, Richard Allestree, and Obadiah Walker, ‘corrected and improv’d’ by John Fell in 1675. But it had already been reprinted in 1702 by Richard Smith, and the ‘new’ edition was a reissue of those sheets, which had already been reissued by T. Huse in 1704. Perhaps their most important joint venture was the translation of Nicolas Boileau’s Le Lutrin, which appeared as Boileau’s Lutrin: a Mock-Heroic Poem. In Six Canto’s. Render’d into English verse. To which is prefix’d Some Account of Boileau’s Writings, and this Translation. By N. Rowe Esq (1708). The translation was largely in fact by John Ozell (d.1743), who signed the dedication to Lord Halifax and who was for a while Curll’s default translator. Rowe contributed only the brief ‘account’ of the translation, in reality simply a puff for it. Samuel Cobb and ‘Mr. Johnson’ were also involved in the translation, according to Ozell’s ‘advertisement’ at the end of the third edition of 1714.23 The book was printed for Curll and Sanger, though some issues have Burrough and Baker in the imprint. A mock-heroic poem which influenced Pope, this brought perhaps the earliest shaft in Pope’s war on the book trade. Ozell had made a slighting reference to Wycherley, Pope’s closest literary friend of the moment, and Pope was moved privately to a manuscript epigram beginning with a contemptuous hit, not at Curll, but at Sanger: O, at Sanger’ s Call, invok’d his Muse, For who to sing for Sanger could refuse? His Numbers such, as Sanger’s self might use . . .24

Curll already had his own sense of the mythology of the partnership: in their twovolume edition of Boileau’s Works (1712), he and Sanger included a touched-up Restoration version of Boileau’s Art of Poetry, ‘English’d’ into a London literary context, with comments on Ned Ward, Garth, Blackmore (not, at this stage, Pope), as well as earlier writers such as Spenser and Waller. Where Boileau makes a joke about his bookseller, the translation reads: His Works, where-ever found, the World admires, And Curll and Sanger shall be teiz’d with Buyers.

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In August 1709 Curll cemented the association by moving to a shop near Sanger’s, at the Dial and Bible opposite St Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street, on the City side of Temple Bar and a major centre of the book trade. Fleet Street had not yet developed an association with journalism, but Curll possessed a base close to the legal and theatrical heart of the town, with an educated readership close at hand. Curll and Sanger scored a popular hit with the Jacobite Edward Holdsworth’s Muscipula, sive Kambromyomachia (1709), a satire on the Welsh appetite for cheese (see Figure 2). There was competition here. The poem was apparently first advertised by Bernard Lintot in November 1708, and published shortly afterwards. Curll however bought the poem from Holdsworth for five guineas and announced that it would be speedily published with Holdsworth’s consent, ‘and by him corrected and considerably enlarged’ in the Post Boy of 22 March. Lintot’s faulty text was denounced by Curll and his author in Steele’s Tatler of 17 and 19 May 1709, though this did not prevent two further editions by Lintot and three piracies. Curll advertised his edition, with ‘a cut curiously engraven’ in the Tatler of 4 June, for publication on 6 June 1709. This was pirated, twice, by Henry Hills, who also helped himself to Philip Horneck’s Ode Inscrib’d to His Excellency the Earl of Wharton (published by Curll and Sanger the same year). The poem remained in print in various forms for half a century and was translated by a number of writers, but Curll was not called upon to reissue it, or translate it, until 1712.25 This kind of competition occurred quite regularly, and other poems that now seem very minor were also fought over. For example, Thomas Hill, a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, provided the world with a Latin poem, Nundinæ Sturbrigiensis, anno 1702, first published by Bernard Lintot, claiming authorial licence, on 4 January 1709, and then by Jacob Tonson on 15 February. Two days later Curll published his ‘correct copy’, apparently printed by Tonson’s nephew, with two further poems in Latin by P. Causton, ‘Tunbrigalia’ (perhaps an early indication of Curll’s connection with Tunbridge Wells) and ‘Incendium Palatinum’. These editions were then pirated by Henry Hills and a Dublin publisher.26 Meanwhile Curll and Sanger made a tentative gesture towards drama in William Taverner’s comedy The Maid the Mistress (1708). Taverner, a lawyer by training, had already established a reputation as a dramatist. Rowe was a useful source, especially since he seems to have made little objection to the use of his name. Rowe’s Epilogue Spoken by Mrs. Barry, April the 7 th , 1709 from a benefit performance for the actor Thomas Betterton, was printed for them by 13 April. Later that year they advertised an extra volume of the works of Shakespeare, offering the poems to put alongside the six volumes of plays that Rowe had edited for Tonson. They further offered ‘a Gratification from J. Baker’, their agent, to anyone who could contribute material ‘to make the Notes as perfect as possible’.27 The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh appeared late in 1709 (dated 1710), in a format designed to be put on the shelf with

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Figure 2. [Edward Holdsworth], Muscipula (1709), reproduced from a private copy. Curll’s peacock sign presumably looked like the image on the title-page of this early classic.

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Tonson’s edition. It was produced with the aid of Charles Gildon, another Curll regular, who provided essays on stage history. A similar volume had been issued by Bernard Lintot a month earlier.28 Curll’s volume cheekily competed with the very edition to which it offered itself as a supplement: Gildon’s essay and critical remarks are keyed to Tonson’s text. Dedicated to the Earl of Peterborough, later a friend of Pope’s, the volume responded to what appears to have been a vain attempt at dismissal by Tonson, who (according to the Preface) ‘thought it not impolitic to lessen the Towns Expectations of these Poems, because he had no Hand in their Publication’.29 The volume contained not only the well-known long poems, and the sonnets (with moral titles) but also a considerable amount of material which would be ejected by later editors. Sanger’s independent list is more consistently Whig than Curll’s: he was later the publisher of the Whig paper, The Medley (1712) which opposed the administration’s Examiner, to which Swift was a major contributor. Since exchanging parcels of books through the trade was a normal and convenient practice, it is likely that they shared stock in ways we cannot now deduce, though some ostensibly ‘non-Curll’ items were claimed by Curll in various contexts: John Toland’s Philippick Oration (for Sanger and John Chantry, 1707) was advertised as partly Curll’s in Blackmore’s Kit-Cats (1708), as was Memoirs of the House of Savoy (for Sanger, 1707). Sanger was called to the livery of the Stationers’ Company on 3 July 1710, and he and Curll continued to issue works together until 1713. Sanger bound two apprentices on his own account in March and September 1712, but he died somewhere around the beginning of 1713 and the apprentices were rebound or turned over in April and August 1713.30 There were auctions of Sanger’s stock in February and March 1713. He was replaced by ‘K. Sanger’, probably his widow Katharine, with whom Curll simply carried on doing business: the name appears with Curll’s in reissues of the Shakespeare volume (1714) and Devout Christian’s Companion (1715). It is found, without Curll’s, in imprints of 1716 and 1717 and then disappears. Even though the link with Sanger proved the most stable of Curll’s associations, it was never exclusive; particular deals must have been struck for particular books. Of 106 items with Sanger’s name in the imprint, 22 have only his name, and 42 have Sanger and booksellers other than Curll. Curll and Sanger also occupy 42 imprints, but in exactly half of these cases other booksellers are present as well. One of these was Robert Gosling, soon to become one of Curll’s regular partners. Like Sanger, but unlike Curll, he was regular member of the Stationers’ Company.31 He appears with Sanger and Curll in the imprint of Sir Orl. Bridgman’s Conveyances, ‘Vol. II’, ‘the second edition’, ‘Publish’d (from an original manuscript of Mr. John Snell, purse-bearer to Sir Orlando) by John Guise, of the Inner Temple’ (1709), a straight reissue of the sheets of a ponderous legal textbook published by Richard Smith in 1702. The triumvirate appeared again in Samuel Cobb’s modernization of Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’, which was published in 1712 alongside two Chaucerian imitations by Prior,

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one of them celebrating Harley’s creation as Earl of Oxford.32 John Pemberton, another regular associate (and legitimate Stationer), appears in 1709 with Sanger and Curll in the imprint of Characters: or, the Manners of the Age. With the Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1709), effectively a translation of La Bruy`ere’s Caract`eres.33 Something of the way these arrangements operated can be deduced from the survival of three distinct states of Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Memorials of the English Affairs (1709), which was published, apparently from a manuscript, with an account of his life by no less a figure than William Penn, and a preface by James Welwood, who had been physician to William and Mary and was a wellknown advocate of the Whig cause.34 This was a prequel to Whitelocke’s earlier Memorials (covering the reigns of Charles I and Charles II), published in 1682 and sometimes thought of as an alternative Clarendon. A large folio volume, it was printed for Curll, Sanger, and Pemberton, but with three variant title pages in which each partner appears first.35 The three booksellers had petitioned the Queen for special copyright protection, in the form of a licence for 14 years’ exclusive rights, declaring that the book ‘tends very much to the advancement of Learning, & they have been at great Costs & Charges in printing an Impression of the said Book’. In the margin of the somewhat scrappy document is an annotation, indicating that the matter was sent to the Attorney General for scrutiny, Curll’s first encounter with that office.36 In the event the book duly appeared with a printed certificate announcing that the Queen was ‘pleased to condescend’ to grant the requested licence to these ‘Trusty and Well-beloved’ booksellers.37 The volume also contained an advertisement leaf for books ‘printed for, and sold by E. Curll, E. Sanger, and J. Pemberton’, listing six of Curll’s more substantial books to date.

QUAC K E RY On his own account, Curll sought publishable books of a rather motley kind. He could move fast: Deuel Pead, chaplain to the Duke of Newcastle and already established as the sort of minister who publishes his patriotic sermons ‘at the earnest desire of the auditory’ preached a sermon on French perfidy in Clerkenwell on 17 February 1709, and Curll published it as Parturient Montes, &c. or, Lewis and Clement taken in their own snare on 20 February. ‘Superfine’ copies were available at 6d. Gideon Hardinge preached his sermon Victory and Success from God alone on 22 November 1709, thanksgiving day for the latest Marlborough victory, and it was published on 6 December. In religious vein, Curll also issued The Danger and Folly of Evil Courses (1707, and 1708, with Sanger), apparently Francis Hewerdine’s only work, though he engaged with Curll for a theological abridgement in 1715.38

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Clergymen anxious to make a mark were probably fairly undemanding in terms of payment, and Curll found other cheap ways of publishing impressive-looking books. Medicina Practica: or, the practical physician (1707), a sort of general health guide ‘collected from the works of the most eminent authors’, including Hermes Trismegistus, Roger Bacon and Nicholas Flamel, was written by a voluminous quack physician and ‘empiric’ named William Salmon. It is a huge book and looks an impressive venture, but it is actually a reissue of the unsold sheets of the 1692 edition. Curll had turned himself into a kind of resurrection-man, looking to republish texts already in the public domain and which thus incurred no payment to authors at all. Some of this ‘reclaimed’ material was scandalous in the manner for which Curll (but not his partners) would become famous. Among the books he published over unshared imprints stands a series of decidedly prurient books. The Case of Sodomy, in the Tryal of Mervin Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven, for rape and sodomy, had ended in execution in 1631. Full of juicy detail and personal letters, Curll’s text was reprinted from a pamphlet with a slightly more sober title of 1699; it came out over the imprint of John Morphew, but Curll reissued it in 1710 over his own name. Also in 1710 he dug up from an early source a further remarkable trial: The Case of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford in Ireland; who was Convicted of the Sin of Uncleanness with a Cow, and other Creatures; for which he was Hang’d at Dublin, December the 5th , 1640. With a full Account of his Behaviour after his Condemnation, and the Letters he sent to his Wife and two Daughters the Night before his Execution. To which is added the Sermon preach’d at his Funeral, the Night after his Execution, in St. John’s Church, Dublin; with some farther Account of his Life. The whole written by Nicolas Barnard Dean of Ardagh, at the Command of Archbishop USHER, and to him dedicated.

Not only are we offered the interesting sin itself, we get a bishop, an execution, private letters to the family, a sermon, a biography, a clerical author and an archbishop dedicatee. There was evidently some disquiet at the publication, for Curll felt it needful to defend it in The Tatler.39 Next, he exhumed a century-old divorce case, calling it The Case of Insufficiency Discuss’d; being the Proceedings at Large, Touching the Divorce between the Lady Frances Howard, and Robert Earl of Essex (1711). This was essentially a collection of documents, again already published, but full of racy detail of the Earl’s alleged impotence, and the start of a long-running series. Curll’s reputation had already begun to look a little murky. On 23 April 1708 he advertised a treatise on venereal disease that promised amazing things: The Charitable Surgeon: or, the Best Remedies for the Worst Maladies Reveal’d. Being a New and True way of Curing (without Mercury) the several degrees of the Venereal Distemper in both Sexes, whereby all Persons, even the meanest Capacities, may, for an inconsiderable Charge, without confinement or knowledge of the nearest Relation, Cure themselves easily, speedily, and safely, by the Methods prescrib’d, without the help of any Physician, Surgeon, or Apothecary, or being expos’d to the hazardous attempts of Quacks and Pretenders . . . Likewise

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the certain easy way to escape Infection, tho’ never so often accompanying with the most polluted Companion.40

The author was described simply as ‘T.C. Surgeon’. An outspoken critic of the use of mercury, the standard quick fix for venereal disease, T.C. had made an exclusive arrangement with Curll for the sale of superior remedies: All the Medicines prescrib’d in this Book, are prepared by the Author’s own Hands, and are left by him at Mr. Edmund Curll’s a Bookseller, at the Peacock without Temple-bar, where this Book is sold. At which Place, and no where else, they are always ready to be had, and will be deliver’d to any Messenger that shall but ask for them . . .41

There was a numbered catalogue of preparations and somewhat gruesomesounding syringes with which to inject them; the latter could also be purchased ready-filled, and requested by code-word, so that one could get one’s treatment and leave the shop swiftly. The Charitable Surgeon was heavily advertised in the early months of 1709, and a second edition appeared on 31 March 1709, with little alteration beyond the addition of a couple of medicines.42 As part of the promotion, the pamphlet roundly condemned other practitioners, including one John Spinke, alluded to as a quack operator ‘now remov’d from Tom’s Coffee-House, Ludgate, to the dark Passage in Milk-Street, the most private place . . . in London’.43 Spinke had been advertising his own ‘most certain, safe and speedy method of curing the French disease’ in broadsheets since about 1700.44 He had been as regularly denounced by John Marten (d.1737), servant to an apothecary, who published A True and Succinct Account of the Venereal Disease in 1704, decrying the dangers of other quack remedies. By 1708 it had grown into A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease in Both Sexes. When The Charitable Surgeon was published, Spinke killed two birds with one stone by identifying ‘T.C., Surgeon’ with Marten and attacking him in Quackery Unmask’d: or, Reflections on the 6 th Edition of Mr. Martin’s Treatise of the Venereal Disease . . . and the Pamphlet call’d The Charitable Surgeon, &c. A second onslaught, A Scourge for a Conceal’d Quack, who Calls his Book The Charitable Surgeon, and himself T.C. Surgeon appeared in the same year (1709).45 Spinke, whose own favoured title was ‘Licens’d Practitioner in Physick and Surgery’, had much to say about Marten’s dangerous and overpriced treatments and his literary indecency. Moreover, ‘T.C.’ could not be found, but his treatments were much the same as Spinke’s, and his ‘Generative Drops’ turned out to be the same as ‘Mr. Marten’s Love Drops, that will, he tells you, enable the most saturnine, frigid, old and debilitated Person to perform strange things in venery’. Spinke further accused Marten of being unable to translate Latin, and escalated the war with an advertisement in Defoe’s Review on 5 April 1709, informing the ‘Hatton-Garden Clap-Preventer’ that one Joshua Stephens was giving himself out as the translator of a Latin book supposedly translated by Marten, indicating Marten’s lack of integrity and class. The Charitable Surgeon

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was further described as ‘only a Bill of Directions for the Use of a Pacquet of Hotch-Potch Mixtures, left to be sold by Mr. Curle, Price between 3 and 4l. which he advises you to use for 40 Days, (which will be about 20l. Expence) and then, if not cur’d, to apply to a Surgeon! Whether this ought to be call’d Charity, or Cheating, Reader, judge you’. Further issues of the Review brought further claims and counter-claims, and in the Review of 12 April Spinke quoted filthy passages in Marten’s book, and lambasted him for his rude personal reflections, his awful Latin, his bribery, and a host of other infractions. In the Post Boy of 7 April 1709, Curll denied that Marten and T.C. were the same individual and stated that he had met Marten for the first time the previous evening. Curll also offered to show ‘an Original Letter’ relating to T.C.’s medical abilities to anyone who was interested. He also derided Spinke’s show of scholarship in maths and made what turned out to be a rash offer: and for his grammatical, though he pretends in his Book to understand Greek, I have five Guineas in my Pocket, which if John Spinke can English so many Lines out of any School-Book, from Sententia Puerilis to Virgil, he shall be entitl’d to. ’Tis Money easily earn’d, and will pay the rent of his House in the dark Passage for a Year, and buy him Ingredients to make Pills and Powders . . . to last for that time. And for his Assistance in that great Task, all the Dictionaries in my Shop shall stand by him; and if he does not perform it some time this Week, he must expect to be enroll’d for a Scholar.46

According to his own account, Spinke went round to Curll’s shop on 9 April, performed the feat of translation, ‘and then offer’d to do the same in any Latin School-book in his Shop, or in the Greek Testament’. But Curll ‘whether according to his accustomed Honesty, I know not’ refused to pay, whereupon Spinke sued; ‘then indeed he, by his Attorney, paid not only the said five Guineas to my Use, but also 14l.2s. and 6d. Costs of Suit, to Mr. Thomas Carwood, who was my Attorney in that Cause. But I have not since heard of any Latin that he wants to have English’d ’.47 The spate of mutual accusations, drawing in sundry other quacks and involving at least one death threat, continued in the Review and other papers.48 Marten was prosecuted in Queen’s Bench for obscenity in his Gonosologium Novum (1709), an appendix to the sixth edition of his Treatise, in which sexual practices were detailed beyond the tolerance of the authorities.49 He defended himself on the grounds that such material had always been permitted, and triumphantly announced his acquittal ‘for want of Evidence’ in The Observator of 2 December.50 Quackery Unmask’d did not reach a second edition until 1711, when it incorporated the Scourge for a Conceal’d Quack with a postscript reprinting the many advertisements in the case. Spinke was dancing on the grave, but he also took a surprising amount of trouble to work out the bibliographical shenanigans behind A New Method of Curing, without Internal Medicines, that Degree of the Veneral Disease, called a Gonorrhea, or Clap, which he says was first advertised by Curll, then readvertised as ‘sold by Mr. Woodward . . . and

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Mr. Baker . . . to whom, upon Enquiry, I was inform’d E. Curll convey’d them’. It was also published over the imprint of John Isted, witness to Curll’s marriage licence who had published some of Marten’s earlier work. Spinke drew attention to the mutable authorship of the work: first it was by ‘E. N., Surgeon’, and then by ‘W. Warren, Surgeon’, by implication an attempt to hook itself to the name of G. Warren, an actual practitioner. The end result was a resounding defeat for Curll’s reputation: he would deal no more in such wares, and most of his future medical publications were considerably more respectable. Spinke’s last words on the matter deserve quotation: We have in and about this Town many poor Schollars who are willing to scribble any Thing that either a Printer or Bookseller will pay them for; and I suspect that this Tract was compos’d by some such Person, and publish’d by him that purchas’d the Copy, purely with a Design to get Money by the Sale of the Book. But whether it was so or not, E. Curll can (I believe) best inform you. However, in Case you shall think fit to make any Enquiry of him, I desire you (he being my good Friend and Benefactor) to do it after a very obliging and Gentleman-like Manner, least, putting him into a Passion, he would look nine Ways at once, and tell you as many L–s into the Bargain.

The last point is the earliest reference to Curll’s squint, and the character that might be inferred from it.51

S AC H EV E R E L L Conflicts on a much larger scale would also affect Curll’s career. In 1710, the face of politics changed with two interlinked events: the impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell at the instance of the Whig Junto, and the collapse of that administration.52 Sacheverell had been an outspoken proponent of High Church views throughout Anne’s reign (Defoe’s Shortest Way with Dissenters of 1703 was in part a parody of Sacheverell’s diatribes against dissenters). But on 27 October 1709, Sacheverell preached an assize sermon at Derby, printed under the title The Communication of Sin, which held that ‘the principles and interests of our Church and Constitution’ had been ‘shamefully betrayed and run down’—dangerous allegations at the time. A month later he preached a sermon published as The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church and State in front of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London at St Paul’s, on an occasion normally used to celebrate the Glorious Revolution of 1688; Sacheverell’s sermon was an outspoken attack on what he portrayed as the corrupt and dangerous rise to power of Whigs and dissenters in all branches of government. The House of Commons, then with a majority of Whigs, ruled on 13 December 1709 that the two sermons were ‘malicious, scandalous and seditious libells’, and Sacheverell was impeached. Unrest that had been simmering amongst the clergy now broke out openly and a political crisis developed: Sacheverell was feted by enthusiastic

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mobs and dissenting meeting-houses were attacked. The trial was a showpiece for the exposition of Whig and Tory theory: the theoretical issues of divine right, non-resistance and passive obedience, and (especially) the significance of the revolution of 1688, were all vigorously debated and controverted. It was also a colossal media event. The standard bibliography of the controversy lists over 1,000 items, most of them from 1710; as well as pamphlets and sermons, there were prints, playing cards, fans, and other spin-off products.53 Curll’s political activity had been fairly muted during the Junto period. But the Sacheverell affair was a feeding frenzy for several trade publishers with whom Curll had dealings: John Morphew, Abigail Baldwin, Benjamin Bragge (until his death in July 1710), and John Baker: all took the risks involved with distributing potentially seditious material. Richard Smith took the opportunity to republish a relevant sermon from his enormous stock of Beveridge material: Submission to Governours, originally preached about 1680 on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I, was trotted out from Smith’s warehouse in Exeter-change. He also published Thomas Dawson’s Treatise of Loyalty and Obedience: Wherein the Regal Supremacy is Asserted (Madan–Speck 156 and 760). These were on the Tory side. Curll also republished anything he thought might conceivably appear relevant. But his main strategy was to provide printed copies of official documents, however acquired, and failing that, to provide copy himself. An overriding concern was to stay out of trouble, and almost all the pamphlets which can be connected with his activity during the Sacheverell crisis do not have his name in the imprint. Nonetheless, it has always been tempting to find a personal stake to Curll’s contributions at this political moment. Though Curll published Benjamin Hoadly’s Whiggish Foundations of the Present Government Defended on 22 December 1709, on the face of it the Sacheverell crisis seems to have brought out his Tory sympathies. Holdsworth’s Muscipula can be counted as a sort of early Sacheverell item, since Sacheverell’s hand was detected in it.54 Curll’s first controversial intervention apparently came late in 1709 with the publication of The Case of Dr Sacheverell. Represented in a Letter to a Noble Lord. Curll noted his authorship of this in a copy which seems to have been designed to be kept.55 The Duke of Beaufort, the High Tory ‘Noble Lord’ of the title page and a known Sacheverell supporter, is addressed as a champion of the Church, which is, as Sacheverell had warned, in danger from the neglect of the Whig ministry and the insolent power-seeking of dissenters. Straus sees these arguments as strongly personal, and it is certainly of interest that Curll weighs in on Sacheverell’s side, or at least on the side of the Church of England; but the substance of the pamphlet is actually, with very slight disguise and a perfunctory introduction, one of Sacheverell’s own sermons: The Nature and Mischief of Prejudice and Partiality (1704).56 Other material was more obvious. On 6 February 1710 Curll appears to have published The Answer of Henry Sacheverell. D.D. to the Articles of Impeachment, together with the articles themselves, supposedly drawn from the Leiden Gazette

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in order to avoid troublesome queries about how he acquired the text.57 The trial itself lasted from 27 February to 23 March, and the rights to publication were granted to Tonson (Madan–Speck 465). Curll did issue (as did some competitors) The Speech of Henry Sacheverell some time after 7 March, when it was delivered.58 He was one of the publishers of the list of Lords who protested about Sacheverell’s punishment, published in April (Madan–Speck 310–11). As time went on Curll apparently stitched in extra pages of text containing further details of parliamentary activity (Madan–Speck 312–13); he also advertised the text in a format to bind up with Tonson’s Tryal.59 On 8 April 1710 Curll began issuing the collective Tracts Relating to the Impeachment of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, a cover title, with a portrait, for reissued sheets of various pamphlets. The actual contents vary from copy to copy, but normally include Sacheverell’s Answer, Speech and Case, and the Reasons of the Lords’ protest (Madan–Speck 350). Some copies also contain An Impartial Account of what Pass’d most Remarkable in the last Session of Parliament, relating to the Case of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, and the title page of Tracts indicates it was also meant to contain A Search after Principles: in a Free Conference between Timothy and Philatheus, issued separately over Morphew’s name on 6 May 1710 (Madan–Speck 408). The pamphlet was an attack on Bishops Burnet and Wake, who had spoken against Sacheverell, with a particular hit at Wake’s sermon The Danger and Mischief of a Mis-guided zeal (10 April); it also came down heavily on Anthony Collins for his freethinking Priestcraft in Perfection (1710). The British Library copy of this latter pamphlet has an unusually detailed inscription: ‘This I wrote at Farmer Lambert’s at Banstead, in Surrey, wither I went with Mr. Gosling. E. Curll’, a rare glimpse of Curll outside London. The Lamberts were a substantial and well-established farming family in the Banstead area and had links with the Gosling banking dynasty to which the bookseller belonged, hence the vacation.60 On 22 April 1710 Curll issued Some Considerations Humbly Offer’d to the right Reverend the Ld. Bp. Of Salisbury. Occasion’d by his Lordship’s Speech, upon the first Article of Dr. Sacheverell’s Impeachment (Madan–Speck 323). This again exists in a copy with Curll’s own annotation of his authorship though the name in the imprint is Morphew’s. This was another act of resuscitation, in that it contrasted the views on resistance and passive obedience expressed by Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, in the speech against Sacheverell (which had been published on 5 April) with views expressed in Burnet’s old sermon Subjection for Conscience’s sake (1674). Two of Burnet’s early sermons had already been reprinted for a similar purpose.61 In June Curll issued The Proceedings of the House of Peers from Tuesday, March the 14 th , to Tuesday the Twenty First, with Baker’s name on the title page but his own name in advertisements, a reprint of a pamphlet first issued in April (Madan–Speck 787 and 312). Curll launched his next assault on wrong-thinking bishops in An Impartial Examination of the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Lincoln’s and Norwich’s Speeches at the Opening of the Second Article

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of Dr. Sacheverell’s Impeachment, over the Morphew imprint, but available from 6 July 1710 from Curll’s shop. The speeches themselves had been published over the Morphew imprint a month earlier (Madan–Speck 338). Again, the British Library has a copy of the Impartial Examination inscribed ‘by E. Curll’. No respecter of persons, Curll argued against William Wake (Lincoln) that Sacheverell was objecting not to toleration in itself but in its potential for abuse; Charles Trimnell (Norwich) was ‘justly reprehended’ for ‘a very gross Mistake’ in imputing a political motive to Sacheverell’s publication of his prayers.62 On 29 August Curll put together Some Considerations and An Impartial Examination in a format for binding up with Tonson’s publications of the trial under the long-winded title An Impartial Examination of the right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Salisbury’s, Oxford’s, Lincoln’s and Norwich’s Speeches upon the First and Second Articles of Dr. Sacheverell’s Impeachment (Madan–Speck 346). In September he reissued The Case of Dr. Sacheverell under a new title, A Letter to his Grace the Duke of Beaufort, using J. Baker as a trade publisher (Madan–Speck 606). So it went on, as long as the political turmoil would support it. On 26 October 1710 Curll published, through Morphew, Some Account of the Family of Sacheverell, from its Original, to this time (Madan–Speck 627), even going to the trouble of entering it at Stationers’ Hall. This was in some ways more in Curll’s line—a compilation, consisting of scraps of information spliced with extracts from the parliamentary speeches of William Sacheverell and family details derived from Thoroton’s Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (1677) to indicate his solid family background. In December 1710 Curll had another tilt at Burnet’s supposed inconsistencies in The White Crow: or, an Enquiry into some more new Doctrines broach’d by the Bp. of Salisbury (Madan–Speck 645–6). This ‘foolish libel’, as White Kennett puts it, was ‘pretended to be dated from Glasgow’, 25 November.63 Burnet had offended Curll in two sermons preached in Salisbury cathedral on 5 and 7 November and in a ‘Restoration’ sermon of 29 May (Madan–Speck 641–4); more properly perhaps, Burnet had given Curll a further excuse to repeat himself, since the same accusations are made as in Some Considerations, with much the same quotations, from Hudibras and from a number of works Curll had himself published.64 Aside from these direct contributions to the Sacheverell fray, Curll put out a lot of reclaimed material about trials and religious zeal in 1710, with a notion of timeliness: The Spirit of Fanaticism, Exemplify’d in the Tryals of Mr. James Mitchel . . . and Major Weir (April 29, 1710) reprinted two cases from the 1670s, one of a Presbyterian convicted of assaulting Archbishop James Sharp, one of a ‘Gifted Brother at the Knack of Extempore Prayer’, and exponent of some remarkable sexual practices. This collection of dirt on the presbyterians was reissued with extras under the title Fanatical Moderation, or Unparalleled Villany Display’d (25 January 1711). Memoirs relating to the Impeachment of Thomas, Earl of Danby, relating to a famous case from the time of the Popish Plot, was also inspired by the political moment.65

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In Business (1707–1710)

These publications would for the most part be counted as Tory in orientation, if not unreservedly pro-Sacheverell: the Church of England is praised, and Queen Anne glorified; Burnet is attacked as a time-server and resistance to the sovereign is thoroughly disapproved of. Yet it is hard to be sure how much personal investment Curll had in them. As the miscellaneous nature of his list and associations indicates, he was first of all a bookseller, seeking to expand his business through the opportunities of the moment (in contrast to Smith, who seems much more committed to a single ideological viewpoint). Curll was probably trying to feed populist sentiment, though the campaign against Burnet, which continued beyond this immediate moment, has the ring of a rooted antipathy. Things get muddier towards the end of the year. Parliament was dissolved in September, at which point Curll republished The Debate at Large, relating to the word Abdicated, anno. 1688, raking up old controversy between Lords and Commons about what James II had actually done in vacating the throne (Madan–Speck 483). Meanwhile Sacheverell took a tour round the provinces, a kind of triumphal self-vindication and rallying-call for Tories much satirized by Defoe. This kept the issue alive while the government fell, to be replaced with a strongly Tory administration in which Robert Harley was a prime mover. The immense series of ‘Addresses’ from the regions of the nation to Queen Anne in the wake of the trial, which contributed to the downfall of Godolphin’s ministry, brought an acerbic (if anonymous) Whig rejoinder from John Oldmixon in The History of Addresses, with the later volumes of which Curll may have involved himself (Madan–Speck 710–13). But Curll also republished over his own imprint part of a sermon by Bishop Wilkins from 1682 under the title A Moderate Church-man the best Christian and Subject (1710), in an apparently unironic address to the Whig Hoadly. He advertised A Second Letter to Sir J[acob] B[ankes] in April 1711; this showed examples from English history of the evil effects of passive obedience and commended Hoadly’s moderation against Sacheverell’s ranting (Madan–Speck 748). There were perhaps signs that Curll was keeping his options open: unlike the committed Tory Smith, Curll was careful to ensure he had some Whig doctrine on his list. He would not always get these balances right, but for the moment he was surviving.

3 The Four Last Years of Queen Anne (1710–1714) Political crises come and go, and Curll was determined to set up more consistently productive literary series. However, his successful negotiation of the events of 1710 did modify the nature of his manner of publication, partly because of the way politics tended to generate literature. With Swift in particular close to the centre of parliamentary life, Curll was able to use political heat to promote interest in more literary poetry and prose. At the same time, he inserted hooks into many of the authors who became prominent during the last years of Anne’s reign, built up his corpus of translations from French, diversified into antiquarian studies, and perfected the art of bringing himself before the public. As the Tory ministry of Harley and Bolingbroke brought the war in Europe to a controversial end while struggling with its own internal divisions, Curll engaged slightly more openly in political publishing. He reissued The White Crow under the title A Full View of the Bishop of Salisbury’s Principles; for the year, MDCCX over his own imprint in 1711 (Madan–Speck 647). The Junto. A Poem, a strongly pro-Sacheverell item, was published by Curll, who may also have been behind the series of poetry collections begun in June 1710 under the title A Collection of Poems, for and against Dr. Sacheverell, of which four parts appeared over anonymous imprints up to March 1711. The sheets of all four were strung together under the general title Whig and Tory; or, Wit on Both Sides in 1712, and finally, as a ‘second edition’ over Curll’s own imprint, in 1713, the year in which Sacheverell’s sentence expired and he was allowed to preach once more.1 The four parts show, on balance, a shift from support for Sacheverell in the first part to a greater voice for his detractors. Squarely in the government camp was a series Curll launched, consisting of ‘preambles’ to the patents granted for new elevations to peerages, beginning with Harley: Reasons which induced her Majesty to create the Right Honourable Robert Harley, Esq; a Peer of Great Britain (1711). This is sometimes ascribed to Harley himself, with revisions by Swift, and might have been published with official sanction; the text, in Latin and English, was entered by Curll and Gosling at Stationers’ Hall, and contains advertisements for them, though it was ‘printed for John Morphew’.2 The format and publication arrangement were repeated in the cases of Sir Simon Harcourt, Lord Dartmouth, Earl Ferrers, the

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Earl of Orrery, Duke of Hamilton and John [Robinson], Lord Bishop of Bristol. Curll followed these with ‘Reasons’ for the elevations of Samuel Massam and the Earl of Strafford, Bolingbroke, and finally, Her Majesty’s Reasons for Creating the Electoral Prince of Hanover a Peer of this Realm. The last made up perhaps the most contentious of the series, since it dealt directly with the issue of the Hanoverian succession, an event that the Prince’s creation as Duke of Cambridge was intended to confirm. This one was issued by Baldwin.3 **Curll’s political list remained, however, a mixed bag. He was apparently a concealed agent for the third edition of William Higden’s A View of the English Constitution, issued in the middle of the Sacheverell fray (April 1710). Higden, once a non-juror and now ‘convinced’ by his researches in law and history that he, and everyone else, should take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, provoked responses from (among others) the non-juror George Harbin in 1710 and 1713, through Richard Smith. Higden is alleged to have attempted to browbeat Smith into refusing to publish a further anonymous response.4 Curll issued P`ere D’Orleans, History of the Revolutions in England under the Family of the Stuarts (1711), on the unlikely grounds that it was useful to have a foreign, especially Jesuit, view of English political history. Captain Martin Bladen, who graduated from translating Caesar to a political career as a staunch Walpolian, is credited with An Impartial Enquiry into the Management of the War in Spain. This appeared over Morphew’s imprint in 1712, but it is actually a Curll publication, supporting Whig policies now facing censure while Tory efforts to secure peace were under way.5 The Secret History of the Gertruydenberg Negotiation (‘Printed in the Year MDCCXII’) was largely a reprint of official documents from earlier negotiations, reminding everyone, and Harley in particular, of the perfidy of the French. Memoirs of the late Right Hon. John Lord Haversham (1712) expressed pro-Sacheverell views and somewhat maverick Tory sentiment. Theology remained politicized, and Curll was involved with the later issues of Richard Bentley’s two-part Remarks on a Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713), a furious assault from the Whig classicist and clergyman on free-thinkers such as Anthony Collins who questioned the authority of scripture.6 One hangover from the Sacheverell controversy was Curll’s bizarre campaign against the Bishop of Salisbury, the Whig Gilbert Burnet. The antipathy Curll displayed towards Burnet seems to have been shared by George Sewell, a discontented physician at Hampstead, trained (by his own account) under Boerhaave at Leiden: he was one of Curll’s first regular ‘authors’ and a clear example of the generation of literature from politics. Curll had published Sewell’s The Patriot, an obsequious poem to Harley on the prospect of peace, in a handsome folio edition in 1712, and Sewell occasionally supplied Curll with further poems of a political bent, such as To his Grace the Duke of Marlborough, after Marlborough’s fall from power (1713).7 On 26 January 1713, Curll entered at Stationers’ Hall a pamphlet which was published a week later as The Clergy and Present Ministry Defended, in answer to Burnet’s ‘New Preface and Additional Chapter’ to the third edition of his

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Discourse of Pastoral Care (1713). Sewell accused Burnet of being old, pompous, self-indulgent and vain, of trimming away from an earlier High Church stance, of preaching other men’s sermons, and of undermining the ministry by publicly doubting its ability to resist the threat from popery, which (Sewell claimed) Burnet overestimated. Thereafter, every time Burnet published something, a sarcastic Sewell rejoinder was sure to follow. A Second Letter to the Bishop of Salisbury (1713) took offence at his new volume of sermons; An Introduction to the Life and Writings of G t Lord Bishop of S m (1714) took its cue from Burnet’s ‘Introduction’ to the 3rd volume of his History of the Reformation. Curll even included a letter from Sewell brazenly soliciting contributions to the anti-Burnet campaign.8 The Reasons for Writing against the Bishop of Salisbury (1714) vituperated against his lordship’s recent ‘Spittal sermon’, and a further sermon prompted More News from Salisbury (1714). Almost all these were openly Curll pamphlets—more clearly Curll’s than they were Sewell’s. All of them were notionally prompted by publications from Burnet, so whatever personal antagonism may lie behind them, there was an obvious publishing gain in hitching the wagon to an out-of-favour star like Burnet. Another easy target was the Tory dissident Earl of Nottingham, now allied with the ousted Whigs, whose Observations on the State of the Nation incurred much Tory scorn. Sewell’s Remarks upon the pamphlet appeared shortly after the first blast against Burnet. There was much noisy controversy and Sewell further provided Curll with Schism Destructive of Government, a pro-government pamphlet against the ultra-Whiggish Richard Steele.9 Sewell was versatile and always on hand: his ‘Life and Character’ of the poet John Philips, who had died in 1708, and whose Works Curll issued in 1713, was much reprinted. A volume of Sewell’s Sacred Miscellanies appeared in 1713, too. Sewell apparently oversaw the translation of The Works of Anacreon, and Sappho (1713), ‘Done from the Greek, by several Hands’, another sign that Curll was looking for a touch of class. In the same year he reprinted Thomas Creech’s 1684 translation of The Idylliums of Theocritus, with a life of the poet by Basil Kennett, Rapin’s ‘Discourse upon Pastorals’ and a few extra epigrams. SWIFT At this point perhaps the most eminent and controversial of all political writers was Jonathan Swift, a very much less pliable figure. A number of Curll’s pamphlets on ‘current events’ have a Swift connection. The Case at Large of Duke Hamilton and the Lord Mohun (1712) and A Full and Exact Relation of the Duel (1713), were prompted by the duel of 15 November 1712, which killed both men; Swift was partly responsible for whipping up the Tory fantasy that the affair was in some way a Whig plot against Hamilton, a Jacobite sympathizer.10 But Curll of course represented precisely the kind of hard-nosed, vulgar and mercenary

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bookseller identified by Swift in A Tale of a Tub (1704), and his interest in Swift was more literary than political. His first act against Swift was the publication in April 1710 of A Meditation upon a Broom-Stick, and Somewhat Beside; of The Same Author’s. This stopped short of ascribing the five pieces it contained to Swift, though his authorship of one of them, ‘The History of Vanbrug’s House’, was clear enough to involve him in a quarrel with Sir John Vanbrugh.11 The manuscript appears to have come from the first in a line of useful lodgers, for Curll recorded its provenance on the title page of one copy: ‘given me by John Cliffe Esq, who had them of the Bp. Of Killala, in Ireland, whose Daughter he married & was my lodger’.12 The book advertised that more of the same would be speedily forthcoming, for Curll had also acquired, at something like the same time, some notes from which he constructed A Complete Key to the Tale of a Tub, published on 17 June 1710, during protracted negotiations and discussions between Swift and his bookseller towards the fifth edition of the Tale. Curll declared that the notes were ‘Given me by Ralph Noden, Esq; of the Middle Temple’.13 The commentary is mostly an unexceptionable translation of the more obvious aspects of the allegory, bringing out its satire of Catholicism and Protestant dissent; the Tale had included a mock-appeal from ‘The Bookseller’ for ‘any Gentleman . . . to furnish me with a Key, in order to explain the more difficult Parts’, so Curll was to some extent merely participating in the ongoing media event that the Tale engendered.14 It even drew attention, with good humour, to Swift’s ‘merry Description of the Self-conceit of the Scriblers of the Town, and the Humours of Booksellers’.15 But despite its ostensible defence of the motives of the work against William Wotton’s criticisms, the Key was offensive to Swift on many grounds. It presented itself as a piece of fine printing (all the woodblock ornaments are either those of William Bowyer, whom Curll is known to have employed in 1710, or close imitations of them) yet the book is wholly parasitic on Swift’s masterwork.16 It disclosed his authorship of a work that would certainly affect his prospects for preferment. On the other hand, it did so in a way that implied he was merely a minor partner in a collaboration with his cousin Thomas Swift, to whom the main texts were attributed, Swift himself merely being granted The Battle of the Books and some ancillary matter. Swift wrote grimly to his bookseller, Benjamin Tooke, who had sent a copy of the Complete Key to him, on 29 June 1710: I believe it is so perfect a Grubstreet piece, it will be forgotten in a week. But it is strange that there can be no satisfaction against a bookseller for publishing names in so bold a manner. I wish some lawyer could advise you how I might have satisfaction: for at this rate, there is no book, however vile, which may not be fastened on me.17

When the fifth edition was published, later in 1710, Swift included an unsigned ‘Author’s Apology’, maintaining anonymity but also attempting to respond to criticism and misreading of the book. To this he added a Postscript:

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Since the writing of this which was about a Year ago; a Prostitute Bookseller hath publish’d a foolish Paper, under the Name of Notes on the Tale of a Tub, with some Account of the Author, and with an Insolence which I suppose is punishable by Law, hath presumed to assign certain names. It will be enough for the Author to assure the World, that the Writer of that Paper is utterly wrong in all his Conjectures upon that Affair. The Author farther asserts that the whole Work is entirely of one Hand, which every Reader of Judgment will easily discover.18

Matters did not stop there. Swift sometimes provided the vampires of the book trade with easy meat, because of his taste for obliquity and masquerade. Through Morphew, he published in his habitual anonymous and disguised manner a volume of Miscellanies in Prose and Verse in February 1711, which prompted Curll to issue an instant—and decidedly unanonymous—compilation calling itself Miscellanies by Dr. Jonathan Swift, consisting largely of the Meditation on a Broom-stick volume and the Compleat Key to a Tale of a Tub. On 14 May 1711 Swift wrote, with perhaps exaggerated anger, in the Journal to Stella: And that villain Curl has scraped up some trash, and calls it Dr. Swift’s miscellanies, with the name at large: and I can get no satisfaction of him. Nay, Mr. Harley told me he had read it, and only laughed at me before lord keeper, and the rest.19

Recalling these events in the light of Curll’s later transgressions, in 1716, Swift told Pope ‘I had a long design upon the ears of that Curl, when I was in credit, but the rogue would never allow me a fair stroke at them, although my penknife was ready and sharp’, perhaps indicating some serious attempt to bring Curll to book during the days of Swift’s close relations with Harley and Bolingbroke.20 It was a note of violent revenge that would recur.

NAMES Not all productions needed a name as big as Swift’s: the age of anonymity was not over. Some of Curll’s projects marked out a kind of interactive territory by which gentlemen could contribute to the books they bought, thus cutting down the need for professional authors. In Whitelocke’s Memorials (1709) Curll announced: In the Press, and will speedily be Publish’d, Mæ Bæ, being a Collection of all the valuable Latin Poems that have ever been written by English Men, and have not yet been inserted in any Collection; together with several Originals never before printed. Those Gentlemen that have any scarce Pieces, or Original Poems by them, if they please to bring or send them to the Undertakers E. Curll and E. Sanger, they shall be faithfully inserted, and they may see the Sheets that are already done . . . there will be so many Copies given Gratis, as is proportionable to what is communicated.

This was more hopeful than successful, for when it appeared, in 1711, Musæ Britannicæ consisted largely of pieces Curll had already published, like

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Holdsworth’s Muscipula and Hill’s Nundinæ Sturbrigienses. Other volumes, trading on the successful series of miscellanies begun by Tonson under the initial editorship of Dryden, were called things like A Collection of Original Poems, Translations and Imitations (1714). These were often ‘made-up’ books, consisting of previously published items stitched together under a new general title. Having opened a branch shop at the fashionable spa town, Tunbridge Wells, Curll advertised it by means of producing polite ‘society’ literature: Stanza’s: To my Lady Sunderland at Tunbridge-Wells. 1712 (ascribed to Isaac Watts) was printed as a broadside for Curll at his London shop ‘and Sold at his Shop on Tunbridge-Walks’. It was then reproduced in the first of a series of miscellanies to go with his new venture: The Tunbridge-Miscellany (1712), a slim volume of tributes to beauties in town with a fair sprinkling of praise for Marlbrough and at least one poem by Sewell. Curll continued the series with The Tunbridge Miscellany for the year 1713, and, in expansionist vein, The Tunbridge and Bath Miscellany for the year 1714.21 Even Poems on Several Occasions. By the Earls of Roscommon, and Dorset, & c (1714), is less focused than it sounds: it contains six poems ascribed to Roscommon, two to Dorset, and is otherwise packed out with ‘&c’: work by Dryden, Otway, Trapp, Rowe, Cobb, Prior, Swift, Welsted, and Sheffield. On the other hand, we have some evidence of Curll’s ability to recruit authors adventitiously. In 1712 Curll capitalized on the interesting case of Jane Wenham of Walkerne in Hertfordshire, an unpopular old woman accused of witchcraft after a series of arguments with local figures. She was tried at Hertford Assizes, and despite Justice Sir John Powell’s evident sense that the thing was a farce (he commented at one point that he would give much to see the enchanted feather that the prosecution spoke of) she was convicted and condemned on 4 March 1712. The judge saw to it that she was immediately reprieved, and eventually gained a royal pardon for her: still the controversy went on, and Curll was first to the post with A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, Practis’d by Jane Wenham (1712). Curll paid Francis Bragge, the clergyman mainly involved in her prosecution, three guineas for the first 1,000 copies of this, and a further guinea when it was reprinted.22 In fact Curll numbered five editions during 1712, not all of them merely reissues. Curll’s associate John Pemberton put out The Case of the Hertfordshire Witchcraft Consider’d (1712), dedicated to Powell, which carefully took apart Bragge’s case; Curll responded with Bragge’s Witchcraft Farther Display’d, which gave further details of Wenham’s evil activities and enchanted cats. Further sceptical pamphlets escalated things and Francis Bragge hit back with A Defense of the Proceedings against Jane Wenham (1712), in which disbelief in witchcraft appeared tantamount to disbelief in scripture.23 From a bookseller’s point of view, this was a useful conjunction of forces: a hot but politically innocuous controversy, with a ready young author keen to make a name for himself without asking much of a fee. But such moments were rare, and for the most part Curll was always eager to appropriate already-established

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names to front books. With Swift under his belt, he began to make a move on Pope. Sanger had issued Ozell’s translation of Tassoni’s La Secchia Rapita as The Trophy Bucket in 1710, perhaps giving Pope a model for his great mock-heroic poem; Curll reissed the sheets of this in 1713, and picking up Pope’s innuendo, reissued it once more in 1715 as The Rape of the Bucket. Curll infiltrated the works of other established authors partly by developing what would become a notorious trademark: the ‘instant biography’ of the dead celebrity. When the actor, and friend of Pope, Thomas Betterton died in April 1710, Curll rushed out his ‘Life’ and reissued one of his plays, The Amorous Widow. The biography does not augur well. It is in fact an essay on stage gesture, with a perfunctory biographical note at the beginning in order to attach the essay to Betterton’s theatrical fame; it was written by Charles Gildon, who had supplied the critical material in Curll’s extra volume of Shakespeare. The next target was John Locke. The philosopher died in 1704 but when Churchill brought out a three-volume edition of his works in 1713 Curll weighed in with an Account of the Life and Writings of John Locke (1713) by Jean Le Clerc, extracted from Le Clerc’s Biblioth`eque Choisie (a regular reservoir of free material for Curll).24 He printed this, along with some thin Remains of John Locke, in folio format to bind up with Churchill’s edition. Then, to profit from the publicity surrounding Addison’s tragedy Cato (1713), a defence of civic virtue claimed by both Whig and Tory factions, he got Sewell wrote some anodyne Observations upon Cato.25 Unable to publish Addison’s Travels, Curll instead commissioned Lewis Theobald (another versatile poetscholar, and future enemy of Pope’s) to translate a review of them and called it Mr. Le Clerc’s Observations upon Mr. Addison’s Travels through Italy (1714). He did not publish Rowe’s plays, which were divided between Tonson and Lintot, but did put out three ‘editions’ of his Poems on Several Occasions. An ingenious method of getting Rowe’s name on the title page is demonstrated by The Works of Monsieur Boileau. Made English from the last Paris Edition, by Several Hands. To which is prefix’d, H is Life, Written to J oseph Addison, Esq; By Mr. Des Maizeaux. And some Account of this Translation By N. Rowe, Esq.26 As part of the anglicising of such big French works, Addison and Rowe clearly rank above Pierre Des Maizeaux, even if their connection with the work is slight (Rowe’s ‘account’ had been printed with the 1708 translation of Boileau’s Lutrin) or, as in Addison’s case, completely gratuitous. The work was dedicated to Halifax, another cost-free means of adding a big name. The actual work of translation was done mainly by John Ozell, but others, such as Samuel Cobb, were involved, as the Preface explains: ‘being too great a Task for One Person to perform within any reasonable Time, they procur’d several Hands to undertake it’. Someone else who claimed a large hand in the venture was John Oldmixon, who on 15 January 1712 wrote indignantly to the dedicatee that he had been ‘yesterday surpris’d to see a Book of mine addrest to Yr Lordsp in another Man’s name without my Consent or Knowledge’. Oldmixon’s torrential fury at the

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theft of his long-meditated work gives us a little insight into the world of early eighteenth-century translation: haveing after I had gone through with it been justly disgusted by one of the Booksellers, as well as for his printing villainous Party Books upon the most late noble Turn tho before he proffest himselfe a very honest Fellow as for his Knavish Dealings by me, I refused to give him the Translation entire till I had Satisfaction, reserving only the Ode on Namur & ye Smaller Poems. The Latter were, it seems undertaken by Mr Cobb & Mr Ozel tho I was very glad to have ye remaining Part of my Version spar’d . . . Yet I thought it unfair to put Companions on me I coud not approve of & those Authors both haveing been of the Blewcoat Hospital [Charterhouse] I did not think their Merit sufficient to make that Education their Glory or My Selfe proud of their Company However I desird that when the Book was publishd I might say something in my own Vindication . . . what I desird was promisd & I was [?? amusd] with it even till I saw the Book in the Gazette & afterwards the Dedication which considering how much was printed that ye Writer of it never saw is as great an Imposition on the World as an injustice to me.

Oldmixon begged his lordship not to favour ‘a Man who has dealt so unworthily by me’, one who was ‘in a Conspiracy with a [Tricking ?] Stationer to injure me’.27 If he knew about the complaint, it left Curll undeterred. Another comparable project, The Works of Monsieur De La Bruy`ere (‘the sixth edition’, 1713) managed to squeeze Rowe on to the title page by including ‘an Original Chapter . . . Written after the Method of M. Bruyere, By N. Rowe, Esq’. Once again, there were several translators, though Ozell is the only one named. Working on the theory that literature about procreation would sell, especially if a reliable literary name were involved, Curll published Claude Quillet’s Callipædia. A Poem in four Books (1712), as ‘Made English By N. Rowe, Esq’. But the internal contents pages make acknowledge that Rowe only translated Book I, with Book II assigned to Sewell, Book III to Cobb, and Book IV to Diaper and Cobb.28 All of this helped to build a literary list: minor writers, especially translators, provided versions of substantial foreign texts (which, in the days before international copyright, involved no author payment); Curll added established names as a front. Occasionally, an author would object, as with Swift and Oldmixon—or the High Church clergyman Robert Nelson, unimpressed dedicatee of A Very Ancient, Authentick, and Remarkable Testimony Concerning our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1712), who vociferously denounced the unauthorized use of his name.29 More often, no public objection was made, presumably on the grounds that this simply increased publicity or gave Curll new material to publish. Curll’s relations with women authors have their own special interest. Susanna Centlivre, already a highly successful and highly Whiggish dramatist, he poached from Bernard Lintot, apparently by paying her twice Lintot’s copyright fee. He bought the copyright of Centlivre’s successful The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret in 1715, having published the play (a lasting hit, with a staunch dedication

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to the Elector of Hanover) a year earlier; he also reprinted The Gamester, recently revived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and bought The Cruel Gift (a rare foray into tragedy) and The Artifice. At the other end of the political spectrum, he published the fictions of the Catholic convert and ‘hardcore Jacobite’ Jane Barker, from 1712, when it might have been reasonably safe to do so, right through to 1723, when it was not.30 But in terms of modern critical reputation, his most successful acquisition was Delarivier Manley, a scandalous figure whose New Atalantis (1709), a roman-`a-clef about the political and sexual intrigues of the London elite, was a huge commercial hit. Curll may have attempted to capitalize on this with cheap imitations, despite marking in his own copy of the Complete Key to the Tale of a Tub the passage criticizing Manley for producing sequels. But Manley herself was the real prize, and her Adventures of Rivella (1714), based on her own life story, is one of Curll’s few new books to have been reprinted in modern times. After Manley’s death in 1724, Curll issued an edition of the book under the title Mrs. Manley’s History of her own Life and Times, with a preface explaining how she came to write for him. In 1714, ‘Mr. Gildon, upon a pique, the cause of which I cannot assign, wrote some account of Mrs. Manley’s life, under the title of, The History of Rivella, Author of the Atalantis. Of this piece, two sheets only were printed, when Mrs. Manley hearing it was in the press, and suspecting it to be, what it really was, a severe invective upon some part of her conduct’, wrote to Curll requesting an interview. Curll ‘returned for Answer to this letter, that I should be proud of such a visitant’. Manley duly turned up, with her sister, and asked to see Gildon’s papers, which Curll (being a gentleman) refused to do without his permission. But upon hearing her own story, which no pen, but her own, can relate in the agreeable manner wherein she delivered it, I promised to write to Mr. Gildon . . . and not only obtained his consent to let Mrs. Manley see what sheets were printed, but also brought them to an interview, by which means, all resentments between them were thoroughly reconciled. Mr. Gildon was, likewise, so generous, as to order a total suppression of all his papers; and Mrs. Manley, as generously resolved to write the history of her own life, and times, under the same title which Mr. Gildon had made choice of.

Curll was enjoined to secrecy (Manley was living with John Barber, also a printer-bookseller) and was told ‘your services are such to me, that can never be enough valued. My pen my purse, my interest, are all at your service. I shall never be easy, ’till I am grateful’. She wrote quickly, albeit in secret, and told him ‘I dread the noise ’twill make when it comes out; it concerns us all to keep the secret. I design to wait on you, to tell you part of that extream acknowledgement, which, my heart tells me, is due to so sincere a friend’. Curll claims to have received ‘several other obliging letters’ from her at this time.31 Doubtless he overestimates the nobility of his own actions: it is quite possible that the whole affair was set up to blackmail Manley into working for him, or at least to profit from her reputation; the letters may be completely fictitious. But somehow Curll

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persuaded her to let him have the text; and for her part, Manley gained from it the opportunity to cast herself into the sympathetic form of a glamorous, spirited, witty, passionately desired and much wronged heroine, and to get her own back on some of her traducers; alluring descriptions of her bed vie for space with sexual innuendo against her enemies, all wearing diaphanous disguises. H I S TO RY A N D A N T I QU I T Y Some of Curll’s life-writings had a further historical reach beyond the scandal of the moment, such as Curll’s publication of a life of and sermon by his namesake Walter Curll in 1712. A series of biographies, a sort of necrology, was begun under the authorship of the antiquary John Le Neve with The Lives and Characters of the Most Illustrious Persons . . . who died in the year 1711 (1713); further volumes for the noteworthy casualties of subsequent years followed. These were presented as documents of history, which leads us to one of the more curious aspects of Curll’s publishing output, the series of local ‘antiquities’ which he promoted between 1711 and 1719. As well as partially offsetting Curll’s somewhat insalubrious reputation, these large-scale books also afford us some detailed insight into his methods of making books.32 Curll’s edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Posthumous Works (1712) unites several features of his activity at this date: manuscript recovery, free copy from gentlemen authors, biographical narrative, an eminent name, and historical scope. It was evidently in train from 1711, for on 21 December of that year Thomas Hearne wrote to Richard Rawlinson, his fellow non-juring antiquary at Oxford: ‘I have not yet had time to step into the Museum & indeed I am not now inclin’d to meddle in Sr. Thomas Browne’s Repertorium ’till I know who is the person that publishes it’. Shortly afterwards he wrote again, having evidently found out: I look upon Sr. Thomas Browne as a better Philosopher than Antiquary. However his Repertorium will be of use. But I like it never the better because a Bookseller is the publisher. I see no need of Glosses unless a compleat Account be intended. That will require more Learning & Skill than a Bookseller is Master of.

On 16 January 1712 he noted, with an ominous increase in pique: Mr. Richard Rawlinson . . . is printing at London Sr. Thomas Browne’s Repertorium, or Account of the Monumts. of the Cathedral of Norwich. He hath given it to a Bookseller, wch. I do not at all like in him, it being not a sign of his Friendship to me, who printed two things for him before, (in Leland) & I shld. have been glad to have done this, provided it be (as he hath told me) under the Author’s own Hand, & contains things that are really valuable, as I believe it may.33

Continuing this vein of Oxford haughtiness towards the London bookseller, Thomas Tanner wrote to Dr Charlett, Master of University College Oxford, on 20 October 1712:

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Curle, the Bookseller, has bought of Dr. Brown’s executors some Papers of Sir Thomas Brown, one of which is some Account of this Cathedrall, which he is printing under the Title of the Antiquities of Norwich. If I had perfectly liked the thing, I should not have been backward to have given a Cut but it was hurried by him into the Press without advising with any body here, or with Mr. Le Neve, who has great collections that way. However, out of regard to Mr. Hare, the Herald, the Dean has suffered them to reprint his Catalogue of Bishops, Deans, and Prebendaries, and I think to send a List of the Chancellors and Archdeacons.34

In the event, Curll’s volume was one of his most elaborate ventures to date, though still bearing the essential insignia—a ‘somewhat hasty gathering of miscellaneous pieces’, as Browne’s bibliographer puts it, one which received grudging, and in Rawlinson’s case, enthusiastic, help from academics.35 Curll had certainly bought some papers from Owen Brigstocke (who had married Browne’s granddaughter), though a letter by Browne’s daughter suggests that Brigstocke may have been manoeuvred into handing over the manuscript to limit Curllian damage.36 The haul included a few letters between Browne and Dugdale and a couple of essay scraps, along with a piece on Iceland and a letter about some urns (not Hydriotaphia); this was put alongside ‘Repertorium: or, The Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Norwich’, which included the ‘Catalogue of Bishops’ mentioned by Tanner. To this Curll added a life of Browne, partially based on some papers by John Whitefoot, rector of Heigham, and John Burton’s Antiquitates of the royal school, from a manuscript given by his son.37 As Curll put it on the title page, it was ‘Illustrated with Prospects, Portraitures, Draughts of Tombs, Monuments, &c’: there were at least 23 plates, not all with subscribers names. Tanner evidently did not subscribe, but Jacob Astley, Viscount Townshend, Edward Tenison, Peter le Neve, and the bishops of Norwich and Ely were named on various of the plates, as was Rawlinson himself. Later Curll would market the Browne volume, initially presented as a sort of writerly ‘remains’, as a Norwich entry in the series of local antiquities he developed during the decade. This may have begun with Jodocus Crull’s The Antiquities of St. Peter’s, or the Abbey-Church of Westminster (1711), though Curll’s name is not on the earliest editions. This contained some historical material, but consisted mostly of lists of abbots, deans, and other officers of the building, and transcripts of the inscriptions. There were nineteen plates, only two dedicated to patrons (Sir Stephen Fox and Charles Killigrew). It had apparently been in progress for some time, for it also had an appendix of monuments added since the work was begun, including those of Cloudesly Shovell, Tom Brown, and two Curll authors, Thomas Betterton and John Philips. The Westminster volume identified its market quite precisely, bringing the economy of tourism to bear on the discipline of antiquarian study: When I observed . . . the great Numbers of Natives and Foreigners that flock thither to be satisfied in the Sight of these Ancient, as well as Modern Repositories of the Bodies of so many great and illustrious Personages, and the eager Desire most of them express

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upon many Occasions, to be more fully informed concerning their Antiquity . . . I judged that a particular Account of the Monumental, as well as of the other Antiquities relating to this Church, would prove no unacceptable Piece of Service to the Public, in relation more especially of Two Sorts of People, viz. Such as perhaps seldom or never have the Opportunity of coming to London to take a view of this Church; and such Strangers also and Natives as coming, perhaps, but once in all their Life-time to this great City, and consequently can take only a cursory View of what belongs to it, may be furnish’d with a further Conveniency of Reviewing, not only at a great Distance what they have seen before, but also of being more fully instructed in what they were not well able to learn by Sight only, but even by the best Enquiries they were able to make, whilst they were in this City.38

This was to be the start of something: ‘so soon as there is Matter sufficient for another Volume it shall be separately printed, by Way of Continuation to this’. A brief Supplement to the Antiquities of St. Peter’s was published for Nutt, Curll and Pemberton in 1713. This started a pattern: The Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Winchester, ascribed to Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who had died in 1709, came out in 1714. In 1713 Curll proposed to publish his first county study, Tristram Risdon’s Chorographical Description or Survey of the County of Devon, by subscription.39 This was an already-compiled local history, with extensive lists of office-holders, from the seventeenth century. Curll clearly sent the proposals out with individual letters giving news of other publications, and in at least one correspondent found not only a willing audience but a willingness to find and contribute material. On 7 November 1713, William Brome of Withington near Hereford wrote to Curll, having evidently received the proposal, to declare his readiness to assist. Brome (1664–1745), a non-juror, was a first cousin, Herefordshire neighbour and friend of the poet John Philips, and it may well be that he had already been instrumental in helping Curll to material from one of his best-selling posthumous authors.40 He wanted to know whether there were to be plates of the monuments in Curll’s further book on Hereford Cathedral, and offered to fund one in memory of his aunt, ‘but with this Proviso That all or greater part of the monuments are to be engraven on Plates. I am very glad to hear such care is taken to preserve the Monumental Antiquities of this Nation . . .’.41 Brome then took responsibility for visiting the chapter clerk at Hereford to request lists of the cathedral officers. On 8 February 1714 he wrote to say that the clerk was willing to transcribe a list of deans, but said that a list of canons would be ‘a long teedious [sic] undertaking, inconsistent with his much business’. The clerk offered to lend the chapter books to a professional scribe. Brome supplied Curll with a list of bishops of Hereford, offering to procure more materials from the Bodleian and to put him in touch with the bishop of St David’s, Adam Ottley, ‘who best understands the Antiquities of our Church’ and ‘is of a very communicative disposition’.42

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A further letter (8 May 1714) records Brome’s assiduousness in procuring an ‘Ichnographie’ of the church (alas, at his own cost) and other documents: The inclos’d is the best List of the Deans that can be procured: as for the names of the Canons there is no Register of them higher than 1521: and those that are recorded since that time are set down in the Chapter Acts which have filled several large volumes (the first of which are difficult to read:) And the extracting the names thence will be a quarter of years full employment for a Transcriber: if, now you are acquainted with these particulars, you would have a Catalogue of the Canons from 1521 I will order one to be wrote for you.43

Despite such chatty willingness, it appears Curll was not above pushing the limits of his generosity. In the previous letter Brome had ordered a well-bound copy of a Discourse of Fish and Fish-ponds (1713) one of two reprinted tracts later ascribed to Roger North (the other was The Gentleman Accomptant); but Curll had taken the chance to expand the order by adding in another book about fishing which Brome did not want. However, he proposed returning it ‘towards S.r Thomas Browns Posthumous Works etc’. It was a tight circle: with a single letter accompanying proposals for one book, Curll had managed not only to secure a subscription, but significant scholarly and financial aid in producing another, together with orders for some of his general stock.

T H AT K N AV E C U R L E Such an apparently innocent pursuit often disguised lurking political tensions, on the eve of the Hanvorian accession, as the ancient order of things was reconstructed in print, and Curll’s association with non-jurors was at its height in his antiquarian publishing, especially in the partnership with Richard Rawlinson. Yet Hearne, the most prickly of the non-juring antiquaries, never accepted Curll, and indeed waged a kind of undercover vendetta against him. John Woodward’s An Account of Some Roman Urns . . . lately digg’d up near Bishopsgate, which Curll published in 1714, had been originally included in the eighth volume of Hearne’s edition of John Leland’s Itinerary (1711–12). Woodward had apparently asked Hearne to print some extra copies for his distribution and when this did not happen he asked Curll to reprint it for him: at least, that was Curll’s story. Curll wrote to Hearne on 6 November 1712 to ask permission to print 250 copies: The Dr . was desirous you should be acquainted with it, to know whether it would be any ways prejudicial to you, which I presume it cannot because all your Leland’s are subscrib’d for, and by your joining it to that work, ’tis a proof you had wholly laid aside all Thoughts of printing it single.44

Despite the slightly hectoring tone of the letter, Curll did not miss the opportunity to advertise in a postscript the forthcoming publication of The Life of William Dugdale and Browne’s Posthumous Works. In reply Hearne was curt.

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Sr.—I am so far from consenting to your reprinting Dr . Woodward’s Letter . . . that I very much resent it, and I think it will be for your Interest to desist. The Dr . left it intirely to my Liberty to act as I should think most proper.

To Woodward he wrote more carefully and at length, expressing surprise that Woodward had not mentioned this new printing to him in recent letters and setting out his conditions for the continuance of their friendship.45 Edward Whitehouse then wrote to Hearne to blame Curll and defend Woodward, and Hearne, satisfied, wrote an apology to Woodward on 13 November. On the same day Edward Steele, Whitehouse’s witness, wrote to give his account: Every Word that past betwixt Dr . Woodward & Mr . Curll, on this Occasion, I heard. For, on Wednesday was sennight, passing with Dr . Woodward in his own Coach, by Mr . Curll’s shop, I desired He would be pleas’d to stop only while I deliverd a Message to Mr . Curll. He, seeing the Doctor, told him several Gentlemen had press’d him to procure them Copyes of His Letter to Sr . C. Wren. The Dr . told him that was so far from being in His Power yt He had been forc’d to refuse a great Number of His Friends, much to their displeasure. Upon that, He urged the Dr . to reprint it. The Dr . told him His Time was wholey taken up other wayes, so that He could not think of any such Thing. He told ye Doctor he would write to you to that Purpose. The Dr . said he might do what he pleasd: but that he should not himself intermeddle in it: and therefore bid him make no use of His Name. Mr . Curll promised he would not. That you might be wholey at your Liberty, and no wayes biased, the Dr . repeated his Injunction to make no use of His Name: which Mr . Curll promised the Docter a second time. Upon which He made a sign to the Coachman, and he drove away.

This account is perhaps the more valuable for being written by someone who evidently knew Curll and who admitted that he sympathized with Curll’s desire to reprint the letter. It affords a useful glimpse of the opportunism and buttonholing tactics which the bookseller often employed. This was not simply a case of Curll’s strong-arm tactics, however. Woodward himself wrote testily to Hearne, asking for a copy of Curll’s letter and admonishing Hearne for his over-reaction and foolish threats. In Woodward’s view he had every right to reprint the letter if he wanted to, and though he protested that he did not, he had little truck with Hearne’s prickliness.46 Hearne responded on 17 November with cordial thanks for the explanations offered by Steele and Woodward, though he was still not quite satisfied with Woodward’s actions in the affair. He sent Woodward a copy of Curll’s letter, which Woodward denounced as ‘one continued Falsehood from Beginning to Ending’. Curll’s motives were obvious: ‘He intended, under Pretence of my approveing it, to have decoyd you to consent to his printing ye Letter: & to have made use of that, afterwards, to draw me in.’ Hearne eventually accepted Woodward’s explanations and the matter was, for them, patched up:

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I am really asham’d for having given you so much Trouble about Mr . Curll’s Letter. I am fully satisfy’d he hath dealt very unworthily both by you as well as my self. It was the first Letter I ever had from him, & I design to have no more Dealings with him.47

It was not quite over so far as Curll was concerned, however. Woodward and Hearne had each left it to the other to decide about reprinting Woodward’s letter, and Curll went ahead anyway, as Woodward reported to Hearne on 31 March 1713: I find an exemplar of my Letter to Sr C. Wren, & that to your Self, relating to London, printed by Mr . Curll. I am surprised, & much vex’d, at it: & unless you have given him Leave to print it, I think he ought to be prosecuted wth ye utmost Rigour.48

But the damage was done, and (as often) it seemed easier to control the process by colluding in it. Woodward wrote again, with perhaps exaggerated confidence on 11 April: Mr . Curll is a very unfair Bookseller. But he has an aw of me: & I think I have made him enter ye Impression, wch is only 250, in my Name, which will be a bar to his printing any more without my Leave. He has admitted Mr . Wilkin, by whose Means indeed I manage him, a Partner in the Edition.49

In a sense, everyone was satisfied: Curll got his publication; Woodward preserved his reputation and the illusion of control; Hearne nursed his grievance. It is not a uniform picture. A letter from the antiquary Browne Willis gives us some further insight into Curll’s ability to ingratiate himself with the scholar: My stay there [London] was near a fortnight, but during it I had great diversion in going to the Tower etc. conversing with antiquaries, and happening into a bookseller’s shop, one Curl, was pleased to see what he was going forward with, which is the publishing the histories of our Cathedral Churches. He has now in the press those of Winchester, Rochester, Hereford, having already published Norwich. Indeed the former Winchester is printed off but then as he promises in the title-page to adorn it with sculptures so he, being to make good his work, must stay till he can get them subscribed for. He showed a most beautiful draught of the monument of William of Wickham and said he was going down to Oxford to see if any of his College would be at the charge of it. He prevailed with me and another gentleman to write 2 or 3 words to you on his behalf that you would, if you had the time, speak to the Warden of New College and likewise the presidents of Corpus and Magdalen that they would have their Founders’ monuments taken.50

This reached Hearne’s antennae within days, for on 22 March 1714, Browne Willis admitted to Hearne that he had acted on Curll’s behalf: What you say abt my being concerned for Curls Interest I take very well I was pleased wh it on this acct that the very words are the same (leaving out the word Whiggish) viz. coxcombe silly impudent Lying & c. as yr great predecessor A Wood Primus Antiquarius Oxon as you are justly the Secundus Speaks in some of his caracters [sic] . . . I am no further interested for him but as he is a publisher of Books of antiq I wd them as correct as possible when they come out I was the more civill to him because he spoke wth so much Honour Veneration & respect of you wch he did of his own accord . . .51

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Hearne, never to be appeased, denounced Curll’s Life of Dugdale and his Miscellanies on Several Curious Subjects (1714), edited by Richard Rawlinson, to John Anstis in the summer of 1714.52 Later in the year, he noted: ‘There is just come out an Abridgement of Asmole of ye Garter. That Knave Curle the Bookseller’s name appears amongst the rest. ’Tis a poor Performance.’53 But from Hearne’s point of view, things were to get worse still. L A RG E P RO M I S E The most surprising aspect of the quarrel with Hearne was its invisibility to the public, for the other aspect of Curll’s business which had arrived at a sort of perfection by 1714 was publicity. Johnson’s famous pronouncement that ‘Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement’ in no.41 of The Idler, might have been made with Curll in mind, for nothing typifies Curll’s activity so much as the effort he put into advertising. We have seen that he was not above simply writing directly to people he thought might be interested in order to puff a new book. More institutional types of publicity were however available, though some of them, like the practice of pinning up title-pages of new books in prominent places such as the Royal Exchange, were by now a bit moribund. The abridgement of Josephus’ Jewish History (1708) was publicized by the ancient means of a circulated handbill, of which one copy survives.54 The ‘Term Catalogues’ organized by the trade itself ran out of steam in 1711, but Curll advertised seven of his books in it in 1708–9, transferring his allegiance at that point to Steele’s respectable periodical the Tatler.55 The reason for the demise of these methods was the increase in newspaper circulation and especially the advent of daily papers with the Daily Courant of 1702 and its imitators. Curll placed advertisements in the Daily Courant from 1706 onwards, and evidently found it particularly congenial for events like book sales and auctions, where a daily reminder to the public was of the essence. Sometimes he opted instead for the thrice-weekly the Post Boy, which perhaps had the merit of being around for three days instead of one (it was also more Tory in orientation and Curll needed to advertise across the spectrum). He used the official government newspaper, the London Gazette, only sparingly. He was a keen exponent of the early announcement, using the newspapers to indicate that a text will be published ‘speedily’ or ‘in a few days’, though often the book was weeks or more away. After initial individual advertisements Curll sometimes included titles in short lists of ‘books lately published’ (see PB, 3 January 1708). Sometimes small clusters of titles hang together, especially in the case of theological tracts. Curll kept certain books to the forefront in his advertising campaigns, suggesting particularly large investment. His edition of Petronius, for example, was announced in The Post Man of 7 February 1708, and a note of its availability was thereafter tacked

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onto a whole series of advertisements for the sale of gentlemen’s libraries in the Daily Courant.56 It was also used as a rider to announcements of forthcoming translations of Callipaedia.57 Nundinae Sturbrigienses featured as the default item that ‘may be had’ at the shop throughout 1709. The Charitable Surgeon was heavily and individually advertised in the Daily Courant between 23 April and 19 June 1708 and between 22 May and 28 August 1708 in the Post Man; it was again heavily pushed in the Post Man of January to March 1709, and the same paper ran at least a dozen advertisements for the second edition, from 31 March 1709. Some books became virtually a fixture of the advertising columns. The Devout Christian’s Companion was published ‘This Day’ on 4 November 1706, according to the Daily Courant; it was ‘just publish’d’ in the same paper of 8 November. It was again published ‘This Day’ in the Post Boy of 23 November, which ran five further advertisements for the book to 12 December. It was then advertised in the London Gazette (19 December) and the Post Man (26 December). It was ‘just publish’d’ according to the Post Man of 18 January and 1 Feb 1707; ‘lately publish’d’ according to the Post Boy of 15 February and the Daily Courant of 1 and 4 March. It was touted in London Gazette 27 March 1707. This fed seamlessly into the publication of the ‘second edition’, ‘Just published’ on 28 March (Daily Courant). The Post Boy ran at least 11 advertisements for this between 3 April and 13 December 1707, seconded by the Post Man, which ran at least six over a similar period. It was appended to advertisements for other publications (Daily Courant 21 and 25 November); it was ‘lately published’ as late as 20 December (Daily Courant). It was even advertised for Smith and Curll, and separately for Curll alone, in the same issue of the Post Boy (3 January 1708). After a few more routine advertisements in these papers, it appeared under the rubric ‘Very proper to be used this Holy Time of Lent’ in the Post Man of 2–4 March 1708. The second edition was in turn supplanted by a third, published ‘This Day’ on 14 May 1708 (Daily Courant; ‘just published’ 19 May); this was announced as ‘very proper for New Year’s Gifts’ in the Post Boy of 21–23 December 1708. Thereafter it was regularly included as an afterthought to advertisements for theological books. The books themselves made up Curll’s other main agent of publicity. He issued a text of Rochester’s Upon Nothing in 1711, ‘Now First Correctly Printed’, as a sort of taster for a proposed new edition that, it was claimed, would sort out the textual chaos left by other printings: What a Surprize then must it be to all True Judges of Poetry . . . to find, upon Examination, that hardly one Stanza of this Admirable Piece has been correctly Printed? I design, with convenient Speed, to give the World a Genuine Edition of his Lordship’s Works . . . so I begin with this Poem, to show with what Disingenuity his Lordship’s Memory has been treated by such Paltry Scriblers, as did not in the least understand what they have presum’d to Publish.

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It did not happen. Despite the advertisement on the title page, promising ‘The Correctest Edition of his Lordship’s Works hitherto Extant’ at five shillings, Curll failed to produce this textual prize and continued to issue his existing edition. Footnotes in one book often refer to the availability of another. In the Lutrin, allusion is made to Tassoni’s Rape of the Bucket, ‘lately English’d by Mr. O, and Sold by Mr. C’ (p. xiv); a reference to Thomas Betterton’s monument in Westminster Abbey prompts mention of the ‘lately published Life’ available from Curll.58 Curll’s title pages, if not quite ‘marvels of optimistic inaccuracy’ (Straus), certainly show a surprising ingenuity. His practice of reissuing the sheets of a first edition, often unaltered, as a second or third edition, offered the opportunity to relaunch books under new title pages. We have already noted the careful positioning of big names (Addison, Rowe, Prior) on title pages to suggest their role in the text was greater than it was.59 Quantity helped too: Curll’s tendency to pack together a number of short items resulted in title pages which were themselves very full of contents, suggesting that buyers got a lot for their money. One of the pamphlets about Jane Wenham, the witch of Walkerne, offers not only an account of her sorcery and an argument in favour of the power of witchcraft but two seventeenth-century witch trials into the bargain, and a reminder that other material of the kind was available at Curll’s shop.60 Sex, the more unusual the better, already supplied a big selling point, though as the title-page of The Case of John Atherton showed, sex wasn’t the only thing that was marketable. Indeed, that title also carried advertisements for unimpeachable theological textbooks. About 30 per cent of Curll’s publications up to 1714 contain advertisements for other books, on the verso of the title page or half-title, on spare pages at the end of the book, sometimes even on the title page itself. The earliest advertisement seems to be in A Letter to Mr. Prior (1706), which gives notice that Caesar’s Commentaries is available from Curll and that the works of Roscommon and Rochester soon will be. Secret Memoirs of the Duke and Duchess of O::::: (1708) advertises the latter volume, four of Curll’s more substantial volumes to date, with The Case of Sodomy. Big books, like Whitelocke’s Memorials (1709), tend to carry advertisements for other big books; the extra volume of Shakespeare (1709), intended to reach a wide audience, advertised twelve literary works. A short advertisement for recent poetry in Greene’s Threnodiae Britannicae concluded with Curll’s address, ‘Where all Gentlemen and Ladies, may be furnished with new Books, Plays, &c’. At the end of Swift’s Meditation upon a Broom-Stick (1710) Curll promised speedy publication of more of the same, but also included an advertisement for two books already published, and one other about to appear. The Compleat Key to the Tale of a Tub, which was one of these, advertised the Meditation on its title page. Curll was also a man ‘by whom Gentlemen may be furnish’d, with most of the scarce C Authors, Cum notae Variorum and E Editions’. In The Devout Christian’s Companion (third edition, 1709), Curll and Sanger advertised three

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further theological books at their addresses, ‘Where may be likewise had all Sorts of Divinty-Books’.61 For religious works in particular Curll sought to align his advertising with his presumed readership. Thomas Wise’s The Faithful Stewards (1710) carried notices of five books of interest to clergymen, and one of the books there advertised, Kettlewell’s Help and Exhortation, itself contained notices of six theological textbooks. In the welter of Sacheverell material, Curll made sure that his texts backed each other up: An Impartial Examination (1710) advertised seven other Sacheverell items and two ‘neutral’ divinity handbooks. Some Account of the Family of Sacheverell (1710) naturally proclaimed the availability of eight related items (though Swift and Petronius were thrown in for good measure). Curll’s edition of Rowe’s Poems on Several Occasions (1714) promoted several French works in the translation of which Rowe was said to have had a hand, but also histories of Jane Shore, miscellanies containing work by Rowe, as well as translations of Theocritus and Anacreon which Rowe had nothing to do with.62 The Travels of the Learned Father Montfaucon (1711) advertised five books of history, travel or biography. Curll was proud of his ornaments: Caesar’s Commentaries were ‘adorn’d with Cuts from the Designs of the Famous Palladio’, while Petronius, Curll’s first classic endeavour, was advertised not only as a neat pocket edition in ‘Elzevir’ letter, but as possessing ten plates ‘neatly Engraven, pleasantly representing the lascivious Intrigues of Nero’s Court’.63 Later books naturally have longer lists and more general claims: as Curll’s business expanded, these filler advertisements became more mixed in character, to the point of randomness. The ‘preambles’ for Harley and Harcourt’s patents advertised books on politics, theology, literature, travel, and sexual problems, as well as other preambles. The Case of Insufficiency Discuss’d (1711) noted not only the juicier aspects of Curll’s sex-trial list but also Petronius and Musae Britannicae; Callipaedia carried advertisements for substantial but not especially relevant books; Sewell’s Second Letter reminded readers of the availability of Curll’s editions of Theocritus and (yet again) Petronius, as well as The Works of Mr. John Philips, a book which itself trumpeted six miscellaneous biographies and a theological book. Witchcraft Farther Displayed advertised sex and politics in equal measure. By 1712, booksellers were increasingly issuing catalogues of their own stock, especially of the books ‘printed for’ them exclusively. Richard Smith paid Bowyer to produce 600 copies of two book catalogues in May 1712 and Curll began issuing his own at about the same time: customers might expect to have pressed upon them eight-page lists such as For the Year 1714, a Catalogue of Books, sold by Edmund Curll, at his shop at Tunbridge-Wells; and at the Dial and Bible against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-street, London.64 By the time Queen Anne died in August 1714, changing the political landscape once more, Curll was an established figure with a certain style. He covered a wide range: big translation ventures, an antiquarian series, political controversy,

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secret history, sex scandal, biography, theology, poetry, drama, and fiction. He specialized in retrieving and reprinting material from cheap sources, in attaching commercial names to literature that was cheaply produced, and in battening on the literary successes of others. He had also begun to annoy Alexander Pope, and over the next few years that annoyance would bring a new sense of literary order—and disorder—into being.

4 Trading Blows (1714–1716) For the next few years, the early skirmishes in Curll’s long war with Alexander Pope dominate his career. These battles make up some of the most familiar episodes in his life, but they still repay careful attention. This is, first, because we have almost always heard the story from the point of view of Pope.1 Second, the clash between Curll and Pope marks a crucial stage in the history of the book trade. Both men utilized the full range of advertising and publicist techniques, and each had a keen awareness of his own distinctive place within the literary market-place. Most accounts suppose that the quarrel began in 1716. However, hostilities really got under way earlier. They date from the appearance of Original Poems and Translations, issued under the name of John Pemberton, in April 1714—if not further back still. By this time Curll had already given offence to a number of Pope’s friends, for example when he had produced an unauthorized version of Prior’s works in 1707 (see p. 27 above). While Prior never joined the group of Pope’s very closest friends he was certainly a congenial figure personally and politically; and in 1715 he became a martyr for the Tory cause when he was interrogated and sent to the Tower. Worse, Curll turned his attention to Swift (see p. 45). In 1710 he had issued A Complete Key to the Tale of a Tub, which among its other irritations had helped to divulge Swift’s authorship of the satires published in 1704.2 A year later he cobbled together what he called Miscellanies in rivalry to an authentic collection of Swift’s work, of which John Morphew was the ‘trade’ publisher and Benjamin Tooke the ultimate instigator. On 14 May 1712 Swift expressed his resentment to Stella concerning ‘that villain Curl’: this would herald a lifetime of enmity towards the bookseller, and laid the groundwork for Pope’s own better-known quarrel.3 Moreover, Curllian methods (and perhaps Curllian priracy) had entered the life of Nicholas Rowe, a good friend of Pope. The two men probably met about 1708, and by 1713 were exchanging visits to each other’s homes: Rowe spent a week at Binfield in September of that year. Together they engaged on minor literary enterprises, some concerned with Addison’s famous play Cato. At the height of their friendship Pope wrote an epilogue for Jane Shore, seemingly rejected by the actress who took the heroine’s role, Anne Oldfield; and he may also have composed a prologue for Lady Jane Gray. In his Full and True Account Pope would remind readers that Curll had issued ‘an incorrect Edition

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of [Rowe’s] Poems, without his Leave, in Quarto’ (Prose Works, i. 263). The bookseller may have patched up his relations with Rowe for the time being when he came to some arrangement with Jacob Tonson over the latter’s jealously guarded Shakespeare rights. As a result, Rowe’s 1709 edition came out again in April 1714, with the volume of poems Curll had added in 1709 included as an integral part of the set labelled Volume 9. For once the names of the most respectable and the least respectable of publishers, Tonson and Curll, joined hands in a single imprint (with several other members of the trade who took part). Some works by Rowe which Curll published may have been legitimately bought from him, but many were probably not. As a final casus belli, Curll had already acquired the services of writers who would lead the offensive against Pope in years to come, including men like Gildon, Sewell, and Oldmixon. Abundant evidence exists, then, to show that Curll had done much to antagonize Pope by vicarious means, even before the pair became locked in direct opposition. B ROT H E R S I N T H E P RO F E S S I O N Of course, Curll did not neglect his general business during the years he was embarking on his skirmishes with Pope. Nor did the change of regime cause him to forget where his bread and butter interests lay when the Hanoverians took over. In August 1714, with the Queen scarcely cold in her grave and the political nation in turmoil, he was advertising Matrimony Unmask’d: Or, The Comforts and Discomforts of Marriage (Henry Meere is listed on the title-page). The author may quite likely be Ned Ward, not usually one of Curll’s men. Later in the year, along with pamphlets on The State of the Nation and George Sewell’s Poem upon the King’s Accession, as well as a collection brought together as State-Tracts, Curll still had plenty of room for items such as The Second and Last Part of the Case of Impotency as Debated in England, a further exploitation of the vein he had found most productive. Meanwhile the opportunity cropped up in August 1714 to deliver a second edition of Swift’s Miscellanies, at a time when the fortunes of the Dean were at a low ebb, so that he no longer had as many powerful protectors. Some of these works bore the imprint of the trade publisher James Roberts (see Chapter 2 above), whose shop in Warwick Lane stood only a few yards from Curll’s premises when he briefly shifted some of his operations to Paternoster Row in 1720. Roberts had strong Whiggish family connections, which helped his career after the Hanoverian accession. By contrast John Morphew, with whom Curll had previously worked, lost the comfort and privilege he had enjoyed during the years of Tory rule, and began to fall foul of the new authorities. One arrest occurred in March 1715, and from then on Morphew regularly found himself hauled off by the messengers of the press to face official interrogation. Prudently Curll began to shift his alliances in the London trade. The name of Roberts became the most frequent on all English title-pages in this era: at least

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120 items so identified would appear between May 1715 and April 1716, for example.4 Generally Curll showed little desire to get close to his brothers in the profession, but he may have made an exception in the case of the influential trade publisher. Significantly, ‘Mr Roberts’ delivered an appeal to Lord Townshend on Curll’s behalf in 1726, and acted as a go-between in the following year.5 Curll undoubtedly had a hand in some of the publications which alerted the authorities, as emerges from secondary evidence, most notably advertisements in the press or in other books which list his name.6 All the same, if we look behind the title-page, Curll’s closest collaborator was not Roberts but his neighbour John Pemberton, who traded from the Golden Buck in Fleet Street. In fact his premises lay across the road from St Dunstan’s church, as those of Curll did around this time. Pemberton specialized to some extent in theological works with a low-church or dissenting cast, and unlike his colleague he seems to have had few contacts with the highflying wing of Anglicanism. Nevertheless, for a time just after the Hanoverian era began the two booksellers worked in extremely close conjunction, co-producing some fifty antiquarian and other works up to about 1720. They often shared rights of the books they issued, with Roberts commonly named as publisher. At this period we see listed together on title-pages the signs of Curll and Pemberton ‘both against St Dunstan’s Church’: another index of this situation is that books in one man’s catalogue regularly appear in those of the other, as for example with A Catalogue of Books Printed for, and Sold by J. Pemberton, at the Buck and Sun against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-street (1715). The overlap occurs still more plainly in a joint list of publications by the two men, along with Arthur Bettesworth, found in The Works of the Celebrated Monsieur Voiture (see p. 73 below): a combined list also appears in A City Ramble. Both these books came out in this same year, 1715. Another frequent collaborator, involved in some thirty items co-published with Curll in this decade, worked in the same small quarter of London. Like Sanger, Pemberton, Lintot, and Curll at various times, Robert Gosling kept his shop in a short stretch of the street lying between Temple Bar and the Inner Temple Gate. From the sign of the Mitre and Crown, opposite St Dunstan’s, he had produced some earlier works of Charles Gildon, and joined with Curll to issue further books in which Gildon had a hand, such as Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia, a Romance (1717), based on Heliodorus. Most authorities locate the heart of the bookselling business some distance away in the area round Paternoster Row and St Paul’s Churchyard but, when the Hanoverian era began, this corner of the city, at the western extremity of Fleet Street, housed just as many prominent publishing concerns. In the case of Gosling, too, we see the same shorthand formula Curll employed for his imprint when he entered into partnership with Pemberton, so that his name appears with that of Gosling ‘against St. Dunstan’s Church’ in The Works of Monsieur de St. Evremond (‘1714’ for 1713). The imprint of English Particles Latiniz’d (1713) once more lumps Gosling, Pemberton, and Curll together as operating at their various signs ‘all

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over against St. Dunstan’ s Church’—propinquity went with business association. In addition, Gosling and Bettesworth were the main London subscribers for John Ayliffe’s work on Oxford University—a work which, as we shall see in a moment, caused a real furore when Curll brought it out in 1714.7 The bookseller cast his net as widely as ever. Some representative items included the medical Works of Dr. Alexander Pitcairn in November 1714, edited by the tireless George Sewell. (For all his efforts on Curll’s behalf, Sewell would supposedly go to a pauper’s grave under a hollow tree in February 1726, unattended by a single friend or relative, and without any memorial. Curll had little time for such niceties.) The Works were published in conjunction with John Pemberton and William Taylor, who would become notable as the man who brought Robinson Crusoe into the world five years later (below, Chapter 6). Never one to give up too easily, Curll made a second attempt early in 1715 to capitalize on the success of Delarivier Manley’s chroniques scandaleuses with a work entitled The German Atalantis: Written by a Lady. The title-page named no names as far as a publisher went, but press notices stated that it was printed and sold by ‘most of the booksellers’, including Roberts, Curll and Bettesworth.8 As usual, the resourceful publisher sought to diversify his output. At the same juncture, he brought out together with Bettesworth a book to add tone to his list, Robert Nelson’s Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England, which went through innumerable editions after its first appearance in 1704.9 Having paid his dues to God, Curll then transferred his service to Mammon when he issued Hob: or, The Country Wake, a farce ‘as it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane’. This work, first staged in 1696, came from the pen of the actor Thomas Dogget, although in its present form the play seems to have been an adaptation by Dogget’s colleague Colley Cibber. Not often had the path of two of the leading dunces collided in this way: for the most part, Cibber endeavoured to keep himself above the Grub Street fray, although Mist’s scandalous Weekly Journal would later devise a way to link the two men (see Chapter 7 below). Curll’s authors regularly found themselves in tight corners, but the fate of Dr John Ayliffe (1676–1732) proved more outr´e than most. A civil lawyer, educated at Winchester and New College, he practised in the vice-chancellor’s court at Oxford. In July 1714 Curll published his book on The Ancient and Present State of the University of Oxford in two volumes. Imprudently, in this otherwise dry recension of Anthony Wood’s history, Ayliffe alleged that funds of the university press had been misappropriated, as well as criticizing the way his own college had been run under the head of the house, John Cobb and a predecessor (‘the supine Negligence of a late Warden’). The vice-chancellor at this time, Bernard Gardiner, warden of All Souls, took the first allegation as a reflection on himself; but the chief complainant was Thomas Brathwait, a former warden of New College and previous vice-chancellor. On 4 February 1715 the authorities brought two actions against Ayliffe in the university court,

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concerning charges made in the book, ultimately passing sentence that he should be degraded (deprived of his degrees) and expelled from the university. He also resigned his college fellowship, although Thomas Hearne—a fierce opponent of the Whig Ayliffe—suggested that he had simply sold the place. For Hearne it was ‘a scurrilous book’. Despite the opposition ranged against him, the ex-doctor had no intention of taking this reverse lying down. He soon produced The Case of Dr. Ayliffe, at Oxford. Giving, first, an Account of the Unjust and Malicious Prosecution of him in the Chancellor’s Court; and, secondly, an Account of the Proceedings had against him in his College (1716). Of course this tract, which reprinted his wild and rambling defence in court, failed to placate the authorities, and of course Ayliffe claimed that this was owing to the Jacobite tendencies of the university. He had appealed to the Visitor, the bishop of Winchester, and also instituted a suit in Chancery. But all to no avail, since Ayliffe refused to make the submission demanded of him, and continued to throw out abusive comments: ‘It cannot be to the Dishonour and Prejudice of the College in general to have some Blockheads, marry’d Men, and Fornicators Therein, if they be not encourag’d thereunto by the loose Government thereof’.10 Nevertheless, he later gained a measure of respectability in London as a commissioner for licensing hawkers and pedlars: in addition, he published treatises on both civil and canon law. Meanwhile two booksellers, Mears and Hooke, got up enough courage to reissue the State in 1723 with a cancel title-page, and this time the author escaped without retribution. By such means Ayliffe eked out a livelihood until November 1732, when he died at his home in Crane Court, Fleet Street, just across the road from Curll’s old shop. His story provides an exemplary illustration of ways in which the printed word, at this point in history, could make and break individuals. O PE N I N G S A LVO S The battle with the Scriblerians and their friends had opened at a gentle pace, but matters began to heat up in early 1714. Around February Curll issued A Collection of Original Poems, Translations, and Imitations, by Mr. Prior, Mr. Rowe, Dr. Swift, and Other Eminent Hands. This contained ten items bound up, most of which had previously appeared separately. A prominent item is Edward Holdsworth’s popular mock-heroic Muscipula, in Latin and in English. As for Prior, Rowe, and Swift, they may have been, in the words of Curll’s earlier biographer, ‘doubtlessly unwilling contributors’ (Straus, 225), but several authentic items from their hand figure in the volume. The pieces by Swift include ‘Baucis and Philemon’, which Curll also chose to import that year into his miscellany by several hands, Poems on Several Occasions. By the Earls of Roscommon, and Dorset, &c. Once the bookseller had pirated an item, he seemed to think he had acquired legal rights by the law of possession. The same sheets were reused in the second volume

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of The Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon, Dorset, &c. in two volumes, the ‘fourth edition’, published in May. If people then had seen recycling as an economic and ecological virtue, Curll’s name would have shone as brightly as anyone’s. Thankfully for Pope, nothing of his appears. At the same time Curll was advertising the second edition of Rowe’s Poems on Several Occasions, which may not survive, although the third does. Some copies of this work contain an extra leaf, with ‘the Exceptionable Passage left out in the Acting and Printing of the Tragedy of Jane Shore’ added. A further publishing spin-off came in the form of works such as Memoirs of the Lives of King Edward IV. And Jane Shore. Extracted from the best Historians, published by Curll around June 1714, and The Life, Character, and Death of Lady Jane Gray, issued under Roberts’s name in May 1714, but ‘repeatedly advertised as Curll’s’ (Straus, 227). The chance was taken to puff Edward Young’s poem on this subject, The Force of Religion, published in the same month. Such books were patently designed to trade on the success of Rowe’s plays, much as a modern merchandizing campaign feeds off a popular film. For the moment Pope escaped, but his immunity did not last long. In the first two weeks of April two attacks appeared. One came from the pen of Charles Gildon, a miscellaneous writer who had specialized in dramatic affairs. His New Rehearsal: or Bays the Younger, cast as a play in two acts, took Rowe as its prime target, with caustic remarks on all of this author’s best known plays to date. But the title-page also promised ‘A Word or Two upon Mr. Pope’s Rape of the Lock’. This comes in the second act with the introduction of a conceited young poet named Dapper, easily identifiable with Pope, and constitutes the first sustained commentary on the Rape. In any case, the earlier sections of the play would have done enough to irritate Pope, since he and Rowe enjoyed such close friendship: Pope spoke highly of the older man’s affectionate and cheerful nature. Gildon’s assault was reprinted in May 1715, now garnished with more hostile passages on the subject of Lady Jane Gray, Rowe’s most recent success on the tragic stage. While the imprint in both editions is that of James Roberts, Pope certainly regarded this as a Curllian production (see below, p. 84), and most scholars have found it hard to disagree. The other document which appeared at this juncture, a collection entitled Poems and Translations, by Several Hands, gave just as much offence.11 A second edition, now called Original Poems and Translations, followed later in the year, with a few changes including the omission of John Oldmixon’s signature at the end of the dedication. The publisher is listed as Curll’s close ally John Pemberton, who issued books by Oldmixon long after Curll had deserted the hack author. At the same time this volume instituted another of Pope’s quarrels, since Oldmixon would berate him in print for years to come. As for the battle between Pope and Curll, it seems a ludicrously small occasion for such prolonged hostilities—a trivial cause indeed for the dire offence they would take, or feign to take, for the next three decades. Yet the episode merits careful attention, as it shows how

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Curll had started to perfect his techniques of provocation, in which aggressive moves alternated with shows of suave affability. Pope would certainly have taken note of the volume, since its title-page prominently displayed a work (doubtless obtained illicitly) by William Walsh, one of the poet’s earliest literary mentors.12 The previous December had seen the first publication of Pope’s tavern piece, ‘An Epigram upon Two or Three’. This runs to no more than seven lines in length, mildly salacious in content but comfortably short of outright obscenity. In the second edition of Lintot’s miscellany, the epigram was printed anonymously. Not until the appearance of Poems and Translations by Several Hands would the identity of the author come to light. But Oldmixon did not confine his offence to outing the poet. He also supplied an invidious title, ‘A Receipt to make a Cuckold’; and went out of his way in the preface to offer a solemn apology for including the item in this miscellany: I know but of one Poem that has crept into it, which I would have had kept still in Manuscript. ’Tis a very little One, and will be easily slipt over in so great a Number of Others that seem intended for the Press; which certainly that never was. Thus much was due to Justice, considering the Company it is in.13

Here the subliminal notion that the compilers of the volume had access to a private manuscript may or may not be true, but it suited Curll to position himself close to the writers’ coalface. Elsewhere in the preface, Oldmixon claims in what would become the familiar accents of his master, ‘There is nothing here, which may not be seen in the Hand-writing of those Authors; if the scrupulous Curiosity of any persons should excite them to examine my Bookseller’. If this had not been enough, the publisher and his associates made sure by inserting a poem called ‘Advice to Mr. Pope, on his intended Translation of Homer’. The author was John Hughes, who seldom wrote for Curll but kept on good terms with Oldmixon, and who provided more material for the collection than anyone else. Pope seems not to have known the identity of the writer: although conceding to Swift that Hughes belonged among the ‘mediocribus’ in verse, he behaved with great kindness towards Hughes and his family around the time that the poet died in 1720.14 At all events, Pope suppressed the bawdy epigram in later editions of his works. He evidently thought it worth providing some kind of explanation, as he wrote to John Caryll on 19 November 1714, ‘The thing they have been pleased to call a Receipt to make a Cuckold, is only six (sic) lines, which were stolen from me’ (Corr, i. 267). Up to this moment Pope had not felt the need to make such a claim in respect of Curll’s methods. He would do so many times from now on. On 15 July Curll ushered into print a different anthology, bearing the misleadingly similar title, Original Poems and Translations, with a new corps of writers headed by Aaron Hill, Laurence Eusden, and William Broome. The volume includes a poem ‘Upon the Duke of Marlborough’s House at Woodstock’, and on this basis Pope’s bibliographer writes, ‘With this book Curll

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comes, for the first time, I think, into contact with Pope’ (Griffith, 33). However, the poem may well not be by Pope at all; and in any case the volume certainly postdated the collection described in the last paragraph. Otherwise the new collection made Curll fewer enemies than most of his efforts in this line, although it attributed to the Oxford wit William King a poem entitled ‘Apple-Pye’ now known to be the work of Leonard Welsted.15 Another potentially embarrassing item surfaced with the third edition of Rowe’s poems, issued around 20 July. This was the epigram ‘On a Lady who P st at the Tragedy of Cato’, a naughty but hardly obscene item which had first seen the light in a collection issued by John Morphew in the previous February. Many years later this poem was acknowledged by being included in the Pope–Swift Miscellanies; but at the time its authorship remained uncertain, and Pope showed no anxiety to claim it. Meanwhile the well-informed Thomas Burnet suggested that the verses were written ‘by Pope & Row both in Ridicule of those that cryed at Cato’.16 Curll continued to reprint the poem, sometimes with an archly inappropriate translation into Latin. It came out in the made-up collection The Elzevir Miscellany (September 1714), which mainly featured lesser lights such as Sewell, William King, Aaron Hill, and Laurence Eusden, as well as in later editions of Rowe’s poems. The episode shows how closely events had entangled Rowe in the initial clashes between Curll and Pope: if he had lived beyond 1718, the whole story of the relations of poet and bookseller might have taken a markedly different turn. A few other exploitative pieces could scarcely escape Pope’s eye at this period. In March 1714 Bernard Lintot published the enlarged version of The Rape of the Lock in five cantos, and it must have diverted the poet to see Curll’s speed off the mark. Together with his sometime rival Lintot, he produced The Count de Gabalis, being a Diverting History of the Rosicrucian Doctrine of Spirits, viz. Sylphs, Salamanders, Gnomes and Daemons. With this item, ‘very necessary for the Reader’s of Mr. Pope’s Rape of the Lock’, the publisher launched a naked attempt to capitalize on the success of the expanded poem. Curll issued his response as early as 8 April. This apparently heralded some brief joint operation, since the advertisement leaf lists ‘Books printed for B. Lintot and E. Curll’; almost all the books listed are Curll’s. Equally, we should expect Pope to take amused note of The New Atalantis for the Year 1713, one of several bids Curll made to climb on the bandwagon first set in motion by Manley’s work. A newspaper advertisement on her behalf by her publisher Morphew disavowed any connection with the new book. In The Rape of the Lock Pope had referred sneeringly to the original (‘As long as Atalantis shall be read’): very likely, he knew something of the background to this Grub Street encounter since Manley was the mistress of Alderman John Barber, already a friend of Swift and later a figure close to Pope himself. As for Curll, he found yet another way of profiting from all the notoriety which had been engendered. The outcome was The Adventures of Rivella, a novel based around semi-veiled autobiography by Manley which he

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had brought out in June 1714, and reissued several times over the years (see Chapter 3). L I V E S A N D C H A R AC T E R S Acute political tensions marked the year 1715, culminating in the outbreak of the Jacobite rising. Curll proceeded in his accustomed fashion, stepping up the level of his controversial material as events unfolded. He does not seem to have strayed into any open Jacobitical productions at this stage, and indeed his list for the year carries a predominantly Hanoverian and Whiggish slant—a prudent choice. At the same time he went on producing works in less touchy areas, with books of devotion, scientific items, and antiquarian titles. Three publications can stand as representative of these categories. To the first group belong the miscellaneous works of the recently deceased High Church writer, Robert Nelson. Subsequently, the executors objected in the Post Boy that this had been issued without their approbation, and contained ‘some actual falsehoods’ (Straus, 234). No surprise: in his lifetime Nelson had complained when Curll dedicated a book to him without permission. In the second category comes Dr. Gregory’s Elements of Catoptrics and Dioptrics, a translation of David Gregory’s work from 1713, issued with Pemberton and Taylor in August. Doubtless, Curll designed this to rival Morphew’s edition in November 1714 of The Elements of Astronomy, another book by Gregory:17 he always kept a keen eye on the activities of his competitors. In the third category we find The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity in Winton, by Samuel Gale, based on a project begun by the second Earl of Clarendon. This appeared in September. Curll would continue to augment his catalogue in all these fields, whatever befell the nation across the decades, and whatever else he was doing. Often he acted as a member of publishing collectives which issued the larger works involving a significant capital outlay. For example, in the case of Elias Ashmole’s The History of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, with a continuation by Thomas Walker (1715), Curll collaborated with several senior figures in the trade (Bell, Taylor, Pemberton, and Baker among them). The book ranks as one of the most significant works in its field that the bookseller ever helped to produce. He still owned some of the rights of the Antiquities of Westminster by his near-namesake, Jodocus Crull, and reissued the work with Pemberton and Mrs Nutt in January 1715. From Curll’s point of view, the death of Nelson was not the only fortunate event of this kind. Among the great and good who departed life in late 1714 or 1715 occur the names of such prominent individuals as the fashionable physician John Radcliffe; two leading Whig politicians Halifax and Wharton; the churchman Gilbert Burnet; and the astrologer John Partridge.18 All of these provided grist to the Curll machine, and each had his last will and testament displayed to the world. Full length biographies of Radcliffe and Halifax probably

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came from the hand of William Pittis, a product of Oxford who had taken a familiar path to Grub Street through the Inner Temple, and had earned himself a spell in the pillory for an intemperate pamphlet. He got into trouble again with the Secretary of State’s office during 1714, and this time Curll came to his aid by providing a surety (see Chapter 6). Meanwhile, the executors of Dr Radcliffe protested at the bookseller’s impudence in publishing without their consent details of the doctor’s life, including ‘false groundless Stories, and fictitious Letters’ (Straus, 233).19 The life of Wharton was supplied by the industrious Oldmixon, who also compiled the biography of his old mentor Arthur Maynwaring, published in August. In the next year these men were followed to the grave by their colleague Lord Somers, and Oldmixon predictably delivered a life of one more Whig hero. The book on Somers, which came out in July 1716, bore the imprint of Roberts, the ‘trade’ publisher, as did the Wharton biography, while that on Maynwaring carried the names of Andrew Bell, Taylor and Baker. Unquestionably, Curll had a hand in all of them.20 By now he had found his stride as publisher of instant biographies. Not every one of these relied on scandalous or licentious content, as his later reputation might suggest; but they almost all contained some illicit or purloined material, and the bookseller dressed them up to look as if they might be scandalous. He also took the opportunity to rebrand several of these books as part of a volume entitled The Lives and Characters of the most Illustrious Persons, who died in the Years, 1713, 1714, and 1715, which he published in 1716. In what we might term Curll’s general list, Oldmixon took an equally prominent role. His four-part Secret History of Europe, begun in 1712 and cautiously ‘sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster’, reached its final, unremittingly Whiggish, volume in July 1715 (Curll and Pemberton); they also issued a second edition of Volume 3 and a third edition of the first two parts. This work went on selling steadily for a number of years. Meanwhile in 1716 Roberts began to advertise Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy at Large, a title Curll would soon take over and which went into innumerable printings over the course of the next century—Curll’s own editions extend to what were called the fifteenth to twenty-first in 1745.21 This Hanoverian fable based its cumbrous narrative on the ramblings of ‘an idiot inspired at intervals to deliver oracular prophecies’ (as the original Dictionary of National Biography puts it). Oldmixon interpreted these gnomic sayings in ‘historical and political remarks’ to serve as a warning against Jacobitism, as well as supplying a life of Nixon for later editions. During the year Sewell, too, kept himself busy. He came out in June with An Essay towards a True Account of the Life and Character of the late Bishop of Salisbury, one of the series of works Curll issued relating to Gilbert Burnet’s contentious career. In reality, by a typical Curllian manoeuvre, this book amounted to no more than a reprint of a pamphlet entitled More News from Salisbury he had issued in the previous year. But Sewell had some fresh items too, such as Verses to the Duke of Marlborough, upon the Present Rebellion; and An Epistle to Joseph Addison, Esq;

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Occasion’d by the Death of the Right Honourable Charles, late Earl of Halifax. Even Miscellaneous Tracts in Defense of the Church and Constitution of Great Britain, a made-up volume, may have had some new material interspersed somewhere. Curll’s authors had to be versatile (facility in prose and verse constituted the minimum requirement), and able to adapt to changing circumstances. True, their work itself did not necessarily alter as time went on, but its packaging often did. Naturally, the flow of books on sex continued this year. If Curll had nothing fresh to lay before the public, he could always lay his hands on some material to recycle. Thus, Cases of Divorce for Several Reasons, which he brought out in July, harked back to cases such as that of the bigamous Beau Feilding in 1706; but it included a more up to date case, that of Sir George Downing and Miss Mary Forester. This couple had gone through a ritual marriage ceremony in 1700, when the bride and groom were 13 and 15. Sir George immediately left on the Grand Tour, and when he came back three years later he refused to have anything to do with his child-wife. However, parliament denied his plea for the marriage to be dissolved on the grounds of non-consummation. The attempt failed because both parties were over the legal age of consent, he over 14 and she over 12, when they married. A brief recital of the story appears in Lawrence Stone’s Road to Divorce, but it did not take a modern historian to see the human interest and social significance of these things: Curll in his day knew all about broken lives and uncertain unions. For a short time, the feud with Pope had gone quiet. Two separate pamphlets entitled Homerides appeared in March and May, both signed by ‘Sir Iliad Doggrel’, probably masking the identity of Thomas Burnet (son of the bishop) and George Duckett. Roberts’s name figures in the imprint on both occasions, but Curll may have held some share in one or other pamphlet—he reprinted one portion of the second item in A Compleat Key to the Dunciad many years later.22 The attack focuses on Pope’s eagerness to make money out of the projected translation of the Iliad, as reflected in his quest for subscribers.23 In July Curll combined with Pemberton and Bettesworth to bring out The Works of the Celebrated Monsieur Voiture, translated by John Ozell, to which he supposedly attached a ‘character’ of the author’s writings by Pope. All this had no more substance than an unauthorized reprint of the ‘Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture’ (first published in 1712). Apparently Pope made no immediate protest; as usual, he was content to bide his time. In October Curll had the effrontery to inscribe to Mr Pope a small volume called The Bath Toasts for the Year 1715 . . . To which is added, Exact Descriptions of the Bath and Tunbridge-Wells. Pope had passed some weeks that autumn in Bath, but otherwise no obvious reason existed to drag his name into an unexceptional collection of verses. In his biography of Pope, George Sherburn noticed one more insult, relating to a notice in the Weekly Packet on 12 November 1715:

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We hear that Mr. Oldsworth of Hants, the celebrated Author of a Poem call’d Muscipula, which is admirably well translated into English Blank Verse lately by a Gentleman, is preparing Amendments and Corrections for Mr. Pope’s Homer, the Errors of which are already pleasantly display’d in a Pamphlet call’d Homer in a Nutshell.24

This short passage manages to bring in endorsements for Curll products amongst others. Edward Holdsworth’s burlesque poem Muscipula, Curll’s legitimate bestseller from 1709 (see Chapter 3 above), had continued to appear in joint Latin and English versions since then. On the other hand Homer in a Nut-shell, a pamphlet dating from July 1715, and friendly towards Pope, came from W. Sparkes, a member of the book trade without any known links to Curll. All this time, Ozell had kept up his activities on the bookseller’s behalf. In July Curll, Pemberton and Taylor brought out a version of F´enelon’s vastly influential novel-cum-conduct book, T´el´emaque, in two volumes. Following the main text comes ‘The Adventures of Aristonous’, with a separate title page. At the end of the second volume Ozell took the opportunity to add a detailed ‘Specimen of the Errors Committed in the former Version of the Adventures of Telemachus.’ This followed up an advertisement in which Ozell had claimed to have detected two or three hundred mistakes in a former translation, namely the one produced by the publisher John Churchill, which had reached its ninth edition in the current year. From Ozell’s comments it appears that the well-known writer Abel Boyer had been involved in the original version, and had offered to supply a revised translation, so ashamed was he of its defects. Almost alone among the authors employed by Curll, the doughty Ozell could claim an equal degree of pugnacity. When both were on the warpath at the same moment, prudent members of the literary profession ran for cover. Perhaps the most interesting single item from this year appeared early in August, under the imprint of Curll and John Senex, better known for his maps.25 The book derives from a French work by Nicolas Gauger, entitled M´ecanique du feu (Amsterdam, 1714), and bears the title Fires Improv’d: Being a new Method of Building Chimneys, so as to prevent their Smoaking . . . made English and Improved, by J. T. Desaguliers. The name of the Huguenot John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744) survives as that of a major experimental physicist and a key promulgator of Newtonian ideas in England. In addition he was a prominent Freemason, serving as Grand Master of the first Grand Lodge in 1719. The book deals with some of the fundamentals of the physics of heat, as well as discussing practical matters such as ventilation. A second edition followed in 1736: Curll often brought out such reprints, long after books had originally appeared. As a sequel there came an account of the new invention by the recently knighted Richard Steele, advertised in the press (PB, 21 January 1716) as ‘given gratis’—but Desaguliers promptly disavowed this item.26 As part of the marketing process for this book, Curll came up with an imaginative ploy: he announced in the newspapers that one of these new chimneys might be seen

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at his own house, ‘made after the cheapest and simplest manner, according to the Directions of Mr. Desaguliers’ (PM, 14 January 1716). Late in the year Curll entered into partnership with Pemberton and Bettesworth once more to publish the third edition of Edward Young’s Poem on the Last Day, one of the author’s first masterpieces in lugubrious moralizing. The list of the books at the end combines the productions of Curll and Bettesworth: some of the works included actually carry Curll’s name alone on their title-page. This practice may point to shared rights, but in other instances possibly it amounted to no more than a policy of scratch my back. For The Christian’s Support by Johann Gerhard (1715) the bookseller primly supplied a catalogue of ‘Books Proper for Families’. He knew the full range of his custom base. THE RISING As the Jacobite rising took its course in Scotland and the North of England, Curll naturally continued to milk the topic. The fast-moving events provided a gift to those in the burgeoning news industry. Writers could dilate on the battle of Sheriffmuir, and the simultaneous halt to the Jacobites’ progress southwards. They found abundant human interest in the divisions among the Hanoverian generals Argyll and Cadogan, the charges of bad faith among the Jacobite leaders, and the belated arrival of the Pretender in Scotland, with his subsequent inglorious departure. Then came the arrest and show-trial of the rebel lords. Understandably the defeated party tore itself apart with recriminations against their inept military commander, the Earl of Mar, and blame laid on the shoulders even of such minor figures as the Earl of Seafield. The nation watched as this tumultuous phase of history played itself out over the winter of 1715–16. Alexander Pope took a particularly close interest, since he not merely belonged to the suspect Catholic community, but had a close friendship with many of those caught up in the struggle. Curll’s own take on the episode had a more commercial inspiration. He came out in January 1716 with items such as A Discourse concerning Treasons and Bills of Attainder, by Richard West, issued under the name of Roberts and recorded in the Monthly Catalogue as published by Lintot, Curll, Taylor, and Pemberton. (Lintot had paid £4 6s. for a half-share on 5 January: see LA viii. 295.) Curll was also advertising anti-Jacobite sermons by loyal clergy, and works such as The Case of the Earl of Mar, which the omnipresent ‘A. Moore’ had brought out in the previous October. A certain W.H. gave vent to The Fate of Traytors: A Poem upon the Rebellion. A lighter note appeared in productions such as The Earl of Mar Marr’d, with the Humours of Jockey, the Highlander: A Tragi-comical Farce. By Mr. Philips, which appeared in December and went into three editions. Nobody knows who ‘Mr Philips’ was: he certainly cannot have been either of the poets John Philips (who had died in 1709) or Ambrose Philips. A sequel appeared late

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in March, as The Pretender’s Flight, or, a Mock Coronation. With the Humours of the Facetious Harry Saint John. A Tragi-comical Farce. Bolingbroke had fled to France a year earlier, a monumental blunder from which he never altogether recovered. When the rebellion fizzled ingloriously to an end, attention shifted to the trial of the peers who had been captured at Preston in November, and subsequently this turned out to mean further trouble for Curll. His general business went on, and at the start of the year he issued Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Most Reverend Father in God, Dr Thomas Tennison, Late Archbishop of Canterbury, another work attributed to James Roberts as publisher which went into three editions. The archbishop had died on 14 December, and it took Curll all of a month to get together 120 pages of disparate materials, including the will. Shortly afterwards came the last will and testament of the non-juror George Hickes, another to figure on the necrology for 1715. It soon emerged that Hickes had been consecrated bishop of Thetford, apparently with the connivance of the Stuart court; this fact, and the papers published after his death, played a large part in sparking off the virulent Bangorian controversy a year later. Against Curll’s custom, no biography ensued—even to his fearless nature, perhaps, it seemed too hot a topic in the present cauldron of politics and religion. If the opening months of the year had seen a relative calm prevail, this all changed in March. As anodyne a production as the ponderous essays of Sir Richard Blackmore, not very explosive on the surface, would nestle in Pope’s mind. On 15–19 March the trial took place at Westminster Hall of the Earl of Wintoun, the only one of the Jacobite peers who had pleaded not guilty. The earl was unanimously convicted by the House of Lords of high treason, and faced the same sentence of beheading which two of his coadjutors had already undergone.27 To avoid this fate, Wintoun would saw through the bars of his cell in the Tower of London, and decamp to the Continent. Soon after the end of the trial Jacob Tonson, the doyen of the trade, announced the publication of an official record of proceedings. This duly came out around 14 April as a seventy-page folio, with all the appurtenances of respectability. Meanwhile Curll had not remained idle. He got the initial spadework done for him by Sarah Popping, a bookseller who also lived on the fringe of the law: she had been taken up in 1711 for publishing a Whig satire, perhaps written by Pittis, called A Welcome to the Medall. In the Flying Post for 10 April, she advertised an unofficial version costing twopence, entitled An Account of the Tryal of the Earl of Winton, allegedly ‘translated from the French Original’ printed at Amsterdam. Only one copy seems to have survived, found among the relevant papers in the House of Lords Record Office. The pamphlet gives an ostensibly factual narrative of the trial, but its bias is unmistakably Whiggish and Hanoverian, with barbs directed at the Jacobite lawyer Sir Constantine Phipps. At one point it draws attention to the defendant’s eccentric behaviour, whereby he ‘affected . . . to be thought

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Non Compos Mentis’. The surviving documents also include petitions by Popping and Curll himself, asking the house to forgive them for their misdeeds.28 In addition, we know something of the genesis of the work, however, as a result of an unpublished letter which Oldmixon wrote to the authorities. Once the House had lodged a complaint against Mrs Popping for a breach of privilege, events moved swiftly. She was taken up on 13 April and brought before the Lords on the following day. The register of those present shows almost all the major temporal peers in attendance, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury (William Wake, recently elected but not yet consecrated) and many senior bishops. This fact speaks to the heightened political temper at this moment. Claiming that she was ‘very much indisposed’, Popping alleged through a witness, Elizabeth Cape, that responsibility for the publication did not really lie with her. Rather, it lay with Curll and John Pemberton, who had sent the pamphlet to be published. As she was ill, her sister undertook the business—evidently the same Elizabeth Cape, now giving testimony. However, evidence was produced in court by way of a note to her (surviving in the documents) signed by Curll and dated 6 April, requesting her to pay the sum of £3 2s. 6d . to ‘Mr. Watley’ for the Account, and to place this to the account of ‘Mr. Oldmixon’. The former can be identified as Stephen Whatley, an active Whig journalist who worked on the Flying Post and wrote a number of pamphlets, including probably some for Curll. Around this time Whatley found himself the subject of another inquiry by the Lords, along with George Ridpath, for something he had written in the Flying Post. After hearing Popping’s testimony, the Lords ordered that Pemberton and Curll should be taken into custody of Black Rod. Three days later, Popping offered a petition to the Lords, which told exactly the same story. Once more she asserted that her sister had published the item without her knowledge, and that she had told all she knew about the ‘Booksellers concerned in it’. She begged to be released without having to pay any fees: ‘Her condition and the profitts She has by publication not being able to bear it.’ On 26 April she was brought in for examination on oath before the House, along with the two colleagues she had named. Again a full muster of peers attended. It was resolved that ‘Ye sd. Curle was only [i.e. solely] concerned in printing ye same and yt ye sd Popping was only ye publisher’. As a result she and Pemberton gained their release, but Curll remained in the custody of Black Rod. By now the enquiry had implicated the printer, Daniel Bridge of Paternoster Row, and he was ordered to attend on the following day: it looks as if he was now remanded in custody. The two prisoners underwent fuller examination on 2 May, before being sent back into the charge of Black Rod. A day later they submitted a petition, in a document which shows Curll at his most unctuous and servile. It reads: To the Right Honble . The Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament Assembled. Humbly Sheweth,

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That your Petitioners are in the Custody of the Black Rod, by Order from your Lordships, For Printing and Publishing a Paper intitul’d, An Account of the Tryal of the Earl of Winton, which your Petitioners are now sensible, is contrary to a Standing Order of this most Honourable House. That your Petitioners not knowing there was any such Order, did inadvertently cause the same to be printed and have thereby justly incurr’d your Lordships displeasure. Your Petitioners for their Offence are heartily Sorry, and for the future do Promise to be more Circumspect, and resolve never again to offend your Lordships: and in regard your Petitioners have Families, which must inevitably be Ruin’d, unless your Lordships have Compassion on them, They humbly Beg that your Lordsips will be pleas’d to Order them to be discharg’d from their Confinement. And your Petitioners as in Duty bound shall Ever Pray. Edmund Curll. Daniel Bridge.

The idea that Curll might become circumspect excites a degree of scepticism. As it turned out, he would be in trouble with the House on at least two further occasions. On 8 May the two men finally had their petition for discharge read. Both were obliged to receive a reprimand from the Lord Chancellor on their knees at the bar of the House, and eventually they were set at liberty, having paid their fees, on 11 May. The official narrative of proceedings survives in the printed Journals of the Lords, as well as in the collected volumes of State Trials; these sources have formed the basis of all previous narratives of the episode.29 The manuscript records add some telling details, including a further set of accounts, presumably those of Popping, with a payment to Whatley (14s. 6d .) and other outgoings. Last on the list comes payment for Home Defended, an intriguing item we have not been able to identify. More information emerges from Oldmixon’s letter, and also from a description he later wrote of events. He composed the letter on 17 April and seems to have addressed it to Lord Cowper, who presided as Lord High Steward at the trial of the rebel lords.30 Humbly Oldmixon apologizes for having occasioned the displeasure of the House of Lords, but claims to have been ‘entirely Ignorant of the Nature of the Offence’. He goes on to explain what happened: A Gentleman, who has for several Years employd Himself in writing on the present happy Establishment, brought me a Translation of the Amsterdam Slips31 of the 3d of Aprill & 7th of Aprill N.S. which I took to be a particular Account of the Process agst Lord Winton, & told him in the Language of an Author, I believd it would do: Accordingly I communicated my Opinion to my Booksellers Mr Curl & Mr Pemberton who purchases the Translation of those Slips of that gentleman & that Translation being printed gave Occasion to the great Trouble, & very great Expence those Booksellers have been put to.

Next, Oldmixon states that, ever since he had been recruited as a political writer by Arthur Maynwaring, ‘Mr Pemberton has been my Bookseller & both he and Mr Curl have printed above a Hundred Greater & Smaller Tracts for Me in the worst of Times & Since in Defence of the Revolution & Protestant Succession. In these I have always been concern’d both as to the Profit & Loss’. He claims that even Jacob Tonson, with whom he has dealt ‘as much as any man’, will

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vouch for his loyalty and reliability. His final point is that the translation was not made out of the official English report, but out of the French version, and so he believed that he was not breaking the rules. Nearly twenty years later, Oldmixon gave almost the same analysis of what had happened in his History of England. He wrote cautiously, he stated, as he had been put to great ‘Vexation and Expence, for only putting it into the Head of a Bookseller to get the Account of [the trial], as it was printed in the Leyden Gazette, literally translated into English by another Hand’. The narrative proceeds: ‘I know very well that the Complaint came from a certain Bookseller, purely out of Apprehension that this Extract would prejudice his Market for the printed Trial.’32 It is impossible to corroborate every detail here. As for the bookseller accused by Oldmixon, this must refer to Jacob Tonson. The translator we now know to have been Stephen Whatley; the bookseller whom Oldmixon approached first was more likely to have been Pemberton than Curll. As for the hundred tracts, this may or may not exaggerate the truth. Between 1710 and 1716 Oldmixon can be identified as the author of at least thirty items, few of them bearing the name of Curll, and mostly published under the imprint of Abigail Baldwin and then her son-in-law James Roberts. (Her daughter Mary had married Roberts in 1705, but Mary died in October 1712, a year before her mother: after this, Roberts carried on the business alone.) However, nothing wildly implausible appears in the claim here, and other evidence supports the contention that Oldmixon published works through men like Curll and Pemberton at his own risk. In other words, Curll may have conducted some of his business as an agent of professional authors—not so much as a vanity press, rather as a kind of dealer on commission. Beyond that, the possibility opens up that Curll held the responsibility for more of the day to day Whig political pamphleteering at this juncture than we have yet grasped. Some might consider it a mystery that the authorities went so easy on Oldmixon and Whatley, whose names they had winkled out at an early stage of their enquiry. In reality, the pamphlet toed an unimpeachably orthodox ministerial line. Oldmixon’s plea to the Lord Chancellor may have saved his skin; and like him Whatley had a long history of service in the Whig cause. From the political standpoint Curll had a more patchy record, which worked to his disadvantage here. Inconvenient as the Wintoun affair must have seemed to Curll, he had other things on his mind. 20 March saw the appearance of A Second Collection of Poems on Several Occasions. By Matthew Prior, Esq., which the title-page announced was printed for Roberts. Nevertheless, the book made regular appearances in Curll’s book lists over the next year or two, and he had already published the key items in earlier miscellanies. It marked the second of several occasions on which Curll’s doings upset Prior. The volume made up the familiar Curllian assemblage, running to 72 pages and containing seven main items, headed by Earl Robert’s Mice, which Roberts’s mother-in-law Mrs Baldwin had issued in 1712. Most, if

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not all, were by Prior, but they had not all been acknowledged. Wearily Prior entered in the London Gazette for 24 March what by now must have been a token protest at this unauthorized publication. The terms of his objection were carefully drawn: ‘some of these Poems are not genuine, others imperfect and incorrect, and the Whole not published with my Knowledge or Approbation’ (DC, 21 March). In response, Roberts inserted a press notice, almost certainly from the hand of Curll himself: Whereas a nameless Person has taken the Liberty to make use of Mr. Prior’s name, and pretended that he had his Order for so doing: This is therefore to assure the Publick, that a Book entitul’d A Second Collection of Poems . . . are Genuine, and publish’d from his own correct Copies: The two last Poems in this Collection being Satyres, Mr. Prior has never yet publicly own’d them.33

As usual, Curll tries to shift attention towards the issue of the authenticity of the items, hoping to deflect any concern over the legitimacy of his rights to print these items without the author’s consent. At this moment, another competitive exercise got under way. It concerned the rival versions of Caton d’Utique, a tragedy by Franc¸ois-Michel-Chr´etien Deschamps (1683–1747), designed to capitalize on the success of Addison’s play. Curll had announced his translation, supplied by the industrious John Ozell, in April, but he deferred publication for a month, owing allegedly to rehearsals for performances of the play at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. When it appeared on 23 May, the play had the further garnishment of ‘A parallel betwixt this piece and the Tragedy of Cato written by Mr. Addison’. The bookseller added in his press notice that tickets for the third (benefit) night were available at his shop—the only time he seems to have interacted so closely with the theatrical management (DC, 30 April 1716). Ozell (or more likely Curll himself) also issued a warning against the competing version by John Morphew. He declared that the rival translator ‘through his Ignorance, has not only mistaken the Sense of the Author in almost every Line; but even the Names of the Persons Represented: The whole Performance being full of Nonsense, and despicable to the last Degree.’ Morphew promptly objected to ‘the unmannerly Quack-Advertisement of the aforesaid Curll, and his assuming Author J. Ozell’, and claimed that his own superior model, published on 12 May, was the work of ‘a Club of Gentleman of the two Universities’.34 In addition, Morphew managed to slip in a reference to a work entitled ‘Curll’s last Will and Testament’. To identify his source for this comment, we must return to the ongoing quarrel with Pope.

A H O R R I D A N D B A R B A RO U S R EV E N G E The rumpus began with a volume entitled Court Poems, ‘printed for’ Roberts on 26 March 1716.35 It would be naïve to call this a bad move on Curll’s part,

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even though it landed him in considerable trouble and provoked savage blows in retaliation by Pope and his friends. In fact, the bookseller’s wider notoriety dates from this passage of arms, which occupied a short space of time in 1716—the ripples, however, would continue to spread for years to come. Not all publicity is good publicity, even for someone who operated as openly and brazenly as Curll. But he may well have calculated that the long-term benefit outweighed the disadvantages: these affected his reputation and his skin, but probably did no harm to his balance-sheet. The volume consisted of three of the newly fashionable ‘town eclogues’, pioneered by Swift and Gay. Scholars now generally hold that two of these items were composed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the third by John Gay.36 In fact Lady Mary had written an eclogue for each weekday (including Saturday), with the exception of Friday, which was covered by Gay’s poem ‘The Toilet’. Soon afterwards Lady Mary left with her husband on his Turkish embassy. In November 1716, her then admirer Pope wrote to her of her ‘Pastoralls’, which were then or soon afterwards enclosed ‘in a Monument of Red Turkey, written in my fairest hand’ (Corr, i. 370, 441). Pope copied out all five of Lady Mary’s eclogues, and on her return to England in 1718 he presented her with his handiwork. The manuscript volume survived in the family for several generations before reaching the New York Public Library, and has been reproduced by Robert Halsband. For his part, Curll continued augmenting the volume as time went on: a collection issued by Rebecca Burleigh in January 1717 (with which Curll was probably connected) added a number of authentic Popian items. Court Poems: Part II (Roberts, 1717) simply inserted the three original eclogues into a familiar ragbag of works by Pope which had previously been published. Another version in 1726, acknowledged by Curll on the title-page, omits some of the additional items, but includes further poems by Pope. What this lengthy process disguised was that Pope himself had written none of the six eclogues, a fact which Curll may or may not have come to know. When the three eclogues first appeared, Curll gave some account of their provenance in the Preface, and he augmented the narrative in The Curliad (1729), as well as in a preface to Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1735), volume 2. His explanation is that the manuscripts were passed on by one Joseph Jacobs of Hoxton, ‘the Founder of a remarkable Sect called The Whiskers’. This was Joseph Jacob (c. 1667–1722), a congregational minister. How Jacob obtained them does not emerge: however, the title-page brashly asserts that the poems were ‘publish’d faithfully, as they were taken up in Westminster-Hall, the Last Day of the Lord Winton’s Tryal’ (that is, 19 March). The story gains some plausibility from the fact that Oldmixon was the recipient, and there is independent evidence that the obscure Jacob was actually known to Curll’s journeyman.37 The Curliad (p. 20) tells us that Oldmixon brought the material to Curll, and it was agreed that they should be published, with the profits divided between Curll, Oldmixon and Pemberton. According to this account,

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Pope somehow got wind of the intended publication, and made some kind of threat. The question of authorship provoked a full investigation, as the Preface tells us, and patrons of St James’s coffee-house came to the general view that the eclogues were ‘the Productions of a L of Quality’. On the other hand, a ‘poetical Jury’ at Button’s Whig meeting-place brought in a different verdict, giving the view that ‘Mr. G was the Man’. A third opinion was sought to resolve the impasse, in the shape of a distinguished gentleman ‘who lives not far from Chelsea’. This unnamed arbiter, possibly Addison, gave a decisive opinion: ‘Depend upon it, these Lines could come from no other Hand, than the Judicious Translator of H’. At this stage Curll probably neither knew nor cared which answer was correct. He would doubtless have settled for any of the above, since the renown of each author was great enough to make the book a marketable proposition. The passage ends with an unmistakable Curllian flourish: the writer claims that he deserves thanks for his pains in ‘endeavouring to find out the Author of these Valuable Performances’. He assuredly knew how to get under people’s skin. At this point Pope intervened. Some scholars, like George Sherburn, have thought that Pope, already a victim of ‘his unlucky fondness’ for Lady Mary, sprang chivalrously to her defence. Against this, Robert Halsband argued that he wished chiefly to protect Gay, who was seeking a position at court and could not risk the offence which would accrue if he were linked to satires within the text on the Princess of Wales and Lady Shrewsbury. It does not take extreme cynicism to observe that Pope would have been personally offended by the sneering reference to the Homeric translation, and had already suffered enough pinpricks from Curll in the preceding years. At all events, his reaction was to administer the famous emetic to Curll, supposedly on 28 March, two days after the appearance of the Court Poems. The alleged scene of this event was the Swan Tavern in Fleet Street, which stood close to Bride Lane as the road made its descent to Fleet Bridge.38 Extraordinary as this episode seems, there can be little doubt that something of the sort actually took place. We have not only Pope’s confessedly satiric narrative, but also Curll’s rehearsal of much the same events in The Curliad, thirteen years later. Pope brought out his famous pamphlet very shortly afterwards, under the title A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller; with a faithful Copy of his Last Will and Testament. Five publishers are listed: Roberts, Morphew, Mrs Burleigh, Baker, and Mrs Popping: all had collaborated with Curll at one time or another. This is the first occasion, indeed, when Pope turned the methods of Grub Street back on their habitual perpetrators. This title-page constitutes in itself a blow against Pope’s target, since it mimics so many of the formulas to which Curll had recourse—the explicitness, the claim to ‘faithful’ memoirs, and the reproduction

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of a will. Rather as with Swift’s hoax pamphlets against the astrologer Partridge, the joke is to give living individuals the sort of treatment they usually hand out to the dead. This account is useful in supplementing our knowledge of the current dispute between the men, but its chief merit lies in the surreal fantasy which ensues, casting a lurid but compelling light on Curll’s day to day operations. On the first point, we find Pope claiming to have reprimanded Curll for ‘wrongfully ascribing to him’ the Court Poems. The bookseller excuses himself by asserting that ‘one of his Authors (Mr. Oldmixon by Name) gave the Copies to the Press, and wrote the Preface’. Pope feigns a ready acceptance of this explanation. What Curll is supposed to say here may reflect the strict truth about these transactions, but by couching it in this way Pope has drawn attention to the shifty and backbiting ways of the literary underworld.39 After the adulteration of Curll’s drink, with its immediate physical consequences, the pamphlet then moves off into another vein. Pope shows an astonishingly close acquaintance with Curll’s recent output, so much so that a modern biographer can only regret not having the same powers of total recall. In a few pages there are more references to particular items from Curll’s back-list than can be fully explored, or even economically stated here. The books mentioned begin with Abraham van Wicquefort’s The Embassador and his Functions (which would be published around 17 April): Curll is said to have been consulted by Lintot, the main publisher of this item, to settle details about the title-page. The index to this volume was compiled by none other than Oldmixon (LA viii. 298). Next comes a book about the supposed witch Jane Wenham: this relates to the pamphlet by Francis Bragge which Curll had produced in 1712 (see Chapter 3 above). Lintot and Pemberton are summoned to hear Curll’s last testamentary directions, and in a brief section he is made to specify his literary crimes. He admits to having vilified the Duke of Marlborough;40 to have aspersed the Duke of Ormonde (this may refer to An Impartial Enquiry into the Duke of Ormonde’s Conduct, a Whig pamphlet published by Roberts in June 1715, and attributable to Oldmixon); to have abused Robert Walpole, but also to have libelled Bolingbroke (this last might point to items such as My Lord V B ’s Reasons for leaving Great Britain, published by J. More in April 1715, but other items are possible.) In the course of his apology, Curll asks for further offences to be taken into consideration. A recent publication we have already noted comes up: ‘The second Collection of Poems, which I groundlessly called Mr. Prior’s, will sell for Nothing, and hath not yet paid the Charge of the Advertisements’. The text alludes also to ‘the French Cato’ and its associated critique, suggesting not quite fairly that the aim had been to show the inferiority of Addison’s play. Curll protests that he has no animosity against Nicholas Rowe, ‘having printed Part of his Callipædia’—as we have seen in Chapter 3, Curll first produced this translation of Claude Quillet’s Latin poem with Sanger in 1712, and went on issuing the work into the next decade with various co-publishers. Along with

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this, Curll confesses that he produced ‘an incorrect Edition of [Rowe’s] Poems without his Leave, in Quarto’—this means Poems on Several Occasions (1714). The text proceeds, ‘Mr. Gildon’s Rehearsal: or Bays the Younger, did more harm to me than to Mr. Rowe; though . . . I paid him double for abusing both him and Mr. Pope’. As we noted, Gildon’s pamphlet had been augmented with some critical comments on The Rape of the Lock. Some less salubrious corners of Curll’s output now come under scrutiny. ‘Heaven pardon me’, he declares, ‘for publishing the Trials of Sodomy in an Elzevir Letter’: these went back to cases such as the Earl of Castlehaven and Bishop Atherton, sometimes reissued in a single volume. However, he expresses a pious hope that ‘my printing Sir Richard Bl[ackmo]re’s Essays will attone for them’. These have not sold and the legatees are invited to take what remains, that is almost the whole impression, and in exchange to let Curll’s widow have ‘the sole Propriety of the Copy of Madam Mascranny’. Here we arrive at one of the best sellers, usually known as The Case of Impotency, which concerned a divorce trial in Paris involving Mademoiselle de Mascranny. It first appeared in June 1714, and bore only Curll’s name, as did the second edition a year later. (A separate series in two volumes dealt with English trials involving impotence.) When Pemberton intervenes, Curll advises his colleague to beware of indictment at Hick’s Hall, the sessions house for Middlesex, for publishing ‘Rochester’s bawdy Poems’. In fact no indictment of Curll in this court has yet come to light. He had been sending out the works of Rochester since 1707, usually in combination with the less risqu´e offerings of the Earl of Roscommon and others. The section ends with an admission, ‘The Case of Impotence was my best Support all the last long Vacation’. That much might be true. As he grows weaker, Curll becomes more apologetic. He printed the wills of peers and bishops, he states, after buying copies at Doctor’s Commons (the probate court) for one shilling each. Next he adverts to his favoured genre, biography: ‘For Mr. Manwaring’s Life, I ask Mrs. Old[fiel]d ’s Pardon: Neither His, nor my Lord Halifax’s Lives, though they were of great Services to their Country, were of any to me: But I was resolved, since I could not print their Works while they liv’d to print their Lives after they were dead.’41 We might notice here how the first sentence rests on a pun on life (equals existence) and life (equals biography). The writer of the first of these biographies, Oldmixon, enters the scene at this point. Curll upbraids his author for ‘that unlucky Preface’, which has doomed him to a painful death, but promises that the third share of Court Poems will still be paid to Oldmixon, ‘as stipulated’.42 Once more, Pope had somehow acquired inside information, perhaps from Lintot. His last act in a publishing capacity is to commend to Pemberton several ‘taking’ title-pages, ‘that only wanted Treatises to be wrote to them’. Some years later, Curll gave his own account of what happened. It has enough points of correspondence to suggest that the central part of the story is broadly true:

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My Brother Lintot drank his half Pint of Old Hock, Mr. Pope his half Pint of Sack, and I the same quantity of an Emetic Potion . . . but no threatenings past. Mr. Pope, indeed said, that Satires should not be Printed (tho’ he has now changed his mind) I answered, they should not be wrote, for, if they were, they would be Printed. He replied, Mr. Gay’s Interest at Court, would be greatly hurt by publishing these Pieces. That was all that passed in our Triumvirate. We then parted, Pope and my Brother Lintot went together, to his Shop, and I went Home and Vomited heartily. I then despised the Action, and have since, in another manner, sufficiently Purged the Author of it.43

So, in after years, Curll came to look on his bouts with the poet. The Account provides a classic example of Augustan satire, which has entertained readers for almost three centuries. It operates in a mode both comic and fantastical, and we would not naturally look for any strict adherence to literal facts. The strange thing is that Pope sticks quite closely to historically documentable aspects of Curll’s career. Its devastating insight into the daily workings of the book trade supplies the basis of its comedic energy. Most readers will not have appreciated the extent of Pope’s knowledge, as we lack a properly annotated edition. One more item of evidence shows just how far ahead of the game the satirist was, although only later would a mysterious reference in the pamphlet to an unpublished work called The Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham become fully intelligible.

T H E C AT H O L I C P O E T The response to the Account came swiftly. Days later, on 3 April, a notice appeared in the Whig paper, the Flying Post. Formally it consisted of a denial by Oldmixon (a regular contributor to the journal) of any part in the latest contretemps: Whereas Mr. Lintot, or Mr. Pope, has publish’d a false and ridiculous Libel, reflecting on several Gentlemen, particularly on myself: and it is said therein, that I was the Publisher of certain Verses call’d Court Poems, and that I wrote the Preface; I hereby declare, that I never saw a great part of those Verses, not ever saw or heard of the Title or Preface to them till after the Poems were publish’d. Witness, E. Curll J. Oldmixon.

These exculpatory remarks do not tally with what Curll later said about the affair, when he clearly indicated that Oldmixon served as the ‘Publisher’, that is editor, of the volume. In 1735 he stated that the pieces were given by the dissenter Joseph Jacob to Oldmixon, who passed them on to Roberts for publication; and once more declared that he, Pemberton and Oldmixon took shares in the venture. This makes it clear that Roberts, as usual, acted simply as a paid agent or distributor. In any case, Curll was obviously behind the newspaper advertisement,

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and his purpose was mainly to spread word of Court Poems more widely. George Sherburn thought that the notice was inserted ‘probably merely to advertise the poems’, and this is the most plausible reason.44 Today we may have some difficulty in appreciating the novelty of Curll’s methods. We already know how quickly he responded to the commercial possibilities of newsprint. Barely a decade earlier, the periodical press had fully established itself with the foundation of the first regular daily newspaper in London, and soon afterwards the first surviving evening, weekly, and provincial papers appeared. All this was taking place at the time that Curll served his apprenticeship. Within a few short years, Curll had grasped the value of a continuous stream of publicity: he aimed to ensure that stories related to his list would run and run in the now freely available columns of the press. The new media permitted a speed of response which had never existed before. In many ways, the experiential change which this produced in the consumption and processing of information can bear comparison with the shift in modes of acquiring knowledge which have resulted from the development of electronic means of communication. In previous centuries, publishers had been limited in the ways they could reach the public. They could advertise their wares in their own books, but this implied that a captive readership already existed. Beyond that, they could display title-pages on their shop-front, which was effective so long as potential buyers actually found their way to the one or two retail outlets which an average bookseller might own. Curll used both these methods, of course, but he now had a much more potent sales weapon at his disposal. And with an enemy such as Pope, also geared to the use of publicity, he could do more than simply advertise. By planting stories in the press, he was able to reach an audience who might previously have taken no notice of the latest publications. ‘Latest’ is a key word here: everything speeded up, as Curll rushed out ‘edition’ after edition, to stimulate a sense of urgency. His activity made authorship into news, and literature a locus of scandal, a temple of infamy, a whispering gallery of rumour. Where modern gossip magazines ‘celebrate’ individuals, by creating people famous for being famous, Curll’s practice turned writers into people who were written about. On one level The Dunciad serves as a highly sophisticated textualization of Curll’s working routine. It took only four days for Curll to get in his next blow. A burlesque advertisement (FP, 7 April) announced the appearance of ‘the Second Part of Mr. Pope’s Popish Translation of Homer’, that is the second instalment of the Iliad. Curll, needless to say, had no edition of his own to offer, but he was at full liberty to sell Lintot’s trade edition, which had actually gone before the public in late March. Predictably, the publisher seized his chance to make insinuations about Pope’s work, and to put in a further plug for Court Poems. He had another offering ready, however: ‘Next Week will be publish’d An excellent New Ballad call’d The Catholick Poet, or Protestant Barnaby’s Lamentation’. Three days on, and another advertisement in the Flying Post for a work entitled Homer Defended,

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being a ‘detection’ of Pope’s many failures as a translator. ‘Any Gentlemen who have made Observations upon Mr. Pope’s Homer and will be pleas’d to send them to Mr. Curl . . . shall have them faithfully inserted into this Work’—another attempt to recruit readers to take part in a sort of interactive mode of composition. Curll also undertook to provide a specimen of a translation of the Odyssey which Pope had allegedly begun in order to spike the guns of Thomas Tickell. This was pure mythmaking, and the pamphlet ‘defending’ Homer never emerged. Pope now had a brief moment to draw breath, while Curll found himself otherwise occupied in the House of Lords over the Wintoun affair. On 20 April the poet wrote to his friend John Caryll, ‘Item, a most ridiculous quarrel with a bookseller, occasioned by his having printed some satirical pieces on the Court under my name. I contrived to save the fellow a beating by giving him a vomit, the history whereof has been transmitted to posterity by a late Grub-street author’ (Corr, i. 339). Modern scholars who dilate on Pope’s immersion in Grub Street, and complicity with its methods, should remember that Pope always knew perfectly well what he was doing. But the bookseller’s production line did not close down for long. On 1 May, while he remained in the custody of Black Rod, the Post Boy advertised the appearance of ‘The Worms, a Satyr; written by Mr. Pope. Printed for E. Curl’, with a repeat notice in the Flying Post two days later. This was a poem in ballad form, originally entitled To the Ingenious Mr. Moore, Author of the Celebrated Worm-Powder. Pope never acknowledged this in his collected works, but it did enter the Pope–Swift Miscellanies in 1728. Moreover, this turned out to be ‘the most popular poem (at least in his own day) that Pope is supposed to have written’.45 A witty excursion on worms and worminess, it went into numerous editions and formed a staple item in miscellanies for many years to come. It soon made its way into versions of the Court Poems, including one put out by Curll under the name of Rebecca Burleigh and one entitled Court Poems, Part II, issued by Roberts, both in 1717. The year after it featured in The Ladies Miscellany and Love’s Invention, a pamphlet otherwise devoted to a ballad on the fashionable masquerades. A decade later it reappeared in The Altar of Love and A Miscellany on Taste. It gets another run in Miscellanea and in Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence. Very likely, Curll made more out of this single item than he did from many of his obviously scandalous works, even though it retailed for just twopence when sold by itself. The bookseller took the opportunity in the first printing of The Worms to declare his intentions: ‘N.B. Speedily will be Publish’d, some more of Mr. Pope’s Pieces, and all his Writings for the Future, except Homer, will be Printed for E. Curll.’ One could safely assume that it was an empty threat. An advertisement for the second edition of The Worms appeared in the Post Man on 5 May, with a brief thrust at ‘Peter Pencil’, who may be Pope. Once Curll had been released from custody, he quickly got up his usual head of steam. On 19 May came State Poems, a volume issued by Roberts which

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reprinted The Worms but otherwise carried nothing from Pope’s hand. Curll repackaged this short collection in years to come. One of the other items is an epilogue designed for Addison’s comedy The Drummer, first performed on 10 March, which linked Pope to the Jacobites and their fears following the untimely appearance of aurora borealis at the outset of the trial of the rebel lords. Around 26 May, Curll got a little of his own medicine, when the unknown and possibly unreal E. Smith published a short ballad entitled Moore’ Worms [sic] for the learned Mr. Curll, Bookseller; who, to be Reveng’d on Mr. Pope for his Poisonous Emetick, gave him a Paper of Worm-Powder. Engagingly, the poem likens Curll to the worm-powder quack, Moore, and ridicules his depredations on ‘Grub-street Rubbish’. Noting that the bookseller was ‘famous for printing the Lives and Last Wills of Great men’, the poem apostrophizes his victim: Ah C! How greedy hast thou fed (E’er Worms gave Food to thee) Upon the late Illustrious Dead, With Worms of thy Degree.

Some ‘Poison’ is said still to lurk in Curll’s veins, after his disastrous adventures involving Court Poems. The poem skilfully deploys the form of a popular ballad, very much in the style of Pope’s own exercises in this kind. By 29 May Curll was able to resume hostilities with a pamphlet, the second entitled Homerides, and as with its predecessor in 1715 thought to be the work of Thomas Burnet and George Duckett. Once more the putative author styles himself ‘Sir Iliad Doggrel’. Most of the text consists of a burlesque in Hudibrastic verse of the opening book of the Iliad. In his preface the author launches a few not very damaging comments at Pope.46 Two much more substantial attacks came out on 31 May. The first was a savage and sustained onslaught, generally agreed to be the work of John Dennis, who had already produced a bitter critique of An Essay on Criticism, published by Lintot in 1711, and who would live to assail Pope on several more occasions.47 Nominally Sarah Popping acted as publisher of the work, but it was ‘clearly part of Curll’s programme of revenge for the emetic and A Full and True Account’.48 The title runs, A True Character of Mr. Pope, and his Writings, and the text consists of an extended diatribe against the poet and almost everything he had so far written. Dennis assails Pope’s character on very possible ground: he is a libeller, a turncoat, a traitor, a ‘virulent Papist’, a coward, a back-stabber, and a villain in many more ways. His deformity reflects ‘the Curse of God upon him’, expressive of his foul nature. As for his books, they amount to ‘Scandalous Libels’, along with a translation of Homer for which he lacked any qualification and which revealed in its Preface the author to be a ‘Dogmatical, Ignorant, Impudent Second-Hand Critick’. All in all the poet displays neither genius nor good sense ‘or any tolerable Knowledge of English’. Like many of Pope’s calumniators, Dennis cannot resist using a simian comparison: ‘Whenever he

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scribbles, he is emphatically a Monkey.’ So the pamphlet goes along, marked by what Sherburn nicely described as ‘insane glitter’.49 As usual with Curll’s material, the commentary cites up to date information: so, Dennis slips in an oblique reference to The Worms. For the most part the critic is paying off his own old scores, but of course the material all feeds into Curll’s campaign against Pope. By now the bookseller had taken to secreting within his advertisements mention of ‘the Pope-ish Controversy’, and promising the town further diversions, so long as it went on (FP, 31 May). This notice illustrates another essential part of Curll’s marketing strategy: the two attacks on Pope are publicized along with Pope’s own poem The Worms. In a sense, Curll had recruited his enemy to the anti-Pope forces. This same day saw the appearance of an item called The Catholick Poet, which had been announced in April. The full title runs, The Catholick Poet: or, Protestant Barnaby’s Sorrowful Lamentation, with further details ending, The humble Petition of Barnaby Bernard Lintott, Living at the Sign of the Cross-Keys between the Two Temple Gates in Fleet-street. Plainly we can expect some internecine squabbles among the book trade. According to the title-page, this pamphlet was printed for exactly the same set of book trade members who had been named in the case of Pope’s own Full Account, that is Morphew, Roberts, Burleigh, Baker, and Popping. But no one has ever doubted that the true instigator was Curll. How else would he have been likely to know the identity of the author of this piece? In The Dunciad Variorum Pope would gloss Susanna Centlivre’s name (ii. 379) with the comment, ‘She also writ a ballad against Mr. Pope’s Homer before he begun it’. In the Curliad, the bookseller offers a somewhat muffled retort: ‘The Fact is true, but the Person on whom it is charged, is falsely accused. The Ballad, here referred to, being wrote by Mr. Oldmixon.’ Later in the same work, Curll enters under ‘Falsehoods, in the true Names of Authors’ the categoric assurance: ‘The Catholick Poet, &c. a Ballad, the whole by Mr. Oldmixon, not one Word by Mrs. Centlivre’ (The Curliad, pp. 27, 31). It is a good joke that Curll of all people should complain about false naming. In any case, Pope accepted the information, and he subsequently incorporated these facts into his Dunciad note on Oldmixon. No one seems to have noticed the oddity implicit in Curll’s ascription, as endorsed by Pope. The Catholick Poet assuredly did not come out before Pope began his translation, or even ‘before it appear’d to the Public’. Two volumes of the Homer version had already come before the world before we hear anything of the ballad, and indeed the Catholick Poet clearly presumes that a comparison with Tickell’s rendition of the Iliad has been made. Little reason exists to suppose that either portion of this two-part work was written before 1716. The ballad occupies the first two sides of the pamphlet, with the remaining four taken up by Lintot’s ‘Petition’ in prose, an exercise in low generic parody to set against Pope’s own. Many of the charges laid against Pope reiterate those made by Dennis, but they come across in a lighter fashion. A brief mock-epic

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proposition names the subject as ‘SAWNY, the Poet of Windsor’, and then the familiar accusations are trotted out, with more emphasis this time on smut and scurrility. The author bestows rueful commiseration on Lintot for his ill-judged bargain with the poet, now that he has so many unsold copies of the translation left on his hands. We hear too about an effigy of the poet, which Lintot had cut at his own expense, based on Jervas’s portrait, and this too remains a drag on the market. As for the ‘Petition’, this provides a burlesque account of Lintot’s beginnings in the trade, and later moves on the shifts to which Pope had recourse in promoting his Homer subscription. Naturally the pamphlet contains abundant reliable information, since Oldmixon had been employed by Lintot for a number of years, and had first contributed to one of the publisher’s miscellanies as far back as 1702. Some of the references here make little sense unless we have an inkling of the author’s dealings with Lintot: thus, a spoof advertisement draws attention to the eccentricities of a translation by John Digby of Wicquefort’s Embassador —as noted earlier, Oldmixon had compiled the index to this book when it appeared a few weeks before. Perhaps he thought that he deserved more than the fee of seven pounds he received from the bookseller. All in all, this is one of the most successful of all the pamphlet attacks on Pope, since it maintains an air of good humour and finds enough dirt on both the poet and the bookseller to make a plausible-looking case. No doubt Curll felt some pride at his handiwork on this occasion.50 Later he might have cause to regret his temerity.

5 The Devil’s Scout (1716–1718) Amidst all these commotions, Curll prudently kept the other branches of his business in full working order. True, an unusual quantity of reprints came out, ranging from an old work called A Compleat System of Husbandry and Gardening, by John Worlidge, to some new editions of old favourites by writers such as John Pomfret, as well as the ‘French Cato’. One new accession to the list took the form of The Art of Midwifery Improv’d, a translation of a substantial manual by Hendrick van Deventer, co-published with Pemberton and Taylor at the start of June 1716: we shall meet the translator, Robert Samber, again in later years. That summer, too, Curll joined a bookseller named John Hooke, with whom he later had slightly strained relations: they came together to bring out Irish Tales: or Instructive Histories for the Happy Conduct of Life, by Sarah Butler (identity unknown), with a dedicatory epistle signed by the ever-present Charles Gildon. The second volume of Richard Boulton’s Compleat History of Magick, and Witchcraft made its appearance in May, a year after its predecessor, with Curll harnessed to his familiar colleagues Pemberton and Taylor. Some have regarded this work as the last serious attempt made by any English writer to defend belief in witchcraft. All along, the bookseller continued to pursue his interest in antiquarian literature. On 22 May he wrote to the noted scholar Ralph Thoresby, intimating that a promised life of Archbishop Tillotson was still not ready, but it would be ‘faithfully sent’ along with the biography of Dr Radcliffe. More significantly, Curll revealed his plans to bring out a new edition of Sampson Erdeswicke’s Survey of Staffordshire, previously circulating in manuscript. Richard Rawlinson had undertaken to edit the text, and Curll sought the loan of Thoresby’s own manuscript. (The edition came out in the following March.) Such a favour, writes the wily tradesman, would oblige not only Thoresby and Curll, but also ‘our club of antiquaries’. Promptly Thoresby gave his agreement, and when Curll acknowledged his generosity on 1 June, he undertook to collate the sheet which had already been printed with the manuscript.1 All this while the bookseller found much of his energy consumed in yet further efforts to capitalize on the success of Manley’s famous Atalantis, and in December 1716 he brought out under Roberts’s imprint Court Tales: or, A History of the Amours of the Present Nobility. To which is added, a Compleat Key. (The

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work turns up in Curll’s book lists from now on.) This contribution to the genre of histoire scandaleuse had first appeared as The Court of Atalantis in August 1714. It contains no new material beyond a key from the pen of Oldmixon, who also wrote the dedication to Richard Temple (later Lord Cobham, the friend of Pope). Obviously the idea was to deceive readers into imagining the book might have some connection with the notorious Court Poems: it had none at all, beyond the involvement of Oldmixon, Roberts, and Curll. Occasionally others outside the Scriblerian circle embroiled themselves in Curll’s affairs. One such episode concerned a poem entitled A Letter to the Knight of the Sable Shield, advertised by Lintot (DC, 25 June 1716). Published miscellanies advertised it as the work of Elijah Fenton, and it was included in Fenton’s collected poems in 1779. Today this author cuts an obscure figure, remembered only as one of the translators employed on Pope’s Odyssey, and the Letter has been described very briefly by his biographer. Earl Harlan suggested that the ‘knight’ addressed, who was able ‘with equal skill | To make a poem or a pill’, masked the identity of Sir Samuel Garth. However, all the signs point rather to Sir Richard Blackmore—who had ongoing connections with Curll, and as the author of Arthurian epics (his Alfred had yet to come) could be said to ‘[take] the field | With Saxon Pen,’ as the text specifies. Blackmore had become famous for boring readers into a state of insensibility, as The Dunciad reminds us, and here the knight is said to have ‘drudg’d [many] to sure repose’. Admittedly the narrative gets itself into extremely confused knots: the central character is a ghost, obliged in his infernal torments to do the will of a bookseller named Tryphon (?Tonson). However, it seems fairly clear that this passage refers to Curll: Oft’ in the wizard’s cell I ’ave seen A sorrel man, of awkward mien, Prying with busy leer about, As if he were the devil’s scout. I ne’er was vers’d in modish vice, But sure those whoreson gloating eyes Have travell’d much on love-affairs, Between the key-hole and the stairs.

Blackmore, if it is he, must lend his assistance: ‘From Curll’s remove the seat of war, | Encamp on t’other side the bar; | Level your eye at Tryphon’s shop, | Another epic at him pop.’ This strongly suggests Jacob Tonson, whose shop at this time lay in the Strand, whereas Curll still had his premises in Fleet Street, just to the ‘other side’ of Temple Bar. What enormities Tonson had been responsible for, to justify the savage attack on Tryphon here, remains a puzzle; and much obscurity still surrounds the poem.2 All the same, Curll cannot have lost too much sleep over such an affair.

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N E C K O R N OT H I N G For long periods, the battle with Pope still occupied his prime attention. Sometimes the hardest blows in this war of words were struck not by abuse, but by sleights and surreptitious measures of the book trade. Among the most embarrassing events of this troubled time for Pope occurred at the end of June, when Rebecca Burleigh advertised A Roman Catholick Version of the First Psalm, for the Use of a Young Lady, by Mr. Pope (FP, 30 June). This item came out on a single sheet, price twopence, and contained a poem of five quatrains in alternate rhyme. Some significance attaches to the form, since Pope was parodying not the biblical version of Psalm 1 but a metrical paraphrase by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. Their versions of the scriptures had first appeared in Elizabethan times and enjoyed huge currency in the Protestant Church, though not of course among Roman Catholics. Pope follows his model quite closely and neatly misapplies its wording: thus, in the original the godly man ‘doth exercise | himself both day and night’ in the service of the Lord, whereas in the parody the young lady’s husband ‘in her Love shall Exercise | Himself both day and Night’. Although Burleigh’s imprint appeared on the title-page, she operated as a ‘trade publisher’ and responsibility has always been allotted to Curll.3 For his part Pope never acknowledged the Roman Catholick Version, and indeed he sought to distance himself from the production. After all, it amounted to the most openly blasphemous work he had permitted himself up to this point. How the manuscript got out has not come to light: but Curll had a way of making these things appear from nowhere. As the press advertisement cheerfully noted, ‘The Pope-ish Controversy continues’. The verses immediately caused a furore, deliberately fomented by Whig journalists on the Flying Post. On 14 July the paper ran an inflammatory story quoting the poem in full, and printing a response entitled ‘The Eccho to Pope’s Drury Lane Ballad’. Shortly afterwards, Pope inserted an advertisement in a Tory paper (PM, 31 July), attempting to clear himself of any knowledge concerning the ‘publication’ of this piece, without explicitly denying authorship. He even promised a reward of three guineas to anyone who should ‘discover the Person or persons concerned in the said Libel, of which I am wholly ignorant’. Conceivably Pope did not know exactly who had published the poem, though he must have had a shrewd idea. What he did know, and sought to conceal, was who had written the work. In a shamefaced way, he wrote to Swift late in June, ‘I suffer for my religion in almost every weekly paper. I have begun to take a pique at the Psalms of David (if the wicked may be credited, who have printed a scandalous one in my name).’ Swift replied at the end of August, ‘And who are all these enemies you hint at? I can only think of Curl, Gildon, Squire Burnet, Blackmore, and a few others I have forgot: Fools in my opinion are as necessary for a good

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writer, as pen, ink, and paper.’ It was in the same letter that he reported that he had long kept a knife at the ready for Curll’s ears (see Chapter 3 above). Pope’s guilty feelings emerged once more in a letter to Teresa Blount on 7 August: ‘If you have seen a late Advertisement, you will know that I have not told a lye (which we both abhominate) but equivocated pretty genteely’ (Corr, i. 342, 350, 359). The effort at damage control proved unavailing, and many of the pamphlet attacks which rained down on Pope made reference to the affair. The poet’s miscalculation plagued him as late as 1728, when Curll raked over the history of this ‘profane Version of the First Psalm’, and even into 1735 when the charges were laid again. A work which adversaries could brand as both blasphemous and obscene must inevitably hurt Pope’s reputation. He never fully rid himself of the scandal: the poem gave his most entrenched opponents, like John Dennis and Sir Richard Blackmore, ample scope for their venomous retorts. This round Curll had surely won on points. However, a major reverse lay in store for the bookseller. On 16 July the head boy of Westminster School, John Barber (not, as is sometimes asserted, a son of the Tory printer, Alderman John Barber) delivered a funeral eulogy in Latin for the famous preacher Robert South, who had died a week earlier. South had trodden an accustomed path to greatness by way of Westminster and Christ Church, but he had declined to become Bishop of Rochester. In what soon proved to be an unwise move, The Character of the Reverend and Learned Dr. Robert South. Being, the Oration spoken at his Funeral, on Monday July xvi. 1716 . . . By Mr. Barber appeared on 26 July, ‘printed for’ Curll and sold by Mrs Burleigh. Not only was this production illicit—worse than that, the Latin was ungrammatical. As a result the bookseller received an invitation to visit the school on 2 August, and there he had to submit to condign punishment. An account of the proceedings appeared in John Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal shortly afterwards: although Applebee showed less anxiety than his Tory rival Nathaniel Mist or his Whig competitor James Read to expose Curll’s failings, he naturally enjoyed an occasional thrust. In this number, a letter signed T.A. describes how a certain bookseller ‘near Temple-Bar’, failed to take a lesson from ‘the frequent Drubs that he has undergone for his often pyrating other Men’s Copies.’ He had been guilty of printing ‘Scraps’ of the funeral oration, and was ‘nab’d’ when he strayed close to the school by the King’s Scholars. Thereupon he suffered ‘a College Salutation’. First, he was ‘presented with the ceremony of the Blanket’, otherwise tossed into the air while wrapped in a rug: thus accoutred, ‘when the Skeleton had been well shook, he was carry’d in Triumph to the School’. Finally, his tormentors conducted him to nearby Dean’s Yard, and there forced him to ask pardon of young Mr Barber on his knees. It oddly recalled happenings before the bar of the Lords, only three months earlier; and it also prefigured Curll’s later spell in the pillory. His treatment seems to belong to some primitive folk custom uncovered by a social anthropologist of the schoolyard:

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but then Curll himself dealt in some heavy punishment, and people considered it no more than rough justice. Before long, one of the ushers or assistant teachers at the school, Samuel Wesley junior (brother of John and Charles) came out with a poem called Neck or Nothing, which carried a frontispiece displaying Curll’s humiliation (see Figure 3). Little wonder that the teaching staff took no pains to intervene on behalf of their pupils’ victim. Wesley couched his account of the episode in the form of a ‘consolatory letter’ from the eccentric writer-bookseller John Dunton to Curll, and used a slightly refined version of Hudibrastic verse. Why, he asks, did Curll go off so unheedingly to his ‘Execution’? One answer presents itself: ‘Perhaps thy Soul, to Gain inclin’d, | Did gratis Copies think to find.’ Yet the writer professes a measure of sympathy: ‘To see thee smart for Copy-stealing, | My Bowels yearn with Fellow-feeling’. Behind this mask of complicity, some familiar charges turn up: Now, without Disguise, Confess, quo’ they, thy Rogueries. What makes you keep in Garret high Poor Bards ty’d up to Poetry?— I’m forc’d to load them with a Clog, To make them study.

‘Clog’ here carries the obsolete sense of ‘a block or heavy piece of wood . . . attached to the leg or neck of a man or beast, to impede motion or prevent escape’ (OED). And then a little later on: Hast thou not oft enough in Court Appear’d, and often smarted for’t? And dost thou not, with many a Brand, Recorded for a Pirate stand? Glad that a Fine could pay th’ Arrears, And clear the Mortgage of thy Ears? Then what Relief dost hope to draw, From that which still condemns Thee, Law? And if from Law no Help there be, I’m sure there’s none from Equity.4

In reality Curll would stand at the bar on a number of future occasions and, as we shall see, he had recourse to the court of Chancery in the hope of attaining what he considered justice. But Wesley displayed a sound instinct here: the law seldom answered Curll’s expectations. The poem suggests that Pope could write an epic on the subject, while ‘Bernard ’ and all the other booksellers from Tonson downwards would harp on this incident with glee, in ‘Fleet-Street and Temple-Bar around, | The Strand and Holborn’. In reality, Pope showed understandable relish in describing the episode to Teresa Blount: ‘Mr Ed. Curll has been exercised in a Blanket at Westminster

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Figure 3. [Samuel Wesley], Neck or Nothing (1716), reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library. The frontispiece, showing Curll’s humiliation at Westminster School, 1716.

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Schoole by the Boys, whereof the common Prints have given some account.’ It provided the first good news for the poet in some time. Swift meanwhile cautioned his friend regarding his battles with the book trade: I can hardly believe the relation of [Curll’s] being poisoned, though the Historian pretends to have been an eye-witness: But I beg pardon, Sack might do it, though Rats-bane would not. I never saw the thing you mention as falsely imputed to you; but I think the frolicks of merry hours, even when we are guilty, should not be left to the mercy of our best friends, till Curl and his resemblers are hanged. (Corr, i. 359)

That would have been going a little far, even in a period when the law condemned many hapless individuals to take the road to Tyburn on what now seem slender grounds.5 But Swift surely had it right, when he suggested that it was unwise to pass out copies of indiscreet works even to close friends, while the inveterate snapper up of unconsidered trifles lay on the wait.

A M O S T D E P LO R A B L E C O N D I T I O N The rest of the year saw just one more major development in the contest. It came with Pope’s second pamphlet ridiculing his adversary, named A Further Account of the Most Deplorable Condition of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Since his being Poison’d on the 28th of March. This time the title-page announced the work as ‘Printed, and Sold by all the Publishers, Mercuries, and Hawkers, within the Bills of Mortality’, an authentic byline for the more surreptitious productions of Grub Street. Formerly scholars believed that the Account came out in May or June, but Norman Ault dated it as late as December on internal evidence. He pointed to the fact that Curll is made to claim in the text, ‘twice was I toss’d in a Blanket’, a statement which seems to indicate that the pamphlet must follow the incident at Westminster School. Ault also made much of a reference to ‘the young Man who is writing my new Pastorals’. This can only mean Thomas Purney, whose Pastorals ‘after the simple manner of Theocritus’ did not appear until 16 November, when they were said to be printed for J. Brown and R. Burleigh. According to Ault, it was ‘hardly credible that Pope should have been aware, in the early part of this year, of this wholly unknown young man’s contract with Curll, even supposing that it existed at that time’.6 This argument carries less cogency, in view of the inside information which Pope demonstrably possessed concerning some of Curll’s operations. We have seen that Rebecca Burleigh regularly acted as ‘publisher’ for his list at this juncture, and she could possibly have been a conduit for such information. Nor we can place much weight on a contract, since relatively few of these survive in the case of Curll, and much of his publishing may have gone on without formal agreements in advance. While the reference to the blanket punishment is hard to explain, the Further Account connects so closely to its predecessor that it seems likely Pope would take the

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chance to follow up on his earlier success as speedily as he could. On balance, a dating around August makes a reasonable compromise. The pamphlet represents one of Pope’s most spirited exercises in satirical prose. Once more it shows an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what Curll was up to. The bookseller is portrayed as suffering from a frenzied disturbance, which causes his wife (presumably the first wife, Anne though Pope gives her the initial ‘C’) to call on Lintot for help. During a lucid interval, Curll summons all his main authors for a council of war. This enables Pope to supply a small gazetteer of Grub Street, with the address of each writer humorously indicated: thus, ‘At the Bedsted and Bolster, a Musick House in Morefields, two translators in a Bed together’. Not all the individuals can be aligned with the locations named, but we have the names of some of those who turn up at Curll’s command, including Dennis and Gildon. One resolution passed by those assembled clearly points to The Catholick Poet, but it remains open to question whether the passage was written before or after its appearance: ‘Resolv’d, That a Ballad be made against Mr. Pope, and that Mr. Oldmixon, Mr. Gildon and Mrs. Centlivre do prepare and bring in the same’. At the end of the narrative, Curll subsides into a wild fury, and apostrophizes his books in a virtuoso shower of language: Now G-d damn all Folio’s, Quarto’s, Octavo’s and Duodecimo’s! ungrateful Varlets that you are, who have so long taken up my House without paying for your Lodging?—Are you not the beggarly Brood of fumbling Journey-men; born in Garrets, among Lice and Cobwebs, nurs’d upon Grey Peas, Bullocks Liver, and Porter’s Ale? . . . Did you not come before your Time into dirty Sheets of brown Paper? And have I not cloath’d you in double Royal, lodg’d you handsomely on decent Shelves, lac’d your Backs with Gold, equipt you with splendid Titles, and sent you into the World with the Names of Persons of Quality?

‘Rags ye were, and to Rags ye shall return’, he proclaims, in accents recalling the burial service. A predictable fate awaits these books: ‘To my Shop at Tunbridge ye shall go, by G and thence be drawn like the rest of your Predecessors, bit by bit, to the Passage-House’ (Prose Works, i. 284–5). We are struck first by the surreal inventiveness of this passage, and scarcely notice how close to the truth it comes, in respect of Curll’s manner of business.7 Finally the pace had slackened a little. The second instalment of Court Poems, already mentioned, came out on 15 September: this contained nothing new of Popian origin, but it reprinted some of the provocative items which had already appeared, and in its very title it served as an aggravation of the former offence. Then, in late October Curll joined a group of booksellers to back a new collective translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (dated 1717), designed to rival the impressive Tonson edition edited by Samuel Garth, a good friend of Pope. Remarkably Curll’s version included a translation by Pope of the episode of Vertumnus and Pomona, first printed in Lintot’s Miscellany in 1712; and even more remarkably no protest followed. In the following month, Roberts published a work entitled God’ s Revenge against Punning, very likely the work

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of Pope, but allegedly written by ‘J. Baker, Knight’. A reply under the title of A Letter from Sir J B to Mr. P appeared on 22 November, under the imprint of John Baker (a real bookseller) and Thomas Warner, reciting most of the usual charges against Pope. It is quite possible, but not certain, that Curll was behind this production, which refers glancingly to the episode of the emetic. The scandal, ‘Baker’ argued, lies not in taking but in giving the vomit, ‘and it is well known Mr. Curll’s Betters have been treated in the same manner’.8 On 10 December the St. James’s Post contained a pseudo-advertisement, actually no more than a prolonged attack on Pope, under the name of Rebecca Burleigh. This promised a satire, named ‘Pope on the Stool of Repentance’, which never became reality. There is some play on the word ‘stool’, in reference to the emetic, while both Neck or Nothing and God’s Revenge against Punning earn a brief mention. The wild character of this piece emerges from a brief excerpt: That Dr. Dunton’s Purge may want no Ingredient that is necessary to bring this Patient (Sir Alexander) to his right Senses, it will be compleated in a Book of 1s. Price, or else will be inserted in his Weekly Paper entitled, Dunton’s Madhouse, till the whole is compleated, but neither this Purge nor Madhouse will be publish’d, till Pope has been lasht (both in Prose and Verse) by those First-rate Wits that are to prove him a fit Patient for Dunton’s Madhouse. DUNTON’ s PURGE when ready for publication, will be sold by S. Poping in Pater-noster-row.9

This really does read as if the demented bookseller and writer John Dunton had taken over: but Curll probably masterminded the whole eccentric notice. At the very end of the year came another Scriblerian squib in the form of a mockprophetic work entitled Mr. Joanidion Fielding His True and Faithful Account of the Strange and Miraculous Comet, sold by E. Berington. This was a real bookseller whose name was more commonly spelt Berrington, probably connected with an old Catholic family, and sometimes linked with John Morphew in enterprises on the Tory side of the political divide. The supposed author rejoices in the name of ‘E. Parker, Philomath’. (George Parker was a leading publisher of almanacs and astrological books.) The satire brings one last reminder by the Popians of events in this tumultuous year: ‘Mr. Curll shall be Vomited the Second Time, Tost in a Blanket the Third, and Cudgel’d the Ninth Time, for printing the Will of Sir J Baker, by the Executors of the said Sir J ’. We need not take the ordinal numbers too literally.

SLANDER SELLING Curll and his minions had plenty of business on hand at the start of 1717. Just into the new year, the publisher brought out a rare venture by Susanna Centlivre into the world of tragedy, a play named The Cruel Gift, which had done well

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after its first staging at Drury Lane on 17 December. The author received twenty guineas by way of copy money, the same sum as for her earlier plays (Straus, 227). The prologue was by Sewell, the epilogue by Rowe, and the play was dedicated to Eustace Budgell, who will figure again later in Curll’s life. As the story goes, Budgell gave Centlivre a diamond ring in return.10 Around the turn of the year came a new biography, this time devoted to another former Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson—the book which Thoresby had been promised in the previous summer. As it happened, Curll had only a small stake in the valuable literary property which Tillotson had bequeathed.11 Year after year the sermons of this popular divine rolled off the press, and John Pemberton could count himself fortunate to have a share in Tillotson’s Works along with more prominent figures in the trade like Jacob Tonson and Benjamin Tooke. The Life of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Tillotson, was compiled by ‘F.H.M.A.’, probably Revd Francis Hutchinson, later Bishop of Down and Connor, the Whig historian. Nevertheless, the Popeish controversy still held the central position. On 5 January 1717 Rebecca Burleigh brought out a volume entitled Pope’s Miscellany, more accurately a reprinting of the items which had made news in the previous year, that is Court Poems, The Worms and the parody of the first Psalm. One small ingredient added to the brew came in the form of ‘The Looking-Glass’, a poem which Curll continued to include among his Pope collections for many years, but which the poet never acknowledged (TE vi. 419). At the end of the month Burleigh followed up with The Court Ballad. By Mr. Pope, this time an unmistakably authentic work, for which a holograph version survives, even though the poet declined to admit it to his canon.12 A list of publications said to be available from the same bookseller covers the recent miscellany along with Dennis’s True Character. The ballad deals in Pope’s worldly and risqu´e manner with the fraught situation at St James’s, as factions supporting the King and the Prince of Wales started to jostle for power. Three weeks later one J. Harris reprinted the ballad together with six epigrams obviously intended as a pendant to the work. The volume in question bore a tricksy title: The Parson’s Daughter. A Tale. For the Use of Pretty Girls with Small Fortunes. To which are added Epigrams, and the Court Ballad, by Mr. Pope. This choice of words obviously aimed to confuse readers into thinking that everything named proceeded from the hand of the great Mr Pope: in fact ‘The Parson’s Daughter’ had nothing to do with him, and was probably written by Christopher Wyvill. Later printings omit the mysterious Harris from the imprint, and substitute Burleigh: in any case, Curll soon began to advertise these newer items in his own name. Further on in the year, around 6 August, Burleigh produced a ‘second part’ of Pope’s Miscellany, full of spurious items once more and containing only two authentic items, The Court Ballad and the Court Epigrams. A second edition of the first part also bore the date 1717. As for The Parson’s Daughter, Curll was still using the sheets as a makeweight to a

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collection in 1728, entitled The Epistles and Poems by Clio and Strephon, chiefly by Martha Fowke. Meanwhile, the bookseller E. Berrington took the initiative. He had soon produced editions of Pope’s Miscellany, suggesting that he enjoyed amicable relations with Curll. (Later he ran the Evening Post, a journal stuffed with Curll’s advertisements.) On 2 February Berrington issued a pamphlet attributed to ‘E. Parker, Philomath’, a deliberate attempt to assume the Scriblerian persona. As the title indicates, A Complete Key to the New Farce, call’d Three Hours after Marriage takes as its object a surreal comedy jointly written by Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot. The play had received its premiere at Drury Lane on 17 January, running for seven performances in the face of vigorous audience participation, some friendly and some hostile. A campaign against the comedy broke out in the playhouse and in the press: ‘Broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets all expressed loud disapproval of the play and especially of its authors.’13 The most notable riposte came from the hand of John Durant Breval on 30 March under the title of The Confederates, a lively dramatic rendering of the controversy which managed to work into the equation recent offerings such as The Worms and the Court Ballad. (Rebecca Burleigh’s name appears on the title-page, but Curll advertised the book.)14 Some amusing lines at the end offer mock-congratulations to John Gay. Most to our purpose, Breval even has Lintot observe to Pope: You may with C your Quarrel now repent; Or else to him you might for Help have sent: But he with Ballads will debauch the Town, And cloud your small Remainder of Renown.15

For some readers, Pope’s reputation suffered when works like The Court Ballad came to be identified with him. However complicit the poet had been in this process, Curll made himself the instrument of the disclosures. Predictably, long-time adversaries of Pope like Blackmore mounted critiques of the farce, while less substantial items such as A Letter to Mr. John Gay, by ‘Timothy Drub’, might possibly have had an origin not far from Curll’s workshop. After all, the furore which had grown up around Three Hours was exactly what the doctor would have ordered for the commercial side of the book trade. One further sniping reference to ‘that stupid Farce, Three Hours after Marriage’ occurs in a mock-heroic poem called with a leaden poverty of invention The Rape of the Smock, which came out later in the year. The author was Giles Jacob, another prolific author in the wider purlieus of Grub Street. Assigned at first to Rebecca Burleigh, this work later came to bear Curll’s name, and figured in his made-up miscellanies such as The Altar of Love (1727). One item turns out to have almost as much to do with Curll as with Pope, namely Leonard Welsted’s poem Palæmon to Cælia, at Bath: or, The Triumvirate, issued by Roberts on 7 March. Unremarkable in other ways, this

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assault on the Scriblerian trio deserves attention because of an extended quasiallegorical retelling of the emetic episode. Since the work has apparently never been reprinted since the eighteenth century, and gives the quarrel between Curll and Pope unusually detailed coverage, it merits extensive quotation here. The key passage opens with a reference to Curll’s shop standing opposite St Dunstan’s church in the shadow of Temple Bar. On the wall of the church was mounted an enormous clock (still to be seen), with a niche containing wooden statues of Gog and Magog, each of whom wields a club to strike the hours: Near Dunstan’s rising pile, where crowds repair, The young for assignations, th’ old for prayer; Where two grim giants strike the vocal blow, While damsels sell their toys and love below; A noted Bibliopole great cares sustains, Fam’d for his sufferings, envy’d for his gains, Who venal Learning courts with low rewards, And hires with promis’d pence ill-fated Bards, A Mercury in ingenious frauds expert, Renown’d for witty wiles and stealths of art.

Welsted now recounts the way in which the Scriblerian group inflicted their revenge on Curll: This harmless Artist fell a destin’d prey To the Triumvirs’ unrelenting sway; By secret stratagem they subtly wrought, And couch’d their satyr in a purging draught; The poisonous juice, with vellicating pains, Successful Wits! ferments in all his veins; He speaks his anguish in distorted looks: Ah! what avail his copies or his books! At length, the dwindled Hero rais’d his head: ‘O frolic Bard, severely blythe’, he said, ‘What Patriot shall from pungent pains be free, ‘If such facetious drugs are known to thee? ‘Keen thy resentments are, and operate soon: ‘O say, is this a Protestant lampoon? ‘Now, Dennis, learn, learn from your foe to write; ‘Mix jalap with your satyr, and ’twill bite: ‘And you, my friends, when call’d to chearful bowls, ‘By me take warning, and shun rhubarb-drolls: ‘I faint; no Art my sickening life can save: ‘The Quack prescrib’d the purge the Poet gave’.

Assuredly by this date Curll was becoming famous for his sufferings, and there may well have been many who envied him on account of his gains. The story proceeds:

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Here, as he paus’d, he felt returning ease, And found the torture lessen by degrees; Then thus went on, his anguish to relieve: ‘Sarcastic Youth’, said he, ‘I give thee leave ‘In artless low obscenities to shine: ‘The fertile realms of Drury shall be thine: ‘Design with deep contrivance plotless plays, ‘And teem with comets which no wonder raise; ‘Be still licentious, and still teaze the age ‘With feeble malice, and with hectic rage: ‘To all thy pen shall threaten I submit; ‘But let not Cornakina aid thy wit. ‘Thy friend, unrival’d, undisturb’d, by me, ‘Gleans an insipid fame, from envy free; ‘His verse, like countries nor polite nor rude, ‘Keeps the dull medium between bad and good; ‘As other works for energy and strength, ‘His are, like May-poles, famous for their length: ‘Canorous trifles let him still pursue; ‘Second to none but Arbuthnot or you: ‘But let him this unnatural war decline; ‘His trade was here an enemy to mine. ‘What spoils, what trophies, on that joyful day, ‘You and your spruce apprentice shall display, ‘In which one Pirate by the treachery dies ‘Of two Twin-bards, assisted from the skies!’

But finally, the poet reports, Curll can find relief at hand: At length the potion’s influences stop; Restor’d at length to Learning and his Shop, To just revenge the valiant Sufferer flies, Seeks the support of Protestant Allies, And to his aid victorious Ridpath draws, The famous Champion of the Whiggish cause: Fierce strife succeeds, and paper-wars are writ, With doubtful fortune, and with equal wit.16

George Ridpath can be identified as the strongly Whiggish editor of the Flying Post, who earned a line or two in The Dunciad. We cannot explain the reference to ‘Cornakina’: Matthew Concanen does not fit the context, and in any case the name suggests a woman, possibly one who cuckolds her husband. In the light of Court Poems, it is tempting to adduce Lady Mary, but giving her this name would have no obvious point. The friend is obviously John Gay, and the ‘Canorous Trifles’ might mean productions such as Rural Sports or The Shepherd’s Week. The poet allowed himself a brief retort in his ‘Epistle to Paul Methuen’, first published in 1720:

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Gay represses the uncomfortable thought that, without Curll, some of these giants might be less visible to the public. All this while, John Dennis refused to be left out of the action. He had no instant answer ready to make to Three Hours, even though the farce had caricatured him as ‘Sir Tremendous’. Instead, he came out around the beginning of March with a long critique which had probably been on the stocks for a considerable period, under the title Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer, with Two Letters concerning Windsor Forest, and the Temple of Fame. This comparatively ‘respectable’ production carried Curll’s name. Lacking the speed and agility of the true hack journalist, Dennis spreads himself over almost a hundred pages, recycling some of his former attacks on Pope. It represents in its way a serious critical effort, although marred as always by the fevered tone and hectic syntax in which Dennis indulged. More interest, for present purposes, attaches to a strange story connected with the publication of this pamphlet—strange, if it involved anyone else other than Curll. The first press advertisements promised that the work would appear on 28 February, but a change of plan must have occurred. On 5 March the Flying Post carried a notice declaring that the Remarks on Pope’s ‘Senseless Popish and Jacobite Translation of Homer’ had indeed been scheduled to appear in the previous week. However, when the ‘Popish and Jacobite Translator’ (so that we do not miss the point) saw the book just prior to its planned publication, he immediately ordered Lintot to buy up the whole impression. Yet on the same evening Curll was able to advertise a new edition, presumably the one represented by surviving copies. It is hard to know whether to believe a word of this unlikely tale. At all events Pope absorbed the gist of Dennis’s commentary, and made his own reply a few months later in the ‘Life of Zoilus’ attached to Parnell’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice.18 Pope struck his most effective blow when he produced his monumental Works, advertised by Lintot at the start of June 1717. He said little directly about the ongoing controversies, barring a remark in the Preface: ‘And perhaps nothing could make it worth my while to own what are really so [i.e. his own poems], but to avoid the imputation of so many dull and immoral things, as partly by malice, and partly by ignorance, have been ascribed to me’ (Prose Works, i. 294). We may wonder if Curll had often erred through ignorance. None the less, the entire volume in its sumptuous amplitude stands as a rebuke to the slight and tawdry volumes of Pope’s adversary. RISK AND RESENTMENT Besides, Curll had other things on his mind. As we shall see in the next chapter, he entered into dispute with Edward Young, not yet famous as the author of Night

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Thoughts, but a man with a strong power-base in Oxford. Another altercation which has only recently come to light pitched the bookseller against still more influential members of society. The history of this conflict can now be traced back as far as the previous December; but Pope knew of it earlier than that. This much emerges from a passage in the Full and True Account, where Curll apologizes for his past sins: The Book of the Conduct of the Earl of N [ottingha]m is yet unpublished; as you are to have the Profit of it, Mr. Pemberton, you are to run the Risque of the Resentments of all that Noble Family. Indeed I caused the Author to assert several Things in it as Facts, which are only idle Stories of the Town; because I thought it would make the Book sell. Do you pay the Author for Copy Money, and the Printer and Publisher. I heartily beg God’s, and my L[or]d N [ottingha]m’s Pardon; but all Trades must live.

Shortly afterwards, Pope ended his Further Account with the graphic image of Curll using ‘the unfinish’d Sheets of the Conduct of the E[arl] of N [ottingha]m’ to wipe his breech (Prose Works, i. 262–3, 285). In sober reality, the bookseller did come to face the ‘Risque of the Resentments’ of the Finch family, as an examination of surviving documents will reveal. While Pope supplies a misleading version of events in several particulars, his pamphlet displays firsthand knowledge of Curll’s abortive attempt to bring out the Conduct in 1716–17. He must have had access to something more than merely ‘idle Stories of the Town’. We can pick up the trail on 13 December 1716, when Edward Southwell, formerly Secretary of State, wrote to the second Earl of Nottingham, Daniel Finch (1647–1730). Swift’s ‘Dismal’, the Tory politician, had broken with his party with a volte-face at the time of the measures to bring the war to an end in 1711, and gone into fractious opposition. In 1716 he lost favour with the Whigs in turn, by proposing lenient treatment for the rebel lords. Over the years he played a part in many controversies which might have made a tell-all memoir potentially embarrassing to both parties. Rumour suggested that in his retirement the Earl had put together several drafts of a pi`ece justificative on the course of his political career.19 This too might prove explosive. The documents show that both the writer and recipient of the letter knew of the project Curll had in train. Southwell reports that Curll had brought him ‘as much of the book as he says is printed’. It was indeed ‘a strange Rhapsody of Stuff ’. Thus Curll offered to acquit himself as a man of honour and according to his promise—a hope others with experience of the bookseller might not have shared. In a postscript, Southwell added, ‘Curl says that Mr Oldmixon the writer is newly made Collector of Bridgewater. Printed to p. 122’. If it came to such extremities, Curll seldom felt any instinct to shield his authors. After this, silence reigns for some months. The narrative resumes on 24 May 1717 when Curll wrote to Southwell, stating that Oldmixon would deliver up the remainder of the copy in manuscript, if Nottingham would be willing to pay

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the charge of the impression. For his part, Curll emphasizes that he now has the printed copies, amounting to one thousand, as well as all the manuscript so far unprinted. He would ‘punctually obey’ any orders given by the Earl. A second letter went out on 3 June, and again Curll adopted a conciliatory tone: however, the more refractory Oldmixon had concluded, ‘by not hearing from you, that his lordship’s Silence is a tacit leave for a publication of the Book’. We have no indication of a reply from Southwell this time; but Nottingham’s eldest son, Lord Finch, had begun to investigate Oldmixon’s circumstances, no doubt with the aim of discovering the price at which he could be bought off. Then on 15 June Curll wrote a third letter, describing a visit by his servant to the Earl’s home in Bloomsbury, when the man was greeted with a violent outburst by Lord Finch. Curll expresses his surprise at this treatment, and again assures Southwell of his desire to comply with all the demands which the family had made of him. Since Southwell first apprized him of the situation, he has complied with all demands. He will not have any concern with the book; and Oldmixon shows a little more flexibility: ‘If my Ld pleases to mark out any passages that are displeasing to him, he is very willing to cancell them, or to suppress the Work upon being paid the expence of print and paper’. Having set out the ‘whole State of the Case’, Curll ends by repeating that any ‘Resentment’ must fall on Oldmixon, since he (Curll) will take care not to share in the guilt. This is the last we hear of the affair. The offending volume never appeared, although it had once proceeded far enough to be listed under the name of James Roberts in the Monthly Catalogue (a Lintot enterprise), among books published in March 1716. Initially Curll had managed to keep his name safely out of notice; however, when the Finch family discovered what was going on, after printing had reached an advanced stage, he was forced to cover his retreat in the letters to Southwell. Since the publisher evidently had to give up all printed sheets and manuscripts to the family as part of a deal, we have no idea what the book contained. Certain other facts emerge which help to illuminate practices in the book trade at this juncture. Quite clearly, Oldmixon bore the expenses of the edition, rather than Curll or a ‘publisher’ such as Roberts. Four years later, as we shall see, Curll reported that Robert Loggin had similarly borne the costs of a book which landed the publisher in trouble. This arrangement may have been employed more commonly than we have realised: it would be easier in such cases for Curll to exculpate himself from potentially awkward situations. The edition size of one thousand copies seems quite large, and indicates that those behind the publication expected it to find a ready sale. Finally, there remains the question as to how Pope managed to discover so much so early, for the text of the Full Account in March 1716 shows marked correspondence in detail with what the bookseller writes in his letter of 15 June 1717. The apologetic tone of the Account also prefigures the less than heroic stance Curll took in his dealings with the Finch family, as he desperately sought to load all the blame on to his hapless author.20

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In respect of books which actually did come to fruition, Curll’s list that summer seems duller than usual. He issued The Life and Death of Lucius, the First Christian King of Britain, an uninspired spin-off from a play by Delarivier Manley, presented in a way to make readers suppose she might have also written the pamphlet. There followed poems by Nicholas Amhurst, Curll’s latest discovery from Oxford; and a few run-of-the-mill political pamphlets. Early in the year Curll bought out under the imprint of Roberts memoirs of Elias Ashmole, whose work he had previously published, and at some stage the Posthumous Works of Dr Robert South, who had occasioned his humiliation at Westminster a year before. The editor is said to have been William Pittis. Undeterred, the bookseller included the Oratio funebris again, along with the will. In fact the works of South had occasioned a minor contretemps in the previous summer, when the doctor’s literary executor had inserted a notice in the press, complaining about Burleigh’s intentions of issuing the Works (EP, 19 July; DC, 26 July). Curll immediately went on the attack, denouncing the executors as acting beyond their knowledge if not beyond their powers (Straus, 248). When the volumes appeared, the publisher did not miss an opportunity in the preface to fashion a puff for his six-year-old anthology Musæ Britannicæ. The life of South included probably derives from Pittis once more. Meanwhile, Breval entered the fray again with Mac-Dermot: or, The Irish Fortune-Hunter, a poem in six cantos, about a guileless Teague who comes up to London and quickly loses his illusions. Despite some hints of contemporary scandal, this proved less popular than Breval’s earlier efforts, and it does not seem to have been reprinted; but Curll kept trying to unload it as late as 1735. A return to more familiar country marked the appearance of Letters, Poems, and Tales: Amorous, Satyrical, and Gallant. Which Passed between Several Persons of Distinction. Now first Publish’d from their Respective Originals, found in the Cabinet of that Celebrated Toast, Mrs. Anne Long. The first advertisement spotted came in the Evening Post on 3 December 1717 (the book is dated 1718). This hodgepodge contains a variety of unrelated items, presumably gleaned from the leavings of Anne Long, a young lady whom Swift had come to know during his time in England. The sister of a ‘brute’, Sir James Long, but once a beauty and toast of the Kit-Cat Club, she fell on narrow circumstances, which forced her to retire under an assumed name to King’s Lynn in Norfolk. There she died in December 1711, much regretted by Swift, who wrote that she had ‘every valuable quality of body and mind that could make a lady loved and esteemed’.21 Only the opening item, ‘A Decree for Concluding the Treaty between Dr. Swift and Mrs. Long’ bears on Swift. In recent years Curll had preyed less on Swift, maybe because it turned out harder to purloin manuscripts, now that the Dean lived in Ireland. At the end of this volume comes a patently unrelated item, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., with separate pagination. Curll also published this poem by itself in 1717, with an attribution to Breval.

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At the opening of 1718 Curll got involved in the controversy stirred by Colley Cibber’s aggressively anti-papist play, The Non-Juror, first performed on 6 December 1717. This was highly popular with Whig sympathizers and irritating to Catholics such as Pope, once more smeared by implication. Again Curll had reason to be grateful to Breval, using his favourite pseudonym ‘Joseph Gay’, who quickly came up with A Compleat Key to the work, decoding the play in perfunctory fashion while assaulting Cibber’s alleged plagiarisms (from Pope, amongst others) more broadly. This appeared on 6 January and reached a third edition by 15 February. The key may have stimulated Pope into resuming activity, as he is believed to have written another pamphlet, A Clue to the Comedy of the Non-Juror, which Curll gave to the world, also on 15 February.22 This urged, in accents of mischievous fun, that the play was in fact a Jacobite libel against the government. Shortly afterwards the publisher advertised the work in the Evening Post as The Plot Discover’d, with the words, ‘The manuscript of this Pamphlet was sent to me on Tuesday last, and I was this Morning given to understand, that this signal Favour was conferr’d on me by Mr. Pope, for which I hereby return my most grateful Acknowledgment for the same. E. Curll’. We can never know for certain what element of genuine gratitude survives in such ironic acknowledgments. A new edition appeared on 20 March, with a jaunty quatrain by Curll on the verso of the title page. Whatever he had been sent, he took the trouble to add in a list of his own books; the final page reprinted Rowe’s epilogue to Centlivre’s The Cruel Gift, which, readers were reminded, was available at Curll’s for a shilling.23 If it looked briefly as though relations might be on the mend, this promise was soon blighted. On 18 April Curll released Charles Gildon’s Memoirs of the Life of William Wycherley, a work which offended Pope on two grounds. He resented the freedom with which the book treated his old friend and mentor Wycherley; and he objected to a malicious passage aimed at his own person and family (Pope’s father is described as a ‘rustick Parent’). This marked a relapse into the savage verbal onslaughts mounted by writers like Dennis, two years earlier, and it can only have exacerbated the sensitivities of the poet. Besides, Curll did not intend his valuable stake in Pope to remain unexploited; and even when he had nothing to hand, he could always devise expedients for disguising this fact. Throughout the winter, starting about the end of November 1717, he devoted some energy to advertising The Ladies Miscellany, Consisting of Original Poems, by the Most Eminent Hands (dated 1718). More honestly, he had made up a collection of previously published poems chiefly by writers like Breval, together with The Rape of the Smock. The title-page announced the presence of Court-Poems, but any unwary readers who bought the volume hoping for the original set would have faced disappointment. Even when this addendum is present (and in some copies it is absent), the title refers to the contents of Part 2, a group containing only The Worms and the first Psalm. Some copies have the ludicrously inappropriate addition of Christus Patiens: or the Sufferings of Christ (1720), a heroic poem

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translated by Charles Beckingham from the Latin of Ren´e Rapin. Probably a little later in the year came Love’s Invention: or, The Recreation in Vogue, featuring a ballad on the currently hot issue of the craze for masquerades. This volume has a half-title, ‘Mr. Pope’s Worms: and a New Ballad on the Masquerades’, and indeed both editions published this year contain The Worms. Possibly for the first time, Curll acted in association here with Richard Francklin, afterwards famous as a result of his involvement with The Craftsman. Contemporary sources state that Francklin began as an apprentice to Curll, although modern research has found no support for this claim.24 By the middle of 1718 the bookseller and the poet had been locked in combat for a matter of four years. It takes little imagination to see why Curll wished to prolong the controversy, as it provided him with endless copy and repeated opportunities to promote his wares. What Pope got out of the affair is less obvious. Like all satirists, he needed enemies, and Curll’s attacks gave him an excellent pretext for retaliatory gestures. Moreover, he used this oblique means to release some of his more scandalous poems while concealing his name and, formally at least, his responsibility. Amongst other things Curll’s press supplied an agency by which Pope could bypass the gatekeepers of established culture, and avail himself of the mechanisms of Grub Street to undermine rival authors. While reserving his most substantial work for respectable figures in the trade such as Tonson and, for a time, Lintot, he found a way of advancing his own cause as he allowed other works to trickle out through fissures in the literary underworld. Nonetheless, at this stage there began an uneasy period of truce, broken spasmodically by isolated events: a further spoof narrative of Curll’s degradation on Pope’s side, the appearance of Giles Jacob’s Poetical Register on Curll’s list, and later the dispute over the Works of the Duke of Buckingham, in which both Pope and Curll were in trouble (see Chapter 7). During this phase of activity Curll seldom managed to get hold of any new Popian material, although Rebecca Burleigh was able to insert into an edition of Court Poems in 1719 a poem on the young lovers of Stanton Harcourt, struck down by thunder.25 Not until 1726 would full hostilities resume.26 In the meantime, Curll shifted his focus to other branches of publishing. He soon found himself mixed up in an imbroglio with his fellow bookseller Nathaniel Mist. In the background of this affair lurked the dangerous Daniel Defoe, who had rarely allowed Curll to get hold of his writings, even though these had been numerous and often surreptitiously produced. As time went on, Curll took on more risky political items, which would finally land him in court again. Most conspicuously, he began over the next few years to enhance his collection of works on sexual matters. Up to this point, he had published comparatively few books in this field, even though posterity has linked his name principally with such items. He had produced the cases of sodomy, divorce trials, the work on impotence, and a few more isolated examples. Only in 1718 did he begin his most sustained concentration on sexual matters, sometimes disguising the books

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as ‘medical’ treatises: on eunuchs, hermaphrodites, the crying sin of ‘onanism’, and other sexual deviations. These high-profile volumes were supplemented by more genteel coverage of sexual affairs in the shape of a new series of translations from the lubricious Latin poetry of Bonefonius, or Jean Bonnefons.27 Curll stood poised on the brink of a new phase in his diverse and outlandish career and, for a time, Pope faded into the background.

6 Curlicism Displayed (1717–1720) While Curll could evidently make himself very agreeable to authors, especially scholars, his relations with the people who actually wrote his books usually ended in trouble. If, as Pope remarks with calculated poise in the Preface to his Works of 1717, ‘The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth’ (Prose Works, i. 292), the life of a bookseller might not be much better. The next few years of Curll’s career sometimes look like a deliberate attempt to offend as many people as possible. The Scriblerians were more in the background, but Curll launched into one squabble after another, mainly as a result of aggressive promotional tactics. His main skill was to get hold of authors, but his grasp of them was never quite so authoritative as Pope’s imaginative account suggests. QUA R R E L S W I T H AU T H O R S Curll’s penchant for milking fairly tenuous associations dry shows inself in two quarrels of 1717. He had become involved with Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724), Dean of Norwich, during the preparations for Browne’s Posthumous Works (1712), for which Prideaux had supplied a catalogue of bishops. But Curll was after more; he had published a sixth edition of Prideaux’s The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet in June 1716 and evidently there was some disagreement between Curll, Tonson, and Prideaux concerning ownership of the copyright. Prideaux had refused whatever permission Curll wanted and referred him to Tonson. On 1 March 1717 Prideaux wrote to Jacob Tonson in great alarm about an abusive letter in which Curll threatened to publish their correspondence and accuse him publicly of covetousness.1 He was now desperate to get rid of Curll at all costs and asked Tonson to make whatever deal he could ‘so that I be not brought upon ye stage in any contest with so vile a wretch . . . There is no medling with dirt but some dirt will stick You can not oblidge me more than by delivering me out of ye hands of this vile knave . . . ’. Curll went on to produce a seventh edition in 1718 and an eighth in 1723, and so appears to have won this round, but as often in his career he had made long-term enemies for short-term gain.2 Shortly after this, Curll availed himself of his connection with Edward Young, two of whose poems he had already published. In July 1717 Curll published An

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Ode Sacred to the Memory of . . . the Countess of Berkeley, by Thomas Newcomb, an established clergyman-poet new to Curll’s stable and a college friend of Young’s. On the back of the title-page Curll printed a purported letter of commendation from Young. This was a typical enough Curll move, to print ancillary text without asking permission. But Young was furious and inserted an advertisement in the London Evening-Post of 29 August denying that he had written any such letter or given any such authorisation. On 31 August Curll printed a robust response to Young in the Weekly Journal and two other papers asserting that Young knew perfectly well that he had written the letter, as published, and that publication of it was perfectly legitimate. He concluded, magnanimously, ‘whatever Bolt was levelled at me by this ridiculous Procedure, I freely forgive it, and sincerely assure you, that I will always keep clear of incurring that vile Scandal of denying my own Hand’.3 In a subsequent advertisement he offered to show the manuscript, and got his fellow bookseller Richard Francklin to testify to the accuracy of his transcript.4 Newcomb himself also supplied (not entirely unequivocal) testimony: I think my self oblig’d in Justice to Mr. Curll, to Attest, that the Letter he printed before my Ode . . . was, (as far as it had any Relation to the Poem) Genuine; and I cannot but stand amaz’d at Mr. Young’s denying it, as well as at his ungenerous Treatment of me, without giving me the least Intimation of his unkind Design, and in Regard to my own Reputation, I think I am not to be blam’d in endeavouring to make my own Vindication reach as far as his Scandal has done.5

Like Prideaux, Young turned in his panic to Jacob Tonson with another version of the story. He had, he now admitted, written to Curll, but the letter as Curll published it had been meddled with. Young went over this version of events in minute detail for Tonson, apparently so that Tonson could place a rebuttal in a newspaper.6 The anxiety Young felt probably had a political element to it: he was close to Addison and to Wharton at this point, and both opposed the position of the Earl of Berkeley, husband of the woman celebrated in the poem. Young sought political advancement and evidently felt his position was compromised; he wrote to Tickell: ‘I shall be very anxious till You are so kind to let me hear how clear I stand of ye scandal of yt Villain in Your own Opinion, & wheather I suffer in His [Addison’s], on whose good Thoughts my greatest Hopes rely’.7 Tickell apparently advised him to ignore Curll, but Young had already committed himself to further public protest.8 Thus the matter concluded for the moment. Newcomb was soon working for Curll again, but relations with Young took much longer to re-establish. ‘A B AW DY C O U N T E N A N C E ’ In the next year, Curll found himself under still noisier attack, this time with less personal provocation, from Daniel Defoe. Though Defoe’s multiple

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identities and contrary commitments as an author may seem akin to Curll’s manner of trading, the two had never joined forces. Curll may have opened hostilities with Defoe as early as 1712, since he appears to have bought up unsold sheets of Defoe’s History of the Union of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1710) and reissued them with a title page very similar to the authorized London publication of the work as A Collection of Original Papers and Material Transactions (1712).9 The Review of 11 March 1712 insisted that the book was only available from the printer and from John Baker. In 1715 Defoe began attacking Curll directly. Responding to the charge that he was the author of The Secret History of the White Staff, Defoe attacked scandal-mongering booksellers and their teams of hacks, ready to produce arguments on both sides to keep up circulation wars, independent of any actual belief or principle. Chief among his examples was the way William Pittis had succumbed to Curll’s economics of book-production: Mr. Pittis has been taken up for writing a Pamphlet, call’d Reasons for a War with France, which Book he has own’d, he was hir’d to Write by that Conscientious Bookseller, so celebrated for his Honesty, Mr. Edmund Curl in Fleet-street, who was one of his Bail; upon which he gives out an Advertisement in several of the News-papers, that a Book was preparing for the Press, entitled Reasons for a War with France; by the Author of the Mitre and Purse, which, as is said above, appears to be the same Author, viz. Mr. Pittis. This so evidently proves the Practice above of Mr. Curl, and his Associates, Writing for and against, that no Men can be so wilfully Obstinate, as not to be convinced.10

Pittis himself answered these allegations against ‘such little Animals as Curl and his Hacks’ in Queen Anne Vindicated, pointing out caustically that this kind of accusation was rich, coming from Defoe. Pittis insisted that Defoe was the author of both ‘Secret History’ pamphlets; he denied his own authorship of what Defoe had attributed to him, and he also absolved Curll of any involvement, ‘tho’ I have no Business to Vindicate any Thing done by Him’. But Defoe had a point, for on 3 December 1714 Pittis had given a recognizance of £200, and Curll had stood surety of £100 for him, for a forthcoming case in King’s Bench.11 This clash prepared the way for a major spat in 1718, on this occasion nothing to do with the questions of copyright that normally disrupted Curll’s arrangements. The matter is slightly obscured by Memoirs of the Life and Eminent Conduct of the Learned and Reverend Divine, Daniel Williams, a substantial and knowledgeable biography of the respected Presbyterian minister, which was published by Curll in that year.12 After Defoe’s death, Curll attributed this to him, and the attribution is accepted by some scholars. Furbank and Owens, however, reject it, thus suggesting there was no publishing association between the two men. Additional evidence against a working relationship between Curll and Defoe would be strengthened by the fact that Memoirs of Publick Transactions in the Life and Ministry of his Grace the D. of Shrewsbury, long attributed to Defoe,

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denounced hack biographers and the writers of ‘Secret Histories’ in a manner which looks like an attack on Curll. But Furbank and Owens have rejected this work as well.13 There is less doubt about what happens next, for Curll now began his flamboyant series of works on the wider spectrum of sexual orientation, mentioned in the last chapter. On 6 February Curll published Eunuchism Display’d. Describing all the Different Sorts of Eunuchs, translated by a new figure on the Curll scene, Robert Samber, from the Trait´e des Eunuques of Charles Ancillon. The original author was a Huguenot lawyer working in Prussia, writing under the pseudonym C. d’Ollincan, and Samber is not much less obscure. He was a Freemason, probably (like Desaguliers) a member of the Grand Lodge founded in London in 1717; and he became a significant contributor to Curll’s increasingly dangerous list over the next few years.14 Eunuchism Display’d earned him ten guineas. On the title page are ‘displayed’ two somewhat opposed aspects of the publication. The book is said to be ‘Occasion’d by a young Lady’s falling in Love with Nicolini, who sung in the Opera at the Hay-Market, and to whom she had like to have been Married’, which by naming the most prominent of the fashionable castrati opera singers gives a prurient contemporary slant to the material. At the same time the work is also ‘confirm’d by the Authority of Civil, Canon, and Common Law, and illustrated with many remarkable Cases by way of Precedent’, giving it the aura of a research project. In other words, it is a mixed bag: the author uses Latin in explicit descriptions to avoid shocking the ladies (p. xi), and the cast of the book is historical; but it is insistently and at all times preoccupied with sexual function. A month later came Onanism Display’d, Curll’s bid to cash in on the popularity of a famous admonitory work, Onania: or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (1710), which reached its nineteenth edition before mid-century. This has recently been ascribed to none other than Curll’s John Marten, and the fourth edition of it (1718) was co-published by his old sponsor John Isted.15 Onanism Display’d naturally presented itself as a work of righteous indignation, partly at the sin and partly at the excesses of its competitor, while allowing for wide latitude in prurient speculation. Straus (250) declares that the translator was ‘almost certainly’ Samber again, but this can be no more than an educated guess. These books provoked an attack by Defoe on what he called ‘Curlicism’ in Mist’s Weekly Journal for 5 April 1718. Defoe contended that the age that appeared to pride itself on modesty and the reformation of manners, was ‘running into the highest Extream of the worst Part of verbal Lewdness, which, for want of a more extensive Word, I call printed Bestiality’. Though Rochester and Chaucer were, Defoe argues, forgotten on account of their bawdy talk (Curll published both of them), this was not enough: ‘Whither will the lewd Writers, and lewder Booksellers, of this Day lead the People, and what numerous odious Things will our Children find in the Libraries of their Fathers?’ In a Puritan frenzy, Defoe exclaimed:

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. . . O Mist . . . hast thou ever heard among the Roll of Sodom, crimes of the Sin of C? Know then, this is the Sodomy of the Pen; ’tis writing beastly Stories, and then propagating them by Print, and filling the Families, and the Studies of our Youth, with Books which no Christian Government that I have read of, ever permitted. The Cry of the Sins of Sodom reach’d up to Heaven, yet they had not printed Bestiality among them, that we read of; but we have outdone Gomorrah, and all the Cities of Europe may be Challeng’d to match us in this Particular.

One bookseller in particular stood out: There is indeed but one Bookseller eminent among us for this Abomination; and from him, the Crime takes the just Denomination of Curlicism: The Fellow is a contemptible Wretch a thousand Ways: he is odious in his Person, scandalous in his Fame, he is mark’d by Nature, for he has a bawdy Countenance, and a debauch’d Mein, his Tongue is an Echo of all the beastly Language his Shop is fill’d with, and Filthiness drivels in the very Tone of his Voice.

Defoe wondered how ‘this Manufacturer of Sodomy’ could be permitted to promulgate his ‘abominable Catalogue’; how could the Stamp Office take its 12 pence ‘for the Advertisement of his infamous Books, publishing the continual Encrease of lewd, abominable Pieces of Bawdy, such as none can read, even in Miniature, (for such is an Advertisement to a Book)’? In a Word, Mist, record it for Posterity to wonder at, that in four Years past, of the Blessed Days we live in, and wherein Justice and Liberty are flourishing and established, more beastly unsufferable Books have been published by this one Offender, than in thirty years before by all the Nation; and not a Man, Clergyman or other, has yet thought it worth his while to demand Justice of the Government against the Crime of it, or so much as to caution the Age against the Mischief of it.16

One week later, a further piece, also ascribed (with less obvious justification) to Defoe, was published in the same journal. This is altogether more muted, subtle, and back-handed, and begins as a reproach to Mist for attacking Curll alone: why must so much stress be laid upon the poor Bookseller, whose Trade it is to publish Books of all kinds, and not one Word said upon the scandalous Authors, Writers, and Compilers of those Books? The Bookseller is no more concern’d than to sell the Books, as Books, and perhaps may never so much as read them; nor is it his business to read the Books he publishes, or to make himself Judge of them.

Curll is not necessarily absolved, however, for the piece goes on to attack other crimes of publishing, such as ‘feigned Stories, the Romances, the Secret Histories’ and so on, ‘in which we have been made to take the Characters and Histories of Persons of the best Quality from the Inventions of Men, nay, and sometimes of Women too, who have by that means vented all manner of Forgery, Slander, and Falsehood’. If booksellers would only put authors’s names on books, ‘all the Scandal removes from the Bookseller, and lies upon the Person who wrote it; then it will be no more Curlicism, but Any-thing-else-ism’. In a postscript which lowers the aim of the attack, the writer suggests:

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There is only one Thing to be wish’d, viz., that all Booksellers who sell stinking books, such as Blasphemous, Bawdy, Lying, Treasonable Books, should like the Tom—men be obliged to open Shop only by Night, and then I doubt there would be very few Booksellers to deal with by Daylight.17

Curll ignored this, and largely confined his response to the first assault. About the end of May Curll published another volume in his series, a translation by George Sewell of De Flagrorum Usu in Re Medica et Venerea, compiled by Johann Heinrich Meibom in 1643. Curll’s title page does not stint on detail: A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Veneral Affairs: also of the Office of the Loins and Reins. Written to the Famous Christianus Cassius, Bishop of Lubeck, and Privy-Councillor to the Duke of Holstein. By John Henry Meibomius, M.D. Made English from the Latin Original by a Physician. To which is added, A Treatise of Hermaphrodites.18 Authority is typically made to consort with prurience. In order to gain the moral high ground, and advertise a possible future book, Curll drew on a recent scandal in which the writer Peter Anthony Motteux had come to grief during an ill-fated sexual experiment: I am here tempted to say something of a more dangerous and modern Improvement on the Art of Lewdness, and of which I know one or two remarkable Histories, and perhaps, when I have finished the Physical Reasons of its Effects, the World may see them Published. In the mean Time the Hanging Lechers are desired to observe, that their Practice is no Secret, and that it is known that some of them have lately had very narrow Escapes in the Experiment, and instead of contributing toward the Propagation of their Species, have gone near to have destroy’d it. A late unaccountable Secret of Murder tends very much this Way, and some others.19

As he put it more bluntly after the book had caused him so much trouble, the work was issued ‘on Occasion of the untimely Death of Mr. Peter Motteaux (who lost his Life in a Brothel through an Act of unnatural Lewdness). No Objection was made to it in Eight Years Time, nor was it published with the least immoral Intent’.20 Sewell was the anonymous ‘physician’ who translated the book and (presumably) supplied the Preface, which gained a certain contemporary urgency from the Motteux case. He contrived to mount a prophylactic defence of ‘Books which treat upon Subjects of this curious Nature, being as liable to the Censure of the Injudicious, as to the Praise and Admiration of the truly knowing’. Anyone concentrating more on the ‘curious frontispiece’, depicting erotic flagellation in full swing, than on the scientific content had only themselves to blame: ‘In Fact it is true, the Fault is not in the Subject Matter, but the Inclination of the Reader, that makes these Pieces offensive’—a defence later used by Defoe himself in the preface to Roxana. The book garnered more medical kudos with which to gloss the sado-masochistic content by including a ‘Letter from Thomas Bartholin, on the medicinal use of rods’.21 As the title page noted, an additional item (one possibly available separately) was Tractatus de Hermaphroditis: or, A Treatise of

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Hermaphrodites, in which the translator and editor Giles Jacob, a prolific figure to whom we shall turn shortly, addressed the kinds of issue Defoe had raised, and hit back at his own practice: I shall make no Apology for my Subject, notwithstanding an impudent Libeller has endeavour’d to load Authors and Publishers of Works of this Nature with the utmost Infamy; and herein I admire at the Front of the Fellow, to pretend to Chastise others for Writing only, when he practises a great deal more Iniquity than any Book extant can prompt him to, every Day that comes over his Head. (i–ii).

Arguing that the study of modern sexual behaviour was a kind of duty, and would not encourage deviance so much as raise awareness of it, the book proceeded with its dutiful scientific comment. But much of the material is not only explicitly sexual but borderline pornography, cast in the form of romance tales, anecdotal and voyeuristic narratives of lesbian adventures with a sprinkling of cross-dressing and sex toys (not to mention a song on Sapphic pleasures ascribed to Rowe). Meanwhile Curll himself steamed ahead: Eunuchism Display’d and Onanism Display’d, together with the old Cases of Impotency and Divorce, were all heavily co-advertised on title pages and in the newspapers as a sort of ongoing library of sexual deviance.22 In Curlicism Display’d (dated 26 May 1718, published 31 May), Curll laughed at Defoe’s ‘formal gravity’, thanking him for the free publicity and the excellent new promotional label. Moreover, ‘Curlicism’ had been going on a lot longer than Defoe seems aware of: ‘Your super-annuated Letter-Writer was never more out, than when he asserted, that C was but of Four Years standing. . . . I do sincerely assure you, Mr. Mist, that C (since it must be so call’d) dates its Original from that ever memorable Æra of the Reign of the first Monarch of the S Race’ (p. 2). The first book Defoe thinks the bishops ought to have complained about is Lord Essex’s divorce case; but the report that Curll had reprinted in one of the impotency volumes was, he declares, drawn up by Dr. George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Moreover, reassuringly, ‘the abovemention’d Case engag’d the Politicks of the greatest Statesmen, and the Casuistry of a Monarch himself ’ (p. 3). Curll then reprinted some of the spicier details to point out just how readable the book was. He then gave details of some of the other Cases of Impotency and Divorce (in effect, transcribing their title pages) and compared them with the cases of conscience Defoe compiled for Mist’s Weekly Journal. As for Eunuchism Display’d, Curll was equally unrepentant, given the prominence of castrati in the English aristocratic cultural favourite, opera. In a triumphant display of disingenuity, Curll protested that Bawdy Books, since they treat only of Matters of the greatest Importance to Society, conduce to the mutual Happiness of the Nuptial State and are directly calculated for Antidotes against Debauchery and unnatural Lewdness, and not for Incentives to them. For which Reasons I shall not desist from printing such B, when any Occasion offers,

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nor am I either concern’d or asham’d to have them distinguish’d by the facetious Name of C. (p. 26)

Curll was entirely brazen about it. He would not have replied at all, ‘had not an Opportunity thereby offer’d it self to me of publishing to the World the Contents at large of these several P, which have of late been so severely inveigh’d against’ by one who had ‘never read a Syllable in either of them beyond the Title Page’ (p. 27). He did also point out that the majority of his list consisted of works of history, divinity, antiquities, or poetry, however. A final flourish had other consequences. Picking up Defoe’s habit of inventing ‘isms’, Curll accused him of ‘M and P’ and wheeled the attack round to the politics of Mist’s journal, which Curll (like many others, and with good reason) denounced as Jacobite. Addressing Mist directly, Curll claimed: ‘you publickly declar’d, in my Presence, before several Witnesses, (who will attest it upon Oath) that the first Letter against me was inserted designedly to reflect on His M under my C’ (p. 29). This at least caused Defoe some uneasiness, and he wrote to his contact in the ministry, Charles Delafaye (later one of Curll’s interrogators), on 4 June 1718: Here has been a Very Barbarous attempt made by Curl the Bookseller upon Mr Mist (Viz) to Trepann him into Words Against the Governmt with a Design to Inform against him; I think Mist has Escaped him but if he brings it into your office I shall Lay a Clear state of the Matter before you. I kno’ the Government is Sufficient to it self for punishing Offendors, and is Above Employing Trepanns to Draw men into offences On Purpose to Resent them.23

Defoe, writing for Tory journals like Mist’s on the instructions of his Whig paymasters, perhaps surmised that Curll was looking for opportunities to act as a government informer, though the first actual evidence for his so doing does not emerge for another few years. At any rate, Mist had his own solution to the matter, at least according to two letters purporting to be from Mist and printed with ironic flourish in Read’s Weekly Journal of 14 June 1718. The first requires Curll to retract by advertisement the accusation of sedition. The second issued a full challenge: I have heard you have offered to meet me at Sword and Pistol. Be assur’d I won’t be trifled with. I have been inform’d of your Insolencies in a certain Company this Afternoon. I’ll be at Six to-morrow Morning on the Bridge, the lower end of Ludgate-hill, at Fleet-ditch.

Read’s Journal was sceptical of Mist’s courage (and his spelling), and sniggered: this fighting un-com-at-able Fellow N. Mist, had so great Presence of Mind as to appoint the Tryal of Skill he intended in such a publick Place, as he thought some good Christian or other would stept [sic] in to prevent Blood-shed; but for fear of the worst he took a wiser way, for he went to the Chapter Coffee-House in St. Paul’s, and about 10 that same Morning was found there fast asleep.24

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Mist then printed two further letters, one (Weekly Journal, 19 July 1718) accusing himself of moral rather than physical cowardice in failing to pursue the campaign against Curll, and one (30 August) praising his campaign against ‘that Monster of unclean Things, who you have so often, so justly, and so victoriously exposed for Curlicism, I mean the Bookseller with a bawdy Countenance, near Temple-Bar’. This writer also disputed Curll’s allegiances and questioned his annoying habit of ‘insinuating as if no Body should have the Privilege of publishing Bawdy or Blasphemy, but they that were for King George; or as if being on King George’s Side gave the Authority to write against God and good Manners’. Curll had thus made one more enemy in Mist, who continued to keep an eye on Curll’s activities and was to have his moments of triumph over Curll in the coming decade. The fallout from the affair was complex. Scholars disagree about whether the spat was genuine or a put-up job, designed to garner publicity for both men.25 If the latter (and it looks too genuinely acrimonious for that), any deal they struck did not last long: Charles Gildon’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D De F , of London, Hosier (1719), one of the most virulent and effective attacks on Defoe’s success with Robinson Crusoe was also, apparently, a Curll book, though it appeared ‘for J. Roberts’. Taking the line that Defoe was his own most amazing hero, Gildon ridicules Defoe’s vanity, cowardice, superstition, religious enthusiasm, and tendency to get into debt. Crusoe becomes a spiritual autobiography for a supreme shape-shifter: ‘The Fabulous Proteus of the Ancient Mythologist was but a very faint Type of our Hero, whose changes are much more numerous and he far more difficult to be constrain’d to his own Shape’ (iii–iv). In a ‘Dialogue’ between Defoe, Crusoe, and Friday, Defoe is forced to defend himself against several charges of inconsistency, absurdity, and literary prostitution; finally they toss him in a blanket (an interesting choice, given Curll’s recent experience). Defoe hit back, somewhat weakly, in the Commentator of 14 March 1720, where journalists with no war to write about were advised to follow ‘honest Curl’, and ‘transcribe last Wills and Testaments from Doctor’s-Commons’. The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell, another substantial and interesting work (it contains the earliest known illustrated alphabet of the modern-style two-handed sign-language for the deaf), long attributed to Defoe, was published by Curll and others in 1720. However, this book has also been rejected by Furbank and Owens, and so it cannot be used as evidence of conspiracy between author and bookseller.26 Whatever the effects of Defoe’s assault on Curll’s reputation, the row with a potential author was unfortunate in other ways, since Defoe was just about to hit his true vein as a writer, and Curll missed out on it. At this point he continued to have a number of occasional partners for particular books, and some of these, such as Thomas Edlin, did rather better out of Defoe. Mears, who shared eleven imprints with Curll, mainly between 1720 and 1724, was one of the publishers of Defoe’s Tour; Curll was not. He also missed out on Defoe’s Moll Flanders

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and Colonel Jack, published by William Chetwood, an occasional associate of Curll’s around 1719–1720 who also managed to pick up Eliza Haywood’s early hit Love in Excess (1719).27 Curll did not get Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1721).28 But most annoying must have been William Taylor, who appeared with Curll in 24 imprints over the period 1712–24, and who raked in huge sums with the publication of Robinson Crusoe, without Curll, in 1719. Perhaps Gildon’s riposte to Crusoe had an element of sour grapes in it for Curll too: apart from the disturbing work by Jane Barker, Curll’s fiction list consisted largely of bright but short-lived successes. A case in point was the publication of two novels by ‘a young lady,’ identified as M.H. and normally now named as Mary Hearne, who (if she existed) produced within a few months The Lover’s Week or the six Days Adventures of Philander and Amaryllis and then a sequel, The Female Deserters: or, the Amours of Some Ladies of Quality (with Roberts alone listed on the title-page).29 If the eruptions over ‘Curlicism’ had been a mere publicity stunt, Curll’s career, and the history of the early novel, might have been rather different. THE POETICAL REGISTER Curll’s relations with some of his existing authors were also by now beginning to fray, though less spectacularly than in the case of Defoe. John Ozell continued to translate for Curll, producing for example a work by a near-contemporary of Cervantes, named Alonso de Castillo Sol´orzano, The Spanish Pole-Cat: or, The Adventures of Siniora Rufina (1717). There was also Rapin’s An Historical Dissertation upon Whig and Tory (1717), F´enelon’s Reflections on Learning (1718) and a French pantomime, The Fair of St Germains (late 1718). Ozell’s translation of F´enelon’s Telemachus was reprinted, with large quotations from Ozell’s Preface appearing prominently in the advertisements (a new twist to Curll’s techniques).30 But by the end of 1718 Ozell had had enough of Curll’s use of his words: ‘his Quack way of inserting them in the Papers under my Name, was not only without my Privity at first, but afterwards contrary to many repeated Promises on his side to forbear it’.31 Curll’s reply was as usual forthright: Ozell ‘is desired to take Notice, that I shall always make use of his Name in the most advantageous Manner I can, to promote the Sale of what Books I have printed for him’.32 Ozell apparently did not translate F´enelon’s Private Thoughts on Religion (1719), for the dedication to Sir Berkeley Lucy is signed by J. Delacoste.33 But the third edition of Telemachus (1720) duly carried Ozell’s name in a prominent position, and Curll was involved with others in putting out a historical work by the Abb´e de Vertot translated by Ozell in 1720.34 He and Curll were sufficiently reconciled for Ozell to translate F´enelon’s Treatise upon the Usefulness of Eloquence (1721), itself involved in noisy rivalry with an alternative edition published by Walthoe. But this seems to mark the end of

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their relationship, and Ozell’s later translations appeared for other publishers, including Lintot and Tonson.35 Another writer increasingly at odds with his publisher was the formerly reliable George Sewell. Apart from his role in the Treatise of Flogging, he fronted the version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses put out by Curll in 1717, and published some obsequious Verses to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales. Occasioned by the Death of the Young Prince through Curll in 1718. Curll and Pemberton combined to put out his Poems on Several Occasions (1719), which included much Sewell material from Curll’s backlist. In the Preface, Sewell grumpily confesses that he has been ‘a sad Offender in the Way of Writing’, and takes this occasion to sort out his genuine works against the machinations of booksellers, in a way reminiscent of Pope’s gesture in his 1717 Works. On booksellers, Sewell writes: These Gentlemen transfer Fame, as some People do Stocks, without a Penny of Money in their Pockets . . . All reasonable Men . . . will think it very strange, that one Fellow may lose his Life for making that poor Jest of forging Hands, and another get an unpunishable Sum of Money by forging Names.36

This looks like a hit at Curll, for Sewell goes on to say that the reader ‘will easily perceive, that it was not my Choice to be drawn into the Press in this Manner; but when I knew it would be done, I was forc’d to make the best Apology I could’ (p. vi). There was no getting round Curll, for he would publish with or without approval; Sewell was thus manoeuvred—conceivably not as reluctantly as he claims—into cooperation. Other authors always lurked in the offing: while writers doing work for Curll never quite formed a team, there was considerable interplay between them. Amongst Sewell’s poems we find a commendatory letter to Major Richardson Pack, a new acquisition of Curll’s. Pack (1682–1728) was a soldier, but had studied at Oxford and qualified as a barrister, and had enough of a classical education to be able to turn out light verses and translations for his own amusement. Curll quickly became his default publisher. His Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1718) consisted largely of epistles to army colleagues and patrons, such as the Duke of Argyll, to whom he owed his promotion, and translations from Latin poetry, with some prose essays. A second edition (1719) added Pack’s prologue to Sewell’s Sir Walter Ralegh and ‘Some Memoirs of William Wycherley’. Pack’s translation of Cornelius Nepos, The Life of T. P. Atticus, laced with heavy innuendo about contemporary party politics, appeared late in 1718 with a commendatory poem by Newcomb. A further slight collection was issued in 1720.37 To some extent, Curll could thus afford to quarrel with Ozell and Sewell, since in effect he carried on publishing them anyway, and writers were not in short supply. He was adept at getting his authors to be flexible, and to produce not only original work, but translations, and commendatory pieces for other

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authors. Thomas Foxton (1697–1769) is a typically obscure but versatile writer, remembered today, if at all, for his collection of Moral Songs Composed for the Use of Children (1728), an early example of juvenile literature. That work was not published by Curll, but the bookseller was certainly Foxton’s main source of income for some years. The Twickenham editor points out that he received only one guinea, plus ‘several books’ for a poem called The Tower (1726), but his translations such as Laus Ululæ (1726), for which Curll gave him £3, earned a better remuneration.38 The work most frequently reprinted was Jesina, or, Delusive Gold. A Pastoral, lamenting the Misfortunes of a Young Lady of Quality, ruined by South-Sea Stock, used as a filler in Curll’s miscellaneous volumes several times. He also provided translations from Latin of the work of Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charterhouse (see p. 206). Foxton provided Curll with a number of poems, but he also translated Robert Bellarmine’s The Joys of the Blessed for £5 10s. (1721)39 Similarly, Charles Beckingham’s second play, The Tragedy of Henry IV of France, performed in 1719, was signed up by Curll and published late that year with a Whiggish dedication to the Earl of Sunderland and an epilogue by Sewell; but he included in the bargain a translation of Rapin’s Christus Patiens: or, the Sufferings of Christ. An Heroic Poem (published in 1720 with a dedication to the Archbishop of York).40 Other work for Curll followed, and Beckingham was at one point living in Curll’s house, at least according to an informer who accused Beckingham of ‘being disposed, if not employed in some dangerous designs, against the happiness the Nation at present enjoys’.41 Not all these authors stayed: Beckingham’s late poems (he died in 1731) were of a Curllian Whig disposition, but were all produced for other publishers. Another arrival, and departure, was performed by Nicholas Amhurst (1697–1742), an altogether more controversial figure. In 1717 Curll published Amhurst’s An Epistle from a Student at Oxford, to the Chevalier, an account of Jacobite manoeuvrings, and A Congratulatory Epistle to the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq, on Addison’s promotion to Secretary of State. Amhurst was the readiest Curll author for the Bangorian controversy, initiated when Benjamin Hoadly, the Whig Bishop of Bangor suggested in a sermon (on the theme ‘The Kingdom of Christ is not of this World’) that the Church was in effect subject to state control. This set alarm bells ringing in High Church circles, and something of the fervour of the Sacheverell crisis of 1710 was revived in pamphlet controversy, though the government dissolved Convocation before any effective censure of Hoadly could be passed. Amhurst and Curll weighed in on Hoadly’s side by attacking the antics of his enemies in Protestant Popery; or, The Convocation. A Poem (1718). This was one of the things that had upset Sewell, who found himself accused of having written it. In the Post Boy of 17 May 1718 he declared that he had had nothing to do with its ‘Scurrility and Nonsense’; he was further irritated by the ‘many very trifling and silly Things [that] have been charged to my Account’. Apparently Sewell had already left

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an earlier advertisement, repudiating the poem, with Curll, who had failed to publish it, perhaps sensing that the ascription to Sewell would do no harm. A sequence of mollifying advertisements was placed in The Evening Post, supplying the thrifty Curll with the substance of a postscript to A Congratulatory Epistle from his Holiness the Pope, to the Reverend Dr. Snape (1718), in which Amhurst labelled Snape a closet Jesuit and Jacobite, alongside the rest of the High Church party. Amhurst’s The Protestant Session followed in 1719. Shortly after this he was expelled from Oxford, allegedly for licentiousness but quite possibly because of his outspoken Whig politics within the Tory enclave. This event no doubt prompted Curll to stitch together his Amhurst portfolio under the title Political Poems . . . Written by a Student at Oxford. On his arrival in London to pursue literature, however, Amhurst instead joined Curll’s occasional partner Richard Francklin, with whom he set up the opposition journal The Craftsman in 1726.42 Another migrant was Richard Savage, supposed illegitimate son of Earl Rivers and to later generations an incorrigible hack author, who came to public attention with his comedy Love in a Veil, performed at Drury Lane in 1718 and published that year by Curll, Francklin and Chetwood. Curll was at this point still actively promoting new drama, though he did not acquire any further playwrights of Centlivre’s abilities.43 With Richard Francklin he published single plays by Charles Molloy (The Coquet, 1718) and George Farquhar (The StageCoach, 1718).44 With other publishers, including Bettesworth and Jauncy, Curll brought out two plays by John Leigh, Kensington Gardens (which includes a small mention of Curll in the play-text) and Hob’s Wedding. He also advertised Gildon and Dennis’s New Project for the Regeneration of the Stage.45 Savage looked like another possible successful dramatist for the list. His parentage was prominently displayed on the title page of Love in a Veil and the text was dedicated to Lord Lansdowne, earlier the dedicatee of Pope’s Windsor-Forest.46 The play brought Savage to the notice of Richard Steele, who supported him for a while, until they quarrelled. Savage later sent Elizabeth Carter a copy of an anonymous Life of Mr. Richard Savage (perhaps by Beckingham, 1727), which referred to the breach, and told her: ‘That there was a slander raised against me, which lasted a long while, is truth, and the worthy Mr. Curll, the bookseller, was the person who raised it; but we were afterwards reconciled, he being fully convinced of my innocence.’47 The story claimed that Savage had performed a ludicrous imitation of Steele’s manner in front of Curll, who had put about an increasingly elaborate story about Savage’s injustice towards his benefactor. It is hard to see what Curll would have had to gain from stirring up trouble in this manner, and he had not been able to acquire much of a hold on Steele, apart from the Fires Improved episode.48 But at any rate, Savage published nothing else with Curll, and he became one of Pope’s agents against Curll in later years. As we shall see (Chapter 10, below) his pamphlet An Author to be Lett (1729) is especially concerned with Curllian tactics.

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S I G N O R C U R I L LO An advertisement for Conyers Place’s Priestianity, issued over the classic Grub Street imprint of ‘A. Moore’, has an obscure postscript reading ‘The Author of the S is desired to read and censure this Piece, otherwise his Master Signor Curillo will turn him off’. The exact point of this is unknown, but it might suggest that Curll was viewed as a hard taskmaster, a kind of foreman in the factory of Grub Street.49 Certainly Curll regularly associated with a group of miscellaneous writers whose work tended to mutual advantage: one praised another, who wrote an epilogue for a third, who wrote a preface for the first, and so on. They wrote their own poems and plays, but prologues for each other; they translated on occasion. Sewell’s Poems on Several Occasions contains work of this kind in relation to Addison, Barker, Montagu, Centlivre, and Pack, most of it previously published alongside work by the authors it commends. But this group was not fixed by any sort of long-term contract, and was clearly not without its tensions and disgruntlements. It is also doubtful that Curll would have envisaged this group, now so obviously second-rate, as fundamentally more under his control (and thus essentially ‘lower’) than those writers, now thought of as canonical, who by and large had little contractual obligation to him. He was aiming for the largest possible share of the literary market, and he had ways of dissolving putative boundaries between ‘Curll authors’ and the rest. Around 1717 Curll began publishing another new author, Giles Jacob (1686–1744). Jacob opened his Curll account with some Essays, Relating to the Conduct of Life (1717), but he had trained as a lawyer, and another early book for Curll was a substantial professional compilation, Lex Mercatoria: or, The Merchant’s Companion (1718). A comprehensive manual, with model documents, this was dedicated to the Earl of Berkeley, as first commissioner for executing the office of Lord High Admiral of Great Britain. The chance to commiserate with the Earl on the death of his wife (as in Newcomb’s poem, mentioned earlier) was not missed. Jacob also provided the translation of the Tractatus de Hermaphroditis. But his most famous production was as editor of The Poetical Register, or the Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets. The first volume, again dedicated to Lord Lansdowne, was published late in 1718 (dated 1719). You could buy it on ‘Royal Paper’ for double the price, and Curll had gone to the expense of providing vignettes of classic authors (Chaucer, Milton, Butler, Cowley, and Waller) and plates of Addison, Betterton, Congreve, and Rowe, all authors Curll had published. The contents also seem to have a Curll slant, since alongside entries on Addison, Congreve, Dryden, Gay, Rowe, Shakespeare, and Steele, we have Centlivre, Dennis, Dogget, Gildon, Manley, Motteux, Oldmixon, Ozell, and Theobald. Among the modern dramatic poets stand Beckingham, Bullock, Breval, ‘Joseph Gay’, Knipe, Molloy, and ‘John

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Philips’, all Curll authors or pseudo-authors.50 Major Pack’s ‘Some Memoirs of William Wycherley’ is also reprinted. A second volume, An Historical Account of the Lives and Writings of our most considerable English Poets, dedicated to Pope’s friend the Duke of Buckinghamshire, appeared in 1720, with plates of Philips, Pope, Prior, and the dedicatee, as well as Creech and Croxall. More early authors were included (Butler, Chapman, Donne, Marvell, Spenser), as well as more contemporary ones: Atterbury was in, as were Blackmore, Cobb, Maynwaring, Halifax, Newcomb, Sewell, Smalridge, Swift, Theobald, Tickell, Young, Amhurst, and Hammond. Even Henry Sacheverell got a mention for his role in Holdsworth’s Muscipula, one of Curll’s legitimate prizes. It made up a kind of network, a directory of available writers, almost a showcase, and clearly some writers were allowed more or less to dictate their entry. The article on the young Savage in the first volume is highly complimentary: after recounting in public for the first time his supposed parentage and lamentable childhood, the compiler observes, ‘Under all these Misfortunes, this Gentleman having a Genius for Dramatick Studies, gave us Two Plays between the Age of Nineteen and Twenty-One.’51 The Curll slant is more evident in the second volume: the entry on Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, reminds us that ‘A Correct, and Beautiful Edition of the Works of this Celebrated Nobleman, was re-printed by Mr. Curll, in the Year 1717’ (p. 79); Major Pack’s works, ‘tho’ very lately Printed . . . have already sold two Impressions’ (p. 130). Two successive entries commend a collection of verse ‘just now’ prepared by ‘the Ingenious Mr. Hammond ’ (pp. 326–7). Decoded, this means that Curll had recently published A New Miscellany. In some ways it is not very different from reading a catalogue of Curll’s literary stock: he had an ‘interest’ in everyone. D E AT H O F T H E AU T H O R Curll had supplementary ways of dissolving the putative distinction between elite and ordinary writers. In Ten New Poems (31 January 1721), for example, the openly erotic The Pleasures of Coition, translated from the Latin of Bonnefons, consorted with a tasteful poem about melancholy, a ludicrous poem about a teapot, ‘Abelard to Eloisa’ (ascribed to Beckingham), ‘The Fair Vestal’ (Addison), ‘The Power of Music’ (Thomas Parnell), and four other miscellaneous poems. Another Bonnefons selection, Pancharis, Queen of Love (27 March 1721) put the ‘Art of Kissing’ alongside poems ascribed to Parnell, Foxton, Beckingham, and John Philips. Cupid’s Bee-Hive (21 April 1721), the third Bonnefons instalment, continued to refuse to accept Defoe’s distinction between pornography and literature, or between high and low authors. Dead authors especially were a godsend to Curll in this respect, and Curll gratefully went on reprinting poems by authors who could no longer protest. Several writers worth Curll’s attention died around this time, including Parnell, Addison, and Nicholas Rowe, the poet

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laureate. Parnell died at Chester in October 1718 and Curll was relatively slow off the mark, not advertising his own edition of Parnell until the point where Pope was known to be editing the poems for Lintot to publish late in 1721.52 The items by Parnell that Curll included in these collections have not entered the main canon of literature, but Parnell’s scrupulous editors were forced to admit that ‘there seems no reason to doubt the attribution’.53 A second edition of Pancharis came out in January 1722, while some of these poems reappeared in collections such as The Altar of Love in subsequent years. Yet one more gleaning appeared as ‘A Riddle’ in the second volume of Curll’s Miscellanea in 1727. No evidence has turned up to show how Curll got hold of these materials, although his source may well have been in Ireland. Pope can hardly have welcomed the appearance of works excluded from his collection in such dubious company. Curll moved faster with Rowe, who died on 6 December 1718. Curll got Beckingham to edit Musarum Lachrymae: or Poems to the Memory of Nicholas Rowe, Esq., with elegies by Beckingham, Amhurst, Centlivre, and Newcomb, and memoirs by ‘S. Hales’, just possibly meaning Pope’s friend, the scientist and clergyman Stephen Hales (more likely, an attempt to implicate him). This appeared in January 1719, with an ‘exact Catalogue’ of Rowe’s works, all available from Curll, who reissued Rowe’s Poems at the same time.54 Curll then made some sort of deal with Tonson and twelve other booksellers to issue The Poetical Works of Nicholas Rowe, Esq; Late Servant to His Majesty in July 1720. The contents were mostly the familiar accumulations of Curll’s earlier editions, with the elegies from Musarum Lachrymae. Tonson contributed Rowe’s translation The Golden Verses of Pythagoras and some other pieces. Callipædia, now ascribed wholly to Rowe, was apparently issued at the same time for twelve of the booksellers, including Curll but not Tonson. The case of Joseph Addison shows even more clearly how Curll was able to mingle the talents of his immediate group of writers with the kudos of those who would not have considered themselves linked to him in any way. Curll had been getting Addison’s name on title pages since the success of Cato in 1713. Sewell’s Epistle to Addison on the death of Halifax appeared for Roberts in 1715 and in that year Curll republished Addison’s Guardian essay on ‘Error in Distributing Modern Medals’ as a supplement to The Knowledge of Medals, by a ‘Nobleman of France’ (Louis Jobert), so arranging the title page as to suggest Addison’s authorship of the whole. In this he also reprinted Le Clerc’s comments urging Addison to publish his study of the mystic meaning of reverses.55 Three editions, each slightly reset and revised, of Addison’s early Latin poem on the altarpiece at Magdalen College, Oxford, translated by Amhurst (The Resurrection) appeared in 1718, with compliments to Addison on his political role and other virtues.56 Curll went to the expense of engraving two different frontispiece illustrations of the altarpiece, evidently aiming for a high polish. The last edition contained an advertisement for Addison’s Dissertation upon the Roman Poets, which Curll published in February 1718.57 Two Poems appeared in May 1718, as a kind of

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taster for a proposed complete edition of the Latin poems; Addison’s early poems to Thomas Burnet and Dr Hannes on science and poetry were translated alongside Latin originals. The ever verbose Thomas Newcomb sent him a letter of mutual puffery, dated from University College, 13 April 1718, in which it is claimed that ‘Your Design of obliging the Public with a correct Edition of all Mr. A’s Latin Poems, and Translations of them, meets here with a general Approbation’. Newcomb’s name was to be concealed, but ‘I will be answerable to the World for the Justness of the Translation, and hitting the A’s Mind; omitting, I think, no Emphatical Beauty or Turn Mr. A has express’d in the Original’.58 Addison appears to have taken no notice whatsoever of these activities, though the translations were ‘apparently without authority’.59 He died on 17 June 1719, after a long illness, leaving the editorship of his works to Thomas Tickell. But Curll had already produced a Poems on Several Occasions on 20 March, consisting of eight translations by Newcomb and Sewell from Addison’s Latin juvenilia and the Dissertation upon the Roman Poets, translated by one ‘Christopher Hayes’. Curll’s various Addisoniana were advertised with a relentlessness bordering on the vindictive for the rest of the year. Addison’s name was dragged in to promote a poem Curll reprinted in late 1719, The Day of Judgment, by William Alexander, Earl of Sterling (died 1640).60 Curll then had Beckingham produce two anthologies of Maxims lifted from Addison’s essays in The Spectator, The Guardian, and The Freeholder. It was to have been one volume, but, Beckingham apologized, ‘The Hurry of the Bookseller (occasioned, as he tells me, by the pressing Demand of the Publick) has obliged me to divide this Collection into Two Parts’. The first part also contained, naturally, Addison’s will. Giles Jacob’s Memoirs of the life of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq derived most of its biographical information from the poems, but came complete with a dedication to Addison’s widow and a puff for the Latin poems. It appeared in August 1719. The clergyman poet Edward Cobden’s Poem on the Death of . . . Joseph Addison followed in January 1720. A translation by Newcomb of a Latin poem, Scating, originally ascribed to Philip Frowde but now transferred to Addison, appeared early in 1720. Throughout this process Curll claimed to be selling a six-volume edition of Addison’s Works, though this appears to be no more than an assemblage of his list of individual Addison items. He had not yet finished, either. Thomas Foxton’s The Character of a Fine Gentleman, incorporating five religious poems of Addison’s into its prose dialogue, came out early in 1721 (a different printing, under the title Serino, was issued by ‘T. Tonson’, perhaps in the same year). Foxton’s translation of Bellarmine’s The Joys of the Blessed (1722) also had an essay by Addison in it. Cupid’s Bee-hive (1721) appeared incongruously with ‘some original poems . . . by Mr. Addison’, and in November 1721 Curll put Addison’s Dissertation alongside Richardson Pack’s ‘Essay upon the Roman Elegiac Poets’ and added ‘An Essay upon Mr. Addison’s Writings. By R. Young, Esq’. In its way the series is a remarkable testimony to Curll’s publishing inventiveness.

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By this point Matthew Prior had also died, on 18 September 1721, but not before another brief tussle with Curll. A poem Upon Lady Katherine H-de’s first appearing ‘By M hP r, Esq’ was published by Graves and Chetwood, 8 April 1718, and then two days later by Curll as The Female Phaeton, ‘By Mr. Prior’ with an aggressive notice, ‘N. B. The copy, before publish’d, has not one Stanza printed right’. Over the next five years Curll reprinted the poem in a variety of contexts, ascribing it sometimes times to Prior, and sometimes to Pope’s friend Simon Harcourt (who died in 1720). A second poem, ‘The Judgment of Venus’, occupied a similar position.61 Prior’s own response was a poem, the ‘Answer to the Female Phaeton’; it was not published, though Pope apparently knew of it. Prior denied Curll’s ascription and jokingly likened Curll to an almoner seeking out the needy: So Thou Director Great of Wit Amongst Us Authors Rule’st the Roast Distributing as Thou think’st fit To those that seem to want the most. Thou did’st to Me a Bard half Starv’d A Plenteous Dole of Fame Provide And gav’st Me what I ne’er Deserv’d Something of Phaeton and Hyde. Prior pretends that Curll has in fact discovered his hidden love for the mother of the three sisters (‘How many Years Hid I the wound | Which forc’d by Curl I now Reveal!’), and then heaps gallant praise on them all. He concludes with a sort of mock deal. By adding to my fame Dear Curl, thou hast undone Me. Making me richer than I am Thou drawst My Creditors upon Me. From Blanket and from Physic free Thou long shal’t Live and We’ll be friends, Put out my Name and We’ll agree Make me at least this smal Amends. Then Curl for Mine and for Truths sake Thy righteous Printing Press employ, To prove I never did Mistake A Lady for a Boy. (57–68).

Within two months of Prior’s death, Curll published A Supplement to Mr. Prior’s Poems (November 1721), ‘Consisting of such Pieces as were (for Private Reasons) omitted in the Collection of his Works in his Life Time; and of others, now first published from the Original Manuscripts in the Custody of his Friends’. This derives in part from the sheets of his 1716 volume of Prior, though the two ‘Harcourt’ poems and one other new (genuine) poem were inserted. Shortly afterwards Curll reissued it as part of Some Memoirs of the Life and Public

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Employments of Matthew Prior, largely extracted from the account in Jacob’s Poetical Register.62 He also cashed in with elegies: Moses Browne’s Richmond Beauties, another barrow-load of royal toadying produced for Curll, included a poem on Prior’s death.63

D E S I R E O F LU C R E Swift was not completely neglected. Without much justification except their Dublin origins Curll ascribed to Swift two items, Ars Pun-ica (1719) and The Right of Precedence between Physicians and Civilians Enquir’d Into (1720).64 Swift’s response was a sort of calculated disbelief. Reverting to the idea that he might have got Curll into the pillory during the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign, he wrote to Charles Ford on 4 April 1720: I cannot help the usage which honest Mr Curl gives me; I watched for his Ears in the Queens time, and was I think once within an Inch of them. There is an honest humersom Gentleman here who amuses this Town sometimes with Trifles and some Knave or Fool transmitts them to Curl with a Hint that they are mine. There is one about Precedence of Doctors, we do not know who writt it; It is a very crude Piece, tho not quite so low as some others; This I hear is likewise a Present of Curl to me. I would go into any Scheam you please with Mr Congreve and Mr Pope and the rest, but cannot imagine a Remedy unless he be sent to Bridewell for Life.65

At some point in the year, he wrote a poem to Stella in which he degrades the character of the women supposedly celebrated in Curll’s tawdry verse anthologies, and by implication the anthologies themselves: Fair Chloe would perhaps be found With Footmen tippling under Ground, The charming Silvia beating Flax, Her Shoulders mark’d with bloody Tracks; Bright Phillis mending ragged Smocks, And radiant Iris in the Pox. These are the Goddesses enroll’d In Curll’s Collections, new and old, Whose Scoundrel Fathers would not know ’em, If they should meet ’em in a Poem.66

But Curll went merrily on. A Defence of English Commodities (July 1720) was an answer to Swift’s controversial Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, and soon after came The Swearer’s Bank (1721), a Swiftian conceit on the idea of forming an Irish bank by fining people for swearing, written in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble.67 These pieces were stitched together with (normally) Letters, Poems and Tales to form A Second Collection of Miscellanies Written by Jonathan Swift, D.D. (September 1720, issued by Roberts), then reprinted with a

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couple of extra pieces to form a volume of Miscellanies, Written by Jonathan Swift, ‘the fourth edition’, with an engraved portrait of Swift as frontispiece (1721). Some copies of this collection also have The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders, a pamphlet on the subject of farting ascribed to Swift, published by ‘A. Moore’ in 1722, perhaps at Curll’s instigation. In Curll’s mind such items belonged wherever he decided to put them.68 On the Pope front, Curll kept going with snippets and reprints. In February 1720, for example, some ‘Verses to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’ were ascribed to Pope.69 Anthony Hammond, Susanna Centlivre’s erstwhile protector, edited A New Miscellany of Original Poems, Translations and Imitations (Jauncy, 1720), with Pope, Prior, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Simon Harcourt as prominent on the title page as the usual suspects (Sewell, Amhurst and so on) were on the inside. Pretending to have become a mere country bumpkin, Pope wrote to Caryll in February 1720 that ‘I am infamously celebrated as an inoffensive unenvied writer, even by Curll himself’. But shortly after this he responded to the continuing annoyance to himself and Swift with a further spoof narrative against Curll, this time in the context of the widespread stock-market mania known to history as the South Sea Bubble. It bore an engagingly detailed title: A Strange but True Relation how Edmund Curll, of Fleetstreet, Stationer, Out of an Extraordinary Desire of Lucre, went into Change Alley, and was Converted from the Christian Religion by certain Eminent Jews: And how he was Circumcis’d and Initiated into their Mysteries. The pamphlet may have been published around April 1720.70 Opening the essay with a quotation on avarice from Blackmore’s Essays, which Curll had published, Pope gives a list of persons eminent for cupidity from Roman times, and then introduces his hero with mock solemnity: Who then can wonder after so many great and illustrious Examples that Mr. Edmund Curll the Stationer, should renounce the Christian Religion for the Mammon of Unrighteousness, and barter his precious Faith for the filthy Prospect of Lucre in the present Fluctuation of Stocks.

Some of Curll’s authors (‘who I fear are not over-charg’d with any Religion’) having observed to him ‘what immense Sums the Jews had got by Bubbles, &c. he immediately turned his Mind from the Business in which he was educated, but thrived little, and resolv’d to quit his Shop, for Change Alley’. Curll visits ‘the Jews at their Club’ and duly bargains his faith for the promise of financial reward. They now promis’d if he would poison his Wife and give up his Grisking, that he should marry the rich Ben Maymon’s only Daughter. This made some Impression on him. They then talk’d to him in the Hebrew Tongue, which he not understanding, it was observ’d had very great Weight with him.

Finally, Curll has to agree to circumcision. He arrives for the operation ‘unknown to his Wife’; on seeing the instruments he attempts to make a run for it, ‘but

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he was prevented by six Jews, who laid Hands upon him, and unbuttoning his Breeches threw him upon the Table, a pale pitiful Spectacle’. Having failed to persuade the Jews to remit the ceremony, he submits. The Savour of the Effluvia that issued from him, convinced the Old Levite and all his Assistants that he needed no present Purgation, wherefore without farther anointing him he proceeded in his Office; when by an unfortunate Jerk upward of the impatient Victim, he lost five times as much as ever Jew did before.

The Jews, ‘finding that he was too much circumcis’d’, throw him out and negate their contracts: and he now remains a most piteous, woful and miserable Sight at the Sign of the Old Testament and Dial in Fleet-street, his Wife, (poor Woman) is at this Hour lamenting over him, wringing her Hands and tearing her Hair; for the barbarous Jews still keep, and expose at Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, the Memorial of her Loss, and her Husband’s Indignity.

Pope characteristically catches some flavoursome details here—the coffee houses were places where dealing in stocks took place, and making Curll alter his ‘Dial and Bible’ sign to leave out the New Testament in preparation for his Jewish identity is a neat joke. But his main purpose as ever is to degrade Curll morally and physically into a castrated, impotent figure whose productions are excremental rather than seminal; in this it prefigures The Dunciad.71

7 Antiquities and Politics (1717–1722) The decade was to end with Curll busier than ever. At the same time as he was cajoling, threatening, sweet-talking and falling out with the writers mentioned in the last chapter, he was beginning to attract notice from the courts once again. Meanwhile his prestige series of antiquarian publications, under the editorship of Richard Rawlinson, began to unravel under the persistent attentions of Thomas Hearne. These slow-moving machinations, outside Curll’s control, represent alternately very public and very private aspects of the making of books. A N T I QU I T I E S Even in the world of print culture, reputation could spread by other means: word of mouth, letters, private communications of all kinds. Curll’s association with Rawlinson continued amicably, not only in the antiquarian series itself but also in topical works such as Rawlinson’s Full and Impartial Account of the Oxford-Riots (1715), notionally printed for L. Fleetwood but equipped with Curll advertisements. But meanwhile Thomas Hearne’s quietly obsessive vendetta against Curll’s antiquarian publishing slowly escalated. When Curll published Pittis’s life of John Radcliffe to protests from his executors (above, p. 72), Hearne industriously promoted rumours about it: Curle, who (as I have always told you) is a pitiful, sorry, scoundrel R . . . .ll, hath printed a Book which he calls Dr. Radcliffe’s Life. ’Tis full of idle, silly, ridiculous Stuff, & I am fully satisfied that all the Letters (except part of one to the duke of Beaufort), notwithstanding they are pretended to be printed from Originals, are spurious. Mr. Pittis, formerly of New-Coll. is said to be the Author of this scandalous Book. I am afraid unjustly. . . . Curle is an impudent Coxcombe, & deserves to be severely punished. I hope you will have nothing more to do with such a K..ve.1

Thomas Rawlinson appears to have been Hearne’s second in the matter, for Curll wrote to his brother Richard on 3 May 1715: ‘I am sorry your Brother should be so zealous in propagating a story without the least Ground, and w.ch upon the Publication of the [sec]ond Edition he must be oblig’d in Honour to recant from. I should have stopt this fallacious Report had I seen him, which I have not since the Book has been publish’d’.2 Other antiquaries became involved. Ralph

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Thoresby wrote to Hearne on 2 November 1715, admitting that he had forwarded letters of John Tillotson to Curll for his life of the Archbishop.3 Curll’s reprint of Woodward’s Letter, already discussed, was evidently still rankling, for Curll wrote to Hearne on 15 January 1717 to reiterate his original story, with some variants, and claimed that Woodward, commenting ‘that good Manners was hardly to be expected from a mere Scholar and a Pedant’ had personally ordered 200 small paper copies and 50 large paper. Scorning the ‘Scurrilous as well as false Reflections made upon me’, Curll asked Hearne for a public retraction, expecting that he would, ‘according to our good old Proverb, Lay the Saddle upon the right Horse’. He went on to protest, with wide-eyed innocence: ‘Consider Sr : that touching any Man’s Reputation, without a full proof of the Truth of what you assert, is the most barbarous Injustice. And my friends do assure me, that to this Letter, I shall receive from you an answer both becoming a Gentleman and a Scholar . . .’. The letter is annotated: ‘No answer return’d’.4 On 13 January 1717 Hearne wrote to Thomas Rawlinson, ‘Your Bro. Informs me yt they are going to reprint my Ld Surrey’s Poems. I hope they will not give us a Grub-Street Ed., such as Curl always puts out’.5 Curll’s edition of Surrey’s poems came out on 16 April; it was a reprint of Richard Tottell’s edition of Surrey’s Songes and Sonnettes (1567), done in old spelling with page references to the copy text—a version of diplomatic editing in ‘correct Antique dress’.6 This much was clearly Rawlinson’s work, though the addition of Pope’s ‘character’ of Surrey, from Windsor-Forest, was probably Curll’s idea. Hearne managed to miss Curll’s History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Rochester, which was edited by Richard Rawlinson, and which appeared about the same time. The History and Antiquities of the City and Cathedral-Church of Hereford, the preliminary negotiations for which exercised William Brome (Chapter 3, above) finally appeared for Curll and Gosling, but some copies of this appeared over the imprint of Gosling alone. As a result Hearne may not have realised it was Curll’s when Richard Rawlinson sent him a copy, acknowledged on 23 April 1717: ‘I suppose ’tis this Book yt Slyford complain’d of some time since to me. He said his Papers were mangled, and that he was very disingenuously dealt by. He desired them to be restored, but this was deny’d’. Hearne wrote sniffily to Rawlinson: a Gentleman, lately come from London, told me that he had it from a Bookseller that you and Mr . Le Neve published most of the things done by a certain Bookseller (who does not bear the best Reputation) in London. I told him I believ’d he was mistaken. He said he was assur’d so by the Bookseller, who, wth all, told him that you likewise published Erdeswick. You see how ready People are to divulge Stories. . . . He told me farther that the Bookseller said that this Book abt Hereford was done by Mr . Brome and Mr . Willis. It appears yt Mr . Willis had a great Hand in it. But I believe Mr . Brome will not own that himself had, tho’, perhaps, he might pro re nata communicate something, wch , however, will not intitle him to ye honour of a Compiler.7

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Curll had evidently been industriously dropping the names of the great and the good who had in any way been involved with his antiquarian publications, and Hearne was suspicious. The spat with Curll was threatening once more to engulf relations with fellow antiquaries, even those of a like political persuasion. Hearne, mistrusting everyone, wrote to Rawlinson again, on 21 May 1717: Mr . Willis deals disingenuously, if he says that I told him that you are the Editor of Hereford. I never said any such thing. I find that he is very angry because ’tis reported that he did what relates to the Bishops, & c. Slyford also disowns the book. . . . I must needs say, tho’ Mr . Willis disowns all but ye little Preface abt ye Missal of Hereford, that it is my opinion yt what relates to the Bps , &c., is his (Mr. Willis’s) own. . . . Hereafter, let him print himself, and take care you do not ingage your self unadvisedly.8

In July he was reporting the continuing fall-out from the Hereford volume; Willis and Sliford ‘lay the whole upon you’, he said, suspiciously.9 Despite his apparent vigilance, Hearne did not always notice potential targets: he had his own troubles with the Oxford authorities and seems to have missed several publications in the series. The Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Worcester was ascribed to Thomas Abingdon of Henlip, in Worcestershire, and based partly on a manuscript supplied by Thomas Rawlinson. In fact Abingdon’s ‘Survey’ lasted only 42 pages, after which a ‘Continuation’ of 114 pages was necessary to bring the account up to date. The list of priors came from Browne Willis once more. The volume was filled out with Abingdon’s account of Great Malvern Priory, ten pages of inscriptions from Chichester Cathedral, and the ‘Antiquities’ of Lichfield Cathedral. Hearne knew nothing of this book until Willis showed it to him, and even then he said little to Rawlinson about it.10 He also missed Inscriptions upon the Tombs . . . in . . . Bunhill-Fields (1717), which most likely was also prepared by Rawlinson. The extent of Rawlinson’s involvement with Curll, about which he was less than fully forthcoming, continued to trouble Hearne, and he taxed his friend with it once more in a letter of 21 January 1718. It hath been here reported yt nothing of Antiquities done by C., ye Bookseller, comes out but what you have a hand in as Editor, and I hear S., Amanuensis to Mr . W., hath spread ye report. I have, when I have heard it, endeavoured to show ye contrary. For I have a true Respect & honour for you, & I would not have things fix’d upon you wrongfully.11

Rawlinson evidently admitted this, to some extent, for later in the year Hearne responded to what appears to have been some sort of defence of Curll: I am very glad you find your Undertaker so honourable a Man. But I find him dislik’d, I know not for what reasons, by all I talk with here. They tell me, withall, that he was toss’d in a Blancket & publickly whipp’d in Westminster School. And indeed, I have now by me a Po¨em to confirm wt they say. Pray, let me know from your self the Truth of all this.12

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In his resentment Hearne somewhat desperately recalls and replays the events at Westminster two years on, with Wesley’s poem on Curll’s punishment to hand. Whatever Hearne and others in Oxford may have wished, Rawlinson would not break with Curll. On 28 July 1718 he and Curll left London to undertake an antiquarian tour round Oxford parishes together, and while Rawlinson transcribed inscriptions, Curll kept a diary of the itinerary, notes on curiosities, and sketches of their reception by the local clergy. At Mapledurham, for example, they found ‘Two remarkables . . . a Whig Parson and a Maypole’; elsewhere a ‘Rich, Stupid, Asthmatick Priest’. Curll’s character sketches are sharp: ‘Mr. Tuder of Checkendon, Rich Large, Lame, Lecherous and Impertinent has a pretty wife who has already brought him a Brace of Children and is big with another. 200£ p annum’. He also enjoyed a perversely incognito moment: ‘Dr. Yeates of Charlton por’d over our paper, said he knew Mr. Curll . . . as well as he did know Mr. Curll talk’d with him in the Chaise for half an hour without ever discovering him.’13 Curll also sent and received questionnaires towards Rawlinson’s project, a history of Oxfordshire which never materialized. Rawlinson was more open about some publications than others. He edited Petri Abælardi, Abbatis Ruyensis et Heloissæ, Abbatissæ Paracletensis Epistolæ (19 December 1717, dated 1718) with his name on the title page; the work suited his antiquarian instincts, and Curll’s penchant for hitching a ride on Pope’s publicity (Eloisa to Abelard came out in Pope’s Works of 1717). Hearne read this with some attention and enjoyment, and passed over Curll’s involvement.14 But in 1719 Hearne finally found a target worthy of his ire. Curll published Elias Ashmole’s The Antiquities of Berkshire with a great flourish on 27 January 1719, in three magnificent volumes, at £1 15s. the small paper and £3 10s. the large. He announced, ‘N.B. The Price of this valuable Work will be raised at Lady-Day next, there being but a few Copies left unsubscrib’d for.’15 Volume I contained Richard Rawlinson’s ‘Some Memoirs of the Life of Elias Ashmole, Esq’, consisting of extracts from his diary.16 The bulk of the first two volumes consisted of a hundred-by-hundred, parish-by-parish survey of churches, monuments, inscriptions and country residences, offering a kind of local necrology. Volume three completed the tour, with more material from Thomas Rawlinson, a catalogue of officers of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor and various appendixes. The transcriptions and documents called for some fairly fancy printing (much of it done sideways or on fold-out leaves) and the volumes must rank as among the most notable Curll ever produced. Hearne rubbished it in advance.17 But when he actually saw the volumes, his anger was unbounded: A Present hath been made me of a Book call’d The Antiquities of Barkshire, by Elias Ashmole, Esq., London; printed by E. Curll, in Fleet-street, 1719, 8vo , in 3 Volumes. It was given me by me good Friend, Thomas Rawlinson, Esq. As soon as I open’d it, and look’d into it, I was amaz’d at the abominable Impudence, Ignorance, and Carelessness

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of the Publisher, and I can hardly ascribe all this to any one else than to that Villain, Curll. Mr . Ashmole is made to have written abundance of Things since his Death. All is ascrib’d to him, and yet a very great Part of what is mention’d, happened since he died. For, as many of the Persons died after him, so the Inscriptions mention’d in this Book were made & fix’d since his Death, also. Besides, what is taken from Mr . Ashmole is most fraudulently done. The Epitaphs are falsly printed, & his Words & sense most horridly perverted. What Mr . Ashmole did was done very carefully, as appears from the Original in the Mus´eum, where also are his exact Draughts of the most considerable Monuments, of which there is no notice in this strange Rhapsody. I call it a Rhapsody, because there is no Method nor Judgment observ’d in it, nor one Dram of true Learning. Some Things are taken from my Ed. of Leland, but falsly printed, & I cannot but complain of the Injury done me.

Finally, Hearne managed to express, albeit only to his diary and friends, his revenge for the incursions on his Leland edition.18 Hearne seems to have missed or ignored The Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey (1719), at five volumes the biggest and most magnificent of Curll’s antiquarian volumes, all proudly displaying his own imprint. At £6 for the largepaper edition, and half that for the small, it was the most expensive publication of Curll’s entire career, and it crowned advertisements for the series, which appeared complete with a threat to raise the prices come Michaelmas.19 The work begins with a reprint of a licence granted by John Ogilby, the Royal Cosmographer, to John Aubrey for a survey of Surrey, to be included in Ogilby’s Britannia. The resulting ‘Perambulation’ was performed in 1673, but rejected by Ogilby. Aubrey continued revising it, and transcribed it once more between 1688 and 1692. In ‘Some Account of this Work, and its Author’, Rawlinson, who had spent much of 1717 on a research tour of Surrey, explains that Aubrey’s work exists in two manuscripts, one in the Ashmolean at Oxford and another ‘in the Possession of a private Gentleman’ (probably his brother).20 Both of these texts were ‘huddled together in a very confused and immethodical order’; after an initial attempt to print them as they stood, they were edited into a regular survey, with additions where appropriate. The main text is in the form of a journey starting from the Thames and taking in villages, churches, tombs, documents, and local histories and poems. It contains much natural history, as well as anecdotes and curiosa. Volume five contained an Appendix of additions and corrections, and a preface to Aubrey’s collections on Wiltshire, as if for an edition (which did not materialize until 1862). Later material by Aubrey was also included, alongside letters from John Evelyn and John Ray and Aubrey’s own incomplete ‘To the Reader’. Each volume contained a few plates, with those in volume five being paid for by Thomas and Richard Rawlinson. It was Rawlinson again who provided Curll with a manuscript of George Bull’s ‘lost’ Vindication of the Church of England (1719), and though Hearne appears to have missed this one too, others obviously did not: ‘I have heard many say that you are one of Curl’s Agents, & that you write for him. I have said I believ’d the

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contrary. You can tell best’. To Thomas he wrote: ‘Mr. Willis always mentions your Brother . . . as Curl’s Author, or, at least, Assistant’. Thomas Jett, a London antiquary, also told Hearne that Richard Rawlinson was inextricably in cahoots with ‘yt vile Fellow, Curle’.21 The sustained assault on Curll was beginning to have effects. On 19 July 1719, Browne Willis was in Oxford: Mr . Willis took occasion to speak much agt all the Books abt Antiquities printed by Curl, tho’ I must needs say yt what Mr. Willis hath published himself (unless when others have taken care of his Papers) is done rather worse than Curl’s Books. . . . Mr . Willis read a Letter from Roger Gale, Esq., in wch he blames all Curl’s Books, & says that he and others now are resolved to discontinue them.22

This appears to be true: Gale published nothing further with Curll, and Willis transferred his allegiance to Gosling, who published his own series of cathedral antiquities from 1717 to 1730. Rawlinson stuck it out, editing The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury for Curll in May 1719. This also enjoyed the sponsorship of Thomas Rawlinson, who provided a manuscript of Christopher Wren’s survey of the cathedral. The survey occupied some twentyone pages, and was succeeded by the usual guided tour of the monuments and inscriptions in the abbey and another local church. There was a hundred-page account of Bath Abbey, lists of the bishops, deans, precentors and other officers of Salisbury, a bibliography of missals of the Use of Sarum, and documents relating to a controversy about the rights of prebends of Sarum dating from 1683. Salisbury was the last of the grand local volumes. Richard Rawlinson left for the Continent in 1719, depriving Curll of his main editor.23 By early 1720 it was clear that Curll had done more or less what he could with the series of local antiquities, odd assortment though it was. A huge advertisement in the Evening Post of 7 January 1720 declared: ‘There is now published at a great Expense in 22 volumes, adorn’d with above 100 Sculptures, Anglia Illustrata’, consisting of the series to date at 10 guineas the lot. Curll, as ‘the undertaker’, was even offering a catalogue of the collection. Further colossal advertisements followed, bravely averring that ‘there being but few Setts, left, the Prices of all of them will be rais’d at Michaelmas next’ (PB, 21 July 1720). In fact it would take Curll more than a decade to shift the books (even with the help of a thief), and there were still a few volumes to add. Rawlinson’s English Topographer, a descriptive bibliography of local history, was published ‘by an impartial hand’ in July 1720 over the imprint of T. Jauncy. An expensive book at 10 shillings (with 25 copies on superfine paper at a guinea), it contains accounts of several of Curll’s earlier antiquarian books, less laudatory than one might suppose (Aubrey’s Surrey is praised, but Ashmole’s Garter lacks the plates, and Ayliffe’s Oxford was all plagiarized from Wood to serve a political turn). On this occasion, Curll was uncharacteristically remiss in plugging his wares.24 Speculi Britanniæ Pars Altera: or, a Delineation of Northamptonshire . . . By the Travayle of John Norden, in the Year M.DC.X was published by Curll without the names of editor or publisher in the autumn of

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1720. Rawlinson’s History and Antiquities of Glastonbury appeared under the editorship of Hearne at the Theater in Oxford, 1722, and the link between Curll and the touchy, proprietorial, and indefatigable world of antiquarian scholarship was for the moment severed.25 Curll made no public statement about these matters, and may not have known the full extent of Hearne’s vendetta against him. It had suited Rawlinson to have a London publisher who was genuinely interested in the subject and it had suited Curll to have authors who would produce (and no doubt subsidize) such ‘curious’ texts for the mere love of it. But the series now fizzled out, perhaps because of Curll’s poisonous reputation inside and outside the antiquarian world. It seems likely, in view of later evidence, that the books simply did not sell well enough to warrant further investment, though Curll’s tactics with his contributors, and the pressure on them from Hearne, cannot have helped. A V E N I S O N - T R E AT Curll’s further antiquarian ventures were all co-published. He went in with three other booksellers (Bettesworth, Pemberton, and Jeremiah Batley) to republish Aubrey’s Miscellanies on various matters of superstitious import in early 1721. They had acquired a copy of the earlier edition of 1696 (the only book published by Aubrey in his lifetime), purported to have been marked up with revisions by Aubrey for a new edition, at a sale of the publisher Awnsham Churchill’s copies on 26 July 1720.26 Various additional materials were inserted. Batley was the named publisher of John Dart’s Westminster-Abbey: A Poem, published on 29 April 1721 with the involvement of Curll, Chetwood, Griffith, Graves, King, and Meadows, according to the advertisement in Post-Boy.27 Dedicated to Atterbury, who listed Dean of Westminster among his preferments, its account of history among the tombs has perhaps a faint Jacobite whiff about it. From Curll’s point of view, however, it may have served as advance publicity for the third edition of Jodocus Crull’s The Antiquities of St. Peter’s, which came out in late 1721 (Dart’s own rival Westmonasterium came out in two volumes for Batley and six others in 1723). With nearly sixty plates of the tombs, the two-volume Antiquities of Westminster was expensive to produce, and it appeared under the auspices of a small conger: Bell, Darby, Bettesworth, Curll, Gosling, Pemberton, Fayram, Hooke, Rivington, Clay, Batley, and Symon. Of these, Darby, Bettesworth, Gosling, and Pemberton were old associates of Curll; Hooke and Rivington were fairly important new ones.28 With the omission of Gosling, and addition of Taylor and Mears, the same list was responsible for issuing a two-volume edition of The Miscellaneous Works of that Eminent Statesman Francis Osborn, Esq in 1722, another exhumation project (Osborne died in 1659). At this point Curll regularly bought copyright shares; surviving trade sale catalogues for 1720–1

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indicate that he was on a fairly regular business footing with the rest of the trade.29 These associations with fellow booksellers show that in one area Curll was by no means a pariah; he was often still welcome in co-publishing ventures and able to cut deals with a wide range of other agents. Newspaper advertisements demonstrate that he had a range of regular distributors who were probably not sharing copyright with him but acting as retailers: as well as the indefatigable Roberts there were J. Fox, T. Griffiths, W. Meadows, J. Brotherton, E. Berington, J. Graves, W. Lewis, M. Harrison, T. Bickerton, and several others. Some books, such as Pierre Joseph d’Orl´eans, History of the Revolutions in England under the Family of the Stuarts (1721) exist with variant imprints, one for Curll and Gosling alone, and one for Curll, Gosling, and ten of their agents. This does not mean, however, that Curll’s dealings with the trade were all friendly. His own trade sale, advertised in A Venison-Treat, at the Sale of a Catalogue of Books in Quires, with some Shares of Copies (1721) does not appear to have been a great success, despite the venison, since a number of the lots did not sell.30 Following an attempt to freeload on the ‘official’ edition of Locke in 1713, Curll advertised in the Daily Post of 5 May 1722 that ‘To prevent any Imposition upon the Publick’, a ‘new Edition of The Compleat Works of Mr. John Locke, in 3 Volumes in Folio’ would be speedily published, with ‘a Supplement containing some Pieces which were omitted in the former Edition. Also a Life’. This was ‘printed for A. Churchill, E. Curll, T. Woodward, R. Francklin’—and was, of course, denounced as a fraud by a weary Awnsham Churchill in the same paper on 10 May. Curll’s association with Thomas Jauncy at this period was extensive but obscure: the two men shared several imprints, and Jauncy appears to have acted as agent for Curll books (including a country network), but also to have taken over projects initiated by his colleague.31 In July 1720 Curll brought out Allan Ramsay’s Content. A Poem in a well-printed edition as a specimen of a projected grand edition of the Scottish poet. He declared: ‘Having been honour’d by a Noble Peer in Scotland with a Present of the complete Works of this Author, I have for some time been preparing them for the Press, with such Notes as are requisite for explaining the Beauties of the Scots Dialect, &c’. Curll noted that ‘At the Desire of several Person of Quality, a small Number will be done on a superfine Royal Paper’.32 But if Curll thought he could get away with this just because Ramsay was in Edinburgh, he was wrong. Responding to Curll’s advertisement, Ramsay announced that the proposed edition was without his consent, without legitimate copyright, and he would be producing his own edition forthwith. Later that year subscriptions for this edition were being taken in by Jauncy, who did publish some separate poems by Ramsay without (apparently) any Curll involvement. Curll later printed some verses by John Cowper of Oxford against the Scottish verse of ‘Ramsay’s Clan’, perhaps indicating some rawness at these issues; once more Ramsay returned the compliment.33

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Shortly after this, Curll found himself involved in his first Chancery case over literary property, and here the enmity with Prideaux turned out to have been a mistake. In 1701 Prideaux had published Directions to Church Wardens, which reached a fourth edition (for Robert Knaplock and Tonson) by 1717.34 Pemberton issued an edition of it in 1713, and Curll evidently bought into this, for he advertised it in the Memoirs of Radcliffe (1715). On 22 February 1721, Knaplock and Jacob Tonson junior began proceedings in Chancery, with Curll submitting a rejoinder before Henry Lovibond on 2 March 1721. The plaintiffs claimed that they had bought the rights of the Directions in 1715 from Edmund Prideaux, the Dean’s son, and entered them in the Stationers’ Company register. They had seen an advertisement by Curll and accused him of infringing their rights. According to Curll, the third edition of the Directions was sold to John Pemberton and issued by him. This may be a slightly evasive answer, since the proceedings named the fifth edition, advertised (but not by Curll) in the Post Boy of 17 February 1721.35 The defendant simply denied everything and produced a series of different arguments to rebut the charge. His main assertion is that the rights had passed from the original publisher in Norwich, Francis Burgess, to his father-in-law Freeman Collins, a London printer. Collins then sold 500 copies (presumably in sheets) to John Pemberton, who published these under his own name. Humphrey Prideaux saw this and wrote to ask Pemberton why he had not received fifty copies to which he was entitled by agreement with Collins. The defendant hopes, implausibly, that Pemberton may still be able to produce this letter. Curll says that he bought the rights to the book from Collins in February 1721, and points to ‘the Fallacy of a Title grounded upon an Act of Parliament made twenty years after the first sale of a Copy’. (The plaintiffs had invoked the Copyright Act of 1710: Curll is presumably appealing to the clause which confirmed existing rights for those held previous to the Act). He and John Collins, son of Freeman, will sue the plaintiffs for trying to monopolize the work: Collins has an impression of 1,000 copies ready to assert his rights: at present he has printed three sheets. Further, Curll claims that it is not necessary to enter every copy (that is, statement of rights) in the Stationers’ register: he certainly had long precedent on his side here. Other more or less contradictory lines of rejoinder are offered. One underlying point at issue (not clearly exposed in the bill and rejoinder) may be whether a bookseller A who bought the stock of printed copies of a book from another bookseller B thereby acquired rights for future publication which the author had assigned to B. At least, Curll was ready to float that possibility, and hinted that Pemberton may have acquired the rights as well as the copies of the book. The case raises significant issues about the implications of the Copyright Act, blurred though they are by Curll’s shifting and prevaricating defence. We do not know the outcome, but the Directions slipped off the bookseller’s list. Characteristically, Curll responded to the lawsuit by publishing more of

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Prideaux’s work: his Original and Right of Tithes (1722) and Jean Le Clerc’s Critical Examination of the Reverend Mr. Dean Prideaux’s Connection of the Old and New Testament (Part I, 1722), a review or epitome of Prideaux’s work which was not in itself hostile but became so in context.36

C O U RT I N G B I S H O P S Defoe might castigate the bishops for failing to stamp out Curlicism, but at least two of them had his measure. In 1722 Curll advertised a translation of Pliny’s Epistles, with his panegyric upon Trajan, and a life, to be done by several hands, and with the customary request for free materials.37 But Curll knew that one particular gentleman had performed part of the feat already, for on 4 November of the previous year Curll had written to White Kennett, by now Bishop of Peterborough, asking him to revise his juvenile translations of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and Pliny’s Panegyrick, copyrights of which he claimed to have purchased. Kennet wrote back on 6 November, courteously but firmly; he asserted that he had never released copyright of the translations, doubted they would be ‘vendible’, and ended with a warning: In short I cannot think it advisable for You to reprint them, nor can I possibly take the pains to revise them. I hope there is no Obscenity or other wrong Lust in them to deceive the People into catching at them. If You despise my Advice You had best however take care to insert no Name of a writer but what You find the old title pages, for You know property and privilege are valuable Things.

Curll’s reply, dated 7 November, was unusually deferential and cautious. He gave a different slant to the copyright issue and the matter of the likely sale; he had paid handsomely for the translations and some accompanying illustrations. He reiterated his hope that Kennett would revise them. Then he played a personal card, sensing that Defoe’s attack lay behind Kennett’s refusal: as I had the happiness of your brother’s friendship, and received many favours from him, so I hope my conduct will in no affair prove disagreeable to your Lordship. I am sorry, my Lord, that rumour only (or some idle paragraphs, inserted against me, in that sink of scandal, Mist’s Journal, wherein the best characters have been traduced) should move your Lordship to cast an aspersion upon me which I am as free as any one whatever of our profession. Indeed the scandalous paper above-mentioned has charged me with promoting obscenity by printing the Trials for Impotency, &c. but how unjustly, my Lord.

He pointed out, with something like pride, that all his sex trials had been drawn up and approved by the best judicial authorities, and he hoped that ‘the enclosed Catalogue will in some measure convince your Lordship, that I have been as ready, and shall always be, to promote any work of religion or learning, as any other person whatever of our profession’. In conclusion:

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Far be it from me, my Lord, to despise your advice. No, my Lord, I hold myself obliged, and heartily thank you for it; and as your Lordship allows property to be a valuable thing, I rest assured, that your Lordship will not deprive, but rather protect my property to these two translations which I have legally purchased, but resolved not to reprint without your Lordship’s approbation.

It might almost have been convincing, but Curll could not help adding a postscript which over-egged the pudding: ‘I am fully convinced that the encomium in the Preface of Pliny was designed for King Charles II and not King James II, as has been maliciously suggested.’38 Kennett’s An Address of Thanks to a good Prince, presented in a Panegyrick of Pliny, upon Trajan had been published late in 1685, early in the reign of James, before Kennett had realized what James’s rule would mean in terms of religious government; but its loyal address to the throne, hastily redirected from Charles II to James II, had been exhumed and used as evidence of the Whig Kennett’s time-serving after James’s death and again during the Bangorian controversy, much in the manner that Burnet’s early and late views on passive obedience were used against him.39 Nonetheless, Curll here makes effective use of what he has: deference, the already-rehearsed arguments against Defoe’s diatribe, the bishop’s own point about property turned in Curll’s favour, the connection with White’s brother Basil Kennett the antiquary, a show of legality (even if not an entirely perspicuous one). The bishop got a catalogue of Curll’s stock into the bargain, though it was apparently not persuasive.40 Pope later tells us of another incident involving a bishop which must be dated to this period. According to this story, Curll, projecting a new edition of Rochester, sent a copy of a previous edition to Dr Robinson, bishop of London, and advertised the new edition as revised and corrected by him. No advertisement of this import has been found and Curll offered 100 guineas to anyone who could produce it. Curll’s own narrative of the matter, a characteristic mix of bravado and innocence, is as follows: Mr. Henry Hoare, eldest son of Sir Richard Hoare, came to Mr. Curll and told him, that Dr. Robinson . . . heard he was concern’d in printing an edition of the Earl of Rochester’s Poems. Mr. Curll told Mr. Hoare that he was, among other Booksellers and Printers . . . concerned in an Edition of that Nobleman’s Works. But likewise told Mr. Hoare, that he would get a Book interleav’d for my Lord Bishop, and whatever his Lordship saw amiss, if he would be pleased to strike out any Lines, or Poems therein, such Leaves should be re-printed, and render’d conformable to his Lordship’s Opinion. Away goes Mr. Hoare, overjoy’d with this Message from Mr. Curll, with a tender of his Duty to the Bishop, and opens his Credentials; upon hearing which the Bishop smil’d, and made the following Reply . . . Sir, I am told that Mr. Curll is a shrewd Man, and should I revise the Book you have brought me, he would publish it as approv’d by me. This no doubt Mr. Curll might justly have done, for whatever is not condemn’d is approv’d; a Standing Maxim This, in Civil, Canon, and Common Law.41

By the time he told the story, of course, Curll knew rather more about civil, canon, and common law.

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He could not always evade attention from the state authorities, though since the trouble over the Wintoun trial in 1716, Curll had managed to steer clear of the kind of political and theological controversy that brought the King’s Messengers to his door. The Bangorian controversy was so conveniently voluminous that a few pamphlets among many made little difference. In picking up Conyers Place’s Thoughts of an Honest Whig (1717) and Some Free Thoughts, by Way of Censure and Character (1718), a niggling, hair-splitting account of Hoadly’s answer to Convocation’s charge against him, Curll found himself another amateur author (master of Dorchester Grammar School) who could provide both timely pieces of mild controversy and completely innocuous theological tracts, such as his Enquiry into the Nature and Original of the Fifty-fifth Canon (1718). Matthias Earbery’s Modest Vindication of the Clergy of the Church of England (1721) attracted no attention, despite its author’s known High Church politics.42 But Curll was beginning to stray near the boundaries once more: William Staunton, a retired Chancery clerk with a taste for theological debate, was a slightly more dangerous proposition. Having come up with what he fondly conceived to be a solution to the Trinitarian controversy, he proceeded to badger various clergymen (among them Daniel Waterland and William Whiston) with it, and Curll published the resulting abortive correspondence in a series of treatises between 1719 and 1724, when they began to fall under official notice.43 S O U T H S E A BU B B L E S Meanwhile it was actually economics that got Curll into renewed legal trouble. Robert Loggin, an officer in the Customs House and a lodger in Curll’s house, published through Curll The Present Management of the Customs (1719) in which he claimed to have discovered ‘Grand Frauds in that Branch of his Majesty’s Royal Revenue, to the Value of above Five Hundred Thousand Pounds per Annum, by the false Entries of P and T for Exportation’. Loggin and his co-author, John Rotherham, were chiefly interested in claiming a statutory reward for their information; presumably Curll scented a cut of the proceeds. Loggin had sworn his testimony before Robert Price (later immortalized in a Curll biography) on 24 July 1717, but when the matter was referred to the Board of Commissioners, the case was rapidly dismissed. After a hearing at the Treasury on 6 October 1719, Loggin was dismissed for non-residence, while his attempts to obtain redress from state officials had produced nothing. Curll’s publication was a sort of public petition for justice, backed up with minutes of the official meetings.44 The Commissioners of the Customs told the Lords of the Treasury that they were not happy and recommended prosecuting Curll. They subsequently reported that Curll ‘having since attended us, and being desirous to make his submission for his said offence: We are willing, if you Lordpps have no

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objection, upon his making his submission, that the Prosecution be dropped’.45 Accordingly, Curll published a notice in the Daily Courant, 17 February 1720, confessing that he had ‘thro’ Inadvertency’ been concerned in publishing the book (at Loggin’s expence, he stressed), and asking pardon. Turning the occasion to account, he also declared ‘I . . . shall always be more proud of retracting an Error than persisting in one’. ‘Inadvertency’ is good, as Straus remarks (258), if not quite le mot juste. Not least because Loggin was his lodger, Curll appears to have been the main driving force behind this publication: he was the only one of the four booksellers in the imprint forced to recant (the others were Roberts, Brotherton, and J. Fox). Though Defoe’s prophetic diatribe on the illegality of Curll’s pornography was several years from reaching fruition, the law was beginning to move in his direction, rather in the manner of the judges coming for Till Eulenspiegel. The public humiliation over the Loggin case gave handles to his other enemies. During a squabble between opposed factions of Presbyterians, Curll took the opportunity to publish some material relating to a decade-old sex scandal against William Clarke, one of the participants. Clarke had, allegedly, misbehaved himself in sexual matters, and Curll printed the ‘Depositions against Mr. Clark . . . for committing fornication with the widow Coleman . . . anno 1708’ at the end of his reprint of an old rape case, The Tryal of Sir Edward Moseley, Bart, advertising it under the title ‘The Backsliding Teacher . . . the whole submitted to the Congregation of the Faithful, in and about the Cities of London and Westminster’.46 Clarke responded with Party Revenge: or, Mr. William Clarke’s Narrative of his Case and Sufferings, for Defending the Doctrine of the Ever-Blessed Trinity. Clarke complains that ‘old Stories’ have been trumped up and industriously spread to his disadvantage by Curll: As it has been his continu’d Practice for many Years to Print defaming, scandalous and filthy Libels, particularly (of late) against the Honourable Commissioners of his Majesty’s Customs . . . so he has rak’d up the scandalous Accounts of some Perjur’d Testators (an old Devilish Plot contriv’d by the High Church Party in the late Reign, to bring the Dissenters into Contempt) which Mr. Clarke hath clearly confuted about 12 or 13 Years ago . . .

Curll was ‘now under a severe Prosecution . . . for publishing a flagrant, malicious, and scandalous Libel’; Clarke claimed that a ‘Bill of Indictment has been found against the said Curl at the Old Bailey’ and that the trial would come on next sessions, with a ‘swingeing Action against the said Curl for the great damages sustain’d by the said Libel’ to follow. This appears to have been somewhat optimistic, since no record of any such prosecution survives; but it was yet another dent to Curll’s general reputation.47 He published a few more pamphlets in the area of finance, which perhaps gave Pope the hint for his ‘conversion’ of the bookseller into a stock-jobber. Early in 1720 he reprinted two works from the 1690s on economic questions by

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the eccentric John Asgill (1659–1738), then in prison for debt, and published a new item by him, A Brief Answer to a Brief State of the Question, between the Printed and Painted Callicoes, and the Woollen and Silk Manufacturers, in answer to a pamphlet by Defoe. But the real economic question of 1720 was of course the South Sea Bubble. It is not known whether Curll invested in the stock or not, though as Straus notes he moved about a lot at this time which may indicate some financial ‘restructuring’. At the end of 1718 Curll moved to a house ‘next the Temple Coffee House in Fleet Street’ (unless this was the old shop opposite St Dunstan’s, under a new name); in June of 1720, he was ‘over against the Golden Head in Paternoster Row, near Amen Corner’; later in the Autumn he arrived at a house ‘over against Catherine Street in the Strand’, where he settled for almost a decade. These shops were advertised in a series of new catalogues of Curll’s stock, which perhaps indicates a need to push business along, though equally their frequency does not really suggest someone in financial trouble.48 Indeed, the Evening Post is so saturated with Curll’s advertisements at this period that he must surely have had some financial stake in it.49 What emerges clearly is that Curll saw the Bubble, like everything else, as a publishing opportunity. He was not alone in this: Cibber’s adaptation of Moli`ere’s Les Femmes Savantes in 1721 had a South Sea twist, and Curll resumed his quarrel with Cibber at that point.50 While some of Curll’s output in this area was loyal and literary enough, there were still legal problems of one sort or another. He published in late September a speech made by the increasingly troubled Eustace Budgell (some of whose strident pamphlets concerning the loss of his post in Ireland he had also published), even going so far as to enter it for copyright purposes at Stationers’ Hall. His advertisement warns: ‘N.B. The above-mentioned Speech having been Pyrated contrary to Act of Parliament, the Offenders are now under a Prosecution for the same.’ Be that as it may, a copy was taken into State Papers for examination.51 He issued An Epistle to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales; Occasion’d by the State of the Nation on 31 October, ascribed to ‘Mr. Stanhope’.52 This compared wit to stocks, and played on the Tory fear that land was being bought up by corrupt and fictitious paper money. It was successful enough to reach a second edition, which warned sternly ‘N.B. If any Person shall presume to Pyrate this Poem, they shall be prosecuted as the Act of Parliament directs, by H. Stanhope’. There were four editions in all, not counting Dublin piracies, as well as a ‘key’. Stanhope was also credited with another poem, The Governor. A Poem on the Present Posture of Affairs at Home and the Proceedings of some Foreign Courts (26 November), celebrating the return of the infallible George I to manage the crisis. The otherwise unknown ‘Mr. Arundell’ produced the ironic The Directors. A Poem in Defence of the South Sea Company (11 November), which praised Stanhope and his hero. This included an odd poem, ‘To Mr. Curll with the foregoing poem’, which Curll might or might not have had the grace to smile over:

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Antiquities and Politics (1717–1722) If, ’midst the most Refin’d, you’ll not refuse, T’ accept the Labours of a Rural Muse, Thy Name to Distant Villages shall spread, Still shall thy Name be with the Muses read; And on thy Grave-Stone let it graven be, Thou were a Friend to Poets, They to Thee.

The topic proved inexhaustible. Curll published Foxton’s Jesina. Or, Delusive Gold. A Pastoral. Lamenting the Misfortunes of a Young Lady of Quality, ruined by the South Sea (1720), spliced together with a poem by ‘Mr. Hastings’ called The Czar, in praise of Sir John Norris. At the same time he published Centlivre’s A Woman’s Case: in an Epistle to Charles Joye, Esq; Deputy-Governor of the South Sea (1720), a whimsical autobiographical poem which makes fun of her situation as a female author and hardline Whig.53 Some of these pieces were stitched together to form South-Sea Pills to Purge Court Melancholy (1721). More riskily, Curll was responsible for A Detection of the Whole Management of the South Sea Company (1721), addressed to John Ward of Hackney, who would later stand in the pillory for forgery, not long before Curll’s own appearance there. S O M E AC C O U N T O F T H E R EVO LU T I O N The South Sea Bubble had provided Robert Walpole with his opportunity to assume power, but another crucial element in that process was continuing fear and agitation concerning the Jacobite threat. It is amidst this conjunction of forces that the perennial tussle between Pope and Curll finds a new manifestation, once more moving into the legal arena. Pope’s friend John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, had commented on Rowe’s death in the poem ‘On the Election of a Poet Laureate’, and had included a brief reference to Curll and Tonson as a specimen of the range of publishing opportunities available to contemporary authors.54 Now he himself was dead (24 February 1721) and Curll set to work. He published a poem on Buckingham House—the Duke’s London residence, later extended to form Buckingham Palace—in Three New Poems (May 1721). This sat awkwardly alongside two mucky Chaucerian poems, one of them attributed to Pope’s future collaborator, Elijah Fenton, in which a sexually precocious girl is said to have ‘Had all Curll’s Letchery by Heart, | Which he in Tryals does impart’.55 In the advertisement the poem on Buckingham House was especially puffed: ‘This poem was approv’d of by the Duke, (who made the Author a handsome Present, but desir’d that it might not be publish’d till after his Decease) in which is inserted his Grace’s Character of Qu. Anne, written upon the Picture her Majesty presented him.’56 But naturally a full edition was expected, and on 12 December 1721 Curll began announcing that he would be ‘speedily’ producing the Duke’s Poetical Works, complete with life and will. This announcement, appearing discreetly as a rider to advertisements for

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other works, continued throughout December and into January, with authorship of the proposed life at length ascribed to ‘Mr Bond’, one of the candidates for the authorship of the Buckingham House poem.57 ‘Variety of curious Sculptures, design’d and engraven by the best Masters’, were also offered, as the project took shape. On 22 January 1722 Curll advertised in the Daily Journal that ‘the Works of the late Right Honourable John Sheffield Duke of Buckinghamshire, in Prose and Verse, with his Life (completed from a Plan drawn up by his grace) by Mr. Theobald, and a true Copy of his last Will and Testament, will speedily be published, by E. Curll . . .’. On the same day this was brought to the attention of the Lords, who ordered that Curll attend the house the next day. Being shown the advertisement, he owned ‘That he caused the same to be printed; that he had not the Consent of the Executors or Trustees, of the said late Duke, for publishing his said Life, Works, or Will’. After further examination, he was sent out and the Lords instituted a rule: ‘That if, after the Death of any Lord of this House, any Person presume to publish in Print his Works, Life, or last Will, without Consent of his Heirs, Executors, Administrators, or Trustees, the same is a Breach of the Privilege of this House.’58 Upon this decision, Curll was once more summoned in, made to kneel, reprimanded by the Lord Chancellor and forbidden to publish the book. Moreover, someone had noticed the main advertisement to which the Sheffield notice was an addendum, and had found it alarming. Curll was dismissed, and a committee was set up ‘to consider of an Advertisement in the same News Papers . . . of Six Books, just published, all printed for E. Curll . . . and to report to the House’.59 The advertised books fall, interestingly, into the category stigmatized by Defoe as Curlicism: De Usu Flagrorum, Eunuchism Display’d, Onanism Display’d, the Love Poems of Bonefonius (three parts), and ‘Family Duty’, an issue of the two Chaucerian bagatelles from Three New Poems without the Buckingham House poem. The other item was Thomas Hobbes’s bizarre Ecclesiastical History in rhyming couplets, a characteristic Curll reanimation.60 For the moment nothing seems to have come of this particular committee, but it clearly represents a tightening of the screw on Curll’s general activity, and some of the titles under scrutiny were to reappear when Curll was eventually prosecuted. The peers on the committee included some of Pope’s friends: Viscount Harcourt, the Bishop of Rochester and Lord Bathurst, and it may be that the summoning of Curll was in part inspired by Pope’s rival ‘authorized’ edition of Sheffield; certainly Curll thought so.61 At any rate, Curll did eventually publish an edition of the Works of Sheffield, backdated to 1721 and selling for 3s. 6d. rather than the previously advertised 5s. It contained thirty-six odes, songs, translations, poems about sex in Rochesterian manner, and the commendatory verses on Pope’s poems from his Works of 1717. The contents had all, as the title page carefully specified, been published in his lifetime. The volume was dedicated to the Duke of Argyll and edited by John Henley, who claimed that the verses

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had been ‘revised and corrected for the Press by himself, and delivered for that Purpose to Mr. Gildon in the Year 1721, all which Corrections and Alterations made by his G, have, in this Edition, been faithfully observed’. This seems a decidedly unlikely claim, especially given that the Duke was close to Pope, who was the editor chosen by the widow to oversee the official Works. It is just possible that Curll had some hand in what happened next, but larger forces than he were certainly at work. In April 1722 the Jacobite printer John Barber petitioned the Secretary of State’s office for a Royal Patent to publish the Duke’s Works, perhaps to stifle any further editions from Curll, and Pope set to work, producing two quarto volumes on 24 January 1723. But by now the ‘Atterbury Plot’ had been discovered, and two days later Pope’s own edition was seized by the King’s Messengers on the grounds that it contained Jacobite material. Pope himself might have been taken into custody; certainly he was roundly condemned by the Whig press. Barber found himself summoned to appear before the authorities more than once.62 Two essays, ‘Some Account of the Revolution’ and ‘A Feast of the Gods’ were cut out before the edition was released, only to be published separately, possibly by Curll, under the eyecatching title of The Castrations.63 All in all, this heightened political censorship was to play a large part in Curll’s subsequent downfall.

8 Trials (1722–1728) At the age of forty, Curll had lost little of his push and resilience. For most people his recent experience would have proved chastening, to say the least. The fracas concerning the works of Buckingham had ended up with an order that he should kneel before the bar of the House of Lords to undergo reprimand; but he apparently felt little shame or remorse, whether or not he was responsible for the appearance of The Castrations. Quite a few copies survive of Curll’s edition, suggesting that it may have had some underground life even after the authorities placed an interdiction on further sale. However, Curll now needed somewhere else to disperse his energies.1

U N D E R C OV E R He found such an outlet, together with the person he had employed to edit Buckingham. This was John ‘Orator’ Henley, eccentric preacher and doughty Whig, and almost as much of a showman as Curll himself. They approached Robert Walpole, now established in firm charge of the nation’s destiny during the phase of reconstruction which followed the South Sea Bubble. On 2 March 1724 Curll wrote to the prime minister from his shop in the Strand, where he had recently moved. His main purpose was to finger Delarivier Manley, informing Walpole that she had a new instalment of the notorious Atalantis ready for the press. The new ‘libel’ no doubt suffered from the added defect that it had not been offered to Curll. Since Manley had been the mistress of John Barber, the printer whom the government permitted to bring out Pope’s more complete edition of the works of Buckingham, some petty motive of revenge may have been at work here. But loyalty to authors never made up a conspicuous trait in Curll’s character. In ‘Corinna’, a poem possibly written a number of years earlier but first published in the Miscellanies of 1728, Swift provides a mocking life-history of a woman writer, ending up with the line, ‘Turns Auth’ress, and is Curll’s for Life’. If the poet had Manley in his mind, the evidence does not suggest that this was really true. With more than usual chutzpah, the bookseller told Walpole of his hopes. The source of his optimism lay in the person of Barnham Goode, a writer and hanger-on of the prime minister. As Curll reports, Goode had informed him

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that he might ‘depend on having some provision’ made for him in return for his ‘unwearied diligence to serve the government’ (that is, as an informer), and that Goode had ‘named something in the Post-Office to your Honour’ for him. In a postscript he added, ‘Lord Townshend assured me he would recommend me to your Honour for some provision in the Civil List. In the Stamp office I can be serviceable’.2 Over-confident as Curll’s expectations had grown, they did not amount to total delusion, for Walpole rewarded some of his loyal acolytes from time to time with official posts. Only a few years would pass before Curll discovered that the government regarded him as less than dependable, and would initiate proceedings against him for a work of political sedition. In his letter to Walpole, Curll claims that the secretary of state, Viscount Townshend, had recruited him to get hold of some papers of Christopher Layer, a barrister implicated in Jacobite activity who went to the gallows at Tyburn in 1723. Again, the writer provides some show of plausibility by mentioning his contacts with ‘Mr. Crackerode and Mr. Buckley’. He meant Anthony Cracherode (d. 1752), solicitor to the Treasury, who handled official prosecutions, and would shortly manage the proceedings against Curll over obscene publications; and Samuel Buckley (d. 1741), the ex-publisher who now headed the government’s information services. Curll had certainly been feeding information to the ministry for some time. In April 1722, for example, he had written to Lord Townshend (who was also Walpole’s brother-in-law), claiming that he had ‘squash’d’ a libel entitled The Administration of Justice.3 The following March he gave Townshend details about some writing he had intercepted concerning the Atterbury plot.4 He claimed that he had ‘never yet erred in any one Information,’ suggesting that he had served as a dependable ally of the ministry on several previous occasions. One sign of Curll’s clandestine activities comes in a letter from John Henley to Walpole, dated 4 March, which states that it would not be ‘at all proper for Mr. Curll to appear in person on these occasions’.5 Events overtook any ambition Curll harboured to serve as an under-cover agent. Yet he continued to offer his services to the prime minister in the early 1730s, and when he got into trouble over his own unwise publications he always tended to bring up in his appeals from prison the great services he had performed on behalf of the government. It seems unlikely that he played any great role in nailing Layer or others involved in Jacobite plots associated with the name of Bishop Atterbury. When the affair came to a head, no subpoena went out for Curll to give evidence. His main reaction came in June 1723, immediately after the bishop had been convicted of treason in a show trial in the House of Lords. Curll promptly brought out an opportunistic collection of Maxims, Reflections and Observations, Divine, Moral and Political. By Dr. Francis Atterbury, To which is added, His Lordship’s Latin Version of Mr. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel. Unfortunately the translation of Dryden used was not Atterbury’s at all. Four years later would come a miscellaneous collection entitled Atterburyana, for no better reason than to capitalize on the bishop’s notoriety. In the last analysis it

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is impossible to oppose Straus’s commonsensical verdict: ‘We do not hear that the minister [Townshend] was impressed by what he heard, and I am afraid that Curll’s value as a secret agent was not very great’ (Straus, 97). Nevertheless he would persist with such efforts in years to come. His reputation with the public continued at a low ebb. A mock prophecy by Elias Bockett (1722) did not even trouble to name the individual concerned: ‘Honest modest Mr. being taken with a violent Fit of the Cholick, it puts him under such dreadful Apprehensions of Death, that he abjures printing Bawdy, and vamping up old Pamphlets with new Titles’. Then in 1723 the author of a hudibrastic satire on The Free Masons awarded Curll the post of bookseller to an imaginary lodge of masons, whose reading centred on writers such as Rochester and ‘wanton, luscious Behn’. Their collection of books, we are told, extends little further: On t’other Shelf ’s displayed a Set Of Impotency and Divorce, Caus’d by debasing Nature’s Force; Onania likewise has a Place, And is by all caress’d, alas! For rather than they’ll want Employ, They’ll deal in every childish Toy, They’ll practice o’er this Sin unclean, Read Books of Curll’s the most obscene . . .6

This group of dissolute pleasure-seekers may not have existed, but if it had then the members would have agreed with the author of these hudibrastic lines on the best man to furnish them with a library. Meanwhile the more routine aspects of the bookselling business went on as before, if dealings with the firm of Curll and Son could ever be totally humdrum. In March 1722 the Irish-born deist John Toland died in severely reduced circumstances: according to Applebee’s Weekly Journal he expired at 3 o’clock in the morning of ‘black jaundice’ and a violent fever. His death was reported as that of ‘the Antichristian’ (MWJ, 17 March). For a number of years this remarkable man—philosopher, political writer, probably freemason, possibly arch-druid—had operated within Curll’s circle of authorship. He wrote for the bookseller’s early partner Egbert Sanger, while several of his books at the start of the Hanoverian dynasty were brought out by publishers like Ferdinando Burleigh and William Mears who often acted as a cloak for Curll.7 A letter to Toland in 1718 was directed care of Roberts’s shop in Warwick Lane. We know, too, that Curll charged Toland for printing expenses in 1714 in connection with an unidentified work entitled ‘New Gospel Discovered’. This may refer to part of Nazarenus, published by Roberts and others in 1718. At the same time, Curll lent the needy author two guineas. Moreover, in 1718 Toland drafted a letter to the publisher, on the subject of his proposed History of the Druids (posthumously published as A Critical History of the Celtic Religion).8 By

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this time Toland’s worldly affairs had sunk disastrously. Prior to his death, he occupied mean quarters in a carpenter’s house at Putney, where he spent his days in abject necessity, made all the worse by losses in the South Sea Bubble. His correspondence with Viscount Molesworth reveals his declining health and morale: Molesworth even alludes to the ‘poverty’ of his landlady.9 As usual, once he learnt that Toland had died, it did not take long for Curll to get off the mark. An Historical Account of the Life and Writings of the late Mr. John Toland. By one of his most Intimate Friends appeared under the imprint of Roberts, Mears, Chetwood and others in the year of the Antichristian’s death. Most scholars believe that the intimate friend was Curll himself. The volume claims to present ‘I. A faithful extract of his works, and an account of his travels in Germany, Holland, &c. II. An account of the controversies wherein he was engaged, and a particular name, and of the manuscripts he left behind’. In reality the book is the familiar hasty compilation, and unreliable in detail, but it plainly does benefit from first-hand knowledge of the subject, something Curll would have acquired over the previous decade. Toland may well be one of those named by Pope in his satirical catalogue of Curll’s house authors in A Further Account: ‘At the Three Tobacco Pipes in Dog and Bitch Yard, one that has been a Parson, he wears a blue Camblet Coat trim’d with black: my best Writer against revealed Religion’ (Prose Works, i. 278). A druidic meeting at which Toland allegedly presided was held near Covent Garden in 1717, right alongside Dog and Bitch Yard and in the heart of Curll’s country. On cue, Toland turns up in The Dunciad: ‘Toland and Tindal, prompt at Priests to jeer’ (ii. 367). Pope would surely have considered Curll a suitable laureate for this prominent freethinker. AT T I C U S On 6 April 1723 came another incident with long-lasting repercussions. Curll brought out a volume of miscellanies entitled Cythereia: or, New Poems upon Love and Desire, which included an item entitled ‘Verses Occasioned by Mr. Tickell’s Translation of the First Iliad of Homer’. In reality this was the first, shorter version of Pope’s famous portrait of Addison, later expanded and incorporated into the Epistle to Arbuthnot under the name of ‘Atticus’. The lines had first appeared anonymously in the St. James’s Journal on 15 December preceding, with the last line reading, ‘Who would not weep, if A n were he?’ However, the title-page of Cythereia boldly lists the item as ‘Satire upon Mr. Addison; by Mr. Pope’. Curll reprinted the verses in Court Poems three years later, and then printed the full name of their subject in the concluding line when he included them in his provocative Miscellanea of 1726. Even though Addison had died in 1719, the appearance of this fragment had explosive possibilities, as it opened up room for Pope’s enemies to accuse him of treachery towards his former friend. Of course Pope himself may have been responsible for sending the item to the

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newspaper: evidence exists that it had already begun to circulate in manuscript by this time. But it was quite another thing for the lines to appear in a catchpenny pamphlet, with the author and his target so clearly specified. Moreover, the copy used by Curll exhibits a number of variants, which seems to confirm that he had some kind of a fast track to sources within the poet’s circle. Not until the ‘last’ volume of Pope–Swift Miscellanies made its appearance in 1728 did Pope allow a longer version of the fragment to come before the public with a ruefully oblique acknowledgment of his authorship. And it was later still, in 1735, that the verses reached their final resting place in the Epistle.10 The affair rumbled on for some years, with each of the protagonists claiming that his rival had told less than the truth about the publication of these lines on Atticus. In preliminaries to The Dunciad Variorum, Pope adopts the role of Scriblerus to defend himself against charges that he had libelled his departed friend, asserting that he had sent this ‘friendly rebuke’ in his own hand to Addison, and appealing to the authority of Lord Burlington in support of his statement that the verses were ‘never made public, ’till after their own Journals, and Curl had printed the same’ (TE v. 33). At this Curll was unable to restrain his indignation, factitious or otherwise: ‘Now in my turn I do, in the antiquated Guise of Martinus Scriblerus, avouch, that in Verity the whole Story of this dignified Avouchment is a Lye; for Pope’s Libel upon Mr. Addison was first published by Mr. John Markland, of St. Peter’s College in Cambridge, with an Answer thereto, in a Pamphlet, intitled Cythereia: Or, Poems upon Love and Intrigue, &c. 8vo. Printed for T. Payne, in Stationer’s-Court, Ludgate-Street, 1723. Price 1s. 6d ’.11 Not for the first time, the facts belie Curll’s confident bluster. As we have seen, the lines had already appeared in the newspaper press. Moreover, the volume which the bookseller cites with such plausible-looking detail turns out to have carried the names of both Payne and Curll himself. He had an obvious motive for taking offence at the fragment, for Pope’s onslaught on Atticus begins with a reference to A True Character of Mr. Pope (1715), by John Dennis (but, in Pope’s belief, written by Dennis and Gildon at the instigation of Addison himself ). As we saw earlier, this attack was published by Sarah Popping, almost certainly as a front for Curll. Nor did the matter rest there. As late as 1735, after the Epistle to Arbuthnot had come before the world, Curll brought out a strange pamphlet entitled The Poet Finish’d in Prose. Being A Dialogue Concerning Mr. Pope and his Writings. He may even have written it himself, since it is full of inside information, although the style lacks something of his usual colour. At one point the writer accuses Pope of retailing his works more than once: ‘he has not only serv’d us up near a hundred Lines together in this very Poem, with very little Alteration, which he sold Lintot many Years ago, and Lintot sold us . . .’.12 This raises the possibility that the Atticus lines were not a piracy after all, but legitimately bought through the ordinary mechanisms of the trade. They certainly stirred up outrage in those of Addison’s friends who survived from the old days at Button’s, when the loyal Hanoverians had

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met to rally the Whig cause under the complacent gaze of their much-admired leader. Naturally Curll continued to mine the rich ore Joseph Addison had left to those bent on literary excavation (see Chapter 7). During these years he produced a steady succession of Addisoniana and para-Addisonian works. Items from Poems on Several Occasions (‘1719’ for 1718), consisting chiefly of translations of the Latin works, he recycled in a volume entitled Miscellanies in Verse and Prose. Written by the Right Honourable Joseph Addison Esq. (1725), along with Thomas Foxton’s verbose Serino: or, The Character of a Fine Gentleman, previously issued by Curll in 1721, which interlarded the text with choice pieces of Addison’s poetry. The book contains critical essays on classical poetry by Addison and Richardson Pack, with texts in both Latin and English: this portion too had first come out in 1721. As so often, Curll’s publishing manipulations had the effect of blurring the distinction between authentic and inauthentic items, as well as between major and minor productions of a deceased author. Pack also made a contribution to another volume dated 1725, that is Delarivier Manley’s A StageCoach Journey to Exeter: the imprint is that of James Roberts, but most of the books advertised at the end prove to have emanated from Curll’s shop. June 1723 saw Curll ushering into the world a book entitled A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies. We might regret today that previous students of his career have paid very little attention to the work of one of his authors, the high-flying Jacobite Jane Barker (1652–c. 1727). In the light of research by Kathryn King and others, it is now evident that she made a significant contribution to the publisher’s list over a number of years, even though she never became especially prolific. Without ever attaining the prominence of Centlivre or Manley, Barker produced a number of books which achieved a degree of popularity. Her fictional output began with Love Intrigues: or, the History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, as Related to Lucasia, issued as the work of ‘a young lady’ in May 1713—Straus thought that this was Curll’s first novel, and we have found no evidence to the contrary. It is possible, however, that he had some share in Exilius: or, the Banish’d Roman. A New Romance. In two Parts: Written after the Manner of Telemachus, for the Instruction of some Young Ladies of Quality. Curll reprinted this in 1715, but he may have been involved in the first edition (?1712), which carried a dedication by his house-author George Sewell. Both these works were republished by Bettesworth and Curll as The Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker in July 1719: the volume has some odd bibliographical features, since the register continues in the two parts while the pagination is separate. In the mean time Barker had helped to translate a work ascribed to F´enelon, The Christian Pilgrimage: or a Companion for the Holy Season of Lent: being Meditations upon the Passion. Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ, issued with Charles Rivington in February 1718. Curll always chose to leaven his catalogue with pious and improving works, and these sometimes figured among his best-sellers. Today the best known of Barker’s works are A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies;

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or, Love and Virtue Recommended: in a Collection of Instructive Novels (1723) and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen; Design’d for the farther Entertainment of the Ladies (1726), the first published by Curll and Thomas Payne, the second by Bettesworth alone. Both works, quilted and highly wrought compilations, use varied literary genres. It is intriguing to note that they crop up in a circulating library catalogue around the middle of the century, when most of the early novelists had disappeared into the ether. About the same time, a printer named Samuel Kent began to prepare a new edition of his work The Grammar of Heraldry. It appeared in 1724, with Pemberton as one of the publishers, and carried an advertisement regarding Kent’s forthcoming opus, H κτισις: [sic] Or, a Critical Exercise on the Hebrew Text, the Latin and English Versions of the First Chapter of Genesis. Kent did not stint in providing all the materials his reader could ask for: he had added ‘Marginal Notes, Paraphrases, Annotations, &c. as Occasion requires, gather’d from the best Authors, and deliver’d in their own proper Language.’ Finally he had thought fit to supply a dedication in Hebrew to the Archbishop of Canterbury. No trace seems to remain of this ambitious project. It was to have been sold by ‘Mrs. Pemberton, and Curl in Fleetstreet, and Mr. Roberts in Warwick-Lane’, at the amazingly low price of sixpence—a bargain such as the trade seldom offered to buyers—Curll more rarely than most. Things were relatively quiet on the Scriblerian front, with no sensational new discoveries, and Pope seemed almost resigned to his newly immune status. Busy on the Odyssey and the Buckingham Works, as well as the edition of Shakespeare later on, he saw himself dwindling from a creator into a mere compiler. In September 1723 he complained weakly to Lord Harley about Curll’s surreptitious printing of poems by Prior (Corr, ii. 203), but the old fire had temporarily disappeared from exchanges between the two men. The Atterbury affair severely damaged Pope, who had been forced to make an unconvincing appearance before the Lords in support of the bishop. Then came the episode of the Windsor Blacks, a marauding gang in the forest suspected of Jacobite leanings who turned out to have Pope’s own in-laws among their number. Just possibly, Curll indulged a fantasy for a moment that he had gained the upper hand over his old rival, and would not need to engage with him so strenuously in the future. If he thought that, he had some rude shocks in store for him. L EW D A N D I N FA M O U S B O O K S At this point the authorities decided that Curll had finally gone too far. First, in May 1723 came a work by Albert-Henri de Sallengre, Eloge de l’yvresse, translated by Robert Samber as Ebrietatis Encomium: or, The Praise of Drunkenness. An eccentric postscript takes the form of a letter to the author, care of ‘that Mirror of privative Perspicuity, Signior Edemondo Curluccio, at the Bible and Dial over

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against Catherine Street in the Strand ’. The bookseller compounded his offence by the appearance in August 1724 of Venus in the Cloister: or, The Nun in her Smock, a version also by Samber of a work by Jean Barrin, which first appeared in English as far back as 1683. Barrin had first announced his anti-clerical attitudes with a work called The Monk Unvail’d: or, A Facetious Dialogue, Discovering the Several Intrigues, and Subtil Practises, together with the Lewd and Scandalous Lives of Monks, Fryers, and other Pretended Religious Votaries of the Church of Rome. Written by an eminent Papist in French, translated in 1678. Advertisements for Venus in the Cloister, which began to appear in the Daily Journal from 22 August 1724, announced it cautiously as available from the ‘Booksellers of London and Westminster’, but Curll probably did not think that he had taken an especially large risk when he recycled this semi-archaic pamphlet, even with its fetching frontispiece. Early in 1725 he continued to plough the furrow of sexual literature in the guise of medical textbooks with a work attributed to Albertus Magnus, De secretis mulierum: or, The Mysteries of Human Generation fully Revealed. (It is unlikely that the medieval saint and scholar had anything to do with this production.) Curll may not have realized that he had overstepped the mark: but the ministry would add De secretis mulierum to the list of offensive publications which they were currently drawing up. Plainly, what Alexander Pettit has recently called a ‘sustained campaign of harassment against the printer’13 prompted by Venus in the Cloister came on the back of a series of similar imbroglios. They extend back for a full decade, and we have already sampled these cases at length. We have also seen that the House of Lords was taking an interest in Curllian smut as early as 1721. Most recently, Curll had been taken up in May 1724 for publishing a libellous pamphlet called Heydegger’s Letter to the Bishop of London, issued by N. Cox around Easter of this year (it was announced in the Monthly Catalogue for April). The work contained among other dross a short poem professing to justify ‘That harmless Pastime, ’. This fashionable activity had been the object of a fierce attack by Edmund Gibson, the politically influential Bishop of London, who had preached before the Societies for the Reformation of Manners at St Mary le Bow on 6 January 1724. In this sermon Gibson inveighed against masquerades for the opportunity they offered to lascivious persons of both sexes. Just one month later William Hogarth enjoyed his first major success with Masquerades and Operas, drawing on many of the issues Gibson had raised. Curll already had some investment in the topic, as he had produced a ballad on the subject, Love’s Invention: or, The Recreation in Vogue, issued with Pope’s popular Worms in 1718.14 The warrant for Curll’s arrest was signed by the Duke of Newcastle, one of the two secretaries of state. Others taken into custody for Heydegger’s Letter included Nicholas Cox, for printing and publishing the work; Thomas Power, for ‘publishing’ (writing?) it; and Samuel Aris for printing it. The messengers also hauled in Richard Macey, a pamphlet-seller in London-House Yard, which ran off Paternoster Row, the nucleus of the book trade located

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under the shadow of St Paul’s. Among these men only Aris commonly worked with Curll. The bookseller was bailed to appear at the King’s Bench court after seeking clemency from Charles Delafaye, the official who handled most of the day-to-day departmental business. Delafaye (1677–1762) held government posts from 1700 until his death. He was editor of the Gazette from 1702 to 1707, and under-secretary of state from 1717 to 1734. In his letter of 8 May, Curll characteristically denied all knowledge of the pamphlet, and proclaimed his ‘Affections to the Governmt ’. He assured Delafaye, ‘as to the pamphlet, I have not any concern therein; neither was there one ever seen or sold in my Shop’.15 Few will credit this statement. According to the Daily Post, the accused men were granted bail on their recognizances at the court on the last day of term (that is 18 May). The subsequent disposition of the case remains unknown. In August of this year, the Flying Post posed with an unconvincing show of sympathy the question, ‘Why is poor Curl hunted down by the Society for Reformation of Manners for his unprofitable starving Bawdry?’16 All this shows that the bookseller had a variety of enemies, in and out of government. He did not suddenly become a target on grounds of a particular offence of a highly specialized nature. We need to take another dimension of the event into account. Curll himself made regular offers to inform against other authors and booksellers, whom he willingly shopped to the authorities. As we have just seen, he had recently approached Robert Walpole and Lord Townshend with information about seditious publications. Throughout the ensuing years he continued to operate in this fashion. He attempted incessantly to buy his immunity from further prosecution by naming offenders within the trade: in 1728 he even fingered Samuel Richardson, then a printer rather than a novelist. The ministry showed some readiness to use his information, but not to wipe his own slate clean.17 Again, we must not think of the charges laid against Curll as suddenly appearing in a vacuum. He had become a prime suspect for many literary misdemeanours, though not always the right choice. During these proceedings, the attorney-general Philip Yorke led for the government in court actions against Curll, but otherwise he played a relatively small part. Later he achieved fame under the name of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, and as such would rule in favour of Pope when the poet sued Curll over copyright in private letters (see Chapter 14 below). Yorke signed two indictments preserved in the King’s Bench records for the Hilary term in 1725, dealing respectively with Venus in the Cloister and A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs. The documents cite Curll as ‘existens homo iniquus [impius on one occasion] et sceleratus’, and append quotations from both pamphlets. The same file contains an indictment for the eccentric atheist, Thomas Woolston.18 But in any case an order had gone out on 24 February to arrest Curll for publishing four ‘Lewd & Infamous Books’: as well as the items just mentioned, these included De secretis mulierum (1725) and Three New Poems (1721). This directive came from the

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highest branch of government. A few days later details of Curll’s examination on 27 February were sent to the Treasury solicitor, Anthony Cracherode. As a result, the Duke of Newcastle on 3 April instructed Cracherode to prosecute the bookseller.19 It took some time to prepare the prosecution, and Curll was bailed at the end of February. (Straus, 101, seems to be wrong in stating that he remained under arrest for nearly five months continuously, until July, although the bookseller did claim in The Curliad that be underwent ‘a close Confinement, of five Months, in the King’s Bench,’ during 1726.) As usual he availed himself of every chance he could to escape trial. Twice, on 20 and 27 October 1725, he wrote to Delafaye from his shop in the Strand, obviously while on bail, and once on 26 October to another official, Mr Stanhope.20 These letters suggest, however truthfully we cannot judge, that Townshend had offered Curll some kind of a deal in return for services to the government, and that the prosecution now under way reneged on this. He claims to have uncovered seditious writings which have lain ‘dormant’ for fifteen years but are now being revived ‘from a notorious Quarter’. Implausibly, he asserts that the prosecutions were mounted against him ‘because I have detected some Traiterous Libels agt . the Govt .’ In asking for Delafaye’s help, he sets out the five (sic) books now under consideration: the additional item is now Ebriatatis Encomium, which involved an old hand in the Curll factory, Robert Samber.21 As for Venus, Curll asserts that this was ‘Printed and Published by Mr [Thomas] Edlin, who I am informed is to be a Witness agt me’.22 He begs Delafaye to save him from the malice of his enemies, ‘who I can make appear are the Enemies to the Government’. Nevertheless an order was made on 28 October to proceed with the trial, and on 18 November the press reported that ‘The Publisher of a Book call’d, A Poem in Praise of Drunkenness, has received Advice to prepare for his Tryal at the King’s Bench Bar at Westminster the 30th inst.’23 With all this going on, Curll evidently felt that it was time for a grand clear-out: he mounted a sale (not auction) or a portion of his stock, lasting at least seven days. The advertisement mentions books ‘in most Languages and Faculties. The Prices set to each Book at reasonable Rates’ (DJ, 15 November 1725). Curll had sometimes sold libraries this way, in the early days, but it was rare to use such a method of retailing general stock. AT T H E K I N G ’ S B E N C H B A R The case came punctually into court on the due date. Curll’s defence was also dated 30 November. It survives in the Bodleian Library,24 owing to the interest taken in the case by Thomas Hearne and Richard Rawlinson, leading antiquarians we have already encountered as an opponent and an ally respectively of the publisher. Curll states that he will plead not guilty and sets up a multi-pronged defence:

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Case This Prosecution appears to be malitious for the following Reasons—in being brought Seven Years after the Publication of the first Book which will be proved a Physick Book ex professo by Dr. Rose—of the Coll of (Physic[ians])—we no [sic] of no Law prohibiting the Translations of Books either out of Latin or French or any other Language neither we presume can such Transactions be deemed Libels The originalls of both Books will be in Court To prove that the Treatise of the use of Flogging is a Physicale book—Call Dr Rose.

The document is signed by Pember and Higgs: the former can be identified as Francis Pember, a clerk in the King’s Bench court. We see that Curll asks the authorities to consult one Dr Rose of the College of Physicians to establish that the Treatise is a ‘physical book’, that is medical and not pornographic.25 Curll also argues that he knows of no law which prohibits translations (obviously true, but irrelevant): neither, he presumes, can such translations be deemed to be libels—a contention designed to cloud the real issues before the court. All to no immediate avail: the court found him guilty of publishing Venus in the Cloister and the Treatise of the Use of Flogging.26 However, sentence was deferred, following a motion on Curll’s part for arrest of judgment. The judges presumably granted this on the grounds that it remained unclear whether a temporal offence had been committed, since Curll’s defence claimed that at most the charge should be one contra bonos mores, and should therefore be heard in a spiritual court. The precedent cited was Regina v. Reid (1707), where Lord Chief Justice Holt had ruled that obscenity ought to be treated not as crime under common law, but rather as an ecclesiastical offence. In addition the defendant’s counsel signified that his client ‘had something material to offer in Arrest of judgment’, and prayed ‘farther Truce’—the usual Curllian tactic to drag proceedings out. By this means he managed to have his sentence postponed, term after term, for an entire year.27 On 3 December the bookseller issued one of his typical publicity releases in the guise of a newspaper advertisement. He admits that he had been found guilty in respect of the two works, although still maintaining that Venus did not bear his name and that he had merely sold it as any other bookseller might have done. He also let loose a bombshell, in a statement that he intended to ‘retire from all Publick Business’, as soon as two books currently going through the press were completed. One of these, entitled The Case of Seduction, described proceedings in Paris against the Abb´e des Rues, ‘for committing Rapes upon 133 Virgins’. This item duly appeared on 23 December, containing an item otherwise mysteriously advertised in November as ‘The Miracle’, consisting of depositions in the Abb´e’s case, translated by W. R. (perhaps William Rogers). But Curll’s retirement proved as revocable as those of Sarah Bernhardt or Frank Sinatra.28 At some stage in the proceedings Curll had compiled a printed justification of his behaviour, under the title of The Humble Representation of Edmund Curll, Bookseller and Citizen of London. Straus dated this rare twelve-page pamphlet

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‘?January’ 1725, but this looks too early, since the complaint may not yet have been laid. It does however contain references to all five books in question, that is the five titles listed in Curll’s letter to Delafaye on 27 October 1725, with a full defence of Ebrietatis Encomium. After the trial had whittled the significant items down to just two, Curll would scarcely have kept up his protestations in the regard to the other three. A likely date would appear to be the summer, after the original arrest at the end of February. Notably, Curll begins with De Usu Flagrorum (the Latin title of the Treatise of the Use of Flogging), which he may have considered either the most vulnerable or the one that could most successfully be defended—here by referring to Jacob’s work on hermaphrodites.29 He also takes the chance to attack with characteristic brazenness an even more successful product of his rivals among the booksellers, that is the widely advertised Onania, ‘that infamous Piece . . . with which our News Papers are daily polluted’.30 Of course, Curll had done his best to regain this ground with Onanism Display’d in 1718, but he had failed to dislodge the market leader. On 6 December Curll put together a characteristic semi-retraction, which he printed in The Case of Seduction. Here he addresses two of the works under fire, repeating his innocence in respect of the more vulnerable pamphlet. He begins with De Usu Flagrorum: I thought the Gentleman, whose Performance it was, had sufficiently Apologised for his Undertaking. But, since, after a Period of above seven Years, my Superiours (to whom during Life I will ever pay such a Deference as becomes me) have thought otherwise, I am fully convinced of my Error; and having complied with the Terms of the Church in publickly declaring both my Repentance and Resolution of Amendment, I hope therefore this Act of Contrition will appease the Resentment of my Prosecutors. The other Book, for which a Prosecution was likewise commenced against me, intitled Venus in the Cloister: Or, the Nun in her S, is a Translation from the French, not bearing my Name; but published last Summer among the common Herd of Novels, of which I sold one to an I, as any other Bookseller might have done.—Hinc illae Lacrymae.31

The bookseller went on to promise to draw up ‘such a Representation of Immorality and Profaneness, every Day vended with Impunity, as would be thought incredible were I not to produce Vouchers for what I assert, which I shall take Care to do against every Charge I make’. He added that his friends felt some concerns ‘lest this F for Abb´ee des Rues, and the Revival of M’s Works, should heap more Coals of Fire upon my Head, if so, some future F must enrol me in the List of those Martyrs, whom Q has doomed to suffer for the Sins of other Men’. As usual, he had set out a strategy in anticipation of perils to come. Further coals of fire were certainly in store for Curll in the New Year of 1726. He had managed to incur trouble on yet another ground, blasphemy, when the Lord Justices met on 9 December and ordered his arrest over an advertisement he had inserted in the Post Boy on 30 November 1725. The notice concerned the Tracts

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of William Staunton, five of which Curll had published in 1723 and 1724, and now advertised as showing that there was no precept for ‘worshiping Christ as God in the Holy Scripture’ (see Chapter 7 above). Delafaye had sent Townshend a copy of the newspaper containing Curll’s advertisement, with objectionable passages underlined in red.32 At this stage the government mounted a raid on the bookseller’s premises, sending in its usual squad of messengers. They seized nine books and pamphlets, including the Staunton items. Curll was arrested and had his bail set at £200, with two sureties of £100 each.33 As one of his sureties Curll named ‘Tho. Cook of St Andrew’s, Holborn, gentleman’. At this time the author Thomas Cooke, soon to be given a minor role in The Dunciad, was involved in work for Curll (see note 28 above). Cooke, the file states, ‘is only a Lodger, and a Man of no good Character as to his Substance’. The other surety did not impress Cracherode any more: Francis Pillonier, a lodger not known in the neighbourhood, had been there only three months. He was in fact Franc¸ois de la Pilloni`ere, an ex-Jesuit who had converted to Protestantism, and came over to England where he supported Benjamin Hoadly in the Bangorian controversy. Pilloni`ere would subscribe to Cooke’s translation of Hesiod in 1728. It looks as if Curll could not raise the bail money at short notice, as he remained in custody. From gaol he wrote first to Cracherode around 21 January 1726 and then in desperate terms to Delafaye on 25 January, maintaining that his crime ‘was not against the government’. He claimed that he had made ‘as humble a Submission as it is in the Power of Man to make to my Ld. of London’, indicating that the Heidegger pamphlet of two years earlier was still weighing against him. In an unconvincing aside, Curll declared that he was ‘resolved never more to advertise any Book that shall give Offence either by its Title or Contents’ (he omitted to say he would not sell such books). Pathetically he foretold his ruin, as ‘My Wife is lately Dead, my Prentice out of his Time and I have only my self and a Servant to Carry on my Business’. The whereabouts of his son Henry at this moment are a mystery, though the young man may have been in custody too: an advertisement in the Daily Journal of 24 January carried only the father’s name, and when Henry was at liberty, he would usually mind the store. Meanwhile his father lived in hopes that Lord Townshend would ‘rescue [him] from this Bondage’. On 21 February Curll renewed his appeal from his confinement: the letter to Delafaye mentions an enclosure (not present in the existing files), a copy of which had also been sent to Robert Walpole.34 Darkly, he hinted at the danger which might face the nation if ‘some Private State Memoirs’ were allowed to reach publication. Maybe Curll had contemplated disclosing the whole story about the memoirs of John Ker, which he was shortly to issue. Apparently he thought better of it, and he remained in the King’s Bench prison until June. It had taken only a short time for second thoughts to set in about his retirement. Within a few weeks a revised notice appeared in the press, following

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an advertisement of recent publications. It offered the same unconvincing apologetics as The Case of Seduction:  King’s Bench, Southwark. Feb. 10, 1725–6 Having been last Term found Guilty of vending two Books, I. A Treatise of Flogging, &c. II. The Nun in her Smock; And having asked Pardon of my Superiors, both in Private and Publick for the Offence taken at these Pieces: I hope, as I resolve never more to offend in the like manner, it will be a sufficient Atonement. In Justice to my own Character, which I defy any Man upon Earth to stain with one dishonest, or dishonourable Action of any Kind, I think my self obliged to declare, that my present Confinement is neither occasioned thro’ Debt, or Disaffection to the Government; and therefore all those with whom I have had, or yet have any Dealings, shall be paid in full in a very short Time. .  (DJ, 11 February 1726)

This serves several purposes: first, it implicitly countermands the promise of retirement, promising only that he will not ‘offend in the like manner’. Second, it advertises the notorious titles once more. Third, it allows Curll moral selfjustification. Finally, it attests to his financial probity and security. To be fair, the bookseller seldom fell down on his monetary obligations, although his creditors may have had to wait and to settle for less than they hoped to receive. But books continued to appear during the time of his imprisonment, most significantly the volumes of Miscellanea which once more stoked the fires of his quarrel with Pope (see Chapter 9 below). According to an earlier biographer, Henry Curll was obliged to seek a new lodger early in 1726, since the previous tenant, ‘Mr. le Blon the painter’, had vacated the premises (Straus, 107). This must be Jakob Christoph Le Blon (1667–1741), a Flemish engraver who is regarded today as the earliest pioneer of colour printing. Unfortunately the first company he set up for this purpose failed in 1725—an adequate reason for him to desert the sinking ship that was Curll’s household. Edmund did not waste his hours in idleness. Among the fruits of his confinement was a jeremiad against the state of the gaols. This pamphlet, The Prisoner’s Advocate, bears the date 13 April 1726 in a dedication to the Lord Chancellor, and may have been published in August. It describes the corrupt practices of the keeper of a spunging-house in Southwark—that is, a halfway house prior to full confinement—to which he had been sent. We can identify this establishment as the Golden Lion, which operated close to St George’s Church in Southwark from the start of the century.35 On 1 June, Curll wrote an abject letter of appeal to Walpole, containing some oddly spry verses. Nothing was too fulsome for the bookseller at such moments: ‘When you cease to deserve well of your country, I will cease to proclaim your merits . . .’. It was a brief respite.

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On 1 July he was brought into court again to receive sentence for publishing the two objectionable pamphlets: but ‘information being filed against him, for since publishing another offensive book; he was remanded back to the King’s Bench Prison’.36 The court report mentions no further obscene works, and it seems that the trial had been overtaken by a different case, involving another sort of ‘offensive’ book. S E C R E T T R A N S AC T I O N S It happened in this way. On 15 June the Treasury solicitor drew up papers for yet another prosecution, and six days later Lord Townshend instructed Cracherode to launch proceedings.37 As regards the threat of severe punishment, this amounted to the most serious of all the charges against Curll. It was directed against John Crawford, alias Ker, author of the Memoirs ‘containing his secret transactions and negotiations’, published on 9 June and fulsomely dedicated to Walpole. The prosecution extended to Curll, for printing and publishing the said work. In fact he had kept his name off the title-page, but the presence at the end in some copies of a catalogue of books issued by Henry Curll provided a bit of a give-away. (This was a huge list, perhaps compiled by Henry as a stock-taking activity when he expected to take over the business, and represented a large effort to shift material lying around unsold.) The prefatory letter signed ‘Philalethes’ patently comes from the father. Next, Curll senior placed a denial in the Evening Post on 5 July. It fooled no one, despite the blustering declaration ‘notwithstanding what has been inserted either in (those Daily-Legends) the News-Papers, or from the Assertion of any Person whatsoever, that I had not any papers seized in the King’s-Bench-Prison, nor am I the Publisher of Mr. Ker’s Memoirs, as my Superiours are well assured by the Author himself. Magna est Veritas & prevalebit’ (Straus, 114). Ker enjoyed little credibility: he had lived the life of an adventurer, an informer and a double agent who had spied on the Jacobites for the government, and regularly played each side against the other.38 On this occasion he was serving a term of imprisonment for debt. As Curll later reported it, Ker had written to the secretary of state (presumably Townshend), to his ‘patron’ (apparently Walpole), and ‘Mr. Pember of the Crown Office’, and believed that he had received a go-ahead to publish his memoirs.39 Then things took an unfortunate turn for Curll. On 8 July John Ker died, while still in the King’s Bench gaol—the very same prison where, just weeks before, the bookseller had met him and obtained the manuscript. Now that Curll was the sole target of the prosecution, the authorities seem to have left him in peace for a little while. Rashly, he even ventured to produce a second and then a third volume of Ker’s Memoirs. No record involving his name appears in the judicial or administrative archives for some time to come. However, the second

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and third volumes of the Memoirs reprint affidavits concerning the accuracy of the text of Volume 1 and related matters.40 More important, in the third volume, the attorney-general’s Latin plea is printed along with an English translation. During pleas before the King’s Bench in the Michaelmas term of 1726, it was noted that Yorke had come into court ‘on Wednesday next after three Weeks of the Holy Trinity last past’ (in late June) to lay information against Curll, ‘existens homo malitiosus & seditiosus’, who had allegedly published a libel that month. Latin phrases meaning ‘wickedly contriving’ and ‘scandalize and vilify’ are scattered through the indictment. The documents set out grounds of the charge, relating in part to the Northern War that the King had conducted. After this, ‘Monday next after three Weeks of St. Michael, this same Term [in late October] . . . came the said E.C. by George Harcourt his Attorney’, to enter a plea of not guilty.41 Late in November he was brought up to court, but his counsel (probably Harcourt) moved for an arrest, and this was granted.42 All the decisive episodes in this story were played out in 1727. The third volume of the Memoirs seems to have come out at the start of the year, later than has been supposed. A group of pamphlet-sellers issued an advertisement then with no mention of Curll: Tomorrow will be Publish’d, upon Oath, | The M and S N of JOHN KER, of Kersland, esq; The T and L P. To which is added, A Copy of the Information exhibited by the Attorney-General against the F P of these Memoirs. A. This Informant being intrusted with all the Papers of John Ker of Kersland, Esq; deceased, (intended to be made publick) hereby deposeth, That this Third and Last Part of his Memoirs and Secret negotiations, &c. is faithfully printed from the Original Manuscripts of the said John Ker, esq; and other Authorities, serving to illustrate the said Work; prepared for the Press by his express Direction. S. GRAY. Jur’ undecimo Die Januarii, 1726–7, (apud Serjeants-Inn, Chancery Lane) coram RO. PRICE. Printed for J. S in Cornhill; and sold by all Booksellers: Where may be had, The F and S P of these Memoirs. (DJ, 23 January 1727)

This was the affidavit printed at the start of the Memoirs, vol. 2, second edition (1727), and in vol. 3 itself. Soon after this advertisement was reprinted along with the notice of a new biography, Memoirs of the Life of Lewis Maximilian Mahomet. On 17 February Henry advertised the same book, and it remained on Curll’s list from now on. (Once again he had stolen a march on the opposition: this volume contains the first printing of Pope’s epitaph on James Craggs.) We may reconstruct events in an approximate fashion. Curll seems not to have been in gaol at the opening of the year, but he evidently sought to lie low, and thereafter it is Henry’s name which appears in press advertisements for several months. He announced a sale of 600 books on 2 March. It seems that the Curlls used the nom de plume of ‘J. Smith’ (maybe a fiction, maybe not) to hide behind at first: Henry then emerged from the shadows after both men were arrested and then bailed during February. ‘S. Gray’, or Susannah, was living in Curll’s house, Henry told

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the authorities (see Chapter 9, below). We shall encounter Judge Price again in the 1730s. The blow was about to fall. Since the previous summer the authorities had taken steps to prepare their ground for a major prosecution. On 3 February they struck, with a warrant to arrest Curll for the second volume of the Memoirs, which had come out in September 1726. Next day Townshend sent messengers in search of Henry Curll, this time with a warrant covering the third volume as well.43 Over the course of the next week they brought in a wide range of book-trade figures for questioning, among them the bookseller Charles Rivington, the bookbinder Christopher Norris, and the printer Samuel Aris. Norris was taken into custody for having ‘a great number’ of the work in his possession. All helped to implicate the Curlls in producing the second volume of the Memoirs: for example, Aris and Henry Parker admitted to printing portions of the Memoirs at his direction. Throughout we encounter a good deal of mystification and subterfuge, related most strikingly to an enigmatic woman who, four months before, supposedly inveigled Henry Curll into ordering 500 copies of the work. Naturally Henry did not know the woman, or the printer. In Curll’s own examination by Delafaye on 3 February, he stated that ‘he is not & that he has not been concerned in the printing or publishing of any Book since the Works of Andrew Marvell Esq’. This could only have been true, if true at all, in the most technical sense. He added that he ‘keeps no shop nor has he kept any for these two years past, and that which is taken to be his Shop is not his but his Son’s’. For his part, Henry deposed on 6 February that he sold copies, but only as the agent for ‘another person’, the shadowy woman. It made a far from convincing defence, and the most lenient observer would spot much prevarication in the testimonies.44 Townshend immediately issued a further warrant for Curll’s arrest in connection with the third volume.45 Again the bookseller threw himself on the mercy of Delafaye, pleading that his son was in one messenger’s custody, while he was in that of another. The entire letter serves to illustrate the wheedling methods Curll habitually used: Sr . Glad I should be to know what is determined concerning me, because I am every way incapacitated from serving my Self, or my Family. If Bail be insisted upon for my Son, it cannot be procured unless I have the liberty to sollicit Friends for that Purpose. As to my Self, Ld . Ch : Justice Raymond told Mr. Paxton (when I was bailed out of Prison on my former Recognizances) that he would take my own Appearance as to Ker’s Memoirs, since I was under Twelve hundred Pounds Bail already, & was thereby sufficiently Secured. Therefore Sr . in the midst of Judgmt . I hope Mercy will be remembered. My Son in one Messenger’s Custody—and my Self in Another—My Family without a Servt .—and my Lodgers going out of the House—my Landlady tho’ I do not owe half a Years Rent has seiz’d my Goods wch . may all be torn from me in four and twenty hours. These Distresses, I hope Sr . will move that Compassion wch . beats in the breast of every Man of

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Honour. I have been with Mr : Roberts ever since Saturday and no one comes near me to let me know your Commands. I am/Sr./Tuesday 3 o’Clock/Yrs : E Curll46

Nicholas Paxton was the Assistant Solicitor to the Treasury and later a butt of Pope; Curll fondly relies on his friendly relations with such men. He tended to overplay his hand in this regard. The very next day, on 15 February, Curll wrote once more, to remind Delafaye of the episode concerning the works of Buckingham, five years earlier, when the copies were seized but ‘delivered up again, upon Cancelling those Parts wch . were objected to’. Curll stuck to his claim that neither he nor son was the publisher or proprietor of the Memoirs.47 A story like this cannot have impressed Delafaye, since he had heard the same sort of thing time after time. However, on 27 February, he did send to Cracherode recognizances on behalf of both father and son, binding them to appear at the King’s Bench on the first day of next term.48 Curll wrote to thank Delafaye for granting him liberty without fees, and requesting that his son should be released too.49 Eventually the Ker trial was set for 18 May 1727, according to the preparatory notes drawn up by Cracherode.50 But by now the obscenity charge had caught up again with the political case. As we have seen, in the summer of 1727 the court came back to the prosecution of Curll for Venus in her Cloister and Treatise of the Use of Flogging, a matter which had been left hanging since the end of 1725. Pettit suggests that the pleadings and judgments reported by Strange and the State Trials took place in the Trinity term, with a final judgment and a verdict given in Michaelmas. This may not be right. Robert Samber was still touting his version of Ebrietatis Encomium, one of the books originally under threat, in the Country Journal on 15 July:    .—I thought I had secured myself from all Censure, when in a Preface to a little Piece (composed for Universal Entertainment and Instruction), entitled Ebrietatis Encomium: or, the Praise of Drunkenness &c., I have declared that, ‘I am very well contented the World should believe me as much a drunkard as Erasmus (who wrote the Praise of Folly) was a Fool and weigh em in the same balance.’ So that I hope so useful a Treatise may (without any Molestation) be sold as usual, by Mr. Curll, in the Strand, to whom I gave it, to print, as my own Act and Deed. Southampton, June 27th , 1727. R tS r

If Curll did not actually write this notice, he very likely inspired its contents, for the Humble Representation had used just the very same argument two years earlier. At this date the bookseller still maintained his defiant pose. In any case, the report clearly labels the case ‘Michaelmas Term, 1 George II’. What Strange states at the end of his transcript of the judge’s opinions is this: But it being a case of great consequence, it was ordered to stand over for a further argument. And this term Page, J. came into the King’s Bench, in the room of Justice Fortescue, it was to have been spoke to by Mr. Solicitor General and myself. But Curll not having attended me in time, I acquainted the court I was not prepared; and my want

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of being ready proceeding from his own neglect, they refused to indulge him to the next term. And in two or three days, they gave it as their unanimous opinion, that this was a temporal offence. . . . And the defendant was afterwards set in the pillory, as he well deserved.51

The date on which Page joined the King’s Bench court appears to have been 13 October 1727. This indicates a different reconstruction of the sequence. We could surmise that the court considered the motion for arrest in the Trinity term (that is, June or July); that the main hearing reported by Strange took place at the beginning of the Michaelmas term, that is after 1 October; and that the session at which Curll failed to mount his defence and the verdict was finally given took place on 27 November. The bookseller was then returned to the King’s Bench gaol without bail, awaiting sentence. He came back into court in the Hilary term of 1728, and finally received sentence on 13 February in that year. Yorke led for the prosecution, and opposed the claim of the defendant’s lawyer that though his client might be punishable in a spiritual court for an offence contra bones mores, he could not be held accountable in a temporal court. The attorney-general’s argument has been set out before, and it need not be repeated here.52 In the end the court rejected a possible precedent in the case of Regina v. Read, and ruled against Holt’s judgment that an offence at common law did lie in this case. Lord Chief Justice Raymond was supported by two other members of the bench, Reynolds and Probyn. Only Fortescue took the view that there was nothing indictable in the alleged offence, since a breach of the peace ought to exist for an indictment to be possible. Later the judge expressed his view that, far from being subject to prosecution, The Nun in her Smock ought ‘rather to be published to expose the Romish Priests, the Father Confessors, and Popish Religion’. PI L LO R I E D Curll had tried everything, but his pleas failed, so that at last he faced conviction on the last day of term (DJ, 13 February 1728). The court sentenced him both for the two obscene libels (a fine of 25 marks or £16.66 on each count, with recognizances for good behaviour required), and for the Ker offence (a fine of 20 marks or £13.33, plus standing in the pillory for one hour). Ten days later occurred the fatal day. A show of resistance proved futile, if we are to believe the press: Mr. Edmund Curll had by a most moving Memorial to one of his Majesty’s Ministers of State, desir’d tp be excus’d from his attending on the Pillory, but his Presence being judg’d absolutely necessary on that eminent Machine of Justice, he was answer’d, that his Request could not be complied with; and Yesterday he performed Homage at Charing-Cross, before an Indulgent Croud of Spectators. (BJ, 24 February 1728)

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If he had looked to find mercy from Walpole or Townshend, it must have been a triumph of hope over experience. Yet the culprit managed to turn the last part of the sentence into a kind of triumphant display, as Strange records: This Edmund Curll stood in the pillory at Charing-Cross, but was not pelted, or used ill; for being an artful, cunning (though wicked) fellow he had contrived to have printed papers dispersed all about Charing-Cross, telling the people, he stood there for vindicating the memory of queen Anne: which had such an effect on the mob, that it would have been dangerous to have spoken against him: and when he was taken down out of the pillory, the mob carried him off, as it were in triumph, to a neighbouring tavern.53

Such an orchestrated piece of street theatre hardly supports the view expressed by Pettit that the sentencing hearing cleared the way for the jurists to consider ‘the less important matters of A Treatise of the Use of Flogging and Ker’s Memoirs’.54 On the contrary, it suggests the Memoirs indeed stood at the real heart of the affair. They brought Curll into the pillory, by far the most conspicuous punishment to which he was subjected, and which allowed him to make a grand political gesture in the face of the public. Nor can we claim that Curll’s sentence was exceptionally harsh: just ten years earlier, William Redmayne had been convicted at the Old Bailey of publishing a scandalous libel, namely The Case of Schism in the Church of England by Laurence Howell. The court fined him £500 and imposed a term of five years in prison.55 Just a year after Curll’s trial, a clergyman named William Rowland was also found guilty of a ‘false and scandalous libel’. The judges sentenced him to stand in the pillory twice and to serve six months in gaol. This ought to have meant ultimate disgrace for the prisoner. Year after year the authorities had pursued their man, and finally they had nailed him. Pope would open the second book of The Dunciad with a contemptuous reference to the episode. Yet when he ‘mounted the Rostrum for one Hour’ on 23 February 1728, the ever resourceful Curll still had some ammunition to fire off. He came out with a daring salvo: as Strange indicates, he had prepared an address ‘To the Spectators’ at Charing Cross, which sought to show that Ker had compiled his Memoirs under the favour of none other than Queen Anne.56 It reads: GENTLEMEN, I Hope you’ll consider, that this Gentleman who now appears before you, is not guilty of any base or villainous Crimes; he has indeed been found guilty of publishing three Books, and that for which he is thus exposed, is called, The Life and Actions of J K, of Kersland, and who had from Her late most gracious Majesty Queen A, of immortal Memory, the under-written Royal Leave and Licence, which will shew you the Trust S had in him, and which he faithfully discharged: Likewise did this Gentleman, who now stands before you, perform his Promise to him on his Death-Bed, in publishing the Two last Books, he himself having published the First in his Life-time.

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What else could a gentleman have done? The ‘licence’ from Queen Anne which Curll printed, however, merely granted the loyal John Ker leave to ‘associate Himself with such as are disaffected to Us and Our Government, in such Way or Manner as He shall judge most for our Service’. Memoirs are not within the terms of reference. No doubt the curious would find abundant copies of the broadside on sale. Curll may have devoted little time to the Tyburn trade, where printers like Applebee hawked confessions of malefactors at the foot of the gallows; but the pillory made just as good a point of sale. Needless to say, this brush with the King’s Bench did not bring Curll’s problems with the law to an end, any more than it marked the true end of his career as a publisher. As early as the following September, he tried to alert the ministry to some obscure threat of conspiracy, evidently involving Mist’s Journal —the case in point seems to have been a notorious issue of the Journal in August. The two booksellers remained at odds, as they had been for more than a decade. Later in the year Curll had been caught in the company with a suspicious individual named Burton, currently in trouble over Mist’s rash publication.57 As well as writing to Townshend personally, Curll sent a letter on 6 September 1728 to the King’s messenger John Hutchins, who had arrested him on previous occasions. Curll insisted that he would be able to clear up matters with Delafaye, and would be able to defeat what he now called ‘this unheard of Attack upon the Constitution.’ He hoped that this would gain him ‘a remittance of all my Past Offences w.ch to this age are indeed but Venal (sic)’. The opening sentence of this message supplies a masterpiece of prevarication: ‘Among all my Imprudencies, a Disaffection to the Governmt was never laid to my Charge.’58 Quite to the contrary, the ministry regularly laid precisely this accusation at his door. Curll kept on asserting his loyalty to the government, and sending Walpole titbits of information; but the first minister was not a man easily hoodwinked. Meanwhile, the bookseller Benjamin Motte had come to hope that the King’s Bench, having tasted Curll’s blood, would curb the other ‘enormities’ for which he was responsible—in other words, his piratical activities with regard to the work of Swift and Pope. But that would prove beyond the power even of the courts to achieve.

9 Tribulations (1726–1728) On top of all these legal battles, Curll had other problems facing him. At one time he seems to have been genuinely contemplating retirement, though any such intent soon wavered. Added to this, in the mid-1720s, his relations with the Scriblerians took a turn for the worse once more. The fisticuffs in the previous decade had brought with them an element of rough horseplay which could still admit of some geniality. But the affair of Buckingham’s Works had soured things between Pope and Curll, and soon afterwards the quarrel grew thoroughly nasty. It must have deeply wounded Pope when the bookseller came out in February 1724 with a translation of Anne Dacier’s hostile ‘Reflexions’ on the Iliad translation. As Howard Weinbrot observes, these had remained little known in England up to this time, even though they had first appeared in 1719 and had been brought to Pope’s attention in 1723.1 To heap injury on the insult, Curll attributed the translation to ‘Mr. Parnell’ and included a dedication to Richard Steele signed ‘T. Parnell’. Needless to say, this individual had no connection at all with the poet’s old friend and Scriblerian colleague, Thomas Parnell, who died as far back as October 1718. The publisher simply extended his well-known proclivity for dredging up distinguished names to use on title-pages: not even the dead were safe now from such ill treatment. The mysterious translator sees it as his job to annotate the text by means of further damaging details. With all his troubles in and out of the courtroom, then, Curll had plenty to occupy his mind around 1725 and 1726. Nevertheless, he kept up the running siege of Pope and his friends. He might garnish a work on a totally remote subject such as The Adventures of Pomponius, translated from the French roman a` clef by Spring Macky, with a sudden digression contrived to lambast the poet, referring to ‘the sycophantick Meanness of the Undertaker, who crawls under the Toilet of every Court-Lady . . .’. Curll liked the term ‘undertaker’: it derived from Lintot’s phrase that Pope had ‘undertaken’ the version of the Odyssey, and was widely used to suggest that Pope had acted as a literary entrepreneur rather than as a genuine author. Spring Macky, a son of the Scottish adventurer and spy John Macky, left few impressions on history other than by way of his work for Curll. The bookseller continued to advertise his edition of Swift’s Miscellanies, which he had last issued in 1721: naturally this contained spurious items, but the Dean was used to that by now. Other casual flicks were made from time to time. Perhaps

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Curll decided to put on sale an unremarkable work by Thomas Pope called The Stamford Toasts at the end of 1725 on account of the chance it afforded to get in a brief dig, since he advertised it as ‘by Mr. Pope, not the Undertaker’. At the same time Curll brought out a fresh version of the Court Poems which had caused irritation years before—fresh at least so far as the title-page was concerned. They now included most of the stray items Curll had managed to filch from Pope’s work-table, including the Atticus lines. MISCELLANEA All these made up very minor infractions compared with the volumes of Miscellanea that Curll began to produce in July 1726—indeed, on his own birthday, the 14th of that month, if Straus’s dating is correct. A cheeky prefatory letter to Henry Cromwell is dated ‘As to fixt Time, the Tenth of June | When ev’ry Tory’s Heart’s in Tune | Anno, 1726.’ This was the Pretender’s birthday. Newspaper advertisements name Henry Curll as the publisher, since his father still languished hors de combat in gaol. The set began with the most explosive item: Volume I contains the letters which Pope had written in his youth to Cromwell, deeply embarrassing to the author, as well as a number of his earlier poems, now published for the first time but none of great significance. Pope may well have been planning to release his ‘Verses’ on Thomas Durfey, as they came out in the Scriblerians’ Miscellanies two years later; but he would have no doubt preferred to do so at a time of his own choosing. Through his informant Elizabeth Thomas, Curll was able to get hold of some new Dryden materials. The second volume sometimes contains the sheets from Court Poems, and it also includes ‘The Three Gentle Shepherds’, a short satire in verse Pope most likely wrote over a decade earlier, but which had never been printed. Otherwise Curll targeted the contents in a different direction. The frontispiece uses a portrait of Swift engraved by George Vertue (to judge from appearances, taken from a portrait by Charles Jervas), and he looms largest in the volume: unfortunately some of the alleged ‘Swifteana’ found here are bogus. Possibly the Dean found more cause for irritation in several authentic items, such as Cadenus and Vanessa, and some poems which had appeared anonymously as Dublin broadsides. It remains a mystery how Curll got hold of some of these works. In Volume I he printed for the first time a poem called ‘Brent’, by William Diaper, who had died in 1717: interestingly, the manuscript survives in the Rawlinson collection in the Bodleian library (along with the letters to Cromwell), suggesting that Richard Rawlinson may have acted as a prime source for Curll. The state of the text differs in separate copies of Volume II, but another of the Scriblerians’ old friends, Nicholas Rowe, is levied into service in many extant sets.2 Curll gives items from some of the old verse miscellanies another run, one section dating back to 1714. A breezy dedication to Pope refers mysteriously to a cause

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depending between Cromwell and two ladies, as well as ‘a late Motion made in Court’. If Cromwell sued Mrs Thomas, no trace remains of this episode. The dedication closes with familiar doggerel: ‘Terminis Trin: the final Day | Succeeds the merry Month of May’. Curll had grown so accustomed to appearing in the halls of justice that they seem by now to have provided him with his private calendar. Two more volumes followed in September, under the title of Whartoniana: or, Miscellanies, in Verse and Prose. By the Wharton Family, and several other Persons of Distinction. Never before published. As usual, the contents are made up of separately published works, most of which have nothing to do with the Jacobite firebrand, the Duke of Wharton: one segment of the second volume consists of letters to Lady Wharton. For once Pope escaped almost unscathed, with just a few lines attacking the Odyssey subscription in Volume I, but Swift did not. Several items were unscrupulously attributed to the Dean: this time Curll claims in his dedication that he obtained the manuscripts for these volumes at a sale ‘t’ other Day at Albemarle Street, when the Duke’s Books were sold by Auction by an Upholsterer, who neither knew what he possessed, nor the Worth of what he sold’.3 The work has some independent interest, as containing some of Curll’s own verse, notably effusive lines addressed to Robert Walpole (he had used them in his appeal to the prime minister from the King’s Bench gaol—see Chapter 8). But unlike its predecessors Whartoniana generated more smoke than fire. In the first week of 1727, a ‘fifth’ volume of miscellanies came before the public under another misleading title—Atterburyana, Being Miscellanies, By the late Bishop of Rochester, &c. Curll could do more with an et cetera than anybody else in recorded history. His cheeky dedicatory preface, dated New Year’s Day, makes some attempt to justify the misnomer. In fact the volume plainly aims to capitalize on the bishop’s recent notoriety, with the secondary purpose of irritating Atterbury’s friend and loyal supporter Pope. Two short novels by ‘Philaretus’ take up the largest share of the volume: we can identify this author to the extent that his name was John Clarke and he was paid a guinea for each of these effusions.4 (He should not be confused with respectable authors bearing the same name who wrote at this period.) The Scriblerians got off lightly in this instance, for Curll could dredge up no more than a last minute addition, printed as a postscript ‘Just arrived from Twickenham (as I am assur’d)’. This presented a poem now generally accepted as Pope’s, with the title ‘Receipt to make Soup’. It had first surfaced in a joint letter from Gay, Mrs Henrietta Howard, Bolingbroke, William Pulteney, and Pope, directed to Swift in September 1726, just after the Dean made his long anticipated return visit to England. The company assembled at Twickenham to sample a new dish of stewed veal prepared according to a recipe supplied by Pulteney’s French cook, and the poem simply versified this recipe. A broadside printing, known to survive only in a single copy at the Bodleian Library, carries the title A Receipt to make a Soop. By Mr. Pope to D n S t. Perhaps Curll lifted his text from the broadside, or alternatively his

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printing in Atterburyana may have itself been the first.5 It remains a cause for wonder how the unscrupulous bookseller could have laid his hands on such a private document so quickly. We have to suspect some connivance in the Pope circle. By far the most important among these Miscellanea was the first set, with its inconvenient disclosure of Pope’s early correspondence with Henry Cromwell. The contents revealed nothing very terrible, but they stood in direct contradiction with the image of himself Pope had been assiduously cultivating over the years. They showed their writer as by turns brash, coltish, bawdy, pedantic, smug, trifling, pretentious, and vain. Cromwell (1659–1728), an elderly flˆaneur almost thirty years older than his friend, had undertaken to school the young poet in rakish attitudes. A bachelor, he posed as a critic, a man about town, and an unthreatening flirt. What made things worse was the means by which the letters came into general circulation. Around 1714 Cromwell had passed them on to a mistress—if he was still competent to act in the appropriate capacity—by the name of Elizabeth Thomas (1675–1731). Her early verse had attracted the notice of John Dryden, who gave the sobriquet ‘Corinna’. Years later her poverty compelled her to sell these to Curll for ten guineas (£10.50). Predictably this led to incarceration in a place more lastingly harmful to her reputation than the Fleet debtors’ gaol, where she was committed around 1728. She found herself allotted an undignified role in the booksellers’ sports in The Dunciad as ‘Curll’s Corinna’ (see Chapter 10 below). In his note to this passage, Pope stated that he had ‘not thought of reflecting’ on Thomas, a disingenuous claim, adding that ‘he has been inform’d she is a decent woman and in misfortunes’. At the same time he disclosed the roots of his anxiety over this affair: ‘We only take this opportunity of mentioning the manner in which those Letters got abroad, which the author was asham’d of as very trivial things, full not only of levities, but of wrong judgments of men and books, and only excusable from the youth and inexperience of the writer’ (TE v. 106). From now on, he would take care about the disposition of his letters. The episode moved this simmering quarrel on to a different plane. Curll had managed to get under Pope’s skin before now, but this event would initiate the most serious battles of the two men, in and out of the courtroom. Some damaging explanatory notes added to the letters also rankled with their author. No doubt the fact that Curll had purloined the Cromwell letters with so little trouble threatened Pope’s frail hold on his identity, which he had always attempted to control with such rigour. Curll insolently retorted to Pope’s strictures that he saw ‘no reason [Mrs Thomas] had to ask either Mr. Cromwell’s or Mr. Pope’s leave’ to dispose of the letters as she thought fit (Curliad, 22). Cromwell told Pope that he had not seen the letters Curll published, and had had no contact with Mrs Thomas for seven years (Corr, ii. 439). He also reported that Curll had

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used the poet William Pattison as an intermediary (see below p. 185). For Pope to find his private self exposed in this public way presented a serious challenge to his psychological well-being: perhaps, in time, it led to his increasing use of self-dramatization in poems such as the Epistle to Arbuthnot. As a response to these events, Pope started asking his friends for the return of letters he had written to them, in case they should be misappropriated in the manner of the Cromwell correspondence. In this spirit the poet wrote to his old friend John Caryll on 5 December 1726: I will begin by entreating of you to consult my fame, such as it is, and to help me to put out of Curl’s power any trifling remains of mine. If therefore you have preserved any verses or letters, I beg you to send them to me (as I will desire every man to do whom I know to be my friend). I will review them, and return whatever can do no hurt to either of us, or our memories, or to any other particular man’s character; but so much, as would serve to bear testimony of my own love for good men, or theirs for me, I would not but keep on all accounts, and shall think this very article more to my reputation than all my works put together. (Corr, ii. 419)

Since he never did return the letters Caryll gave him, and actually used them as the basis of doctored texts in subsequent editions, Pope’s words here cannot have been completely honest. It looks rather as if Curll’s initiative had given him the idea for editing his earlier correspondence and then publishing it in a form which would enhance his reputation. On occasions he may have been genuinely irritated by his persevering adversary, as he when he complained to the bookseller Benjamin Motte on 30 June 1727 about a press notice for the Cromwell letters, ‘The advertisement of Curl is a silly piece of Impertinence, not worth notice, & it serves to tell every body what makes for my purpose & reputation, ‘‘That those Letters to Mr Cromwell were printed without My Consent or knowledge’’ ’ (Corr, ii. 438–9). Here Pope most likely refers to advertisements which had just come out in the Evening Post.6 At the same time, Curll’s Miscellanea played a part in instigating the series of Scriblerian Miscellanies, beginning in June 1727: Swift and Pope had already concocted the idea for some such collection, but Curll’s volumes gave them the perfect excuse to bring out their own authorized series.7 In the best discussion of these matters, Maynard Mack has pointed out how Pope had long endured the assaults of Curll, who ‘organized his stable of hacks . . . to rain down pamphlets on each new work as it appeared, filled the newspapers with unsavoury publicity, worked up ‘‘Keys’’, often false, to identify Pope’s pseudonyms, invented new scurrilities, perpetuate old lies, and offered . . . access to print to every unfriendly or jealous pen’. Immediately to the purpose, Mack describes volumes ‘pieced out . . . with every sort of flotsam from ‘‘An Essay on Gibing’’ to ‘‘The Praise of Owls’’ ’.8 These deathless works actually appear in the set of Miscellanea now under review. Deliberately, Curll printed the Essay in such a way that it could be

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falsely attributed to Swift. As for Laus Ululae, this was a bizarre mock-encomium, supposedly the work of the seventeenth-century neo-Latin author Conradus Goddaeus and translated by ‘a canary bird’ (in fact, Thomas Foxton). It had first been advertised a few months earlier (DJ, 20 December 1725), but it scarcely exists as a separate volume. In any case, Curll’s procedures ensured that the works of the Scriblerians regularly came before the public in such outr´e company. Even though Pope and his friends were pleased enough at times when their writings scraped into surreptitious print, they may not have wanted to see these things juxtaposed to facetious pieces on owls and gibing. In March 1728 Benjamin Motte, the publisher of the Miscellanies, would set out the official justification for their existence, as a well-merited riposte to the insults which Swift and Pope had received over the years. He wrote: The dispute with Mr Curll stands as follows:—For many years past he has made it his business to pick up straggling and imperfect Copies of Verses, which he has father’d upon Dr Swift or Mr Pope, or some other name of reputation. Some of these were really written by these Gentlemen, but publish’d by him without their knowledge and against their consent; and many Pieces were laid to their charge which they knew nothing of, and were so worthless that they had reason to be ashamed of them. To vindicate their Reputation they made a Collection of such things as were genuine, and have just now published them, having before for a valuable and substantial consideration made a formal Conveyance of the Copyright of them to me in May last. On the Publication of them I receiv’d the following Letter from Curll:— Mr. Motte,—I have carefully examin’d your new last volume of old Miscellanies; in the Art of Sinking, your Authors have printed the Project for advancing the Stage, which is my copy; and most of the other pieces in the Volume have been by me published many Years ago. To-morrow night you’ll find I have in some measure undeceiv’d the Town. And to do myself justice, will reprint whatever is New in this last Volume as a just reprizal for what they have taken from me that is Old | Yours | E. Curll. However Swift and Pope agree, Nor they nor you shall bubble me.

Q. Whether, in case he be in execution in the Court of King’s Bench, that Court has not a power to curb him in such enormities? (Corr, ii. 477–8) A slightly less particularized explanation appears in the Preface to the first volume of Miscellanies. After describing the dishonest practices rife in the trade, Pope continues: Those very Booksellers who have supported themselves upon an Author’s Fame while he lived, have done their utmost after his Death to lessen it by such Practices: Even a Man’s last Will is not secure from being exposed in Print; whereby his most particular Regards, and even his dying Tendernesses are laid open. It has been humourously said, that have fished the very Jakes, for Papers left there by Men of Wit: But it is no jest to affirm, that the Cabinets of the Sick,

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and the Closets of the Dead, have been broke open and ransacked, to publish our private Letters, and divulge to all Mankind the most secret Sentiments and Intercourses of Friendship. Nay, these Fellows are arriv’d to that Height of Impudence, as when an Author has publickly disown’d a spurious Piece, they have disputed his own Name with him in printed Advertisements, which has been practis’d to Mr. Congreve and Mr. Prior. (Prose Works, ii. 91–2) Sometimes we can sense a hint of paranoia in the offing, even though Swift hid it behind a vein of humour when he ended a letter to Martha Blount from Twickenham, ‘Pray do not give a copy of this Letter to Curll the bookseller’ (Swift, Corr, iii. 90). Likewise Pope wrote of the forthcoming Dunciad in a joint letter he and Gay sent to Swift, ‘My Poem (which it grieves me that I dare not send you a copy of, for fear of the Curl’s and Dennis’s of Ireland, and still more for fear of the worst of Traytors, our friends and Admirers) my Poem, I say, will shew you what a distinguishing age we lived in?’ (Corr, ii. 455). Years later Curll managed to use this letter as evidence that Pope had been telling less than the truth: ‘This Passage detects a most flagrant Falshood; for, in the Notes, it is positively asserted, that the Dunciad was first printed in Ireland; verifying a good old English Proverb, that,—Liars ought to have good Memories’. It delivered a shrewd thrust, since Pope clearly prided himself on keeping on top of the oversights and unwitting errors of his enemies. In a less serious vein, the Scriblerians and their allies mounted further reprisals against the bookseller. According to a letter from Arbuthnot to Swift in August 1726, Lady Hervey, formerly the court beauty Molly Lepell and now the wife of Walpole’s acolyte, had got into a ‘a little sort of Miff’ about a ballad sent to her (Swift, Corr, iii. 44). She had in mind an adaptation of John Gay’s ballad ‘Molly Mog’, which Lord Chesterfield and William Pulteney applied to Lady Hervey. The poem contained this quatrain: If Curll would print me this sonnet To a volume my verses would swell; A fig for what Dennis says on it, He can never find fault with Lepell.

It may have been when Swift made his visits to England in 1726 and 1727 that he composed his ‘Advice to the Grub Street Verse-Writers’. This good-humoured address to the ragged poets in their garrets contains two thrusts at the Dean’s old enemy. The first comes in recommendations for presenting their work to the public, and the second in a suggested plan for its distribution: Get all your Verses printed fair, Then, let them well be dry’d; And, Curl must have a special Care To leave the Margin wide. Lend these to Paper-sparing Pope;

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And when he sets to write, No Letter with an Envelope Could give him more Delight. When Pope has fill’d the Margins round, Why, then recall your Loan; Sell them to Curl for fifty Pound, And swear they are your own.

T H E K EY TO G U L L I V E R By attacking Curll so directly, the Scriblerians had given him a prominence he craved. This struck the author of an article in the British Journal on 25 November 1727, probably the Irish journalist Matthew Concanen (not one of the bookseller’s regular team). The item was reprinted in A Compleat Collection of all the Verses, Essays, Letters and Advertisements (1728), an omnium gatherum of responses to the Miscellanies. Concanen seized on the disproportion between the grandiose literary aspirations of the Scriblerus group and their choice of such a humble target: The first Thing we meet with here (and indeed half the Work is taken up with it) is a Page or two of severe Satire upon Booksellers, particularly one Edmund Curll. I won’t enter into the Occasion or the State of the Controversy, or the Strength of these Gentlemens Raillery and Reasoning; but is it not truly pleasant to see two of the greatest Genius’s of our Age set their Wits to a paltry Bookseller? . . . Your Triumphs, O ye Bards, proclaim, and all your Flags unfurl, For Doctor Swift and Mr. Pope have conquer’d Edmund Curll. Henceforward let no little Under-Wits disdain to write against Curll, if he provokes them, (as I have known several give themselves such Airs) since the two Leaders of the Muses Bands have put their Names to a Libel against him. Rejoice therefore, O Edmund Curll, and let thy Gladness know no End, since thou hast had the Honour to be satirized by the same Pens, which have been employed in lampooning the Duke of MARLBOROUGH and Mr. ADDISON.

The author claims that the Scriblerians aimed to take over Curllian methods to propagate their own works; ‘It is an easy Matter to keep the dullest Stuff alive by the Art of multiplying Impressions, which consists only in the Variation of Types, Title-Page, Size and Paper. Mr. Curll is so great a Master of this, that I don’t wonder at his falling under the Resentment of such People as intended to make a Monopoly of it’.9 Thus, even before The Dunciad appeared, Curll had achieved a sort of parity with his tormentors. By 1726 the unscrupulous bookseller had offended Swift time and time again. In all likelihood, therefore, the Dean lost little sleep over some of some fresh

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insults which came his way in that year. Around April came the first edition of Cadenus and Vanessa, a poem which had begun to circulate in manuscript after the death of Esther Vanhomrigh in 1723. The item was potentially scandalous enough to produce a flurry of more or less illicit versions in Dublin, London and Edinburgh. It is not clear which text Curll advertised from July, but most likely he had a share in the edition put out by James Roberts, although a key promised in the newspaper has not been located. He reprinted the poem in later collections. Then, late in October 1726, Benjamin Motte issued a work with the innocentlooking title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Posterity has every reason for gratitude to Swift for his masterpiece, but Curll had a special reason to salute Gulliver’s Travels. It gave him the opportunity to issue a key to the book in four parts, published between late November and the end of the year. Authorship was attributed to ‘Signor Corolini, a noble Venetian now residing in London,’ otherwise styled ‘Corolini di Marco.’ Whoever this gentleman was, he probably haled from nearer Bow than Brescia. The work took the form of letters to Swift, with paraphrase, quotation and impertinent commentary intermixed, but its chief purpose lay elsewhere: ‘It was a neat project, which skilfully advertised a number of recent Curll publications, regretting that they were not to be found in the libraries of the various Royal palaces which Gulliver visited’ (Straus, 280). The ingenuity with which the publisher carried out this task shows up in a footnote concerning ‘Richard Sympson,’ who signed the preface as the ostensible editor of the work written by his ‘cousin’ Gulliver. ‘Capt. William Sympson, his near Relation,’ the note helpfully records, ‘hath Published a new Voyage to the East-Indies. Printed for Mr. C.’ The note refers to A New Voyage to the East-Indies: viz. I. To Suratte, and the Coast of Arabia [etc.]: By Capt. William Symson. To which is added, a Particular Account of the French Factories in those Parts, With many excellent Remarks by the Sieur Luillier. Done from the French. This Voyage had been brought out by Curll and Bettesworth in 1715, and reissued in 1720. The appearance of Gulliver, and the accidental use of the name ‘Sympson’, provided an opportunity to revive flagging sales. But you had to be Curll to spot these gifts from fortune. Corolini offers a few unexpected insights: unusually for the time, he has seen that the storms in the South Sea at the beginning of the work have oblique reference to the great Bubble of 1720. The inclusion of this observation allows a note on Swift’s poem The Bubble, which is ‘Printed for Mr. C in the Strand, where may be had all his other Writings.’ (James Roberts had published the item in question for Benjamin Tooke in 1721: this is the first time we hear of Curll’s involvement.) In fact, the Key functions as a kind of advertising brochure, in which the writer takes every chance to puff various items of Swiftiana on sale at the bookshop, however contrived the link: ‘The insufficiency of Lucrative-Debates is finely exposed in Dean Swift’s C and V. The only True Copy of this just Satire is printed for H. C in the Strand.’ The coup de grace came when the four parts were reissued in a single volume as Lemuel Gulliver’s Travels

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into Several Remote Nations of the World. Compendiously methodized, for Publick Benefit; with Observations and Explanatory Notes throughout. Here, the first few lines of the title are set out in such a way that a careless buyer might easily suppose that he or she was purchasing the original rather than the shameless spin-off. By this date Swift had probably come to expect this much, or worse, from Curll. Others were striking to take advantage of the popularity of Gulliver. A fashion rapidly grew up for miniaturized ‘Lilliputian’ verses, in which even Pope would deign to indulge himself. One set appeared as Two Lilliputian Odes (1727), and in a postscript to these the author gets in some digs at John Dennis and Curll: Or if E. C should see What I’ve wrote, He would not Be at Rest, Till ’twere drest Out in Print, From his Mint, Tho’, God knows, there’s nothing in’t.10

Even in squibs, it was important to use the publisher’s name as a household word, recognizable to all who bought books. One of the works advertised in the Key is a new edition of Bishop Samuel Parker’s History of his own Time, with ‘proper remarks’. These are stated to be by Edmund Curll, ‘late Bookseller’. The main aim of the advertisement is to launch a savage attack on a rival version, recently issued by Revd Thomas Newlin. Even by Curll’s standards, it reaches an astonishing height of abuse. It reads in part: N .B. Mr. Newlin’s Version of this History, is for the Generality, jejune, puerile, low, and bald: The Errors in Chronology are very gross: Many are the Omissions and Interpolations throughout the whole Work, by which the Sense of the Author is perverted, and the Readers greatly imposed on.

Warming to his task, the advertiser suggests that Newlin must have had some ‘bungling Coadjutior’, and then adds: It is a mean Performance; and, if done by one Hand, the Operator must acknowledge either his Ignorance, Supineness, or Neglect—utrum horum, &c. For to particularize the Incoherencies, Deficiencies, Tautologies, Mistakes, and Blunders which occur almost in every Page, would be to transcribe the whole Book.11

The ‘late Bookseller’ had not lost his talent for invective. Anybody who still thinks that Edmund Curll was a warm-hearted and benevolent fellow might find it salutary to inspect such passages. Not much emerges about Curll’s private life as he strove to keep afloat amid his legal troubles. However, it looks as if he was living for a period with a certain

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Susannah Gray. According to a deposition by his son Henry in 1727, she was a gentlewoman who resided in the house; he did not know ‘whether she may be marryed or not, but that she did go by the Name of Gray, & if she is marryed she goes by the name of Curll’.12 This may indicate what is popularly called a common law marriage. Then, while Edmund awaited his trial in the King’s Bench, his premises briefly came under threat during an upsurge of popular feeling in the streets. The bookshop, as we have seen, stood on the south side of the Strand, almost opposite the entrance to Catherine Street. This exact spot, too, marked one of the sites for erecting the pillory (just down the road lay the best known of these sites, Charing Cross). In April 1727 the City Under-Marshal, Charles Hitchen was sentenced to stand in the pillory here after his conviction for attempted sodomy at the Talbot Inn, a tavern just down the Strand from where the punishment would be carried out. Evidence showed that he came upon his mark, a man named Williamson, at the Savoy gate, that is a few yards from Curll’s shop. Hitchen had once employed the arch-criminal Jonathan Wild, but he later turned against his former associate, and rode in the procession to Tyburn when Wild was hanged in 1725. His volte-face did not bring him popular esteem. In fact the court’s verdict set the scene for a piece of street theatre as brutal as any the city could provide: Last Tuesday Mr. Hitchen was erected on the Pillory over-against Catherine-street in the Strand. His friends had so barricadoed the Avenues leading to him with Coaches and Carts, as almost render’d the Approaches of the Mob inaccessible: However, the Artillery used in these Occasions, play’d incessantly from all Corners, and a Battery in Catherine-street, conducted by a great Number of Drury-lane Ladies play’d with good Success for Half an Hour. Mr. Curll’s Windows suffer’d pretty much by it; and the Constables, endeavouring by a Sally to level that Work, were drove back to the Pillory by a strong Body of the Mob, tho’ not without some Blood spilt on both Sides. All Means used by the Peace Officers and Mr. Hitchen’s Friends and Brethern to repel the Fury of the Populace proving ineffectual, the Criminal met with the Reward due to his Demerits. He was taken down at the usual Time, and carried back to Newgate, almost ready to expire, with the Fatigue he had undergone in the Rostrum, his Night-Gown and Breeches being torn in Pieces from his Body. (RWJ, 6 May 1727)

Apart from the damage done to his premises, Curll must have wondered if this gave him a glimpse of things to come. As it turned out, less than a year would pass before the bookseller endured the same humiliating punishment along the street at Charing Cross, although this time the mob showed more kindness to the victim. Of course Hitchen had been convicted of a crime, sodomy, which ranked among the few which nobody ever imputed to Curll. The marshal’s unpopularity with Londoners went back to his corrupt enforcement of the law and heavy involvement with Jonathan Wild. Yet the rage of the populace against Hitchen rose to astounding lengths, as they ‘tore off his Breeches and Shirt’, and struck him on the bare skin with canes, until he ‘appear’d as a tatter’d Scarecrow to fright Owls by Night’.13 It

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serves as a reminder of the violence which coursed through London on a regular basis, and which Curll may have witnessed while he cowered in his home on bail from prison. Hitchen, incidentally, had familiar dealings with some thirty or forty young thieves in the vicinity of Temple Bar, just along the road from the bookshop opposite Catherine Street. Some of the potency of Pope’s depiction of the book trade as a quasi-criminal operation comes from the fact that the laws of sedition made its members subject to the same threats and sanctions as more workaday wrongdoers. Routinely over the years, the Curlls offered fresh provocations to their main antagonist. For example, around April 1727 Henry issued a made-up miscellany entitled The Altar of Love —a later edition in 1731 would supply a new come-on by way of the sub-title, ‘or, the Whole Art of Kissing in all its Varieties’.14 Most of the volume consisted of the usual saucy Bonnefons material, with some items Curll had attributed in his Humble Representation to John Markland and William Bond. However, it reprinted seven of Pope’s works, including The Worms and ‘A Receipt for a Soup’, the recent addition to the canon revealed by Curll in Atterburyana. The collection also contained the epitaph on James Craggs, not yet published by the poet himself. More intriguing than anything else is a section called ‘Popeana’, which ran to forty pages and consisted of quotations drawn from Pope’s works at large. This represented an ingenious challenge to the copyright law: if Pope had seen fit to bring the matter to court, the bookseller might well have been able to mount a defence on the grounds that he had reprinted only short fragments of the works in question. From the poet’s angle Curll had produced a greater irritant by placing these works (all authentic, but some not yet acknowledged by Pope) alongside adversarial items. Thus, some copies contain Cythereia (1723) with its offensive lines on the Addison portrait; most also contain a new reprint by Henry Curll of Giles Jacob’s The Rape of the Smock, a burlesque of Pope’s satire first published in 1717. Such books flitted in and out of print, seldom yielding sensational revelations and usually rehashing the old ingredients of Curllian cuisine. Nevertheless, by sheer weight of attrition, they opened up an ever-wider gulf between poet and publisher. T H E U N F O RT U N AT E P O E T Even as Curll flitted in and out of the court room, and at the same moment conducted his bloodiest battles with Pope and Swift, he somehow kept up a remnant of his ordinary business. At this date his list shows the same extraordinary variety in terms of subject and tone. To take a case almost at random, in the autumn of 1727 he was reprinting Whartoniana and the key to Gulliver; he was reissuing The Lives and Last Wills and Testaments of . . . Eminent Persons; and he was bringing out the second part of a work Of the State of the Dead, by Thomas Burnet, best known as the author of The Sacred Theory of the Earth.

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This Latin tract, first published posthumously in 1720, came out in a translation by Matthias Earbery, who as we saw earlier was at one time placed under a sentence of outlawry for his literary misdemeanours. Suspicion has arisen, too, that Curll had a hand in The Velvet Coffee-Woman: or, The Life, Gallantries and Amours of the late famous Mrs. Anne Rochford, published by the obscure Simon Green at Westminster (but advertised by other booksellers, including Henry Curll). This eccentric tribute reveals that the subject owned many of the more scandalous productions, all carefully named, which had been issued by ‘a Bookseller in the Strand, Tota notus in urbe’, The writer emphasizes the appeal of Curll’s wares: ‘There being daily as great a resort to his Shop by the fair Sex, for Instructions in the Science of Love, as there is to the Chambers of Temple-Barristers the Night before a Term begins.’15 Both Latin and English texts were supplied in Hog-landia: being a Description of Hampshire, published around 7 November. This book, originally written by Thomas Richards under the title Choirochorographia, would later find a place in Curll’s capacious repository The Altar of Love (no matter that the piece has nothing to do with love). Its laborious foolery may work for students of neo-Latin, but in its English guise the mock-heroic idiom creaks horribly. Most of these items bore in their imprint the name of Edmund’s son Henry, who had to mind the shop with his father otherwise engaged in the King’s Bench for long periods. But the older man used his spells of freedom to advantage. On 14 July 1727 he auctioned the ‘curious’ collection of one Mr Wallis, late of Hoxton, of books in various languages, and advertised the sale in a catalogue impressively styled Manipulus librorum. All this time, Curll had retained his taste for antiquarian lore, though fewer opportunities to publish in this field presented themselves. In August 1726 (dated 1727, like most of his output at this juncture), he issued The Whole Works of Walter Moyle. The author (1672–1721), a Cornish republican, had frequented Will’s coffee-house along with the wits surrounding Dryden and Congreve. He possessed a wide range of interests and miscellaneous learning and, as Joseph M. Levine remarks, he had ‘an independent mind and enjoyed a disagreement’. Moyle had taken the opposite side to the Tory antiquarians such as Dodwell, Hearne and Richard Rawlinson: he also weighed in on the subject of the notorious object known as Dr Woodward’s shield, which so divided the world of learning.16 The Works were edited by Anthony Hammond, politician and litt´erateur: Curll added a separate Apology for the Writings of Walter Moyle, Esq., defending the latter against Hearne and Woodward (this too ends up in some copies of The Altar of Love). Most of this section consists of Curll’s correspondence with interested parties. The bookseller’s own convictions (as his verses on Moyle, printed in Whartoniana, show) ran in a rationalist and anti-mystical direction, so that Moyle’s dry style probably appealed to him. At all events, he was still replaying the quarrel in the Memoirs of Hearne he published in 1735 (see Chapter 13 below).

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At this point occurred one of those incidents which have contributed to the growth of legend around Curll. On 9 September his son published the first volume of The Poetical Works of Mr. William Pattison, late of Sidney College Cambridge. A second volume, entitled Cupid’s Metamorphoses; or Love in all Shapes, would appear on 16 December (this part is dated 1728). Oddly, Curll dated his prefatory letter to Cupid’s Metamorphoses from King’s College on 7 December 1727: we have no idea what connection he can have claimed with this august seat of learning, but he might have been up in Cambridge soliciting buyers, for against their usual practice, the firm of Curll used a subscription campaign to launch the first volume. The book details no more than 120 subscribers, which makes it an undistinguished list in terms of quantity, as well as in quality. Individuals from Cambridge provide a strong presence—St John’s shows most prominently with thirteen out of more than thirty names in all. Among the best known subscribers we find the names of Lord Carteret, the Countess of Hertford, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the painter Jonathan Richardson the elder. Professional authorship is represented by Eustace Budgell, Matthew Green, Anthony Hammond, John Henley, and Aaron Hill. We even encounter the newspaperman Nathaniel Mist, an unwonted gesture of solidarity with Curll, along with friendlier faces in the book trade such as Henry Woodfall and William Mears. Most conspicuously of all, however, comes the name of ‘Mr. Pope’. This provides something of a shock in that, according to most biographic accounts, Pope had accused Curll of starving the hapless Pattison. However, the story has a few more complications. At one stage, Curll had planned to include a portrait of the young author in Volume I. But this scheme fell through, as a stinging paragraph in one of the press notices reveals: ‘Mr. J V-G having undertaken to engrave Mr. P’s Effigies, from the Painting of Mr. S of Bath, perform’d it in all Respects so ill, that in Justice to Mr. S’s Reputation, I was obliged to turn the Plate upon his Hands. This will appear, by comparing his wretched Print with the fine Original Picture now in my Custody. E. CURLL’ (DJ, 18 September 1727). So much for the prominent Flemish engraver Jan Van der Gucht. Pattison, an authentic if minor talent, had reached the age of just twenty.17 He was born in 1706 to a Sussex farmer who rented a small property from the Earl of Thanet. When the promising youth was about fourteen, the Earl placed him at Appleby school in Cumberland. Here he made rapid strides in his study and gained the encouragement of a local clergyman from Kirkby Stephen. In July 1724 Pattison entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where his main interests lay in the classics and in poets such as Spenser. However, he carried out his academic work in a desultory fashion, and after a quarrel with his tutor left the college in the summer of 1726, making his way to London. Here he quickly made many contacts with writers, including the poet laureate Laurence Eusden and Pope’s friend Walter Harte: he is also said to have frequented Button’s

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coffee-house—though that establishment had long outlived its period of high fashion. The archetypal progress of an unfortunate poet culminated in the usual way—lack of money, failure with patrons, a begging epistle to Lord Burlington in which he admits to being destitute of friends as well as funds. This work, entitled Effigies Authoris, makes the habitual self-vindicating claims: With restless Heart from Place to Place I roam, A wretched Vagrant destitute of Home; Driv’n from fair Granta’s Shade by Fortune’s frown . . .

While sheltering at night in St James’s Park, the poet is inspired by a vision to make his way to Chiswick, home of the munificent earl, from whom he now implores help. A few touches suggest Pattison might have had the makings of a satirist in him, a vein he attempted elsewhere; but here he is too sorry for himself to take this route. Meanwhile his quest for subscribers, begun around the autumn of 1726, proved disappointing, with a poor response in the North country. Ultimately he fell ill, and underwent treatment by Dr Thomas Pellett for smallpox. Pellett (c.1671–1744) was a future President of the Royal College of Physicians. But Pattison’s health continued to fail relentlessly, and on 10 July 1727 he died.18 Our main source for this typical Grub Street saga comes in a brief set of ‘Memoirs of the Author’s Life’ appended to the Poetical Works. These follow a dedication to Pope’s friend, Lord Peterborough, signed ‘Lucasia’. Either item, or both, may derive from Edmund Curll himself. If we can trust the account provided here, far from starving Pattison, Curll actually provided him with a refuge in his last days—it was at Curll’s house that the young man died. His burial took place at nearby St Clement’s Dane church. At the onset of Pattison’s fatal disease, the memoirist reports that he called at the bookshop to buy Pope’s letters, and found the stricken poet siting in a chair. Curll, it appears, had gone to pay a visit at Ilford in Essex, but had already made arrangements for the patient to be treated by Dr Pellet, ‘to whom he was recommended by his Friend Mr. Eusden’.19 The collection contains pieces in familiar genres, from odes to such as Sir Christopher Musgrave to anacreontics and occasional poems: we also find verses addressed to some of those on the subscription list, notably Carteret and Lady Hertford, along with several schoolboy efforts. (Cupid’s Metamorphoses shows competence over a wider range of forms, including Ovidian translations and epigrams; Curll had found, all too briefly, a recruit to his authorial ranks who could handle octosyllabic couplets with the ease and accomplishment of Swift.) Most striking in context is ‘An Epistle to His Majesty, King George II. On his Accession to the Throne’, pouring incense on the new king, Queen Caroline and Frederick Prince of Wales. A note tells us Pattison had made a late bid to gain royal favour: ‘The Author died on the Day, he was to have been introduced to the King, with this Poem, viz. July 10th, 1727’. The poem was issued separately by Henry Curll on 18 July. A poignant touch comes in an

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observation suggesting the hand of the father rather than that of the son: this poem, states a press notice, ‘has prov’d the Swan-like Dirge of the Poet, who died Yesterday Morning, when his Poem was intended to have been presented to their Majesties’ (DJ, 11 July 1727). The ‘Memoirs’ claim that Pope met Pattison at the bookseller’s shop on the day of the new king’s accession, which occurred on 12 June 1727. Evidence that some contact was made appears in a letter from Henry Cromwell to Pope, dated 6 July, which reveals that Curll sent ‘a young man to me, whose name, it seems, is Pattison’.20 However Pope got to know of the aspirant poet, he must have deduced from the ‘Memoirs’ that the blame for Pattison’s sad end could not be laid at the door of Curll. Not only did he subscribe to the Poetical Works, he found himself addressed with some flattering verses in the text, ‘To Mr. Pope’,21 and he received warm compliments in other items included. This being so, it seems disingenuous for Pope to allow a damaging phrase to stand in An Author to be Lett (1729), a pamphlet which formed part of his retaliation against Grub Street. Even if Richard Savage wrote this work under the name of ‘Iscariot Hackney’, as most commentators believe (see Chapter 10 below), Pope undoubtedly knew of its contents. In view of these facts, the claim made by Hackney that Curll had caused him to be arrested for debt ‘just at the time of his starving poor Pattison’,22 is an unworthy one to make. On this occasion the moral advantage surely belongs to Curll. On the other hand, Pope would have been aware of a poem by Pattison, ‘To Mr. E. Curll, Bookseller’, included in the bookseller’s hostile Miscellanea in 1726. The lines attack Tonson for his profiteering ‘Tricks’ in repeated editions of Dryden, and by implication assault Pope and Lintot. Parodying Pope’s ‘Verses to be Prefix’d before Bernard Lintott’s New Miscellany’, Pattison introduces Curll in an ambiguous role: Then, pr’ythee C, e’er ’tis too late, (For Mortals must submit to Fate) Collect, correct, and eke produce The scatter’d Labours of thy Muse, I’m sure they’ll make a pretty Volume, And every Body will extol ’em; For Fame you’ll have a double Venture, As Author first, then next, as Printer: So shall you prove by that you’ve writ, What T passes for a Wit.

The poet moves on to the way in which the volume should be decked out (‘let your Letter | Be good as Lintot’s, if not better’). As Barbara Benedict observes, ‘Pattison ridicules the confusion between the producer of words and of print’; such things fed the resentments that went into the Dunciad.23 Perhaps it was at this stage that Curll drafted one of his more pathetic letters, although it carries no date. Addressed to Sir Hans Sloane, it shows that even

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his resilient heart had been crushed, temporarily at least, by the reverses he had undergone: I have been so weakened by malicious Prosecutions that, to keep my self on my Legs, I have been oblig’d to Sollicit the Contributions of my Friends in the present Subscription. And, as you Sir have been pleas’d always to vouchsafe me your Friendship, I hope you will be pleas’d, at this Crisis of my Affairs, to afford me your Generous Bounty to prevent my Destruction & the Triumph of my Enemies. I am Sr. yr. Distress’d & most Ob. Servt. E. Curll24

If this desperate plea concerned the works of Pattison, it had no effect. Sloane’s name is missing from the list of subscribers. In February 1728, after he stepped down from the pillory, Curll may have thought he had got away with it. His supposed disgrace had turned into a publicity coup. (As late as 1735, he would proclaim in his catalogue that the publisher of Ker’s Memoirs had been imprisoned and fined by the government.) He had weathered a variety of prosecutions and rebukes from authority. With his remarkable self-confidence, he had still not given up hope of mending fences with people in power: in September of the same year he would make a further attempt to get back into the good graces of Lord Townshend (see p. 223). His prolific series of miscellanies had embarrassed Pope and Swift, his main adversaries, and helped to usher in a new era of publishing, with the letters of living individuals made freely available for the first time. However, a rude awakening lay in store for Curll, as it would shortly for everyone among the company of booksellers. Previously a somewhat anonymous segment of the literary fraternity, they suddenly found themselves under a garish spotlight.

10 The Dunciad (1728–1730) Many people experience, in one way or another, a life of two halves. For Curll, this involved twin defining moments, each of which occurred as he approached forty-five, so that he reached the watershed a little beyond the midway point on his path. Up to this time people had got to know him well enough, as an outright scoundrel in the judgment of many, but he had scarcely become a figure of major public importance. His annus horribilis of 1728 would change all that. Within weeks of his descent from the ‘rostrum’ at Charing Cross, he was pilloried more cruelly in The Dunciad. From now on he would forever hold a place in the lexicon of literary scandal. Like Garrick as portrayed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, he found himself suspended between comedy and tragedy, a situation Pope did much to engineer.

T H E B O O K S E L L E R ’ S FA RC E A brilliant image by Emrys Jones has caught the reaction of Londoners to the mysterious Trojan horse which confronted them in May 1728: ‘Just as the Lilliputians one day found the sleeping man-giant Gulliver within their kingdom, so Pope’s contemporaries can be imagined as discovering this strange offensive object, lying like an enemy weapon or a ponderous missile.’1 The sequence of events surrounding the publication of The Dunciad has been told many times, and it would be otiose to repeat all the details here. Instead, our concern will fix on Curll’s involvement in the poem. This means first his share in provoking Pope into print; second, his role within the poem; and third, his response to its appearance. By this date, needless to say, Curll had given his antagonist plenty of causes for hostility, and provided many sticks with which Pope could beat him. Surprisingly, perhaps, the bookseller got away with one light flick in Peri Bathous, when that work came out in the Miscellanies on 8 March 1728. This occurs in Chapter 7, where the discussion turns to the need for a candidate in dulness to familiarize his mind with the lowest objects: ‘There is no question but the Garret or the Printer’s boy may often be discern’d in the compositions made in such scenes and company; and much of Mr. Curl himself has been insensibly infused into the works of his learned writers.’2 Here we have one of the germs of The

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Dunciad. Pope built his great epic of the world of letters on the thesis that the book trade does more than passively deliver the productions of authors: rather, the publishing business creates the authors it requires, and its leading practitioners inform the texture of contemporary writing. In the list of contents, ‘Pieces Contained in this Book’, which Pope attached to The Dunciad Variorum, ‘Mr. Curl’ and ‘the Journalists, &c.’ are named alongside John Dennis and the hero Lewis Theobald: while Curll has eight entries in the index, more than any individual except these two, Shakespeare and Pope himself. We witness something which had never happened before, as a major work allotted a key role in the drama of authorship to the commercial underpinnings of the system. By contrast, the stationers represented by Henry Herringham merit just a single couplet in Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682). Admittedly, Curll has to share some of the action with Tonson and Lintot; but these two men had taken a leading part in Pope’s own career as a professional writer. During the opening description of Rag Fair, the nerve-centre of Dulness in this original version of his poem, the author links two of the booksellers in a single phrase: ‘Hence springs each weekly Muse, the living boast | Of Curl’s chaste press, and Lintot’s rubric post’ (i. 37–8). By making this linkage Pope offers a calculated affront to Lintot, with whom he was now on bad terms. But Curll lies around the entire volume as Tonson and Lintot do not. He appears in the preliminaries, the text (books i–iii) the notes, the comical ‘Errata’, and the appendices. As a result, The Dunciad could scarcely have existed in the form we have it without Curll’s unwitting contribution. Actually the bookseller resembles the Almighty—present even when he is not visible. Appendix II in The Dunciad Variorum contains ‘a list of books, papers, and verses, in which our author was abused, printed before the publication of the Dunciad.’ The second part of this list concerns items which were published after the poem came out. Curll’s name occurs three times in the first segment, and fully five times in the later portion, with such obvious items as A Compleat Key to the Dunciad, The Popiad, The Curliad, The Female Dunciad, and The Dunciad Dissected on the register. But in fact many of the earlier books and pamphlets listed had a Curllian origin, and in some cases Pope knew as much, because he refers to them in his squibs in prose against the bookseller. Almost half of the inclusions probably had a connection of some sort with Curll. Likewise with the post-Dunciad items: many of these, though stated here to be ‘printed for’ individuals such as ‘J. Roberts’, demonstrably emanated from Curll’s shop. To appreciate this, one had only to read the advertisements in the press, and that Pope certainly did. The influence which the bookseller’s output exerted on the poem stretches even further. James McLaverty has well observed that ‘the notes to the Variorum are something like a talking bibliography’, and he also points out that a large number of these notes relied on Giles Jacob’s An Historical Account of the Lives of the English Poets (2 vols., 1719–20), better known as The Poetical Register.3 We have

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seen in previous chapters that Jacob regularly worked for Curll as a compiler: he had been responsible for some of the attacks on the poet charted earlier. Most crucially, his lives of the poets constituted an echt Curllian production. Thus, McLaverty has abundant right to say that Jacob was ‘given a major role in the commentary, telling us about Dennis, Theobald, Cibber, Ward, Budgell, Ozell, Oldmixon, Centlivre, and Jacob himself ’.4 What further links these individuals, of course, is that most of them laboured in Curll’s factory. This in turn enables us to see that Pope built up his awareness of the London literary under-class principally from the lucubrations of Curll graduates. These explicit references in the footnotes constitute just a faint shadow of the true state of affairs. Much of the text depends on Pope’s reading of books which had emerged from the notorious literatory. One example should suffice: Three wicked imps of her own Grubstreet Choir She deck’d like Congreve, Addison, and Prior; Mears, Warner, Wilkins run: Delusive thought! Breval, Besaleel, Bond, the Varlets caught. Curl stretches after Gay, but Gay is gone, He grasps an empty Joseph for a John! (ii. 115–20)

The notes make it clear that Pope knew exactly what Curll and his confr`eres had been up to, over the course of many years. Not many people apart from Curll can have known the identity of ‘H. Stanhope’, whose name as we have seen may have masked William Bond; and he certainly disseminated the works of ‘Joseph Gay’, alias John Durant Breval. What the received text disguises is that the original Dunciad had printed line 118 with a series of blanks: ‘B B B, the Varlets caught’, and this was a procedure carried out elsewhere. Moreover, Curll’s Key filled in more of these blanks in the poem than any other source, prior to the fuller disclosure Pope allowed himself in the Variorum text. Unquestionably the pamphlet served a useful purpose, as even a friend of Pope, the second Earl of Oxford, effectively admitted: ‘I see curl [sic] has advertised a Key to the Dunciad, I have been asked for one by several I wish the True one was come out’ (Corr, ii. 496). The notes use Curll for another purpose: they cite his testimony so as to distance Pope from any personal contact with the dunces. In annotating the passage just quoted, the lay-figure Scriblerus debates the credence to be given to the Key: ‘’Tis true Curl declares Breval a Captain, author of a Libel call’d The Confederates: But the same Curl first said it was written by Joseph Gay: Is his second assertion to be credited more than his first?’ The others cut an even less believable figure: ‘He likewise affirms Bond to be one who writ a Satire on our Poet; but where is such a Satire to be found? where was such a Writer ever heard of? As for Besaleel, it carries Forgery in the very name, nor is it, as the others are, a surname. Thou may’st depend on it no such authors ever lived: All phantoms!’ (ii. 118). In contriving the death of the author two hundred and fifty years before

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Roland Barthes, Scriblerus has shifted the focus of literary production to the bookseller. If the putative writers do not exist, who is left? Simply their ‘creator’, the mendacious Curll. We could generalize these findings a little. The ‘Grubstreet Choir’ supplies one of the main voices in the polyphony of The Dunciad, and contributes much of the central matter of the poem. These voices often sang from Curll’s songsheet, since the works Pope drew on had regularly been commissioned or advertised by the publisher. Without his stable of authors, the dunces would shrink to a shrivelled band of eccentrics and outsiders. Figures such as Mears, Warner, and Wilkins (‘Booksellers and Printers of much anonymous stuff’, says the note at ii. 117) occupied an anonymous niche in the world of publishing: the last two were chiefly involved in newspapers, while Mears sometimes collaborated with Curll. Anyone who wished to book the full Grubstreet choir would have had to go through the key entrepreneur in this area of literary commerce. In the notes, Pope sometimes laid stress on the connections between leading dunces and their principal trade outlet: thus he cites a pamphlet by John Dennis in which the old critic appeals to the testimony of ‘Mr. Curll my Bookseller’ (note to i. 104). Often these notes record the publishing history of individual productions by the dunces. Thus, the same note just quoted refers to a work by Dennis, ‘printed for S. Popping’: actually, as we have seen, A True Character of Mr. Pope probably derived from Curll. Again, a gloss on Gildon’s name contains the statement, ‘abused Mr. P. very scandalously in an anonymous Pamphlet of the Life of Mr. Wycherly printed by Curl’ (i. 250). Elizabeth Thomas sold some private letters of Pope without consent ‘to Curl, who printed them in 12o 1727’ (ii. 66). The mock-pedantry of these bibliographical details fixes the crime as one committed by a member of an honourable profession who ought to know better.

T H E E N V Y O F H I S P RO F E S S I O N To understand just why Pope drew so heavily on Curll’s output when he wrote The Dunciad, we need to look at what the index to the poem calls ‘his panegyric’. This occurs at the bookseller’s first main entrance to the text, as the authors and stationers prepare for their ‘high, heroic Games’ in Book 2. The note on ‘dauntless Curl’—possibly spelt this way with due deliberation—begins as follows: We come now to a character of much respect, that of Mr. Edmond Curl. As a plain repetition of great actions is the best praise of them, we shall only say of this eminent man, that he carried the Trade many lengths beyond what it ever before had arrived at, and that he was the envy and admiration of all his profession. He possest himself of a command over all authors whatever; he caus’d them to write what he pleas’d; they could not call their very names their own. He was not only famous among these; he was

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taken notice of by the State, the Church, and the Law, and received particular marks of distinction from each.

This adopts a tone of ostensible respect, but manages to get in a large number of damaging thrusts, particularly with the concluding barb which reminds us of the ways in which the law had taken ‘notice’ of Curll. In the following paragraph, Pope extends his putative encomium: ‘It will be own’d that he is here introduc’d with all possible dignity’. Indeed, the scholiast suggests that the publisher emerges ‘unrival’d and triumphant’ from his escapades in the poem. The last section of this note provides more direct evidence concerning Pope’s intentions when he chose a target: The tribute our author here pays him is a grateful return for several unmerited obligations: Many weighty animadversions on the Publick affairs, and many excellent and diverting pieces on Private persons, has he given to his name. If ever he ow’d two verses to any other, he ow’d Mr. Curl some thousands. He was every day extending his fame, and inlarging his writings: witness innumerable instances! but it shall suffice only to mention the Court-Poems, which he meant to publish as the work of the true writer, a Lady of quality; but being first threaten’d, and afterwards punish’d for it by Mr. Pope, he generously transferred it from her to him, and ever since printed it in his name. The single time that ever he spoke to C . was on that affair, and to that happy incident he ow’d all the favours since received from him: So true is the saying of Dr. Sydenham, ‘that any one shall be, at some time or other, the better or the worse, for having but seen or spoken to a good or a bad man’. (TE, v. 104–5)

Here, more than anywhere else, Pope confronts the nature of his dealings with Curll. The technique resides in a sort of ironic double bluff. At first sight the claim that Curll ‘extended’ Pope’s fame and ‘enlarged’ his writings looks like an amusing way of castigating the bookseller for his false attributions to Pope. But the poet knew, even if his audience did not, that Curll had expanded the canon of his genuine writings, often with Pope’s secret complicity. Moreover, the remark about fame cuts both ways: Curll had locked his adversary into undesirable notoriety by scandalous productions such as Court Poems, yet at the same time he had given Pope endless opportunities for more favourable publicity. Another note at ii. 134 expands on a reference to Curll’s ‘rueful length of face’, yet again drawing attention to the fact that he had been subjected to humiliating penal sanctions: ‘True it is, he stood in the Pillory; an accident which will lengthen the face of any man tho’ it were ever so comely, therefore is no reflection on the natural beauty of Mr. Curl.’ In fact the publisher was notoriously ill-favoured. According to one fictional source, he was tall and thin with goggle eyes, while Laetitia Pilkington described him as ‘an ugly squinting old fellow’ (see Chapter 15 below). Since the appearance of Aubrey Williams’s groundbreaking Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning (1955), we have understood that a detailed topographic grasp of London underlies this entire poem. Assuredly Pope enlisted his knowledge of the book trade when he set the scene for the booksellers’ games at a very particular

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location: ‘Amid that Area wide she took her stand, | Where the tall May-pole once o’erlook’d the Strand’ (ii. 23–4). This means a section of the street Pope’s friend John Gay had mentioned in Trivia (1715), ‘Where Katherine-street descends into the Strand ’ (iii. 262). Both Tonson and Curll had shops on this very road junction.5 The Old Bailey proceedings are dotted with references to the area, often involving thefts of various kinds. A few years later, for example, the victim of one robbery began his evidence in this way: On the 22d of Oct. I was going to my Lodgings, and met these two Women near Catherine-Street End; they asked me to give them a Glass of Wine, so I carry’d them to the Swan Tavern in the Strand; we had two Pints of Wine among us; and after that I went with them to their Lodgings in Eagle-Court, and there was some Liquor brought in a Pewter Pot, but I would not drink any. It was a dirty sort of a Room, and I did but just sit down, for I had not been there a Quarter of an Hour, but I perceiv’d Wood [one of the accused] very busy about me.6

All the places mentioned lie in the immediate vicinity of Curll’s establishment at the time of the original Dunciad. The locale chosen releases one more satiric charge. This same site was used when criminals stood in the pillory, and as we saw in the previous chapter the unscrupulous City official Charles Hitchen underwent his punishment here in May 1727, when in the ensuing disorders ‘Mr. Curll’s Windows suffered pretty much’ (RWJ, 6 May 1727). Just a matter of months later, of course, Curll himself received a sentence to the pillory, and endured his punishment at Charing Cross, a few blocks to the west. Both these events occurred in the period when Pope was at work on The Dunciad : the second came only three months before the poem’s initial appearance, but that left plenty of time for the notes to the Variorum edition in 1729. The episode at Charing Cross is duly recorded in the annotation, at ii. 3. All this indicates that The Dunciad localizes the contests of the book trade not where its traditional home lay, in the City near to St Paul’s, but in a part of London once consecrated to polite living, which had now fallen in its social tone. Rather like politics and the theatre, low-class publishing had crept westward from the old commercial centre towards respectable Westminster. Needless to add, Curll had long run his own business from the vicinity Pope specifies, the ever more seedy district bordering Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and he would continue to do so for the rest of his career.

NETHER REALMS Curll takes a comparatively slight part in the main narrative of The Dunciad. His share of the action does not extend beyond the Grub Street sports day which takes place in Book 2, as a degraded equivalent to the heroic games of epic. Here he behaves with his accustomed swagger, showing a confidence

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denied to his colleagues in the trade: ‘Alone untaught to fear’, the poet calls him (ii. 53). However, he managed to defeat Lintot in the foot race, in spite of slipping in a puddle ‘which Curl’s Corinna chanc’d that morn to make’ (ii. 66). Here Pope displays publishing as a competitive struggle, in which the bookseller ‘imbibes new life’ from the effluvia over which the goddess of sewers, Cloacina, presides: Oft, as he fish’d her nether realms for wit, The Goddess favour’d him, and favours yet, Renew’d by ordure’s sympathetic force, As oil’d with magic juices for the course, Vig’rous he rises . . . (ii. 93–6)

The dunce James Ralph found this passage especially vexing: ‘Had P e been offer’d as the Prize of a genuine Race, L t would not have troubled himself so far as to undertake it . . . and even C l would have expected the real Disappointment from him, almost in every Particular, which is only imagin’d in the Dunciad.’7 In his note on this last passage Pope reverts to the episode of Elizabeth Thomas, and the letters to Cromwell (see Chapter 9), picking up on a phrase his antagonist had employed to defend her in The Curliad. ‘Obscene with filth’, the publisher lies in the street—a wonderfully apt image for the life of public muckraking in which Curll engaged so long. In his rage the bookseller offers up a prayer to Jove, ending ‘Down with the Bible, up the Pope’s Arms’ (ii. 78). A note helpfully explains, ‘The Bible, Curl’s sign, the Cross-keys, Lintot’s’. Naturally this provoked a correction in The Curliad, which stated that Curll no longer used this sign, with a short ‘parody’ of the bookseller’s own making: How little is it from the Grave we claim, Lintot a Sign preserves, and Curll a Name; For He desires no other Sign than Fame.

But Pope had made his point, and characteristically he did so with a reference to shop-signs listed in an imprint. Far from feeling exhaustion, Curll participates in further events. First he attempts to snatch the papers of phantom authors—it is at this point that the lines occur about ‘Breval, Besaleel, Bond’, just quoted. Despite his failure to seize the elusive prize, he receives consolations from the goddess of Dulness. Like a brothel-keeper, she assures him, Curll will be able to bestow fancy names on the authors in his factory: ‘As the sage dame, experienc’d in her trade | By names of Toasts retails each batter’d jade’ (ii. 125–6). Here the rhyme underlines Pope’s connection between the ‘trades’ of prostitution and publishing. So, the goddess continues, ‘each hostile name [shall] become our own’ (ii. 131), as Cooke morphs into Prior, and Concanen into Swift. At this juncture Dulness presents the bookseller with a tapestry bearing images of the

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punishments meted out to Grub Street luminaries such as Defoe and Tutchin. But she does not forget the veritable Curll: ‘Himself among the storied Chiefs he spies | As from the blanket high in air he flies’. This of course alludes to Curll’s misadventure at Westminster school in 1716, as a note reminds us (see also Chapter 5). In the next line the publisher refers to ‘our purgings, pumpings, blanketings and blows’, and again the annotation harks back to the story of Pope’s ‘revenge’ in the same year by means of a vomit. Curll is made to describe his humiliations with a perverse pride. The Dunciad functions in part to replay the quarrel between poet and publisher, with the aim of bringing to a reader’s attention the many provocations that Curll had offered to Pope. After this comes the best known episode involving Curll, the pissing contest. Here the prize is a majestic Juno, otherwise Eliza Haywood: modern scholarship has left us in no doubt that Pope intended this as an insult of peculiar force, intended to bracket Curll with a writer practising in the ‘lowest’ departments of literature.8 In his note on Haywood, he goes out of his way to cite the Key to the Dunciad, thus establishing Curll’s intimate knowledge of Haywood’s domestic arrangements. Later in the note Pope refers to The Female Dunciad (1728), a pamphlet he believed to be of Curllian origin. In the competition for Haywood, two contestants step forward: Curll and his former associate William Chetwood, a miscellaneous author and publisher who (according to the Key) was once involved in a drunken prank involving a chamberpot. Though dissuaded by his son from competing, Curll enters the fray. Chetwood’s ‘small jett’ of urine splashes back in his face. His rival does better: Not so from shameless Curl: Impetuous spread The stream, and smoaking, flourish’d o’er his head.

(ii. 171–2).

The spectators watch with admiration: ‘Swift as it mounts, all follow with their eyes’ (ii. 177). Little doubt where the gold medal is going to end up. As we expected all along, ‘happy Impudence obtains the prize’, and the winner leads his trophy away in triumph. When Pope describes the way in which ‘shameless Curl’ achieves his victory, he adds one more damaging—and possibly unfair—detail. Glossing the line, ‘His rapid waters in their passage burn’ (ii. 176), the scholiast writes in the guise of Theobald, ‘I am aware . . . that burn is the proper word to convey an idea of what was said to be Mr. Curl’s condition at that time’. Offering to retract the idea that the bookseller was suffering from a venereal disease, he lodges the implication all the more securely in a reader’s mind: ‘But from that very reason I infer the direct contrary. For surely every lover of our author will conclude he had more humanity, than to insult a man on such a misfortune or calamity, which could never befal him purely by his own fault, but from an unhappy communication with another.’ The Twickenham editor rightly insists that no real evidence exists to support the charge here

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regarding Curll’s condition, but he then scurries around in search of rumours and innuendos regarding the bookseller’s private life. We might reflect that the only case where a member of the book trade publicly maintained a literary lady in this period involved not Curll and Haywood but Pope’s friend Alderman Barber and Delarivier Manley. Curll, then, maintained a presence in The Dunciad both as an actor in one section of the main drama and also, more pervasively, as a catalyst of duncely production. He became more directly a target in the Variorium as Pope drew for his notes on Curll’s various published responses. Above all, the poet managed to convert the Key to the Dunciad into a major satirical mechanism. Curll’s explanation of who is who within the poem exactly served the needs of his opponent. For one thing, it blew the cover of individuals whom Pope had carefully ‘shielded’ in the 1728 text by the use of initials. Once Curll had spelled out these names, it was far easier to print them in the Variorum text. Secondly, Pope could cite as genuine testimony the publisher’s remarks on all things relating to commercial writing. The dunces seem almost to have their own voice in the proceedings, when the notes report their doings from the pages of a fellow denizen of Grub Street. R E TA L I AT I O N It would be hazardous to attempt a full register of all the items in reply to The Dunciad with which Curll somehow got involved. The list starts with pamphlets which Curll certainly wrote himself. In this category comes the Compleat Key to the Dunciad, nominally published by Anne Dodd and advertised on 28 May: it aimed chiefly to supply detailed glosses and identifications. Sometimes the entries rake over ancient quarrels, for example the episode involving Pope’s ‘profane’ version of the first Psalm (pp. 18–20). New editions with substantive alterations, allegedly ‘to keep pace’ with new printings of the poem, came out on 4 June and 2 July, as we learn from The Curliad (pp. 23–4). Fresh insults were offered with cheerful insolence: ‘A DODD, is forbidden selling any more KEYS, on pain of Mr. Pope’s Displeasure. This Second Edition of the Key is rendered conformable to the Second Edition of the Poem.—Sequiturq; Sequentem.’ On the last-named date appeared a pamphlet called The Popiad, widely believed to have come from Curll’s own pen, and advertised in the third edition of the Key, with a sneer at his neighbour, the Catholic bookseller linked to Pope: ‘N .B. All Persons who are charitably disposed, and will give but a Peter-Penny to Mr. Lewis’s Boy in Covent-Garden, towards purchasing him a Wooden Crucifix and a Set of Horn-beads, may have a true Copy of his Manuscript Key to the Dunciad.’ The Popiad consists mostly of reprinted material, hauling back into light some earlier assaults on the Homer translations by John Dennis and Mme Dacier. Most significantly, it charges that Pope rewrote the entry for Jacob’s Poetical Register

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before publication in order to augment its laudatory quality. Pope did not fully dispose of this accusation when he added an erratum on the relevant passage in the text (iii. 149), and Curll would continue to drag it out in years to come. August saw the appearance of The Female Dunciad, already mentioned (p. 194 above). This attribution to Curll might seem dubious, since it was issued by Thomas Read, a rival and an adversary in Grub Street more than a colleague, but the work does contain some of Curll’s old material and the editorial commentary adopts his favourite cadences. In any case a press advertisement acknowledges Curll’s share in the enterprise (DJ, 9 August). Sections of the Poetical Register are brought into the text, which concludes with Thomas Foxton’s verse satire ‘The New Metamorphosis’. The pamphlet also prints a portion of Pope’s correspondence with Cromwell, adding that ‘the Originals . . . may be seen under [Pope’s] own Hand at one Edmund Curll’s, a Bookseller in the Strand ’ (p. vii); and it reproduces yet again the version of the first Psalm, ‘The Worms’, and the ‘Court Ballad’. Of course Curll could get away with publishing these items time after time, since their content made them too scabrous for Pope to copyright them. More was to come. On 5 September followed Codrus: or, The Dunciad Dissected, attributed to ‘Mr. Phillips’. In this strange rhapsody, which Pope attributed to Curll and Elizabeth Thomas, the plot of a burleque poem ‘The Toad and the Ox: A Fable’ rests on the erroneous assertion that the poet’s father had been ‘but a Husbandman on Windsor-Forest’, a travesty of the real facts. The main section supplies a fantastic biography of Pope, assailing him for using abusive terms in the most abusive language: ‘He Lampoons both Church and State, all that he knows, and all that he knows not, and bids an open Defiance to human Kind, in Terms so Coarse and Filthy, that few Readers can forbear Puking at his bare ideas.’9 Then, probably around late April 1729, soon after Pope brought out his own augmented version of the poem, came the highly informative pamphlet entitled The Curliad, or A Hypercritic upon The Dunciad Variorum—or ‘A Mail from Parnassus’ as it appears in one advertisement (DJ, 28 April). This contains a certain amount of commentary on the text proper, but its chief value lies in its review of earlier episodes in the quarrel between Pope and the dunces. Here many items receive a definitive attribution for the first time. With little sign of embarrassment, Curll goes over the circumstances of his prosecution, asserting that De Usu Flagrorum had been published without objection eight years earlier. He also repeats his defence on the basis that Dr Rose of the College of Physicians had justified the publication of the two books under threat (see p. 159), and this time prints the argument in full. He also provides his most detailed account of the way in which he obtained the memoirs of Ker. The commentary on the Variorum text bears the heading, ‘E.C . ad A.P. S.P.D.’ (Professor of Sacred Theology). A more extensive category includes pamphlets which Curll issued on behalf of other authors. This group includes at least seven items, disregarding works which came out under the name of a trade publisher or the non-existent ‘A. Moore’.

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However, the count does include A Popp upon Pope, an amusing narrative of a retaliatory attack on Pope in which he is subjected to a ‘horrid and barbarous whipping’. This time the poet was stung to the extent that he issued a denial in the press (DP, 14 June 1728; Guerinot, 116). Moore published A Popp on 1 June 1728, but a month later it reappeared in Curll’s own anthology of hostile pieces, The Popiad. Other noteworthy items include The Progress of Dulness, featuring a poem perhaps written by Curll’s old work-horse William Bond as ‘Henry Stanhope’ (see above, Chapter 7); and The True Περι Βαθους, a comparison of Boileau’s version of Longinus with Pope’s mock manual, which glancingly refers to The Dunciad. The former appeared in June, the latter around September. Much of the Progress reprints earlier attacks on Pope by John Dennis.10 Curll withheld his name from the title-page, but he left plenty of his clues to his involvement. Late in the volume comes an ‘Advertisement’, signed by ‘A.P.’, ‘J.S.’, and ‘J.G.’, dated from Twickenham on Whitsun eve, and shamelessly asserting that the impatience of the public had obliged the present work to be divided in two. The second part, entitled The Popeiad, would appear after the holidays, printed for E. Curll in the Strand: as we have seen, this title was delayed until the start of July. At the end of the volume comes a typical postscript, headed ‘Covent-Garden, June 8. 1728’. It professes to describe how a gentleman sent to William Lewis the bookseller, whose shop lay within a stone’s throw, for a copy of Curll’s Key. Lewis gave an insulting answer, stating that his boy had a key in manuscript: this reply was passed on to Curll. A further missive refers to Curll as one whose character ‘every Body knows’. The episode ends with a familiar line of riposte: Now, it so happens that, Mr. C’s Key to the Dunciad faithfully unlocks all the Wards (sic) of that impudent Libel; and L’s Boy’s Key is in favour of the Libeller. To Mr. William Lewis at his Shed under Tom’ s Coffee-House. ’Tis well for C— his Character is known, Thou’rt but a Mute even at Dulness’ Throne, Thy Style and faulty Spelling is thy Own.

Lewis did not show much sense when he got involved in a war of words like this. A ghost here is a volume purportedly available as The Pope-ish Controversy Compleat, advertised in the press on 22 July 1729 and again in a later booklist of Curll (see Guerinot, 325). So far no one has managed to find a copy of this work, but it seems likely that Curll did bind up unsold copies of some of the attacks just listed. Possibly the collection included The Twickenham Hotch-Potch, originally issued by Roberts in May 1728, but advertised in The Curliad along with other attacks for which the bookseller was certainly responsible. In any case this miscellaneous compilation, despite its title, has less to do with The Dunciad than with The Beggar’s Opera. The mood in which Curll assembled this volume, if indeed it ever existed, can be judged from his advertisement (DJ, 12 May

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1729): ‘This Day is Open’d The Second Campaigne of the Dunciad Wars’, followed by a list of eight items attacking the poet and the poem. The Dunciad has done more than any other single work to impress on the mind of later generations the image of Curll we generally carry with us—the image, of course, which Pope wished to create. In later revisions of the poem, when most segments underwent considerable change, the poet made no substantial alterations to the sections involving Curll. The surrounding personnel underwent some modification: thus the bookseller competing with Curll in the pissing contest became Thomas Osborne, instead of Chetwood. But Curll’s role remained the same, partly because he had not altered his activity in the real world to any great extent. Thus the earliest versions of The Dunciad preserve the bookseller in his most characteristic poses, at the apogee of his career. He would never live it all down. T H E S O C I E T Y O F B AT H O S Scarcely had the ink dried on The Dunciad before Curll received another buffeting. This came in a pamphlet written by Richard Savage, who had served as Pope’s main informant on Grub Street, and issued by the fly-by-night ‘publisher’, known as A. Moore. (Thomas Cooke referred to Savage’s treachery in The Battle of the Poets: ‘From Pope deputed, from my Heart’s Ally | To yonder Camp I tend a dauntless Spy’.) Savage had lived a wild life, and only two years earlier he had been convicted at the Old Bailey on a capital murder charge. Later he became the unruly friend, and perhaps alter ego, of the young Samuel Johnson.11 The new work purports to derive from an unregenerate hack: An Author to be Lett. Being a Proposal Humbly Address’d to the Consideration of the Knights, Esquires, Gentlemen, and other Worshipful and Weighty Members of the Solid and Ancient Society of the Bathos. By their Associate and Well-Wisher Iscariot Hackney. Numb. I. To be continued. Actually, no further parts ever emerged. Savage targets the writers who had taken starring roles in Pope’s poem, such as Theobald, Moore Smythe, Eliza Haywood, Dennis, and so on: they all figure in the ‘Publisher’s Preface’ at the start. A brief autobiography by ‘Hackney’ follows, describing his gradual process of induction into the scribbler’s role. He describes how he became acquainted with ‘Dick Morley, Author of Mother Wiseborn’. This refers to another Moore pamphlet, attributed to ‘Anodyne Tanner’, entitled The Life of the late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn, Vulgarly Call’d Mother Wybourn (c.1721), relating to the activities of a high-class prostitute. The story continues: We commenced Authors together. At my first setting out I was hired by a reverend Prebend to libel Dean Swift for Infidelity. Soon after I was employed by Curll to write a merry Tale, the Wit of which was its Obscenity. This we agreed to palm upon the World for a posthumous Piece of Mr. Prior. However, a certain Lady, celebrated for

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certain Liberties, had a Curiosity to see the real Author. Curll, on my Promise that if I had a Present, he should go Snacks, sent me to her. I was admitted while her Ladyship was shifting; and on my Admittance, Mrs. Abigail was order’d to withdraw. What passed between us, a Point of Gallantry obliges me to conceal; but after some extraordinary Civilities, I was dismiss’d with a Purse of Guineas, and a Command to write a Sequel to my Tale. Upon this I turn’d out smart in Dress, bit Curll of his Share, and run out most of my Money in printing my Works at my own Cost. But some Years after (just at the time of his starving poor Pattison) the Varlet was revenged. He arrested me for several Months Board, brought me back to my Garret, and made me drudge on in my old, dirty Work.

Hackney supplies further damaging information about his career, here amalgamating the life-histories of men like Breval and Bond: ’Twas in his Service that I wrote Obscenity and Profaneness, under the Names of Pope and Swift. Sometimes I was Mr. Joseph Gay, and at others Theory Burnet, or Addison. I abridg’d Histories and Travels, translated from the French, what they never wrote, and was expert at finding out new Titles for old Books. When a notorious Thief was hanged, I was the Plutarch to preserve his Memory; and when a great Man died, mine were his Remains, and mine the Account of his Will and Testament. Had Mr. Oldmixon and Mr. Curll agreed, my Assistance had probably been invited into Father Bohour’s Logick, and the critical History of England.

Some inaccuracies and exaggerations show up in these excerpts. Far from starving the unfortunate Pattison, Curll went out of his way to care for the young poet, as we saw in the last chapter. Moreover, the two books by Oldmixon mentioned at the end do not seem to have been on his list, though they were issued by his former adjunct, John Pemberton. Lives of malefactors dispatched at Tyburn, we know, rarely caught his interest. Yet in spirit the passage sticks very close to reality, especially with its recognition that Curll claimed the ‘remains’ of a dead person as a body-snatcher might seize a carcass. Near the end, Iscariot Hackney recurs to the lessons he imbibed at the feet of Curll: ‘My pamphlets sell many more Impressions than those of celebrated Writers; the Secret of this, I learned from Curll to clap a new Title-Page to the sale of every half Hundred; so that when my Bookseller has sold Two Hundred and Fifty Copies, my Book generally enters into the Sixth Edition’.12 In such a wide-ranging satire, Curll evades attention for long periods, but he clearly emerges as one of the presiding spirits in the republic of letters. An Author to be Lett comes across as wittier and more engaging than anything Savage ever wrote in his principal vein, that is poetry, and most readers will wish that he had attempted prose satire more often. But that cannot be a view Curll would have shared. Another amusing sidelight on events from the perspective of Pope’s friends can be found in the Tory paper Mist’s Weekly Journal in June 1728. (Conceivably Savage had a hand in this item, too.) Anticipating the style of the Grub-street Journal a few years later, the paper satirizes the doings of what it calls the

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‘Knights of the Bathos’. By this the author means professional scribblers such as those Pope had labelled ‘dunces’, with Dennis, Welsted, Moore Smythe, and Aaron Hill among the most identifiable. The knights hold a court, announcing that their meetings, ‘hitherto held at Mr. C l’s in the Strand ’, would now be moved to Charing Cross. They pass a number of resolutions, including one ordering ‘That a Key to the Dunciade be composed; and that Mr. C l attend next Saturday, to receive Instructions for the same’. Some following items call for notice: ‘A Message from Mr. C l, by Mr. C[oo]k, that Mr. C l humbly craves to be excus’d from coming to Charing-Cross, so soon after his standing in the Pillory There. Order’d, that Mr. C k do compose the said Key to the Dunciade’.13 Thomas Cooke, as a recent lodger of Curll, makes a plausible go-between, but it is unlikely that he actually prepared the Key for his landlord.14 The ‘Speaker’ of the court, Moore Smythe, ends by appointing Curll to print all the votes and resolutions of this house—a parody of parliamentary grants to members of the book trade (MWJ, 8–15 June 1728). A week later comes news that the allies have discovered Curll to be one of the Pope’s spies and hanged him in reprisal (since the Pope’s forces are said to be concentrated at Twickenham, the alternative identification is plain enough). The columns in Mist’s paper always provided some of the liveliest journalism around, and this applies to the present satire, deeply indebted as it is to Pope’s earlier pamphlets on Curll. A PRETTY LIVELIHOOD By this time the publisher had become a byword for infamy. Even the haughty Lord Chesterfield, ambassador at the Hague, made a joke about his famous ‘lives’.15 Understandably he still preoccupied the Scriblerian group. In the first book of his highly successful Fables (1727), Gay has a line to the effect that when true literary genius appears, Envy calls up all her forces, ‘and all Curl’s authors are in pay’.16 The next year, Gay told Pope that the race of Curlls had seemingly multiplied (Corr, ii. 508). On 30 November 1727 Dr Arbuthnot reported to Swift a conversation at court with Mrs Howard, ‘about Yow Mr Pope Curle & myself’.17 Perhaps as a mere reflex of habit, Curll found himself one of the booksellers named in an injunction John Gay obtained on 12 June 1729. The dramatist had taken action against those alleged to be breaching his rights in respect of Polly, the contentious (and banned) sequel to The Beggar’s Opera.18 The suit by Gay also named Henry Curll, J. Pote, and Anne Dodd. In his smalltime way Pote imitated Curll as a purveyor of scandalous material. However, among the three English piracies known, plus one in Dublin, none appears to have any link with Curll. These are the ‘T. Thomson’ edition (by Thomas Astley and James Watson); the one by Thomas Read; and one by Jeffrey Walker. James Sutherland quotes the replies by Walker and Read in Chancery,

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and no sign emerges here of Curll’s involvement. The likeliest of the three would be the one by ‘T. Thomson’, if any of them. Read operated mostly as a rival: Astley in one case (1728) as a collaborator with Curll. Sutherland does not mention the case of Gay v. Astley (C 11/234/45), which obviously relates to the same imbroglio. As the evidence presents itself at this date, it appears that Curll could plead innocence for once, and the suit against him seems to have gone no further. Meanwhile, in a sadistic fantasy by Jonathan Smedley, The Metamorphosis (1728) the Scriblerians are turned into monsters and then tortured by their Grub Street adversaries. Enter the chief of the booksellers: Cu—l next advanc’d and full of Spight, Swore, that they never more shou’d bite; And; falling to his Work, like mad, He kick’d out every Tooth they had.19

Actually Curll was not an unduly spiteful man: he gave as good as he got in the battles of the poets, but seems rarely to have harboured a grudge. By 1730 Edward Young could invoke Curll as one who almost reluctantly supported starving hacks: And though full conscious of his injured purse, Lintot relents, nor Curll can wish them worse. So fare the men who writers dare commence Without their patent,—probity and sense.20

In a sharp assault on the literary scene, Harlequin-Horace (1731), brought out by Pope’s young prot´eg´e Lawton Gilliver, the man about town James Miller took the status of the publisher for granted: Then, then, my Friends, your ev’ry Point you gain, When no one Precept in your Works remain, But Ribaldry, and Scandal lawless reign. Thus shall you reap the Profit you pursue, And Curl get Money by the Copy too.

Good-humouredly, a comic Trip through London issued by Roberts in 1728 supplies a list of payments for fashionable expenses including an item, ‘Paid Edmund Curll, for good Books, 1l. 5s’.21 If this meant good in the sense of readable, rather than godly, Curll may have been the right choice.22 The mysterious ‘A. More’ struck one more curious side-blow in these battles with a pamphlet issued some time in 1727 (a reprint in June of the following year carried the name ‘A. Moor’, but there was no need to be too particular in these things). It was called Hereditary Right Exemplified: or, A Letter of Condolance from Mr. Ed d C l to his Son H y, upon his Late Discipline at Westminster. The main facts are set out in Foxon, H151: ‘A pretended letter from Edmund Curll to his son Henry, recalling his own sufferings at Westminster

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(recorded in [Samuel Wesley] Neck or nothing, 1716); satirizing Curll’s trade.’ Although the poem by Wesley supplies an obvious model, the second effort displays a weaker hold on ideas and technique, as it negotiates its way through some lumbering octosyllabic couplets. For some reason Henry is persuaded to duplicate his father’s ill-fated trip to Westminster School, with the result that he too undergoes a beating at the hands of the boys. Edmund advises his son that he should not contemplate retirement: ‘Nor need’st Thou Publishing with-hold, | Tho’ Pope should rave, or Swift should scold.’ His advice on business matters is cynically precise: The Printing-Trade goes well enough, Since I and Dunton left it off; And trust me, Thou can’st never do, As Bookseller and Author too; They’re inconsistent! chuse Thee whether, But never aim at both together. If I may counsel, Hal, depend Solely for Wit upon thy Friend. Let that thine Author’s Province be, For thine, ’tis only Piracy. Steal all comes near Thee, Bad or Good, Thou’lt pick a pretty Livelihood. No matter how Thou fobb’st the Town, How coarse the Paper, or how brown; No matter tho’ the wretched Stuff, Is not like Lintot’s wiping Proof. Tho’ Patience ’self it would enrage, To foul ones Fingers with thy Page. What tho’ Thou rak’st in every Nook Of private Life, or Pocket-Book? Like me still careful to display, The Deeds of Mid-night in Mid-day? . . . The Rascal swings that steals a Purse, A scabby Sheep, or found’red Horse; While he goes scotfree with his Prey, Who steals our Fame or Friend away.23

In fact the father had not really retired, as we have seen; and although Henry would announce in the Daily Post Boy on 7 August 1730 that he was giving up the trade, he too did not follow through on this declaration. The last verse of all in the poem gets in a joke about ‘E dC l, late Bookseller’. As it happens, the year 1730 would see the most lastingly influential of all portraits of Curll, those of Pope alone excepted. It came from the pen of the youthful Henry Fielding, when The Author’s Farce was produced at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket on Easter Monday, 30 March. By signing the piece ‘Scriblerus Secundus’, the dramatist plainly signalled his allegiances. The play

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soon attained popularity and became Fielding’s first great theatrical success, enjoying over forty performances in its opening season. Just a day after the premi`ere followed publication by James Roberts, one of three London printings that year along with a Dublin edition. The farce revolves round a struggling author named Luckless, but much of the more incisive writing homes in on comic characters with an obvious real-life basis: thus ‘Marplay’ represents the vain actor-manager Colley Cibber, who would become the king of the dunces when Pope revised his poem. A play-within-a-play in the third act allows thrusts at many of the outstanding figures in the world of show business, notably the original king dunce, Lewis Theobald; Orator Henley; the impresario John Rich; Eliza Haywood, novelist and actress; and the star castrato Senesino. In this puppet show a bookseller named Curry briefly appears. However, it is the main action of the play that gives an extended role to ‘Bookweight’, whom the hero expels from his lodgings after the publisher refuses to hand out an advance on a play Luckless has on the stocks. (Curll’s enemies often seem to have fantasized about some kind of physical retribution they might visit on him.) The most telling scene depicts Bookweight as he admonishes his writers to raise their level of productivity: ‘Fie upon it, gentlemen! What, not at your pens? Do you consider, Mr. Quibble, that it is above a fortnight since your Letter from a Friend in the Country was published? Is it not high time for Answer to come out? At this rate, before your Answer is printed your Letter will be forgot.’ In conversations with others on the publisher’s payroll, the drama exposes a number of subterfuges used to sell books, notably the shifts of one writer who translates Virgil out of Dryden. In puzzled accents, he observes to Bookweight, ‘Your trade abounds in mysteries’, to which the reply comes, ‘The study of bookselling is as difficult as the law, and there are as many tricks in the one as the other’. Fielding extends the notion in a Curllian speech he allots to Bookweight: Sometimes we give a foreign name to our own labour, and sometimes we put our own names to the labour of others. Then as the lawyers have John-a-Nokes and Tom-a-Stiles, so we have Messieurs Moore near St. Paul’s and Smith near the Royal Exchange.24

Most of the satire aims at broad comedy rather than strict accuracy; but it approaches near enough the truth to hit home. By this time everyone knew whom the playwright meant.

11 Going it Alone (1728–1732) As the 1720s came to an end, Curll began to look a more isolated figure. For a time he engaged in fewer co-publishing ventures than a decade before. Many of his earlier partners in the book trade had gone out of business: John Morphew, Abigail Baldwin, William Taylor, Andrew Bell, and John Baker were dead, while others like Rebecca Burleigh and Sarah Popping had ceased activity. James Roberts continued to prosper as one of the leading figures among London stationers, but he appeared less often as the distributor of Curll’s products. Although John Pemberton carried on in the trade, his ties with Curll had withered to nothing. The names of the two men had been joined on the titlepage of more than thirty separate books in the first five years of the Hanoverian era, but such coupling became a rarity later on. This happened in the case of The Works of Monsieur Voiture, reissued by Curll, Pemberton, and Bettesworth in 1735, with the inevitable addition of Pope’s ‘Verses to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture’. The edition had first appeared in 1715, when the three booksellers all owned a share. Some of the reasons for this isolation went back to Curll’s business practices and personal life. At various times, as we have seen, he collaborated closely with others in the publishing industry: initially Richard Smith, then Sanger, Pemberton, Gosling, Mears, and others. He also had some surreptitious links with John Wilford in the 1720s. But he did not establish a lineage within the trade. John Osborn, a prominent bookseller who died in 1745, left a will in which he bequeathed a mourning ring to many of his colleagues. Among them were Samuel Richardson, Samuel Birt, Andrew Millar, James Leake, Gosling, and John Peele, as well as Mrs Richardson and ‘Miss Midwinter’, a printer’s daughter who lived with the Richardsons. He named his friends Thomas Woodward, Charles Davis and Daniel Browne (who also got rings) as referees for a dispute concerning his son’s share in the business. The two witnesses to this will were Richardson and James Leake: as is well known, Richardson’s wife was a sister of Leake. Often intermarriage played a crucial role in these dealings of the dynasts. In 1731 an elder John Osborn had left money to a daughter, Mary Longman, and this business went to Thomas Longman (founder of the famous publishing house), whom Mary had married in the previous year. Longman took over the firm of William Taylor, who named William Innys and John Osborn as executors

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of his will in 1724: Innys married Taylor’s widow in the following year. Osborn referred in the will to his wife Shirly, ‘commonly called Shirly Baker’: this may have been the widow of another publisher, John Baker. He also witnessed in 1720 the will of Andrew Bell, who appointed the printer John Darby as overseer: Bell had married Darby’s sister Elizabeth in 1696. Similarly, James Roberts inherited the business of Richard and Abigail Baldwin, having married their daughter Mary in 1707. Apprentices such as Paul Knapton, indentured to Bettesworth, made their way in the trade: Charles Hitch went one better and took the boss’s daughter as his wife. By contrast Curll did without regular apprentices. Examples of such mutual aid could be multiplied. Curll dealt with most of these individuals at one juncture or other, but he had not built up lasting alliances and he remained outside the charmed circle of the Stationers’ Company. Much the same applied in the case of authors. Curll’s stable of professional writers had formed something of a mutually-supportive professional cadre in the first part of his business career. Over time they had started to drop off at regular intervals. As we saw, Toland had died in 1722, to be followed by Gildon in 1724, Sewell in 1726 and Richardson Pack in 1728. A promising recruit, Pattison, disappeared as soon as he came into view. Delarivier Manley had never been a Curll hack in the full sense, but he was happy to print her works, and even her death in 1724 did not entirely stop the flow. A bigger loss occurred in 1723 when Susanna Centlivre died. By 1729 John Dennis had spent his force. Others lived on, but passed out of Curll’s sphere of influence: thus Thomas Burnet and George Duckett turned legitimate, and John Durant Breval deserted the flock when he went on his travels. Meanwhile John Oldmixon carried on as a struggling author with the patronage of Pemberton, but he produced only one more book with which Curll had any connection—Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy in its multiple editions. As for translators, Samber went quiet some years before he died around 1734: John Ozell still kept up a fierce pace, but he and Curll appear to have quarrelled irreconcilably after their war of words in the press in 1718. The quarrel had revived briefly in 1734 when Ozell threatened to breach the rights of Curll, Pemberton, and Innys: ‘Sir, We shall not suffer you to sell our Property to others, as we hear you are about to do’ Curll declared (DJ, 8 January 1734). Only one later translation by Ozell carries Curll’s name: Spanish Amusements: or, The Adventures of that Celebrated Courtezan Seniora Rufina, called, the Polecat of Seville (third edition, 1741); but this was merely a recycling of a text first issued in 1717 with a souped-up title. R I S E N F RO M T H E G R AV E Nevertheless, a few items exhibit the old swagger, for nobody could ever accuse Curll of lacking the courage to take a risk. Early in September 1728 he advertised a new translation by the ever-willing Thomas Foxton of Archæologiæ Philosophicæ,

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by Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charterhouse, latitudinarian divine, and a widely read author, who had died in 1715. This book, dating from 1692, made up one of a number by Burnet that Curll planned to publish. He drafted the advertisement in his finest blustering manner: This Day is risen from the Grave of a Chancery-Injunction, and publish’d . . . Dr. Burnet’s Archaologiae Philosophicae . . . . N.B. Some of my timorous Brethren, through the ridiculous Threats of Mr. Wilkinson [Burnet’s literary executor], late of Lincoln’s-Inn, having let a Translation of Dr. Burnet’s Archaeologia, &c. lie suppress’d near seven Years, it now happens, that the said Wilkinson’s Death proves to be Dr. Burnet’s Resurrection. Therefore the Publick, and Mr. Wilkinson’s Successors, may be hereby assured, I shall go through with a Translation of all Dr. Burnet’s Works, and that, his own Commentary upon his Theory of the Earth will be publish’d in a Month’s Time. E. CURLL. (DJ, 6 September 1728)

This was not the first time the bookseller had clashed with Burnet’s executor. In 1727 Henry Curll had brought out a version of De statu mortuorum, under the title Of the State of the Dead. The translator, Matthias Earbery, had declared in a prefatory note that his reputation had been under attack for the ‘liberty’ he had taken in performing the work. He defies Burnet’s friends to carry out their threat to issue an injunction in Chancery, with the lame addition that he was ‘pretty well assured’ that the text was genuine, since Mr Wilkinson had ‘returned no Declaration to the contrary’. These represent the usual Curllian tactics: if authenticity has not been denied, then in effect it has been confirmed. In July 1728 Edmund published a second edition of this work, now confident enough of his standing to omit the prefatory note. Characteristically he heads his advertisement, ‘Notwithstanding the many Attempts to suppress such a Learned and Curious Work . . .’ Part of his genius in the promotional sphere lay in his ability to convey the idea that he was privy to secrets which the public had a right to know. Following Curll’s advertisements, a further item came out in October 1728, claiming to be a commentary by Burnet on his own famous Sacred Theory of the Earth. Even if the bookseller did not get round to every single opusculum by the same author, he continued the battle with material such as an Appendix to the Ninth Chapter of the State of the Dead in December, still breathing fire against the late Francis Wilkinson as he combed every clause in the lawyer’s own will. With feigned incredulity, he writes to the translator, Foxton, that in the will Wilkinson ‘makes no Confession of Sins, dies in the Communion of no Church, and expresses no Hopes of a Resurrection’. The Archæologiæ are advertised as ‘seven Years suppressed, by an Injunction in Chancery’. As late as 1734 Curll continued to vent his resentment in advertisements: ‘N.B. This learned Work was suppressed by an unprecedented, and most partial Decree by the late Lord Chancellor Macclesfield, thro’ the false Informations of Francis Wilkinson, Esq; but, Mortui non mordent’ (DJ, 5 July 1734). Macclesfield and Wilkinson, he means, were safely dead.

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The controversy sprang up in this way. In 1716 Curll had snapped up Burnet’s will and published it, along with that of the astrologer John Partridge: a list of the doctor’s writings at the end suggests the watchful bookseller already had a publishing scheme in his head. Then, a few years later, William Chetwood, a former associate of Curll, had projected a translation of the Archæologiæ. He promptly found himself hit by a suit filed in Chancery by George Burnet, the brother and executor of the author.1 There ensued an important test case for the recent Copyright Act, and a ruling of some significance delivered by Lord Chancellor Macclesfield. In response Chetwood and his fellow defendants claimed that the Act did not cover translations; but the Chancellor ruled against them and granted an injunction forbidding them to publish. He based his ruling on the grounds that the work contained reflections on religion (in a humorously couched dialogue between Eve and the serpent, which formed part of an allegorical reading of six days of the Creation and the Fall), and that it was the duty of the court to restrain such publications.2 Some thought that Burnet had lost a good chance of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury because of this injudicious passage. Moreover, the work eventually found itself on the Index of prohibited books drawn up by the Holy See. However, since he had given this judgment, Macclesfield had himself suffered disgrace and removal from office, something that may have emboldened Curll—if he ever needed that. It does not look as if the authorities made any attempt to suppress the new translation: once again the bookseller’s brazen defiance achieved his ends for him. In late 1728 he managed to get hold of a work he had probably long coveted, The Epistles and Poems by Clio and Strephon, to which he added with accustomed largesse an old favourite, The Parson’s Daughter. The Epistles first appeared in 1720, as letters exchanged between Martha Fowke, a popular young writer attached to Aaron Hill’s circle, and William Bond, one of Curll’s oldest hands. According to Eliza Haywood, who wrote a harsh attack on Fowke as ‘Gloatitia’, the practised charmer had used her powers of enchantment on Curll to get him to issue her work: ‘She bribed, with all the Favours she is capable of conferring, a Bookseller (famous for publishing soft things) to print some of her Works, on which she is not a little vain.’ In return Fowke called her antagonist ‘the Scorpion Haywood’.3 Such cat-fights did nothing to harm Curll’s business. The Epistles were labelled ‘the third edition’: earlier printings had generally borne the name of J. Hooke, but it emerges that the list of Hooke’s books in this volume included many known to be published by Curll (Straus, 287). The two men shared an imprint on several occasions, including two items in 1720. Perhaps the bookseller had been a sleeping partner in this venture all along. One reason for suspecting a connection is that Fowke gets a strong write-up in Jacob’s Poetical Register, with a warm endorsement for an anthology in which her poems appear, namely A New Miscellany of Original Poems, Translations and Imitations (1720), edited by Anthony Hammond (see Chapter 6 above). It does not sound like Curll to give other booksellers’ works unnecessary publicity.4 Another version of Clio and

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Strephon, strategically retitled The Platonic Lovers by John Wilford, came out in 1732, but Curll had again dropped out of sight. Briefly his son Henry made a bid for freedom. A new imprint materialized in 1728: ‘Printed for H. Curll, in Clement’s Inn-Passage’. This refers to an alley close to St Clement’s Dane Church, where Drury Lane led down into the Strand. The passage lay about three minutes’ walk away from the main shop, cutting through an insalubrious area noted both for slaughter-houses and for beggars’ lodgings. No matter—the alternative establishment faded away almost as soon as it hoved into sight. T H E H O U S E W I T H G R E E N S PI R E S From time to time, Curll senior resumed one of his old lines, auctioning books. We know this from a catalogue advertising a sale around 1729, headed A Young Student’s Library: or, A Catalogue of Books Belonging to the late Mr. Lusher, of Pembroke Coll. Oxon. The whole to be sold by auction, by Edmund Curll, Bookseller, at his Literatory [in] Covent-Garden. This must refer to Thomas Lusher, who entered the college in 1715 and whose will was proved on 3 April 1729. The sale catalogue is dated to December 1729 in the Bodleian copy. On 11 August Curll had appended a note to an advertisement in the Daily Journal: ‘N.B. As I shall retire from Publick Business at Michaelmas, my House is now to be Lett. And, in Order to sell off my S-S, I will abate Gentlemen 5s. in the Pound of the usual Prices; resolving for the future only to deal in my own copies. E. Curll.’ But the closing-down sale was only a prelude to the move: on 15 September (DJ ) he announced his move to the Literatory, or Universal Library. Curll’s new establishment stood in Bow Street, next to Will’s coffee-house on the corner of Russell Street—just across the road, in fact, from Tom Davies’ bookshop where Johnson met Boswell in 1763, a site now marked by a blue plaque. To celebrate his move to the district around Covent Garden market, Curll put up a new sign, that of two green spires. The premises seem to have served as a repository as much as a bookstore, and may have specialized in antiquarian stock. Here the buyer could obtain books ‘not to be had elsewhere’. In the Daily Journal of 18 October, Curll inserted (as a news item, rather than in the advertising columns) the following improbable item: The Right. Hon. The Lord Viscount Townshend, Sir Robert Walpole, and many other Persons of Distinction, have been pleased to honour with their Subscriptions, a very valuable Work, entitled, Anglia Illustrata: Or, The Natural History and Antiquities of several Counties in England, in Surrey, Berkshire, Devonshire, Staffordshire, Northamptonshire, &c. in 20 Vols. Printed for E. Curll, in Bow-street. Covent-Garden, and are only to be had of him.

The collection is advertised from ‘C’s LITERATORY’ on 22 October in the same paper. The contents are given, and of course these are the old county

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and cathedral histories again, selling at £5 the small paper, £10 the large, single volumes five shillings and ten respectively; ‘The Particulars of this most valuable Collection, are deliver’d out Gratis by Mr. C.’ Curll had never entirely forsaken his interest in antiquities, and he gained a new burst of energy when Richard Rawlinson, the scholar and Jacobite, returned to England after many years on the Continent. Few played a more decisive role in Curll’s acquisitions policy than Rawlinson, a non-juring bishop and expert on historical topography with a wide range of contacts in the literary world. It causes no surprise to find that the most direct evidence of Curll’s deep involvement in his antiquarian projects can be found in the Rawlinson manuscripts at Oxford. (It is relevant that the only assemblage of the poetry of the Curllian author Robert Samber survives in the antiquarian’s collections.) The material relates to A New Method of Studying History, issued in two volumes in 1728. Rawlinson’s name appears as author on the title-pages of both volumes: in the first volume he credits the origin of the work to Nicolas Langlet Dufresnoy, but this ascription disappears in the second volume, devoted to a wide-ranging annotated bibliography of historical writing. He claims to have translated the volume during a ‘summer’s recess’ in Italy, and an Italian version appears to be his source. The imprint in Volume 1 reads, ‘Printed by W. B in St. John’s-Lane, near Hick’s Hall. 1728’, while the title-page of Volume 2 carries no imprint. Some copies of volume 1 name other booksellers, such as Batley, Rivington, and Pope’s Lawton Gilliver, a recent arrival. However, Rawlinson unquestionably consulted Curll over the project and the bookseller involved himself deeply in it, as the Bodleian manuscripts make abundantly clear. The documents show that he was even more active in the publishing world than he chose to reveal, and that in certain areas he possessed genuine knowledge. Attached to the flyleaf of Rawlinson’s own interleaved copy of the New Method are four closely written sheets of corrections, as reported fifty years ago by B. J. Enright.5 They consist of detailed corrections and augmentations to the text of Volume 2: four of the corrections were included in the list of errata printed in a cancelled sheet at the end of the book. Many concern the attribution of unsigned works, especially in the case of translations, and Curll does not neglect the opportunity to praise items he had published, such as Crull’s abridgement of Josephus and Pack’s versions of Cornelius Nepos, though most of the texts he names were not from his shop. Along with these notes come messages exchanged between Curll and the printer, William Burton (see above, Chapter 8). Enright remarked that the handwriting is identical to that Curll used when he made his collections of manuscripts relating to Oxfordshire.6 He also commented that the materials ‘disclose a laudable effort to secure accuracy and completeness strangely at variance with Curll’s reputation as an unscrupulous and ‘‘unspeakable’’ publisher’. Certainly the corrections show that Curll was both careful and learned in his favourite antiquarian pursuits, even though these qualities did not carry over to the bulk of his publishing output. He complained

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to Burton of some ‘cursed blunders’ in the last leaf but one of sheet Hh in Volume 2, that is a discussion of the principal historians of Great Britain (one of the areas where Curll claimed most expertise). While we can scarcely elevate the bookseller to the rank of a major scholar, he emphatically played a role of some note in the progress of English antiquarian studies. In the late summer of 1729, Curll paid a visit to Oxford, where he was entertained by Rawlinson and other members of the university who had a taste for antiquities, and many of them doubtless for Jacobitism too. It seems to have been at this juncture that Curll put into active mode a plan he had formed long ago—to bring out a comprehensive collection of works on English history. He perhaps hoped to sell it almost along the lines of a modern ‘standing order’. The shop with the sign of the green spires may have been acquired (presumably on lease) for this purpose. To bolster the antiquarian side of his business, Curll managed to get the support of an important figure in the shape of Browne Willis (see Chapters 3 and 7 above). In February 1730 he inserted a notice in the Daily Post Boy, quoting a recommendatory letter from Willis written some years earlier to Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, Oxford, praising Curll’s industry in promoting a collection of topographical works. No bookseller in town, Willis stated, had been ‘so curious’ as Curll. According to the press notice, ‘This kind recommendation of that learned Antiquary, Browne Willis Esq., of Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, was given upon a journey to Oxford, and has been greatly serviceable to me. E. Curll’. Later that year, an advertisement in the same newspaper indicated that Henry Curll was to leave off business at Michaelmas (LA i. 445–6)—one result was that his father made yet one more attempt to dispose of the antiquarian series. We have no idea why Henry so abruptly announced his intention to quit the trade, particularly as his name reappears in the business during 1733 and 1734. Meanwhile, the elder Curll had fallen into one of his trademark disputes with Charles Davis (d. 1755), a bookseller in Paternoster Row who specialized in sales through catalogues. Davis ran his business just a few doors from the site where Curll had his shop in 1720, ‘over against the Golden Head’. According to Curll’s Chancery bill, signed on 23 February 1730, the two men made an agreement in 1729 by which Davis would sell some of Curll’s antiquarian stock. Unfortunately the memorandum of agreement, though signed by both parties, was retained by Davis alone. As a result he had now begun to cheat, maintaining that Curll had failed to deliver items as agreed: ‘no Witness being present at the time of the Agreement or Bargain being made . . . The said Davis taking an unfair Advantage thereof and knowing that your Orator cannot prove the promises in such manner as required by the strict Rules of Common Law’, now sets his colleague at defiance. It does not sound much like the shrewd businessman Curll to enter into such a flimsy agreement without a proper receipt. No doubt he inserted the line about common law to justify an action in the court of equity. In the previous June, Curll’s bill asserted, he had sent a cart over to Paternoster

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Row with all the stock mentioned in his bill, excepting a few items for which he had immediate need. He would have needed a large cart. Neither Davis’s reply nor the adjudication has been found.7 T H E L I F E O F C O N G R EV E Understandably, the publishing output dropped to a lower tally in 1729 than in most previous years, shell-shocked as Curll must have felt in the aftermath of The Dunciad. As we saw in the previous chapter, much of his time was taken up with this poem and the parerga it elicited, including the bookseller’s own riposte The Curliad. A long tradition identifies one of the 1729 piracies of The Dunciad with Curll (see Straus, 289; Griffith, 216), but recent bibliographical research makes this unlikely (Foxon, P774). He no doubt sold illegitimate versions in his shop. However, he received one timely fillip for his list. It came with the death of Congreve, who had long stopped writing but had not ceased to prompt scandalous gossip on account of his private life. By way of initial response, Curll published A Letter to Lord Cobham, written by Congreve several years earlier. In fact Congreve had got wind of a former plan to reissue some of his works. He wrote to Pope in May 1727: ‘By the inclosed you will see I am like to be impress’d, and enroll’d in the list of Mr. Curll’s Authors; but I thank God I shall have your company. I believe it is high time you should think of administering another Emetick’ (Corr, ii. 434). The advertisement in question has not been identified. Curll’s major undertaking took the form of Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Amours of William Congreve Esq., which naturally included the verse epistle. Strangely, this remained the only full-dress biography until the publication of Edmund Gosse’s Life of William Congreve in 1888. That the work should be dated 1730 supplies another minor anomaly, when in fact it appeared on 11 August 1729, seven months after Congreve’s death.8 Disconcertingly the book affords no details whatsoever about Congreve’s love affairs.9 We might find this omission understandable, given the circumstances under which the Memoirs appeared, but it remains suspicious that no one amended the title to suit the contents. Another gap concerns the absence of any mention as to the publisher: yet this was undoubtedly a Curll production, one more ‘terror of death’ realized for a hapless eminent Augustan. Finally comes the major crux. The title-page attributes the Memoirs to a writer describing himself as ‘Charles Wilson, Esq.’: elsewhere, the name becomes ‘Charles Wilson of Bath’. No one has ever settled, or indeed seriously investigated, the identity of this man, otherwise unknown to history, though Curll also ascribed a life of Robert Walpole, then supposedly in press, to him (DJ, 20 September). The publishing history has its own complexities. Congreve died on 19 January 1729, and as usual the publisher followed his first instinct to get hold of the will. Duly, on 16 April (DJ ) appeared Mr. Congreve’s Last Will and Testament, with

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Characters of his Writings. By Mr. Dryden, Sir Richard Blackmore, Mr. Addison and Major Pack. Richardson Pack, a largely inoffensive writer who had done Curll sterling service previously, died the year before. He earned his niche here because the publisher was assembling his Whole Works, issued in 1729 with a few spotty memoirs. (This volume also left out some of the dirtier items Pack produced, such as ‘The Female Philosophers: A Tale’, which the publisher with more boldness inserted into a later collection, Major Pack’s Poetical Remains, in 1738.) From the peculiar Curllian vantage-point, these circumstances made it a good idea to include a tribute to Congreve from Pack. In addition the booklet had an apparently irrelevant item about loose women appended as a makeweight, padding it out to almost forty pages. But by this date Curll had already advertised the Memoirs as forthcoming. We have not traced this notice, but its existence can be deduced from the following riposte which appeared in the Daily Post of 29 April: Whereas it has been advertised by E. Curl, that there is now in the Press, Miscellaneous Essays, and familiar Letters; by William Congreve, Esq; To which will be prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, Writings and Amours, by Charles Wilson, Esq: This is therefore to inform the Publick, that Mr Congreve’s Life &c. will be publish’d with all possible Speed from Authentick Papers, by a good Hand sufficiently authorised. To which will be added, an Account of his Works already printed, as well as of his Posthumous Writings, of which no other Person can have any Memoirs relating thereto.

Public curiosity had doubtless been whetted by the original notice: Congreve had kept virtually silent for thirty years, except as an occasional poet, whilst his sexual liaisons were not a matter of complete secrecy. At all events, the press notice abashed Curll not a whit, and next day he inserted in the same newspaper a postscript to his normal list, which now includes Congreve’s last will and testament—separately available but included in the Memoirs when they appeared. The postscript runs: P.S. The anonymous Advertiser in the Daily Post of Yesterday, who modestly stiles himself, a good Hand, sufficiently authorized to write Mr. Congreve’s Life; is hereby desir’d to take Notice, that Familiar Letters and Essays, written by that Gentleman, (of which the originals are in Mr. Curll’s Custody, to satisfy any Person who has a sufficient Authority to inquire) are in great Forwardness at the Press, and will be publish’d in about a month. CHA. WILSON Great-Russel-street, Bloomsbury, 29th April 1729.

The announcement evidently pleased its inserter so much that he retained it for future use on 5 and 16 May, though it drew out no second reply. Then things went quiet up to 11 August, when the Daily Journal carried this notice: This Day is published, (In Opposition to all ridiculous Messages and Threatenings). . . [Memoirs, etc., dedicated to George Duckett] . . . P.S. I hope (in the Preface to these Memoirs) I have given a just and full Answer to the Messages of a Certain Physician, and the Inquiries of a certain lady concerning them. Honi soit qui Mal y Pense. CHARLES WILSON.

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This curious document, to which Curll added a misleading statement of his impending retirement (again!), was repeated four times in August: a shortened advertisement appeared as late as 5 November.10 As for the rival version from ‘authentic papers,’ no more was heard of such a project. Something had deterred the authorized biographer, and Curll may have known what. From this time Arbuthnot and his party lay low. Might Curll himself have inspired the notice in the Daily Post to whip up a factitious public controversy? The preface to the Memoirs has its merits as a valuable item of Curlliana, though hardly as a reliable source of information. (A dedication, dated 14 July 1729, comes first.) The author takes the opportunity to admonish ‘one Dr. A*** a Scot’ for his busybody activities: ‘I know he is much more remarkable for Politicks than Physick, and for Wit than Wisdom.’ Thus Wilson writes off the Scriblerian satire in which Arbuthnot had participated by means of a brisk comparison, much to the latter’s disadvantage, with the work of Dr John Woodward—just one more side blow in the long-running battle between Curll and the Scriblerians. The attack then switches to a woman: Edmond Malone seems to have been the first to identify Mrs Anne Bracegirdle as the object here. (Another possible candidate is the second Duchess of Marlborough, Henrietta Godolphin, the residuary legatee.) ‘A certain Lady, to whom Mr. Congreve bequeath’d a handsome Legacy’ desired a sight of the papers in the press, thereby exposing her own ‘Ignorance in the Republick of Letters’. The writer fears none of the ‘Drawcansir’ threats to which he has been subjected. With complacent assurance, he adds that his ‘Sphere of Life is in a tolerable Degree of Situation’. Finally, he announces that he is easily to be found in Great Russell Street, as Arbuthnot is in Burlington Gardens, in case anyone should see fit to dispatch the letter ‘with any more Expresses’.11 At this point the text reproduces the Daily Post advertisement dated 29 April, with an insolent addendum that its insertion cost the sum of three shillings and sixpence. To augment its authority, the book is described as the work of one who had ‘an intimate Acquaintance with [Congreve] of near thirty Years’. In order to prove that such a friendship existed, at any rate, between Curll and Congreve, the writer quotes an affable letter (dated 7 July 1719) from the dramatist concerning the Poetical Register. In it he states that he greatly approves of the ‘usefulness’ of the undertaking, and is willing to supply an account of his ‘own poor Trifles & self’. We lack proof that the letter is genuine;12 and a further possibility exists that the true recipient of the letter was Giles Jacob, the editor of the Register, rather than its publisher Curll.13 Moreover, no one has ever satisfactorily established as the truth Jacob’s claim that all living authors in his compendium had vetted the copy and approved their respective entries.14 Nothing about Jacob’s encomiastic coverage of Congreve in the Poetical Register suggests that the compiler had the benefit of a firsthand briefing from his subject. In this loaded context it is so much the harder to accept Wilson’s account of the exchange. If Wilson really masked the identity of Curll himself—a live possibility—the doubt must grow.

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The book that follows exhibits an extraordinarily jumbled state. After the preliminaries come three distinct sections, each with separate pagination. The first basically reproduces the earlier pamphlet entitled Mr. Congreve’s Last Will and Testament. It includes a copy of Congreve’s will, the probate order, testimonies from Dryden, Addison, Blackmore, and Richardson Pack, as previously published; an allegedly new and authentic version of the verse epistle to Lord Cobham; an account of Congreve’s death and funeral; and more. Then follows Part I of the memoirs proper: the main staple of contents here resides in a series of letters from Congreve to Walter Moyle.15 Part II drifts off into even more rambling and episodic regions, as it presents some ‘singularly inaccurate details’ concerning Dryden and his family (Straus, 139). These were communicated by ‘Corinna’, alias Elizabeth Thomas. Part II also contains Congreve’s short fiction Incognita in full, as well as a final tribute from Steele. Interlarded throughout appear some incidental remarks on Congreve’s life, but the biography amounts to scarcely more than a palimpsest which the careful reader fitfully teases out. Curll even manages to insert a lengthy passage regarding the medicinal benefits of snails, as taken up by Congreve at the end of his life. The reason for this excursion will astound no one: it allows the publisher to incorporate a puff for the posthumous works of George Sewell, which had recommended such treatment, and which Curll had lying on his hands. It is equally unsurprising that this curious production has gained an indifferent reputation.16 A nineteenth-century editor of Colley Cibber’s Apology cited it as an instance of ‘injudicious celerity’ in producing biographies.17 ‘I would advise you’, wrote Mrs Pendarves to her sister, ‘not to buy Congreve’s life; only hire it, for it is very indifferently done.’18 As just observed, the identity of Congreve’s first biographer remains a mystery. The name which comes up most often is that of John Oldmixon, and for this responsibility seems to belong to Malone.19 In fact, nothing more than an offhand suggestion occurs in Malone’s edition of Dryden, where the name of Oldmixon appears as ‘perhaps’ the writer of the Memoirs.20 A host of writers including Leigh Hunt, Edmund Gosse, Ralph Straus and many others follow Malone on this point. Moreover, modern bibliographic works generally accept the ascription, but it is far from certain that the work has been correctly attributed. Admittedly, Oldmixon enjoyed the friendship of George Duckett, to whom Wilson dedicated the book, but we do not know of any evidence that he could claim the long-lasting intimacy with Congreve of which the author boasted. On balance, Giles Jacob seems a more likely candidate.21 Only one thing does appear certain: that Curll served as the real instigator. In his preface ‘Wilson’ states, ‘I employ’d Mr. Curll to print these Memoirs’. The newspaper campaign he mounted, too, has Curll written all over it, though the prefacer claims that it was all done ‘by my Direction’. Moreover, Curll would advertise the work regularly in years to come, and he also issued the will

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separately under his own name, garnished with other materials (1729, second edition 1730). The next year yields an even skimpier record. Only seven items from 1730 can be attributed to Curll: it might look as if the veteran was beginning to slow down as he approached the age of fifty, except that he soon picked up again as the decade went on. Among these seven came a ‘second’ edition of the Memoirs of Congreve, which may not even exist; another was a new edition of the will, which does; and a third was a poem by William Bond, Cobham and Congreve. An Epistle to Lord Viscount Cobham, in Memory of his Friend, the late Mr. Congreve. Spring Macky moved into action again, this time translating The Art of Knowing Women: or, The Female Sex Dissected, a version of a book by Franc¸ois Bruys, L’Art de connoître les femmes, avec une dissertation sur l’adult`ere (The Hague, 1730). Evidently Curll had begun to find it harder to rake up salacious texts of the kind which had once littered his shop like autumn leaves in Vallambrosa, or else his experiences with Venus in the Cloister at the court of the King’s Bench had temporarily cowed him. Very briefly he had some connection with a short-lived successor to Abel Boyer’s well-known monthly review, which began life in January 1730 as The New Political State of Great Britain. Including the Public Affairs of Foreign Courts. Compiled by Mr. Morgan. We do not know for certain the identity of J. Morgan: but he is most probably the obscure Joseph Morgan, who had produced translations for Curll over several years, and would do more. He had two specialities: the Arab world, and lugubrious dissertations on death. Whoever he was, he lacked Boyer’s flair for commentary on the news, and by the time this periodical sank after a few issues Curll may have already jumped ship (as Straus, 290 indicates: see however DJ, 12 June 1730). Nevertheless, the bound volume of The New Political State includes several biographies in which Curll had an interest, as we shall see in a moment, including those of Dr John Freind, Sir Thomas Pengelly, and Sir Richard Steele. Plainly as a spin-off from this project came an item advertised in February 1731, The Memoirs of the Earls of Nottingham, Portmore, Lord Trevor, Bp. Sprat &c. (Straus, 292). We have not seen such a book and suspect it was little more than ad hoc parcelling together of the various lives, hurriedly recycled from the Political State. Briefly a new a partner appeared in the shape of William Leventhorp, a figure so stealthy that he seems almost to resemble a legal fiction. He might possibly be the ‘Mr. Leventhorp, Mercer in the Strand ’, who subscribed to Thomas Newcomb’s The Last Judgment of Men and Angels, published by Mears, Pemberton and Hooke in 1723. An individual of this name married Elizabeth Price at Christ Church, Newgate in 1699 (marriage allegation dated 5 June), and a will was made by William Leventhorp of the Charterhouse in 1742 (proved 22 February 1745). For a very short time, Leventhorp joins Curll in publicity material, with books to available from them both at the sign of ‘Congreve’s Head’. The name of the newcomer turns up in Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John Friend,

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M.D. and of the Physical Controversies wherein he was Engaged. Written by Dr. Rouse (1731). This probably refers to Philip Rose, whom Curll had invoked to justify the publication of The Use of Flogging. Again, the life had been used first in The New Political State, and was recycled as separate item. As for John Freind, an eminent physician and ally of Dr Richard Mead who clashed with Dr John Woodward, he had died as far back as July 1728. Curll was slipping. The same year, 1731, saw one of his more brazen mendacities, when he and Leventhorp produced alleged Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Richard Steele, announced as ‘written by himself’ in an advertisement from two years previously (DJ, 22 October 1729). In fact, the book allots less than thirty digressive pages to Steele, and the rest consists mainly of early issues of the wholly irrelevant New Political State, just described. The items appear along with short extracts from Gilbert Burnet (died 1715), drawing on opinions Burnet had given in 1680 about ‘cases of conscience’, namely ‘Is polygamy lawful?’ and ‘Is a woman’s barrenness a just ground for divorce, or polygamy?’ All these elements reappear in The New Political State, which as noted also binds up the life of Bishop Thomas Sprat (first issued in 1715) and others. (The separate parts are paginated continuously.) By now the publisher showed himself willing to throw together any combination of works, however little they had in common. Earlier on, he had usually made some attempt to group items with the hint of a logical connection. But in any case Leventhorp did not stay around for long, and vanished with as little ceremony as he once hove into sight. T H E G RU B - S T R E E T J O U R N A L By now Curll was facing sustained assault from a new direction. From its inception the Grub-street Journal became Curll’s main scourge in the newspaper press, as well as the strongest adherent of Pope’s party. This weekly newspaper ran for 418 numbers from 8 January 1730 to 29 December 1737. Its original editors were Richard Russel (b. c.1686), a nonjuring clergyman, who served until 1735, and John Martyn (1699–1768), a botanist, who acted up to 1731. The journal claimed to emanate from a tavern named the Flying Horse (a depraved Pegasus) in Grub Street, north of the City of London. It was distributed by James Roberts, Lawton Gilliver, and John Huggonson, at a price of twopence per issue. A sequel, The Literary Courier of Grub Street, ran for thirty issues from January to July 1738. Pope’s enemies always believed that he took a leading hand in the proceedings. Nobody knows how much week-to-week contact he had with the journal (he scarcely ever mentions it in his extant letters), but its contents certainly reflected his own position with considerable accuracy. In fact, the journal operated as a kind of serialized Dunciad. In all likelihood Pope contributed small items on a fairly regular basis, but they cannot be identified with assurance. The principal targets of satire included Colley Cibber, Lewis

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Theobald, Eustace Budgell, and Stephen Duck, as well as the inept journalism found in other newspapers of the time. Among butts of Pope who figure in the Journal we find the authors James Moore Smythe and Matthew Concanen, the classical scholar Richard Bentley, and the epicene courtier Lord Hervey. However, Curll and Orator Henley often bear the brunt of the attack. The fourth issue (29 January 1730) contains an application from ‘Kirleus’ for the post of bookseller by appointment to the honourable Society of Grub Street. In presenting his curriculum vitae he rehearses some of Curll’s own history, ironically transmuted into a career of injured merit. The poisoning episode is blamed on ‘a profest Papist’, while the blanket-tossing at Westminster was ‘approved, if not incouraged by a late Bishop, who once made a bitter invective against me in the House of Lords’, that is Atterbury. According to Kirleus, he once made his ‘utmost endeavours to get some satisfaction for this [latter] violence: but as if Justice was fled from Westminster-Hall, as well as piety from Westminster-Abbey, I could meet with no Lawyer who would undertake my cause, tho’ I did not pretend to consult any in forma pauperis.’ The writers of the Journal build up such a good case for the ill-treated Kirleus that it is hard not to feel some sympathy for him, even if we know how partially he spins his tale in relating the afflictions suffered by ‘a good Protestant’ at the hands of ‘the Friends of Popery and arbitrary Power’. Without a blush, he boasts that he has carried the publishing business further than any of his rivals: ‘I dare challenge the most eminent of the trade to shew a catalogue of books of his own printing, equal to that which I am ready to produce. Let the compositions of levity be counted by number, and those of gravity examined by weight; the Stock of my Antagonist will be found deficient in the sum total, and deceitful upon the balance’ (the writer plays with the biblical tag, ‘Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting’, in a way that Pope would have enjoyed). Kirleus proceeds: Those who have made the greatest figure in our way have generally run chiefly upon some single branch of Science, as Divinity, Physic, Law, Poetry, &c. and have frequently raised an estate, by going on servilely and stupidly in one track of business. But, moved by nobler views, and having a laudable ambition to become famous in the Commonwealth of learning, I scorned to confine my self to any one of its parts, but endeavoured to the utmost of my power to promote it in all. And tho’ Biography, secret History, natural Philosophy, and Poetry were my chief favourites; yet no part of literature can complain, that it has been disregarded.

It became apparent earlier (see Chapters 4 and 5) just how closely Pope must have followed Curll’s career in order to compose his satiric pamphlets on the bookseller. The same clearly applies to the Journal’s dramatization of Kirleus and his discontents. He goes on to claim that ‘a perfect Encyclopædia of Arts and Sciences may be collected solely from the books which I have published,’ and continues:

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This may seem a paradox to those, who form a judgment of the number of books printed for me, by seeing my name in the Title Page; and may thence be apt to conclude, that where that does not appear, I was not at all concerned. This is a very uncertain way of judging: there being a great many cases, in which it is not at all proper, either for an Author, or a Bookseller, to put his name to the book he publishes. And I can evidently prove, whenever it shall be deemed necessary, that I have actually printed and sold as many books under fictitious names, or under none at all, as under my own.

This was the heart of the Scriblerian case against Curll. However, no. 15 in the Journal’s run (16 April 1730) reveals that preference for the vacant post has gone to ‘Captain L. Gulliver’—a cunning choice of name, blending the figures of Lemuel Gulliver and the real-life Lawton Gilliver, a young bookseller whom Pope had helped to set up in trade. One of the members opposes Curll’s candidacy, on the grounds that he had given rise to a new form of obscene writing known as ‘Curlism’. Despite a sophistical defence by one of the other members, claiming that lewd books perform a useful role in society as a vent for lecherous impulses, the cause is lost. But the Journal allows Curll’s defender some rope in defending his productions: For the design of some of them is to give a true historical account of former transactions, which may serve as precedents in determining the like cases which may happen, such as Cases of impotency and divorce,&c. Others are designed to promote natural knowledge, as The use of flogging, Art of kissing, Art of getting pretty children, Mysteries of conjugal love. &c. which all tend very much to the good of the public, by inciting to the propagation of a sound and vigorous offspring. And Books of Novels, if the events are unfortunate, are useful to deter young persons from following the like lascivious courses. Now if the abuse of writings of this kind be an argument against the use of them; it will hold equally strong against books of Anatomy, Surgery, Midwifery, &c. which are all perverted by the natural corruption of some readers to the promoting of lewdness and debauchery.

Could even Curll himself have put the case better? The main reason given for rejecting Curll as a candidate has its own preposterous show of reasonableness. A leading figure in the Society, named Pamphleteero, opposes the election of Curll to this post, but recommends instead that he be made a member of the group. He argues that the publisher is equally distinguished in the capacity of an author, who has ‘imitated the stile of some of our most celebrated Brethren both in prose and verse’, so that he would be wasted in the current appointment: It has been resolved, that whoever has that place shall not be an Author for the future, nor publish any thing, except a title page, or an advertisement to the reader; and that he shall not vend any obscene or irreligious book. As it would be great pity to deprive the world of the ingenious lucubrations of Mr. K, by his confining himself to the employment of a bookseller; so I am very certain, that he will never consent to do it, much less to deprive himself of the annual profit arising from the sale of diverting books.

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Once more the text reveals an intimate knowledge of Curll’s business: There are three branches of literature in which he has distinguish’d himself, Natural History and Philosophy (called by some Obscenity) and Antiquities. In labours relating to the 2 former he spent the vigour of his years: to the latter he has applied himself in his more advanced age, as a subject more suitable to his maturer judgment. The testimony of a learned Antiquarian relating only to his collections in one of these sciences may be justly applied to him in respect of all, that no Bookseller in Town has been so curious as he. Twenty volumes of Antiquities, and more than twice twenty of Natural Philosophy and History are a noble stock for one Book-seller, sufficient to enable him to carry on in his Literatory a very profitable business, with ease and dignity in his old age.

The argument prevails, and Kirleus has to yield place to Captain Gulliver. We might note that the Journal has picked up on the commendations of Browne Willis, the ‘learned antiquarian’ mentioned here. Soon afterwards, in issue no. 24 (18 June 1730), the editors returned to their attack. They allege that Mr Kirleus, in his disappointment at being rejected by the Society, had launched a rude attack on members in the Daily Journal on 23 May. (Such a piece exists, but we cannot tell whether Curll had a hand in it.) The paragraph proceeds: They very much approve his having lately cleared his Literatory of Books of Antiquities, more proper for a Dutch Genius; and retaining only such as relate to Biography, secret History, natural Philosophy, and Poetry, subjects much more suitable to the brightness of his parts.

These sly words, congratulating Curll on having cleared out his stock of antiquarianism from his ‘literatory’, may mean that he had really abandoned the repository in Bow Street. Curll sometimes appears in the news columns of the Journal. While the organ is best known today for its literary essays, it was in fact a fully-fledged newspaper, rounding up domestic and foreign news from the daily press. On 17 September 1730 it reprinted an advertisement from the St. James’s Evening Post, concerning Matthias Earbery’s translation of the De Statu Mortuorum. The notice also carried a statement signed by ‘Cha. Price’ at Cambridge, supporting the version of Earbery (and Curll), and belabouring the rival version by John Dennis as ‘very imperfect and negligently perform’d’. The members of the Society object that, while they are familiar with Curll, Earbery, and Dennis, they do not recognize the name of Price. In this they are not alone. But the bookseller can also be found in the advertising columns of the Journal. Unfazed by the extensive campaign waged against him, on 12 November 1730 Curll bought space in the paper to promote The Art of Knowing Women, printed and sold by Curll and Leventhorp with three other members of the trade, followed by a second insertion on 8 December. The title was not all that different from the sort of publication about which the Journal had twitted him just a few months before. Not even Daniel went into the lions’ den of his own volition: but Curll seemed happy to do so.

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T H E M Y S T E RY O F B O O K S E L L I N G During the next few years he seldom stayed for long out of the pages of the Journal, which made repeated allusion to the dubious tricks of his trade. When Pope and Curll clashed in 1735 over the poet’s correspondence, the paper weighed in from time to time with onslaughts upon Curll’s scandalous manoeuvres—no one yet knew, of course, that Pope had been complicit in the entire business. A withering attack appeared on 8 January 1736, pouring scorn on the three volumes of Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence which had already appeared, and holding out even less hope for the fourth, which had been announced but not yet published. The writer launches a bitter onslaught on ‘the scandalous practice of prefixing the names of celebrated Writers to the mean performance of those who cannot otherwise impose their Trash on the world’. He also castigates Curll for having abused ‘in a very indecent manner, a truly worthy, industrious, inoffensive person, I mean the late Mr. H of Oxford’. Nothing else could be expected from ‘this doubty (sic) Re-publisher’. Similarly, when the bookseller ventured to set up ‘Pope’s Head’ as his sign, the Journal (31 July 1735) had a neat response: Curst C, besieg’d by Duns, to raise the cash With P—’s immortal busto stamps his trash: So squandering Coyners, to retrieve a loss Imprint their monarch’s image on their dross.

The joke here depends on the fact that Curll used the symbol as a logo on titlepages as well as on the shop sign. On 12 June 1735 the Journal printed an essay on the art of puffing as a special feature of the modern publicity machine. In its course, they observed, ‘The negative puffs are seldom used: the most remarkable instance of these was given by a very ingenious book-seller; who, in order to sell The life of Mr D, put this negative material puff in the very title page, Not written by Mr. C’. It was true enough. Perhaps the most incisive of all these attacks came in Journal no. 147 on 26 October 1732. This consisted of a dialogue on ‘The Art and Mystery of Printing’, illustrated by an ‘emblematic design’ showing a scene in a printing house, given various fantastic interpretations by way of allegory (see Figure 4). John Henley finds himself in the line of fire once more, but a strange Janus-faced figure stands at the heart of the design: The grand figure I take to be a bookseller, who has as much occasion for two faces in the way of trade, as persons in any other business. To a customer, who asks him how such a book sells, it is proper to answer with a brisk countenance, Extremely well. But if the author asks the same question, he must look grave, shake his head, and say, Very indifferently. What was sayed in relation to the same printer’s being concerned in printing weekly papers, pamphlets, or books, written in direct opposition to each other, is equally

Figure 4. The Art and Mystery of Printing, from the Grub-street Journal, no. 147, 26 October 1732, reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

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applicable to booksellers: Nay, they have frequently employed persons to write answers to books printed for themselves, in order to make them sell the better, and sometimes an author has been employed to answer himself. The same bookseller has frequently printed, at his own charge, religious and impious, godly and lewd books. This sufficiently justifies the application of the figure with two faces–In the attitude in which he is placed, he may be supposed as giving his order to his slaves the printers, who work like horses, grunt like hogs, and fawn upon him like dogs. Or else he may be considered as giving directions to his authors, to write poetical, political, historical, theological, or bawdy books; which authors are properly represented by the gentlemen who have the heads of a dog, a horse, or a swine, and are accordingly treated by him like spaniels, hackneys, and hogs.—

Another segment of the print shows a devilish figure hanging up on a rack what may be proof sheets of Cases of Impotency. Higher up we can see sheets of books entitled Onania, Rochester’s Poems, Sessions Papers —and Manual of Devotion. The editor is able to explicate this, too: The devil in the last division of the picture, seems to denote a particular bookseller, stripped of all his false ornaments of puffs, advertisements, and title pages, and in propria persona, putting up his own and other peoples copies, books, some of pious devotions, and others of lewd diversion, in his literatory.22

Not much need to specify who the particular bookseller might be. For six years the Journal kept up its onslaught on Curll. Often the attacks linked him with Henley, as the two men formed the advance guard of self-publicizing puffery: ‘The Original Art of Advertising was stolen from Mr. C’s Literatory, by Grub Orators and Hyp-Doctors, by Paper-mongers, by Pamphleteers, by Titles of books, &c. and Mr. C’s Native Right to that ingenious and profitable Art is indisputable, which is mimick’d by those Jackanapes’ (6 January 1732). Some of the products of Curll’s chaste press received scornful notice on their appearance: a life of the actress, Anne Oldfield, in February 1731, for example, or two years later the biography of Robert Wilks, both cruelly anatomized by the editors (see below, Chapter 12). The Journal gave the same treatment in October 1733 to his life of Matthew Tindal, to show that fewer than four out of the book’s sixty-four pages contained original material. Mr Curll, we are told, ‘by a prescription of a great many years, justly claims it as his great privilege to publish the Lives of all great men’. Often the editors launched epigrams at the bookseller: it is unlikely that they came from Pope’s hand but some conceivably could. In March 1733, no. 167, the Journal printed a poem from the Ordinary of Newgate to the notorious murderer Sarah Malcolm, whose plain features Hogarth would depict in a savagely eloquent portrait. These lines display the fate in store for such celebrities: No Grubstreet Hack shall dare to use your Ghost ill; H[en]ly shall read upon your Post a Postill; H[ogar]th transmit your charms to future Times; And C l record your Life in Prose and Rhimes.

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A ‘postil’ here means a homily. In the following July, no. 184 shows a hack writer Scriblerus Incurabilis putting up his property for sale, notably ‘some dozens of last wills and testaments—and lives of remarkable persons not yet dead (all these bespoke by Mr. Edm. Curl)’. Mock advertisements satirize the means Curll had employed to get his works before the public. For much of the time the Journal operated as a prose sequel to The Dunciad, and its subject-matter overlaps to a remarkable degree with the notes to the poem. The aims of the newspaper meant that Curll was a sitting target, as representing Grub Street in its purest form. ‘I may venture to affirm’, Kirleus is made to state, ‘that the mystery of bookselling has been carried to a greater height by me, than by any, either of my Predecessors, or Contemporaries’ (29 January 1730). In the end the Journal did Curll less damage than The Dunciad, since the writers sometimes delivered their thrusts less skilfully, and they failed to embed his encounters with enemies in a running narrative as Pope manages to do in his great epic of dunces. Nevertheless, the paper once more put Curll on the defensive. Increasingly it seemed that he just could not escape the reiterated charges which had mounted up against him for the better part of two decades.

J U S T I C E A N D M E RC Y Yet he had still not abandoned hope of worming his way back into official favour. In September 1728 Curll wrote one of his most characteristic letters to Lord Townshend, worth reproducing in full for its mixture for bluster, self-pity and resourcefulness: My Lord,/Notwithstanding the severe usage I have met with, nothing shall ever alter my principles. I hope still to be made amends for all I have suffered. And this very day puts it in my power to do the Government more service than can be expressed. There is a conspiracy now forming, which may be nipt in the bud, by a letter which I have intercepted, I may say, as miraculously as that was which related to the Gunpowder Plot. I am willing to make Your Lordship the instrument of this eminent service; but I will deliver the copy of this original letter into no custody but your own. I beg Your Lordship’s immediate answer. I am, Your Lordship’s ever devoted Servant,/E. Curll.

With a slightly nonplussed air, Townshend wrote from Windsor to state that if Curll had anything of service to the government, he would be glad to see him as soon as possible.23 Nothing more is known. Such offers of information abound among the state papers, and the authorities generally took these seriously—quite often they were able to crack down on dissidents by this means.24 But in this case the main series of papers contain no relevant information. Most likely Curll wanted to implicate a fellow member of the trade, Nathaniel Mist, who had been in trouble with the authorities over a rash item in his Journal. Curll never showed any reluctance to kick an adversary when he was down, and he may well

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have been following up his letter on the subject to the messenger John Hutchins three weeks earlier (see p. 169). But conclusive evidence is lacking. Two years later Curll tried again. He wrote to Walpole on 31 March 1730, asking for an interview to communicate some information. This concerned Lord Bolingbroke ‘& the rest of Brindsden’s Durham-Yard Assembly, who intend to overturn you’.25 In 1723 Bolingbroke had been allowed to return from exile and had played a key role in the opposition to Walpole, most significantly by sponsoring the critical journal The Craftsman (in which Curll’s old partner Francklin had a major stake). John Brinsden acted as his secretary and political agent, while Durham Yard lay off the Strand near the Savoy. Again nothing survives in the state papers to explain this message, which Walpole doubtless took in his usual imperturbable stride. In the next year Curll came forward with a proposal to the commissioners of the Treasury, with the prime minister at their head. This involved a suggestion for ascertaining the size of newspapers or the number of lines taken up by advertisements. At present, he claimed, music, ballads and pictures with printed explanations were able to evade stamp duty. To enforce these tighter regulations, the bookseller recommended appointing an inspector, with a consequent boost in the annual revenue of £10,000.26 After due consideration, the board do not seem to have been lured into adopting any part of the plan, least of all into appointing Curll inspector, as he was certainly more use to them as a poacher than as a gamekeeper. Yet he would persist in his efforts to appease the authorities. Curll’s life took a new turn in 1732. He found himself attending court at the Old Bailey on 25 May, but not in the dock for once: reversing the habits of a lifetime, he now entered a criminal case as the injured party. His servant, Sarah Beeston, aged about fifteen, stood accused of stealing a number of valuable antiquarian books while her master had left the shop on business, and selling them to James Gibson, who kept a bookstall in Russell Court, just a stone’s throw from Curll’s premises in Rose Street. In his evidence Curll explains that he had recently lost some sixty books and had noticed seventeen volumes in a row on Gibson’s stall, which he recognized as his property. On enquiry he found that a girl had brought several parcels of books to the stall, for which she was paid 12s. 6d . (62.5p). Taxed with this, the servant confessed. Curll made a show of not wishing her any ill: I justly had more Resentment against the Buyer than the Child, and tho’ I have been obliged to do Justice in this Court, God, forbid that I should be guilty of the Blood of any one! I have done nothing hither to without the best Advice, and will do nothing but what is just and honourable. I would take the Directions of this Court in any Case; and as Justice and Mercy always go together, here I hope to have them both. The Girl had lived with me about 3 Months, and I am sure I had the greatest Tenderness imaginable for her; I [loved] her next to my own Flesh. I can prove nothing of my self, I know nothing but by her own Confession; and God forbid that I should charge her with any thing farther than I know.

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When asked to name the books he had lost, Curll went through a characteristic performance, which allows us to get a glimpse of his stock, especially in antiquarian books, at this juncture: Let me see. I have them all in Court, but they are sealed up in a Bag. Here, Cholmly the Constable, bring the Bag forward, break open the Seal. Pish! Here, here; you take it the wrong way. Ay, now you are right; give me the Books. Three, 7 and 5 is 12–16—one more, that’s right. Here’s 17 Volumes. Here’s the 4th Volume of the Antiquities of Surry in Octavo, large Paper. There are 5 Volumes in the Set, which I value at 5 Guineas, 2 Volumes ditto, small Paper; the whole Set is 5 Volumes, Value 3 Guineas, 2 Volumes of the Antiquities of Westminster, one Volume of the Antiquities of Rochester. These 3 Antiquities in my Hand are the Breach of 3 Sets, all span new, 11 Guineas as good as any in my Pocket. Then here’s L’Estrange’s Æsop compleat, Denham’s Poems, the devout Christian Companion, and the Lord knows how many more. O! here’s a particular Volume that I lost out of my own private Closet up 2 pair of Stairs backwards; ’tis a Collection of Pieces relating to Dr. Sacheverell, The Mouse Trap, Van’s House, Meditations on a Broomstick, and several other Things bound up together.

When Gibson went to Curll’s shop, the bookseller fell into a passion after he brought downstairs a shagreen case and claimed that ten guineas and ‘a broad piece’ had been taken from it. The hapless girl could mount little by way of defence, beyond suggesting that some other people in the house might have committed the offence. However, several witnesses ‘gave her an extraordinary good Character’. Gibson put up more of a showing, and he managed to obfuscate some of the issues in a fashion that would have done credit to his accuser. Thomas Corbett, a bookseller, who spoke on Gibson’s behalf, stated that he was a carpenter who knew little of books: his wife ran the business, as she was the daughter of a bookseller. However, Corbett threw doubt on the value ascribed to the books by Curll, pointing out that the collection included many broken sets: ‘But if the Sets had been compleat which Curll values at three Guineas a set, I don’t believe any Bookseller would have given half the money for them’. It seems that Corbett was thinking of the price the books would command within the book trade, whereas Curll may have assessed them at their retail value to outside customers: he retorted, ‘If you don’t know how to make so much of them, I do’. Other witnesses disputed parts of Curll’s story, and testified to the good reputation of the defendants. The case reached an all too predictable close. While the court acquitted Gibson of receiving, poor Sarah was convicted—though charitably the jury set the value of the books at 10d . (just over four pence in modern currency). This meant that she did not qualify for the death penalty, and instead she received a sentence of transportation. On the judicial panel at the Old Bailey sat the fearsome Judge Page, who had condemned Richard Savage to the gallows a few years before. ‘Hard Words or Hanging, if your Judge be Page’, wrote Pope. So, as things went then, it proved a reasonably happy outcome. The two accused were the eighty-ninth and ninetieth defendants to come before the court that day.27

12 Covent Garden Drollery (1732–1734) Up to this time in his life Curll had shown a somewhat intermittent predilection for the theatre. Of course, he always issued saleable plays when he got the chance, and he had done well out of Susanna Centlivre for one. Drama possessed its own crew of publicity-conscious entrepreneurs, notably the actor-manager Colley Cibber and the eccentric dancer turned showman, John Rich: they were quite capable on their own of keeping theatrical matters in the news. However, after Curll published the memoirs of Congreve, he seems to have experienced a new surge of interest. For a short while around 1731 he even changed his shop sign to ‘Congreve’s Head’, a device once used by Tonson. The actual premises had just moved a short distance down the Strand to the corner of Burleigh Street, on the opposite (northern) side of the road, immediately adjacent to Exeter Exchange. Then in March 1734 he shifted the centre of his operations to Rose Street, a jagged alley leading from Covent Garden to St Martin’s Lane at the very heart of theatrical London, with strong links also to crime and prostitution. In fact Curll was dogging the footsteps of John Rich, who in the full flush of his profits from The Beggar’s Opera had built a fine new theatre near here. It opened in December 1732, on the site of the modern Covent Garden opera-house. Just a year after Curll moved into Rose Street, the jury for a trial at the Old Bailey listened to some graphic evidence: On the 22d of April last in the Evening, I was called by Mr. Price to carry two Shoplifters, Ann Ward, and Bridget Fream, from the Round-house before Justice Hilder, who made their Commitment to the Gate-house A Coach was call’d for that purpose: The Coach-man drove down Rose Street, into an Alley where a House had been burnt down, which occasioned a Stop for a Quarter of an Hour. At about eight o’Clock we came into St. Martin’s Lane, where the Prisoner and eight or nine more attacked us, broke the Coach-Doors to pieces, and rescued the Woman. My Hat was beat off in the Fray, and I saw the Prisoner take it up and carry it away.

Assuredly Curll witnessed his share of such incidents. The noted historian of London, Dorothy George, wondered how far the existence of the playhouses helped contribute to a loss of respectability: ‘Covent Garden acquired its bad reputation as soon as it ceased to be a fashionable district—when the quality moved westwards, or was this migration hastened by the character of the place, for which its theatres, gaming-house and night-cellars were largely responsible? It could not have been a pleasant place to live in.’

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Appositely, George quotes a petition of the local shopkeepers and traders to the Westminster Sessions in 1730: ‘Several people of the most notorious characters and infamously wicked lives and conversation have of late . . . years taken up their abode in the parish. . . . There are several streets and courts such as Russell Street, Drury Lane, Crown Court and King’s Court and divers places within the said parish and more particularly in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane infested with these vile people. . . . There are frequent outcries in the night, fighting, robberies and all sorts of debaucheries committed by them all night long . . . ’ As we have seen, in 1730 Curll had kept the establishment he called the Literatory right on the corner of Russell Street and Bow Street, within a few yards of Drury Lane theatre, and practically next door to Rich’s new playhouse. He must have known what he was doing. MARKETING MEMOIRS Covent Garden market has figured in the English imagination from the time of Pepys, thanks to the prints of Hogarth, the vivid opening scene of Pygmalion, and Hitchcock’s Frenzy. We can get a sense of the reputation which the immediate environs bore in Curll’s day, and for many years to come, from this description by the Victorian social writer George Augustus Sala: ‘Thoroughfares, almost inconceivably tortuous, crapulous, and infamous, debouch upon New Street. There is that Rose Street, or Rose Alley, where, if I be not wrong in my topography, John Dryden, the poet, was waylaid and cudgelled; and there is a wretched little haunt called Bedfordbury, a devious, slimy little reptile of a place, whose tumble-down tenements and reeking courts spume forth plumps of animated rags.’1 Off the east side of Rose Street there wound an especially narrow alley, known in Curll’s day as Glastonbury, Lassingby’s, or Lainsbury Court, and surviving today as Lazenby Court behind the Lamb and Flag pub. These associations would not have alarmed Curll in the slightest, and the notion that someone had mugged the great Dryden in his neighbourhood might almost have brought him a perverse pleasure. The turn his career took towards drama comes in the shape of theatrical biographies which started to emerge in the early 1730s. Events took off with the death of the noted actress Anne Oldfield on 23 October 1730, followed by her burial in Westminster Abbey—‘with almost as much pomp as Sir Isaac Newton’, as Voltaire incredulously reported. Within days Curll had advertised that a certain William Egerton was preparing a life. Angrily a rival team announced (DJ, 29 October) that ‘authentick’ memoirs of the actress were available from the booksellers of London and Westminster, usually a cloak for piracies, in contrast to this production under the ‘sham’ name of Egerton. Six ‘editions’ of the rival biography, slightly augmented, came out by the end of the year. Not until February 1731 did Curll manage to respond with Faithful Memoirs of the Life,

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Amours and Performances, of that Justly Celebrated, and most Eminent Actress of her Time, Mrs. Anne Oldfield. Interspersed with several other Dramatical Memoirs. By William Egerton, Esq. The reason for the delay was that Curll had padded out his book to some 250 pages, five times the length of his competitor. But he had done this by printing all sorts of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam—not merely Oldfield’s will, but also that of her protector Arthur Maynwaring and, quite irrelevantly, that of Wycherley. Poems to or about Oldfield, by writers including Richard Savage, further swell the volume, as do theatrical epilogues which the actress spoke. In short, the Memoirs follow the standard lines of compilation, and many believe they come from the hand of Curll himself.2 Most sources also attribute to him The Life of that Eminent Comedian, Robert Wilks, Esq;, published late in the year (DJ, 8 November 1732). An Irish-born actor and a leading figure at Drury Lane for many years, Wilks had died at his home in nearby Bow Street on 27 February preceding. For once a fellow member of the trade had beaten Curll to the post: William Rayner got there first with Memoirs of the Life of Robert Wilks, Esq; Containing an Account of his Transactions before his Coming to England, Together with a True Copy of his Will, issued on 19 October. Another rival version was published by the unknown ‘S. Slow’ under the title Authentic Memoirs or, the Life and Character of that most Celebrated Comedian, Mr. Robert Wilks; To which is added an Elegy on his Death. By Daniel O’Bryan Esq. If it miffed Curll to find himself out-published in this way, he could scarcely have endured it when a competitor released the will before he had a chance to print it. The situation called for strong counter-measures, and these included advertising the work as ‘THE GENUINE LIFE’, as well as the promise of new materials, ‘communicated by Captain Knapton his Brother in law, and by his disconsolate Relict’. In his own Memoirs of the actor Curll ensured that ‘testimonials’ to the authenticity of his work appeared, with suitably dismissive comments made by Wilks’s widow and his brother-in-law Alex. Knapton: ‘that very silly Pamphlet, said to be written by one O’Bryan (if there be any such Person’). No pot could have called the kettle blacker. In an amusing squib at Curll’s expense, the Grub-street Journal came up with analysis of the contents of this book. The inventory ran: ‘False title-page and dedication’ (8 pages); ‘Preface, with a catalogue of Lives printed for and (most of them) supposed to be written by Mr. E. Curl’ (6 pages), the subject’s will (4 pages), only 8 pages (out of 78) devoted to his life, with 19 pages of ‘Digressions’ plus further postscripts and advertisements. Near the end, yet another catalogue of the publisher’s output. The Journal’s summary looks cruel, but it consists of nothing but the truth. The Life of Wilks makes for a more incoherent volume than even Curll had managed to produce: it recycles material from a dozen earlier books, and veers dementedly from topic to topic. Only two months elapsed before the appearance of The Life of Mr. John Gay, Author of The Beggar’s-Opera, &c. A press notice leads readers to expect a

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preposterously titled volume, The Life, Amours and Adventures of Mr. John Gay, which bears little resemblance to the real contents (DJ, 7 February 1733). Gay died quite suddenly on 4 December 1732, and Curll had the book ready by the beginning of February. He signed with his initials the dedication to the late writer’s sisters, Catherine Baller and Joanna Fortescue. An advertisement opposite the title-page asserts that Mr Pope’s life was ‘preparing for the Press’, which may be more of a trial balloon than a deliberate untruth. The notice lists other biographies, including Delarivier Manley, Anne Oldfield, and Arthur Maynwaring—the last no fewer than seventeen years old. As for the main text, it starts with a classic piece of misinformation, asserting that Gay was born in 1688, like Pope, rather than in 1685. Things get no better as the work proceeds, perhaps because Curll had never enjoyed much luck in snaffling up unpublished items by Gay, compared with those of the other Scriblerians. In the absence of such materials, the writer has to rely on a rapid summary of well-known works with such quotations as fell into his hands. Yet the publisher had done his best. We know this from a letter Arbuthnot sent to Swift on 13 January 1733, lamenting the death of their old friend, and containing the best remembered line ever written about their persecutor: ‘Curle (who is one of the new terrors of Death) has been writing Letters to every body for memoirs of his life. I was for sending him some particularly an account of his disgrace at court which I am sure might have been made entertaining by which I should have attained two ends at once publishd truth & gott a Rascal whipd for it. I was overruld in this’ (Swift, Corr, iii. 578). Curll issued an appeal for material in the Daily Advertiser on 9 December 1732, but he got no more for his pains than some commonplace remarks by an unknown ‘J.R.’ Other biographies of lesser interest continued to emerge. A life of the freethinker Thomas Woolston, who was so often joined in infamy with Curll, came out under the name of James Roberts in 1734 (but later advertised by Curll). Also in this year, bearing the imprint of Roberts, appeared The Life of Mr. John Dennis the Renowned Critick, issued after the old warrior finally succumbed on 6 January. The title-page roundly declared that this was ‘Not written by Mr. Curll’—but we can safely bet that he sold it. The book contains ironic praise of Henley, Budgell, and Giles Jacob, while exposing Dennis himself to some harsh ridicule. A new vein of legal biography opened up for Curll with Some Private Passages of the Life of Sir Thomas Pengelly, late Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Written by a Lady, his Intimate Friend (1733), almost certainly compiled by the publisher himself.3 Then came the life of another judge, Robert Price, ‘Printed by the Appointment of the Family’, with a dedication signed by Curll (DJ, 23 January 1734): the will had first seen the light in May 1733 and would still have been separately available. Curll had solicited information from the public when he published the will, promising that Price’s biography would be published ‘with all convenient Speed’. We shall return to Price in a moment, as his remarkable widow enters the story. Beyond this, the bookseller reissued

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a few superannuated lives, including old war-horses like the memoirs of Lord Keeper Somers, dating back to 1716. A fresher department of biography entered the list with Memoirs of the Secret Services of John Macky, Esq., published with the aid of the subject’s son Spring (1733)—even if the spy had been dead for seven years. Perhaps Curll had some hand in another compilation called Genuine Memoirs of the Life and Character of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole (1732), dutifully loyal to the prime minister, although the title-page allots responsibility for editing this to William Musgrave. In part this was a reprint of an anonymous life which Curll had published one year earlier. A peculiar mutation of the genre emerges in Pylades and Corinna: or, Memoirs of the Lives, Amours, and Writings of Richard Gwinnett Esq; and Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas Junr . . . . Containing, the Letters and Other Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse, which passed between them during a Courtship of above Sixteen Years. To which is prefixed, The Life of Corinna. Written by her self, which came out in two volumes (1731–2). It was just like Curll to rehash this dish just when everybody had forgotten about Thomas, who died in 1731, still in narrow circumstances: to be fair, the memoirs make for a piquant narrative, as the autobiographer describes her medical, legal and financial misfortunes, which brought her at last to the debtors’ gaol. Some interest attaches also to the letters exchanged between Henry Cromwell and Elizabeth about Pope. The dedication to the Duchess of Somerset bears the signature ‘Philalethes’, which often indicates Curll himself. Another give-away feature has been remarked: ‘Almost every note refers to a book which has been published by Curll. He lost no chances’ (Straus, 292). C O N F RO N TAT I O N A N D C O L L A B O R AT I O N From time to time, Curll continued to engage in joint publication with William Mears. In 1732 Mears had brought out the literary remains of a satirist well known in the first decade of the century, William King (1663–1712)—not to be confused with other authors of this name. The volume bore a resonant title, Remains of the late Learned and Ingenious Dr. William King, Containing Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse and Prose. Two years later came an identical reissue, but this time co-published with Curll and now titled Posthumous Works of the late learned William King, L.L.D. in Verse and Prose. Published from his Original Manuscripts, Purchased of his Sister, by Joseph Browne, M.D. King had been a friend of Swift, who helped to gain him the post of official gazetteer, in kindness to a ‘poor starving wit’. However King very soon resigned. The volume contains a substantial memoir by Browne, longer than most of the separate lives Curll had on his list. In this, Browne refers to the episode of the Gazetteer, blaming the shortness of King’s tenure on the unreasonable demands of John

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Barber, printer, Jacobite, and as we have seen another close ally of Swift. In best Curllian fashion the memoir concludes with King’s will, made ‘the Night before he died’. Here there is an added benefit in that the will establishes Browne’s claim to the material, since it names Elizabeth King as sole legatee. Otherwise people might have harboured reasonable suspicions, owing to the fact that Bernard Lintot had brought out most of King’s work during his lifetime. In a letter from Pope in 1716, Lintot is made to observe, ‘I remember Dr. King would write verses in a tavern three hours after he couldn’t speak’ (Corr, i. 373). The start of 1732 saw the appearance of Milton Restor’d and Bentley Depos’d, which was billed as the first of a series (DJ, 28 January): no more seem to have come out. This work has some easy fun at the expense of the classical scholar’s efforts to improve Paradise Lost. By a sort of conditioned reflex, the pamphleteer invents a short letter from Swift to Bentley (whom the Dean had belaboured thirty years before in The Battel of the Books). At least this permitted Swift’s name to be prominently displayed on the title-page. Curll needed no more than that. For a short while the bookseller became embroiled in a once-famous dispute regarding the text of Clarendon’s History, an episode to which Pope makes brief reference in The Dunciad (ii. 199). On the basis of dubious testimony deriving from the poet Edmund Smith and a Whig politician George Duckett, a veteran author with long-lasting connections to Curll, John Oldmixon, brought an allegation concerning the first edition of the History. Oldmixon claimed that the text had been adulterated by the Oxford editors, including Pope’s friend Francis Atterbury. Curll’s intervention took the form of a pamphlet entitled The Clarendon-Family Vindicated, from the Gross Falshoods and Misrepresentations of John Oldmixon . . . and George Duckett, published around 1732. From a biographic standpoint, the most interesting passages concern some dealings with the antiquarian Thomas Tanner, who was now on the point of becoming Bishop of St Asaph. These emerge from a letter Tanner addressed to Curll on 8 January 1731 (probably 1731/2), cited in the text of this pamphlet. The aim of the letter is to dissuade Curll’s author ‘in his Defence of the C-Family’ from using Tanner as a witness to the Earl’s original drafts, since he had not seen these, and moreover believed the History to have been faithfully reprinted. It also comes out that Curll had received ‘a signal favour’ from Tanner in 1712 in connection with the appearance of Sir Thomas Browne’s antiquities of Norwich cathedral (see Chapter 3 above). According to the letter, Tanner wished it were in his power to do the bookseller a similar favour at this time—but it was not.4 Curll’s main contact among the Oxford antiquaries was of course Richard Rawlinson, apart from his long battle with Thomas Hearne. The letter from Tanner amounts to a polite brush-off, but the massaging hands of Curll converted all such communications into a token of his scholarly credentials.

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T H E B AT T L E W I T H BU D G E L L The year 1733 saw an event that would create a large public impact and catch up the willing Curll as it did so. At its heart stood the figure of Eustace Budgell, a first cousin once removed of Addison, who had once given his relative some literary and political opportunities. At this date Budgell started a weekly magazine called The Bee, one of a number of ventures he had come up with as a means to support his failing career. In its pages he published a sneering paragraph, deploying the familiar mythology of Grub Street, concerned with a scribbler who receives an invitation to a garret in Rag Fair (site of an old clothes market in east London, where Pope had located the nerve-centre of the dunces). There the hack would find ‘a large Quantity of taking Title Pages, serious, comical, or political on both Sides’, along with ‘Some Dozens of last Wills and Testaments and Lives of remarkable Persons, not yet dead (all these bespoke by Mr. E. C.), many last Dying Speeches and Confessions of Men as yet unhanged: Store of doleful Ditties, horrid Murders and Cases of Impotency’.5 Curll had heard all this before, but he may have grimaced when he came to the final title. The work in question was not the old Cases of Impotency item: instead, it was called The Cases of Impotency and Virginity fully Discuss’d, and it related to a divorce case in the ecclesiastical court involving Edward Weld and his wife Catherine, daughter of Lady Aston, who accused her husband of impotence. Two booksellers had put out rival versions of the proceedings: one came from the shadowy ‘E. Rayner’, claiming to publish ‘by authority’, and the other from William Mears. Curll unquestionably had an interest in the latter, attributed to John Crawfurd, LL.D., because he issued an appeal to the public not to be taken in by the sham version which he described as ‘imperfect Trumpery’, and to have patience till the ‘authentic’ documents were published (DJ, 26 February 1732). Confusingly, the first advertisement on 15 March listed Mears as the main publisher, with no mention of Curll, and carried a further warning from Crawfurd to ‘beware of Counterfeits’. The notice even carried an affidavit sworn at Serjeant’s Inn to confirm that everything was above board. This touch is pure Curll, and by May he was puffing a second edition—indeed he went on promoting the book for many years. On his side, Budgell could easily have known about this volume. He had studied at the Inner Temple as a young man, and styled himself a barrister: he also preserved an interest in related matters of law, by reason of an incurably litigious streak in his make-up. Apart from fighting his own battles, he took up the cudgels on behalf of investors ruined by the South Sea Bubble and embarked on quixotic campaigns in both England and Ireland. Curll had published some of this material. Most of his work in 1732 was ‘printed for’ Mears: it does not appear that Curll had any involvement, but the two booksellers maintained close

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enough relations for Budgell to be well up on events within the circle of the trade. This cause célèbre now brewing up, as it drew Curll within its orbit, also brought him into contact with one of the more remarkable women of this period, Lucy Price. On 16 August Matthew Tindal, the prolific deist controversialist, died in London aged about eighty. He had never married, and people expected that his inheritance would go to Nicholas Tindal, his nephew, a clergyman, schoolmaster and translator. However, the elder Tindal left the bulk of the fortune, allegedly worth two thousand guineas (£2,100), to Budgell, who had no kind of blood connection. Nicholas Tindal found himself named merely as residuary legatee. Once he discovered that virtually all his uncle’s assets (some £1,900 in stock) had already been loaned to Budgell, he refused to administer the will. A bond for £1,000 had disappeared, while the document itself was written out, not by the testator himself, but by another hand, soon to be identified as that of Lucy Price. It showed other suspicious signs. After Nicholas had obtained such property as remained, he got Curll to publish on his behalf what amounted to an accusation of forgery in a pamphlet supplying a ‘true copy’ of Dr Tindal’s will. Already, within days of Matthew’s death, a notice had appeared in the press, ‘to prevent Imposition’, stating that ‘Mr. CURLL has obtain’d Leave to publish the True Memoirs of Dr. TINDALL’S Life and Writings . . . and that all Accounts of this Gentleman, but what is printed by Mr. CURLL, is (sic) false and spurious, and founded only on Calumny.’ The witness to this ridiculous claim was none other than one of the doctor’s legatees, ‘L.P.’ (DC, 20 August 1720). Within two weeks Curll had started to advertise A True Copy of the Last Will and Testament of that Famous Free-thinker Matthew Tindall, LL.D.,With a Calculation of his Nativity in the Year 1711, by Mr. Parker; and a Particular Account of his Death. By now a suspicion had got abroad that Budgell had somehow forged the key provisions, though this pamphlet simply quotes Budgell’s own account of Tindal’s death from The Bee. Evidently the bookseller obtained his materials from the extraordinary Lucy Price, who appears to have played a role in the management of Tindal’s household, and it was she who had apparently written out the will for him. In the light of what we now know of Lucy’s career, this allegation of forgery looks all too plausible. On 4 September she sent a letter to Walpole, supposedly written by Tindall but again in her hand, asking for an instalment of a government pension to be transferred to Budgell.6 With more obvious justice, Nicholas Tindall also claimed the money. To get a full grasp of the situation as it evolved, we need to know something about the life-history of Mrs Price. She was a Herefordshire heiress, originally named Lucy Rodd. In 1679 she had married Robert Price, a lawyer and Tory politician from the Welsh borders, who ultimately became a judge in the Exchequer court and in Common Pleas. After the judge’s death in the previous February, Curll had acquired his will and enough biographic information for an allegedly

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‘authoritative’ life which would appear in January 1734. However, the marriage of the Prices had not lasted very long. In 1690 Robert sued a cousin of his wife on the grounds that this man had enticed his wife from him and fathered a child by Lucy. He was awarded £1,500 damages, and arranged a settlement whereby Lucy received a small annuity for the rest of her life. The husband, as was then normal, scooped the major prize, as he ‘enjoyed untrammeled possession of her inheritance, valued at their marriage at some £13,000’.7 For her part the wife showed plenty of resourcefulness. She took up residence in chambers in Gray’s Inn (where her father had studied) and according to an account by William Chetwood ‘often took upon her to act as a Counsellor at Law’—a flagrant breach of all legality and propriety. As the ‘Petticoat Counsellor’ she made herself indispensable to a number of clients who needed legal documents drafted. At the same time she dabbled in literary translations, and produced a version of Calderón’s play La Dama Duende. She gave a copy of this to her friend Richard Savage, and according to Chetwood another copy went to an actor-producer named Christopher Bullock. In due course a play based on this translation was performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre in late 1716 and soon afterwards published by a group of booksellers including Mears and Bettesworth—but not Curll, though he had brought out Bullock’s last play. A dispute raged over the authorship of this play, with both Savage and Bullock claiming prime responsibility (Chetwood and Giles Jacob tell different stories here). Most likely Curll became acquainted with Lucy Price through this theatrical agency: she was certainly known to Chetwood, the prompter at Drury Lane and himself once part of Curll’s circle.8 Meanwhile the quarrel over Tindal’s will had begun to heat up. By the middle of September, Curll judged the time right to release a book he had been trailing almost since the moment that the old man had breathed his last. Accordingly he issued Memoirs of the Life and Times of Matthew Tindall, Ll.D., dedicated to Mrs Price, who signed a press advertisement that the memoirs were indeed ‘GENUINE’: she had herself communicated some papers written in the doctor’s own hand (DJ, 17 September). Disappointingly, these sections deal with material that was decades old, and the book throws no light on the dispute currently raging. The volume usually contained the will, but buyers were later assured they could have the biography separately. Meanwhile Budgell protested that the document had appeared without his consent as ‘the Dr’s Principal Executor’, and as the will requested him to bring out a new edition of Tindal’s works, he would set his name to it, ‘to prevent any Imposition’.9 On 20 September Curll printed in the Daily Journal a number of letters passing to and fro between the major participants: himself, Budgell, Nicholas Tindal, and Lucy Price. Such exposure of private communications served Curll’s purpose of keeping the controversy before the public. By selective quotation Curll managed to make Budgell admit some damaging facts: notably, the fact that the copy of the will his adversary had printed was authentic. The last letter in the exchange carried more threat:

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To Mr. BUDGELL. SIR, I will shortly show the World who best understands the A of Imposing upon and Cheating both private Persons and the Publick. This Affair between YOU and I, shall (in your most elegant Phrase)      , before I have done with you. I expect your True Answer. E. CURLL. (DC, 20 September 1733)

Noise held no terrors for the bookseller. Soon Thomas Cooper, proprietor of the Daily Journal, had started to advertise a version of the will, which may or may not be the same as Curll’s. On 17 October Cooper announced a Vindication of Eustace Budgell, which proves on examination to be no more than a mock-defence couched in heavily ironic terms—a sardonic work which throws further dirt in the direction of Budgell. Two days later, the newspaper campaign opened up again when Henry Curll advertised the reprinting of an old work by Tindal, along with ‘A Letter to Mr. C, Bookseller, from the Reverend Mr. N T, concerning his Answer, and a Sketch of the Character of the very remarkable E B, Esq; who fancies he makes a vast Noise.’ Unfortunately the last item appears to be lost. What we do have in the advertisement is a long self-justification by Lucy Price, in the face of the scandalous assertions which had been put about. She solemnly swears that she had not ‘directly or indirectly ever had or receiv’d any part of the personal estate of the said Dr. Tindall, nor do I ever expect to have or receive any part thereof, except the small Legacy of a book’ (Rapin’s History, translated by Nicholas Tindal). Well might she style herself ‘Relict of the Hon. Robert Price, Esq; (one of the Justices of his Majesty’s Court of Common Pleas)’ (DJ, 19 October 1733). No legal draughtsman could have phrased her claims more astutely. As a parting shot, she states her intention to prosecute anyone who continues to disseminate the libels against her. Around this time Curll wrote to Robert Walpole on the matter, and he took the opportunity to make more explicit charges without risking a libel suit: Hond Sr:/I an always pleased wth having any Opportunity of Transmitting what I think you will Approve. The Gentleman who lays this Proposal before you will be instantly forthcoming upon Notice sent to me. And I have likewise the Pleasure of turning up, that noted Hockley in the Hole-Squire, Eustace Budgell to the Town for an errant Sharper. He basely took Advantage of poor Dr: Tindall’s Age, wheedled him 2 years ago out of a Loan of 1000l. and abt 6 months ago out of 1000l more, & gave Bonds for the same. Afterwards, [illegible] learnt the poor Dr: a Will without a Book, to rehearse to Judge Price’s Widow, got it witness’d by his own Footman and the Landlady of the House and now stiles himself Dr: Tindall’s Chief Executor. This is the greatest Act of Injustice to poor Mr: Nicholas Tindall his Nephew, to whose 4 Children abt: 3 Years ago the Dr had given 500l. a Piece. When Mr Tindal came to the Town there was but one of Budgell’s Bonds in the Dr :s Strong Box. The other Budgell had wheedled him out of, Cancelled the same, & denied ever having had

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any more than 1000l. till Mr. Tindall proved the other upon him by the Accots of Mr Snow near Temple Bar the Drs. Banker. [in the margin] But of this Sr the Town will shortly hear more./I am ever Sr. Yr. most Ob:/humble Servt. /E Curll10

This unpublished letter leaves a few questions unanswered: it is not clear whether Curll wrote before or after the Memoirs came out. (The proposal mentioned at the start seems to have nothing to do with the Budgell imbroglio, and concerns the illegal export of wool to Stockholm.) We can identify Thomas Snow as the goldsmith to whom John Gay addressed his supposedly ‘panegyrical’ verses at the time of the South Sea episode. He had a banking business ‘without Temple Bar’ until his death in 1746. The reference to the ‘Hockley in the Hole-squire’ alludes to the fact that Budgell lived, like Dr Tindal, in Cold Bath Fields, near Hockley in the Hole: it also casts him as a bruiser, fit to engage in the rough sports at Hockley, near Clerkenwell Green.11 In any case, Curll displayed his usual shrewd sense of realities by bringing his complaints to Walpole, a longtime enemy of Budgell who had suffered for many years from the pamphleteer’s caustic pen. One absurd allegation to which the demented writer clung concerned his belief that the prime minister had laid plans to have him murdered. By comparison any delusions of grandeur that Curll harboured amount to no more than a minor eccentricity. Over the next few months, l’affaire Tindal occupied several columns in Budgell’s journal The Bee. Much of the coverage relates to the hardships which Budgell had endured as a result of his public-spirited behaviour, and the injustice of allegations that he had fraudulently gained a share in Tindal’s inheritance. He claims on the contrary that Nicholas Tindal had voluntarily made over his share of his uncle’s legacy. Only a portion of this material concerns Curll directly. However, the author lays into the bookseller with special venom, remarking that ‘Mr. Curll is a Person who knows the Privileges an Englishman was born to, and makes a very free Use of the Liberty of the Press’. He names his adversary as ‘a fellow who has once already stood in the Pillory, and whose very name is a Shock to every Man of Honour and Honesty’, and as ‘the most perfect Compendium of Impudence and Wickedness’. Curll, ‘we are most credibly informed, has been obliged several times to walk about Westminster-Hall with a Label about his Neck’. Budgell asserts that Curll will never get him to engage in a paper war, despite all his efforts—though the extensive attention devoted by The Bee to this episode seems to constitute such a war. According to the journalist, ‘Curll, for about these fifteen Years last past, has been continually teazing Mr. Budgell with his Letters’, to which no answer was ever given. Further, ‘to shew what a Man of Consequence he was’, Curll claimed that the Commissioners of the Stamp Office had sought his assistance, and that Sir Robert Walpole regularly consulted him for advice ‘in whatever related to

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Printing, Pamphlets and Libels’. Indeed Mr Curll ‘pretends to be Sir Robert’s first Minister’. For one very extraordinary ‘job’ Curll had done for him, Walpole had given the bookseller fifty pounds and later his brother-in-law Lord Townshend had matched this sum. We have no idea whether any of this is true; but the assertion that Curll had access to the prime minister at any time he chose, and ‘could persuade him almost to do anything’ is palpably the merest fantasy, if he ever made such a claim. Another story alleges that Curll broke in on Budgell with a lady companion whom he was visiting. Budgell asked him to leave, which he did ‘after a short Swagger’, but Budgell told the lady he would not call on her again unless she refused admittance to Curll. In the event the lady (almost certainly Mrs Price) had forbidden the bookseller entrance to her house. This did not stop Curll claiming that he was on good terms with Nicholas Tindal as well as the latter’s bookseller, John Knapton, and that these two would cooperate with Curll in an edition of Matthew Tindal’s works. More lurid episodes involving threats on Curll’s part figure in the next few issues. Some equally bizarre anecdotes filled the pages of The Bee over subsequent weeks. Budgell wrote an open letter to Walpole in the pages of his journal, highlighting Curll’s extravagant claims of influence, and suggesting condign punishment for the bookseller, who had been turned away from his own door ‘above twenty Times’. Perhaps the strangest story of all concerns Curll’s son Henry, ‘a shabby Fellow in a Morning Gown’, who allegedly came up to Budgell and assaulted him in Fleet Street. As the recital has it, Henry challenged him to emerge from the shop where he had taken refuge, and boasted that if he or his father ever caught Budgell in Burleigh Street, the journalist would never get out of it alive. Soon after The Bee printed a letter signed ‘J. Whitehead’, but presumably written by Curll, which alleged that the publisher intends to reissue some works by Matthew Tindal, which he originally printed with John Darby and Egbert Sanger. Naturally Budgell pours scorn on this project, and uses the plan to blacken Curll’s character within the trade: As to the Booksellers standing by one another, we are sensible that among the Booksellers (as among most other Traders), there are some who are very great Scoundrels, and others who are Men of Probity, yet we must do the whole Body of Booksellers this Piece of Justice, that we never yet met with one of them, who did not declare that he abhorred and detested the Proceedings of Curll, and would never be concerned with him in such notorious Cheats and Impositions, as he has endeavoured in late Years to put upon the Public.

Again there may be some truth behind this, even though Budgell’s hectoring manner and demented style make it hard to decide what credence to give to his accusations. Shortly afterwards, in November 1733, The Bee printed a poem by ‘Mr. Gerard,’ whose identity remains uncertain but probably serves to cover Budgell himself (the name also appears at the head of An Epistle to the Egregious Mr. Pope

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in February 1734, suspected to come from the same hand). This reviews aspects of the Tindal case, and concludes with another blast at Curll: For Shame when shar’d with C is double Shame. Knave join’d with Knave may plead the common Rule, But Fool with Villain is peculiar Fool. This, C, of all they Crimes the Measure fills, Thou Forger of Mens Works, and Hawker of their W. All wholesome Chastisements are lost on thee, Thou Scandal to the R and P. ‘Since now the Circle of thy Reign’s compleat, ‘Thy Ev’ning Glory must at T set.

Others before Mr Gerard had made this prediction, but nobody seriously believed that Curll would end up on the gallows. He was far too wily for that. A year later, Curll found himself caught up in another ridiculous imbroglio, which featured at length in The Bee around October 1734. It centred on a certain John Williams of the Fleet Prison, who had mounted a paranoid attack on the booksellers, accusing them of assigning to him a translation of a work called The History of Osman the Great. Curll seems to have had no direct part in this transaction, if it ever took place, but that did not allow him to escape from censure. According to the report Williams provides, Curll came to him and explained that he had commissioned a version of this work from Mr Sparrow, who had been paid three guineas for the work done. However, learning that Charles Corbett and others had got further with a rival version, Curll agreed to resign his claim and give the portion already translated to the other booksellers for a guinea and a half. It emerged that the alternative translation had been prepared by Corbett himself; and when Sparrow queried his knowledge of French, Curll explained that the task had been performed ‘by the Help of Dictionaries, or one thing or another.’ Circumstantial as the account of Curll’s visit is, we may wonder whether his name had been introduced simply to add spice to the thin tale Williams tells. By this date he stood for every kind of infamy, and a writer bent on blackening the name of mercenary booksellers could hardly avoid mentioning him.12 A poem dealing with the same contretemps, ‘The Board of Booksellers’, appeared in The Bee in January 1735, portraying members of the trade as unscrupulous plotters. Here Curll figures briefly in the same role as he had taken in the letter by Williams. The entire episode surrounding Tindal inflicted further damage on Budgell, already branded by the public as eccentric and capricious, even though his most vehement accuser had never been noted for perfect veracity. Two years later Pope would supply a reminder of the scandal in his Epistle to Arbuthnot, with wording calculated to inflict the most exquisite pain:

Covent Garden Drollery (1732–1734) Let Budgel charge low Grubstreet on his quill, And write what e’er he pleas’d, except his Will.

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(378–9)

Appropriately, the next couplet refers to ‘the Two Curls of Town and Court’ who equally abused the poet. Meanwhile the Grub-street Journal poured its own scorn on Budgell, and even included a caricature of the principals in the struggle over Tindal’s will (see Figure 5): Curll is seen combing the wig which, according to the prose explanation appended, stands as an emblem for the will. In combination these items of bad news may finally have broken Budgell’s fragile hold on mental stability. On 4 May 1737 he filled his pockets with stones, took a boat on the Thames at Somerset Stairs, and threw himself into the river.

H E N RY TA K E S T H E R E I N S For once, Curll kept out of trouble during this period, at least as regards criminal prosecution. His name makes one brief appearance in court archives, but only as a surety. He acted on behalf of Joseph Morgan, gent., who had translated from Italian a work called A Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, published by William Mears, and written by the freethinking conte di Passarano. This Piedmontese nobleman, otherwise Alberto Raducati (1698–1737), earned a mention from Pope as one who had defended suicide. Late in November, the authorities arrested Passerano, Morgan, and the bookseller William Mears, who often collaborated with Curll, in connection with the offensive Dissertation. On 11 December 1732 Curll entered into a recognisance of £50 at an examination before Charles Delafaye, and subsequently Morgan was bailed to appear before the King’s Bench in the next session.13 This may or may not indicate that the bookseller had some interest in the book under prosecution. If he had, he would have kept Delafaye in the dark about it. The Dissertation was reprinted with a note at the head of the title-page: ‘On Account of the Bold Truths contain’d in this P, the Author (who wrote it in Italian) was oblig’d to fly the Kingdom; the Translator was sent to Newgate, and the Publisher confin’d in the Fleet.’ Quite a little Curllian episode, in fact. Briefly Curll took on the role of estate agent, when in August 1733 he advertised two properties and two manors in Warwickshire to be let, the particulars printed and delivered free. A month later he was selling an unnamed gentleman’s book collection over the course of five days. He likewise had ‘to dispose of ’ a landscape he attributed to Rubens. Meanwhile, for some unknown reason, Henry Curll had once more taken over the running of the business, to judge from advertisements. Henry was doing his best to dispose of some of the recent favourites: he heralded items such as ‘Dr. Crawford’s Account of the late proceedings between Mrs. Weld and her Husband, relating to the Charge of Impotency against him’, and Love

Figure 5. The Art of Trimming emblematically displayed, from the Grub-street Journal, no.200, 25 October 1733, reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

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without Artifice. He touted Bishop Burnet’s defence of polygamy, and the Altar of Love. There was the second, but sadly last, part of The Pleasures and Mysteries of the Marriage Bed modestly unveil’d, ‘an instructive poem for young brides . . . but a severe satire on old maids’. Another concluding volume took the form of a third instalment of the poems of Matthew Prior, announced on 21 November. When it came out, the volume bore the names of S. Birt and the shadowy ‘W. Feales, without Temple-Bar’, a conveniently vague address for this pirate of play-texts. Older items such as The Art of Knowing of Women and Court Tales reappeared. Henry also conjured up an appealing work entitled A Collection of the Hermetic Philosophy, or Miscellanies on Supernatural Subjects. This turns out to be John Aubrey’s Miscellanies of 1696, in the edition which his father had put out with Bettesworth and others in 1721. In the accustomed manner Henry (if it was really he) specified all the mouth-watering contents: omens, apparitions, voices in the air, second-sighted persons, and so on. Edmund must have been proud of him. Until the spring of 1734 Henry’s name routinely appeared in advertisements. Then it suddenly vanished: Edmund himself fell quiet, and when normal service resumed it was the father who figured in all transactions. This appears to be because Curll married once more. On 22 February 1734 the Daily Journal reported that ‘On Tuesday last, Mr. Curll, Bookseller in the Strand, was married at Kensington by Rev. Dr. Wilcox, to Mrs. Bateman, Relick of Mr. Joseph Bateman, late of Westminster, a very eminent Builder’. The Grub-street Journal naturally picked this up and commented ‘The relick of a very eminent builder, is no improper match for a very eminent book-seller: but my brother forgot beauty, merit, and fortune’. Fortune, if there were any, would no doubt have been welcome. We have not identified Bateman the builder, but someone of that name married an Elizabeth Filips at St Mary le Strand in 1703, and Joseph and Elizabeth Bateman’s son died within days in 1714, according to the register of St. Sepulchre’s. We do know positively that Curll’s second wife’s name was Elizabeth, for shortly after marrying, Curll made out his will (see Appendix 1). After all the terrors of death for which he had been responsible, thoughts of mortality finally started to cross Curll’s mind. The document was first made out on 10 March 1734 at Rose Street. It did not employ the usual legal form or terminology. Ignoring the formulae of so many of the wills he had published, in which a testator sought the benign intercession of Christ, Curll began, ‘Whenever called upon by nature I freely resign my Spirit to the Supreme being’ and then constituted his ‘dear and affectionate Wife Elizabeth’ and son Henry joint executors for the disposal of ‘my worldly Goods of all kinds’. He was ‘well assured that my dear Wife if she survive me will be the best ffriend in this World to my Son and his ffamily’. He desired to be ‘Interred in a decent manner wheresoever they shall think fitt’. On 27 July 1737 the testator deleted Henry’s name from the will, apparently an indication of death rather than disfavour.

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T H E P OW E R O F I M P U D E N C E The bookseller remained a part of popular cultural capital, or at least the mythical entity he had projected still lived on. As an example, in The Harlot’s Progress: or, The Humours of Drury Lane, a Hudibrastic poem inspired by Hogarth’s great series in 1732, a representative passage occurs when the poet cites Moll Hackabout’s last will: My Bunch of Rods, for Flogging—Cull, When he is jaded, dry and dull, d Cu l I give, To modest Edm That he in Lechery may revive; With Ballads, and some baudy Books, (I thought to leave to Pastry Cooks) As a reward for what he’s done, I leave betwixt him, and his Son.14

Some might suspect that these charges had grown long in the tooth, since Curll’s most famous set of ‘baudy Books’ had been produced more than a decade earlier. In truth, he had kept his hand in all this time, as instanced by the appearance in 1732 of The Cases of Polygamy, Concubinage, Adultery, Divorce, &c. Seriously and Learnedly Discussed, drawing chiefly on the work of Bernardino Ochino. (This was brought out again by one of his co-publishers in 1735 as Select and Curious Cases of Polygamy, Concubinage, Adultery, Divorce, &c.) The market for such material had never dried up. Love without Artifice: or, The Disappointed Peer. A History of the Amour between Lord Mauritio and Emilia (1733) sadly lacked the letters of the hero of the piece, Lord William FitzMaurice; but a correspondent kindly supplied these, with the result that Curll could bring out a new version as Love and Artifice in the following year, now garnished with the missing items. At the same juncture a Scottish poet Joseph Mitchell, noted for his devotion to Walpole, singled out the insolent icons of show business. Curll naturally figures prominently in ‘Catholick Brass: or, The Power of Impudence’, but even he and Colley Cibber have to yield first place to Orator Henley: In his egregious Conduct, Face, and Mind, Antient and Modern Impudence are join’d! Not thine, O K, brazen-fronted Bard, Can be with H’s Virtues once compar’d! Nor thine, O C, of infamous Renown, The Bane and Scandal of the credulous Town!15

A more effective satire came from James Bramston, one of the abler poets who took Pope’s side in most disputes. In The Man of Taste (1733), he located Curll’s habitual methods within the social and political practice of the book trade at large:

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Long live old Curl! he ne’er to publish fears, The speeches, verses, and last wills of Peers. How oft has he a publick spirit shewn, And pleas’d our ears regardless of his own? But to give Merit due, though Curl’s the fame? Are not his Brother-booksellers the same? Can Statutes keep the British Press in awe, While that sells best, that’s most against the Law?

Of course Curll, in sober truth, never had his ears cropped; but the image was poetically justified, and formed the stuff of legend. In the same year the prolific Thomas Newcomb composed thirteen verse satires under the title, The Manners of the Age. His portrait of a distressed poet contains the lines, ‘While port his voice, instead of nectar, swells, | Curll’s garret the Olympus where he dwells.’ Later he gives advice to authors on the publication of their works: Your next great Care is, who shall paint and sell; Chuse Edm-nd ’s Shelves, if you design for ease; If to be known, chuse Lintott’s learned Keys.16

The reference is to Lintot’s shop sign, the cross keys. Professional jealousy may enter into this judgment: Newcomb’s satires were issued by Jeremiah Batley, a comparatively minor figure in the trade, who is mentioned in the next couplet. Some clues to the state of the business in this period emerge from a large catalogue of stock compiled in 1735 as Books Printed for E. Curll, at Pope’s Head, in Rose-Street, Covent-Garden, with the shop sign presented as an effigy on the first page (see Figure 6). The poet’s countenance had become the publisher’s trademark. The list extends to sixteen pages, with the most respectable items of all (theological) given pride of place. Large quantities of books follow in different categories: history and state affairs, biography, novels, antiquities, trials, poetry, miscellanies, and mathematics. A special section of ‘Biography, lately Printed’ testifies to a recent surge in activity here. Elsewhere on the list we find items published as long as twenty years earlier. ‘Libri miscellanei’ contains some books not published by Curll himself but presumably available at his shop. The last page is taken up by ‘Mr. Pope’s Works, in all Sizes,’ with ten familiar items, among them bizarrely the works of Walsh, not to mention ‘Four Prints of Mr. Pope, in different Attitudes. Price 6d . each’. On the list we also encounter ‘The Honour of Parnassus,’ being ‘a curious Draught and Prospect of Mr. Pope’s House and Gardens at Twickenham, with Verses describing the same.’ This can be identified as the depiction of the villa which Peter Andreas Rysbrack made for Curll in June 1735: ‘While Mr. Pope was dangling, and making Gilliver and Cooper his Cabinet-Counsel, away goes Mr. CURLL . . . and . . . takes a full View of our Bard’s Grotto, Subterraneous Way, Gardens, Statues, Inscriptions, and his Dog B.’17 Even though Curll still had hundreds of items in his

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Figure 6. Curll’s catalogue, 1 December 1735, reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library. Curll’s shop sign supposedly resembled this portrait.

backlist, the Popian items already dominated the catalogue, even as the major struggles of 1735 began to play themselves out (see Chapter 13).18 Pope himself kept fairly quiet. In A Letter to a Noble Lord (written 1733, but not published until 1751), he aligned the attacks of Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with those of ‘Mr. Curl and his brethren’ (Prose Works, ii. 449). When Curll occasionally teased him he did not rise to the bait—unless he replied anonymously in the Grub-street Journal. For example, March 1733

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saw the publication of Achilles Dissected by ‘Atex Burnet’, which carried this very charge against Pope: ‘I rave, I foam, my utmost venom hurl, | And in the Grubstreet-Journal libel Curll.’ This passage continues, ‘By Popiads, Keys, Court Poems, I’m become | Of Ridicule, his universal Drum.’19 Mears published the volume in question, but almost certainly with Curll’s involvement somewhere along the line, as it included old items of his. The bookseller himself adopted a clever device in imitating Pope’s earliest imitation of Horace, addressed to William Fortescue, and incorporating many verses from the poet’s earlier work. He added a sly note, ‘It is hope the Reader will compare this Parodie, with Mr. Pope’s Imitation of the same Satire. E. C.’ We know that this item reached its intended audience, for Pope mentioned it to Fortescue in a letter of 8 March: ‘Curll has printed a Parody on my own words which he is proud of as his own production, saying, he will pay no more of his Authors but can write better himself ’ (Corr, iii. 355).20 The truce between a pair of born combatants could never last. In early 1733 the publisher had started to advertise for materials towards his planned biography of Pope. But this project backfired on Curll, giving his opponent the idea for a machiavellian scheme, which would raise hostilities to a new pitch. The Dunciad had marked only the first stage in cruelty.

13 Mr Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1734–1736) The delicate sequence of cloak-and-dagger events by which Pope manoeuvred Curll into publishing an edition of his letters was perhaps the poet’s most consummate and intricate piece of plotting, and not all the details are clear even now.1 Pope published (anonymously) his own Narrative of the Method by which Curll published the letters, and Curll responded with a True Narrative, reprinting Pope’s story with his own notes and rebuttals, and a further collection of ‘Initial Correspondence’ relating to the affair.2 These contained partial (in every sense) sequences of the letters between Curll and two mysterious figures, ‘P.T.’, an invention of Pope’s, and ‘R.S.’, his agent, who delivered to Curll a ready-printed edition of the letters; but neither Pope nor Curll had a complete set of the documents, and each was anxious to portray the other in the worst light. Most of the originals do not survive, and many of the letters are presented as undated or fragmentary; some bear dates which cannot be right. The bibliography of the early editions of the letters is itself very complicated.3 On the other hand, there are only too many surviving advertisements from an increasingly noisy game of newspaper tennis played by Curll and Pope during May and June 1735, and there is a reliable account of the hearing in the House of Lords which Pope engineered once Curll had advertised the letters: these sources give us a reasonable skeleton narrative around which to try to arrange the material provided, with variable amounts of distortion, by the main protagonists.

‘ S O M E PA PE R S I N M Y S C R I TO I R E ’ Curll had, as we have seen, annoyed and embarrassed Pope by the publication of the early letters to Cromwell in 1726. Pope had been offended in a different way by Lewis Theobald’s edition of The Posthumous Works of William Wycherley, Esq, in 1728. Wycherley was one of Pope’s earliest literary associates and Pope felt some annoyance at the way that Theobald, in his official capacity as a lawyer, had presided over Wycherley’s dubious deathbed marriage settlement and usurped the role of literary friend and executor. Curll was not clearly known to be part of the publication, but it was printed for Arthur Bettesworth and other

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Curll associates and contained some ‘Memoirs’ of Wycherley by Major Pack, previously published by Curll in 1719. At any rate, Pope responded by printing a second volume of Wycherley’s Posthumous Works, in which the contents of the first was denounced as largely spurious, and Pope’s early correspondence with Wycherley was printed. Pope had it printed for ‘J. Robetsr’, probably a deliberate and contemptuous misprint for the publish-anything James Roberts. It came out, briefly, in November 1729, but was withdrawn for reasons that are not clear: only one copy is known.4 Pope appears to have caused extra printings of the Wycherley letters from standing type, and to have printed at the same time some other letters, probably resulting in more or less a full volume of letters to printed by 1730.5 Certainly he was writing to the Earl of Oxford in September 1729 with a settled plan to collect his correspondence in order to set straight the literary history of his period (Corr, iii. 54). But though letters amounted to a recognisable literary genre by the early eighteenth century, with models going back to Cicero and Pliny, mediated through French examples such as Vincent Voiture (one of Curll’s staple translations), and though there was a ready market for intimate letters of writers such as Rochester, it was scarcely honourable to publish one’s own letters without some kind of extreme provocation. Having already published Pope’s embarrassing letters to Cromwell, Curll was the obvious figure to provide such provocation—whether he intended to or not. Curll would be made to look like the rogue Pope considered him to be, there would be the pleasure of tricking him into the bargain, and Pope would be able to produce a selection of his letters printed and edited for his own purposes, rather than have the world treated to his authentic but unguarded private letters to Henry Cromwell. Maynard Mack’s statement that for ‘more than twenty years now, Curll had hovered over Pope’s career and reputation like a particularly nauseous harpy with both sphincters set on ‘‘Go’’ ’ is coloured by partisan sympathy, but comes close to what Pope wished the world to perceive and perhaps to what he felt privately.6 Pope’s comment to Swift, 16 February 1733, about the tendency of letters to become public one way or another is a straw in the wind: ‘Yet let not this discourage you from writing to me . . . as I do to you: Innocent men need fear no detection of their thoughts; and for my part, I would give ’em free leave to send all I write to Curl, if most of what I write was not too silly’ (Corr, ii. 349). Curll’s Life of Gay (issued earlier that month) had declared ‘Mr. Pope’s life is preparing for the press’ and had brazenly asked for the usual materials. It was time for Pope to make his opening move. A mysterious letter was apparently sent via a messenger of the Earl of Oxford’s early in 1733: ‘I beg your Lordship to send, (by some Sober Man who can Swear upon occasion) the Letter to Curll . . . I shall think it a particular obligation. He must read the Contents, that he may testify it to be the same paper’ (Corr, iii. 359). Just possibly this relates to the first direct overture to Curll. On 27 March 1733, posing as an old school fellow (one ‘E.P.’), Pope sent Curll a potentially damaging story about his early

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education: Pope was supposed to have been whipped for a satire on his teacher and removed from school.7 Given Curll’s experience at Westminster, and the standard correspondence between satire and punitive whipping, the anecdote is offered as a kind of compensatory punishment: ‘How much past Correction has wrought upon him, the World is Judge; and how much present Correction might, may be collected from this sample’. Curll acknowledged receipt of this, indeed, incorporated it into a further advertisement requesting materials for a life of Pope from which ‘Nothing shall be wanting but his (universally desired) Death’.8 Things went quiet for a time, but on 11 October of the same year Pope contacted Curll again, this time in the guise of a cautious, estranged friend of the family, one ‘P.T.’, offering a fairly sober (and largely accurate) account of his parentage. This was designed both to ensnare Curll and to use him to counteract the recent contemptuous allegations about his family published by Lady Mary and Lord Hervey (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 334–5). He asked Curll to place an advertisement in the Daily Advertiser, acknowledging receipt of the letter. Curll apparently did not comply.9 ‘P.T.’ wrote again on 15 November protesting that he intended no personal advantage other than ‘that of doing Justice to, and on, that Person, upon whom, Sir, you have conferr’d some Care as well as Pains in the Course of your Life’. More temptingly still, however, There have lately fall’n into my Hands a large Collection of his Letters, from the former Part of his Days to the Year 1727. which being more considerable than any yet seen, and opening very many Scenes new to the World, will alone make a Perfect and the most authentick Life and Memoirs of him that could be.

P.T. would send Curll the original letters on condition that he published an advertisement showing that the publication was Curll’s idea; P.T. was partly dependent on people who ‘know what hath pass’d betwixt Mr. Pope and me formerly’ and who would think badly of him if he set ‘such a thing a-foot’ personally (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 335–6). Curll appears to have done nothing at all about this, perhaps scenting a rat in the slightly peculiar demand: it looks as if Pope was not intending at this stage to hand over the printed letters, merely to get Curll to advertise his own edition. Things went quiet again, though Curll was still on Pope’s mind: early in 1734 he had Tonson bind up a copy of pamphlet attacks on him with the spine title: ‘C & C’ (Corr, iii. 399), and there are routine jibes at Curll in Pope’s major poetic work of self-definition, the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, which appeared on the second day of 1735. On 3 March 1735 Pope wrote to the Earl of Oxford to ask for the loan of a bound book of copies of his letters, which Oxford had been keeping in his library, clear evidence that he needed material for the edition. The next move seems to have come from Curll. On 22 March 1735 Curll, for reasons that are not clear, wrote an apparently unprompted letter to Pope (‘the first he ever receiv’d from him’, as Pope later put it), inclosing the material Pope had sent

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him as from ‘P.T.’ in order ‘To convince you of my readiness to oblige you’. Curll later affirmed that he rediscovered P.T.’s draft advertisement by chance, while ‘regulating some Papers in my Scritoire’, and felt moved to try to resolve the enduring ‘Resentment’ between himself and Pope.10 This does not sound very convincing: at the very least, Curll must have been hoping to get more out of Pope than out of ‘P.T.’. All that appears from the letter (which is friendly enough in itself) is that Curll was trying to get Pope to countenance (and thus ‘authorize’) a new edition of the Cromwell correspondence: Your Letters to Mr. Cromwell are out of Print, and I intend to Print them very beautifully in an Octavo Volume. I have more to say than is proper to write, and if you’ll give me a Meeting, I will wait on you with Pleasure, and close all Differences betwixt you and yours E. Curll P.S. I expect the Civility of an Answer or Message. (Prose Works, ii. 332).

What he got was an advertisement from Pope in Daily Post Boy of 3 April, declaring loftily that he had no intention of entering into correspondence with Curll, and that furthermore he ‘knows no such Person as P.T . that he believes he hath no such Collection, and that he thinks the whole a Forgery, and shall not trouble himself about it’.11 Pope was biding his time, in effect covertly talking up this unauthorized edition and talking down any possible involvement in it on his part. But he still needed Curll to take the bait, and on 4 April P.T. wrote again to Curll to complain about Pope’s haughty advertisement: I did not expect you of all Men would have betray’d me to Squire Pope; but you and he both shall soon be convinc’d it was no Forgery. For since you would not comply with my Proposal to advertise, I have printed them at my own Expence, being advis’d that I could safely do so. I wou’d still give you the Preference, if you’ll pay the Paper and Print, and allow me handsomely for the Copy. But I shall not trust you to meet and converse upon it [after the Suspicion I have of your Dealings with Master P.] unless I see my Advertisement of the Book printed first, within these Four or Five days. If you are afraid of Mr. P. and dare not set your Name to it, as I propos’d at first, I do not insist thereupon, so I be but conceal’d. (Prose Works, ii. 336–7)

Curll was suitably nettled by Pope’s advertisement, and with this private message from P.T. to bolster his confidence, advertised in his turn: This is to certify, that Mr. C . never had, nor intended ever to have, any private Correspondence with A. P. but was directed to give him Notice of these Letters. Now to put all Forgeries, even Popish ones, to flight; this is to give Notice, that any Person, (or, A. P. himself) may see the O, in Mr P ’s own Hand, when printed. Initials are a Joke; Names at length are real. No longer now like Suppliants we come, E.C. makes War, and A.P. is the Drum.12

To the private note from P.T. he responded by placing the appropriate notice at the end of a long list of his stock in the Daily Post Boy of 8 April.

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In a further note, of about 15 April, P.T. laid down some rather stiff financial terms and asked for Curll to announce through the newspapers that he would be at the Rose Tavern on 22 April to view the printed sheets, which he did in the Daily Post Boy of 17 April. In the event the meeting was postponed for a week by P.T., who seemed ‘in a terrible panic lest Mr. Pope should send some of his Twickenham bravoes to assault us; but how Mr. Pope was to know of this meeting is the cream of the jest’.13 Pope’s delay here is unexplained, and Curll was both confused and irritated by this ‘dealing thus . . . in the Dark’. He thought P.T.’s price (£75 deposit on 650 copies at £3 per score) too high, though he protested he could easily pay it ‘if I think the Purchase would be of any Service to me’. P.T. arranged for someone to visit Curll on the evening of 29 April, but Curll had taken umbrage: But in one Word, Sir, I am engaged all this Evening, and shall not give my self any further Trouble about such jealous, groundless, and dark Negociations. An H and O D is what I have been always used to, and if you will come into such a Method, I will meet you any-where, or shall be glad to see you at my own House, otherwise apply to whom you please. (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 338)

Despite these laudably high sentiments, however, Pope managed to keep Curll hooked. Shortly afterwards Curll offered ‘to discharge the Expence of Paper, Printing, and Copy-Money, and make the Copy my own, if we agree. But if I am to be your Agent, then I insist to be solely so’ (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 338). On 3 May P.T. wrote again to say that fifty books, without title pages, would be forthcoming shortly and that Curll should start advertising ‘five or six days together’ that the book would be out on 12 May (‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 442). In his reply, on 5 or 6 May, Curll protested his own ‘J and H Treatment’ in business matters once more and chided P.T. for his obfuscations. He was suspicious; he had twigged that ‘P.T.’ must be false initials, and he was not sure how ‘E.P.’ fitted into the picture; but he was also keen to conclude a deal, and explained away his earlier attempt to shop P.T. to Pope on the grounds that P.T. had been quiet for so long. Pope’s second fictional intermediary, a figure variously known as R.S., R. Smith and R. Smythe, now enters the picture. This role is usually said to have been performed by James Worsdale, a painter, character actor, and would-be poet, who turned up at Curll’s in an outfit marked by conflicting signals. Curll tells us that on 7 May ‘R. S., a short, squat Man, came to my House, not at eight, but at near ten at night. He had on a Clergyman’s Gown, and his neck was surrounded with a large Lawn Barrister’s Band. He showed me a Book in sheets almost finished, and about a dozen original letters, and promised me the whole at our next meeting’.14 The next day Curll received another letter from P.T., in the now familiar combination of easiness and tetchiness: ‘you see I leave all to your own prudence’ as to price on the one hand, insisting on the return of his letters and necessity of staying concealed on the other.

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The same day Curll received a letter from R.S. asking for a title page and preface to the books (again, so that Curll would appear responsible), and repeating the request for the return of the letters. Encouragingly, ‘the old gentleman is vastly pleased at our meeting last night . . . I shall have great news, and good, to tell you on Friday, to both our advantage’ (‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 442). A further letter from R.S., on 10 May, desired Curll to get 600 title pages printed and assured him that he was the sole bookseller engaged in the publication. ‘Why don’t you advertise?’, he added, in what was perhaps a genuinely edgy postscript (‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 443). As to P.T.’s letters, Curll procrastinated, saying they were ‘in a Scrutore of mine out of Town’ but that he had sent a messenger for them: ‘I N B M W’.15 According to Pope’s obfuscatory Narrative, Curll now talked the whole murky business up (one of Pope’s pleasures in the scheme was knowing how completely Curll had swallowed the medicine once more): He now talk’d of it every where, said ‘‘That P.T . was a L, or a P of C, who printed the Book at a great Expence, and sought no Profit, but Revenge on Mr. Pope . . .’’; particularly, ‘‘That some of the Letters would be such as both Church and State would take Notice of . . .’’ He told some Persons that sifted him in this Affair, ‘‘that he had convers’d only with his Agent, a Clergyman of the Name of Smith, who came, as he said, from Southwark.’’ (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 333)

Certainly, Curll advertised the volume with the now customary flourish in The Daily Post Boy, on 12 May 1735: This Day are published, and most beautifully printed, Price 5 s. Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years, from 1704 to 1734, being a Collection of Letters, regularly digested, written by him to the Right Honourable the late Earl of Halifax, Earl of Burlington, Secretary Craggs, Sir William Trumbull, Hon. J .C ., General ****, Hon. Robert Digby Esquire, Hon. Edward Blount Esquire, Mr. Addison, Mr. Congreve, Mr. Wycherley, Mr. Walsh, Mr. Steele, Mr. Gay, Mr. Jarvas, Dr. Arbuthnot, Dean Berkeley, Dean Parnelle, &c. Also Letters from Mr. Pope to Mrs. Arabella Fermor, and many other Ladies. With the respective Answers of each Correspondent. Printed for E. Curll, in Rose Street, Covent Garden; and sold by all Booksellers. N .B. The Original Manuscripts (of which Affidavit is made) may be seen at Mr. Curll’s House, by all who desire it. (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 340)

On the same day, Curll wrote to R.S. to ask for more books and original letters, and to ask if he liked the advertisement, which implies, as Pope pointed out, that he wrote it himself, despite later denials.16 That morning (12 May) R.S. delivered by another messenger ‘some titles’, presumably the fifty books which form the so-called ‘morning’ edition.17 Curll was instructed to stay at home pending the delivery of more books by one o’clock. At that point R.S. sent for Curll to come to the Standard Tavern in Leicester Fields, where Curll gave him £10 in cash, with a note of hand for £15; R.S. already had a conditional note for £5 from Curll. There was perhaps some primitive version of a royalty system involved,

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and R.S. evidently drove a bargain hard enough to be convincing.18 Within half an hour two porters turned up with five bundles of books on a horse, ‘which R.S. told me came by water’, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reminder of Pope’s presence up the river at Twickenham. R.S. ‘ordered the porters to carry them to my house, and my wife took them in’.19 When all the fuss was over, Curll discovered these bundles were in fact imperfect: They contained but 38 books in each bundle, making in the five bundles 190 books, all wanting the letters to Messrs. Jervas, Digby, Blount, and Dr. Arbuthnot’s letter. But he said they contained 50 in each bundle, which, with 50 I had before, without titles or prefaces, made 300. (‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 443)

The omission of certain letters would turn out to be important.

B L AC K RO D O N C E M O R E For now ‘the Tables . . . began to turn’, as Pope puts it in his Narrative (Prose Works, ii. 341). By what Pope presents as a curious coincidence, on this same day, 12 May, Lord Islay, a neighbour and fellow-gardener of Pope’s, thought fit to take notice of Curll’s advertisement in the House of Lords, since its mention of the two Earls suggested there might be an infringement of a familiar Curll kind: it was, after all, Curll’s attempt to publish the works of the Duke of Buckinghamshire which had led to the House’s decision that the works of peers were protected by privilege. Moreover, Pope had deliberately contrived to align the timing of the publication with discussion of the ‘Booksellers Bill’ in the House; hence the urgency with which the delivery took place.20 Once Curll’s advertisement was read, it was ordered that Black Rod seize the whole impression and that Curll and the printer of the Post Boy, John Wilford, attend a hearing on the 13th.21 About two o’clock the same day, within an hour of delivery, the 190 books seen by Curll at the tavern were impounded. Meanwhile Pope was coolly covering his tracks, writing to Caryll on the very day of publication in a state of posed ennui: But what makes me sick of writing is the shameless industry of such fellows as Curle, and the idle ostentation, or weak partiality of many of my correspondents, who have shewn about my letters . . . to such a degree that a volume of 200, or more are printed by that rascal: But he could never have injured me this way, had not my friends furnished him with the occasion by keeping such wretched papers as they ought to have burned.22

On 13 May, with Pope’s friends the Lords Harcourt and Bathurst in attendance, the matter was considered by the Lords. Wilford and his printer were examined first, but were quickly dismissed. Then Curll was ‘likewise examined touching the same Advertisement, as also the Contents of the Book advertised; and concerning

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a Note in the said Book, mentioning something of Letters that would be inserted in a Second Volume.’ Black Rod testified he had seized ‘near five hundred’ books at Curll’s, apparently something of an exaggeration. The matter was then put to a committee, which Curll was to attend on the 14th. R.S. wrote to Curll on the day of the first hearing, the 13th, with P.T.’s response and instructions. Sir,—As soon as I heard of our misfortune of the books being seized, I posted away to P. T. He said he found his great caution was but necessary; but though he knew Mr. Pope’s interest with the great, he apprehended only his personal revenge, or a Chancery suit, knowing he would spare no cost to gratify his revenge. He said if you had been more cautious than to name Lords in your advertisement, this could not have happened; but since it has happened, you shall not only find him punctual, but generous.

P.T. had sent R.S. with money for the printer, and he had now had ‘the whole impression in my hands’. The imperfections in the bundles were blamed on the printer: ‘I then found that the rogue had delivered your last parcel imperfect; but I will bring you both those sheets, and the whole impression, the very first day they can be safely delivered you’. R.S. again warned that P.T.’s favour depended on his role being kept secret, and said that Curll should merely answer that he ‘had the letters from different hands, some of which you paid for, that you printed these as you did Mr. Cromwell’s before . . . and that, as to the originals, many you can show, and the rest you can very speedily’. The old gentleman’s ‘wonderful caution’ had led him to print title pages which did not contain Curll’s name, so Curll could go on selling them whatever the Lords decided. In short, if you absolutely conceal all that has passed between P. T., me, and yourself, you win the old gentleman for ever. For his whole heart is set upon publishing the letters, not so much for this volume, as in ordine ad to much more important correspondence that will follow, viz, with Swift, late Lord Ox d, Bishop Rochester, and Lord Bol. (‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 444)

Pope was enticing Curll further, while keeping his own role secret, by promising Curll not only the missing parts of the books he already had, but yet more tempting material of a familiar Curllian kind. Curll was certainly still hoping for some of what he was promised, but was not quite so much of a fool as to follow R.S.’s advice to the letter. He had been in this situation before, and though he was prepared to prevaricate, he was not prepared to put himself in the position of sole blame. On 14 May the Committee sat, and the standing order relating to the publication of peers’ writings was read. Lord Islay told the committee he had a copy of the letters bought from Curll’s shop, containing an abuse of the Earl of Burlington in a letter to Jervas.23 The seized books were all in sheets, and Curll had to be called in to fold a set into a book; but even then the lords could not find the offending letter: it was among the segment of omitted letters. The Lords gave Curll a fairly hard time anyway; Motte reported to Swift that ‘Curll was ruffled for [the letters] in a manner, as to

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a man of less impudence than his own, would have been very uneasy’.24 Under examination, Curll said that he had been sent the advertisement that had given rise to Lord Islay’s first complaint and had merely copied it out. In general he seems to have told as much of what he knew as was to his advantage. In defiance of R.S.’s advice, he told the Lords that he had tried to alert Pope to P.T.’s offer but that Pope had issued the scornful advertisement of 3 April. Curll declared he had not even looked at the second instalment of books, those seized on the afternoon of the twelfth, but on perusal before the committee he discovered they contained prefaces and title pages, which had been lacking from the first parcel of fifty. He was questioned about his affidavit concerning the ‘originals’ to be seen at his shop (he admitted all he had was the Cromwell correspondence), about the false claim to have letters from lords as well as to them (he pleaded ignorance) and about the promise, in a footnote, of a letter from Chandos to Pope to be printed in the next volume (he declared he would publish no such letter without permission). He was hoping to retrieve more original letters from ‘P.T.’ but had never seen him. He was dismissed. Lord De La Warr, in the Chair,25 could find nothing offensive in Curll’s book, but the matter was adjourned for the next day to see if further copies of the book would show anything damaging. Curll was directed to appear again, on the 15th, and bring with him such ‘original letters’ as he possessed. This appears to have been less satisfactory for Pope, and it is not clear whether he actually intended there to have been something incriminating in the volumes delivered to Curll, or whether simply getting him examined before the Lords was enough for his purpose. Pope appears to have involved both his regular printer John Wright and a new associate, John Hughs, in a rush printing of some extra letters, and it looks as if Hughs may have been slow to deliver.26 At any rate, the deception continued. On the 14th R.S. wrote again to Curll to ‘advise’ him further: We heartily congratulate you on your victory over the Lords, the Pope, and the Devil: for we have sure information that the books will be restored to you either this day or to-morrow. The old gentleman is charmed with your behaviour yesterday; only thinks it wrong that he hears you owned the books were sent to your wife by an unknown hand. . . . The Lords will think you more sincere, and it will have a better air, to say you had the originals and copies from different hands, and that . . . you printed them in your own right. You can suffer no more for printing than for publishing them, and the Lords cannot touch a hair of your head. (‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 445)

R.S. laid before Curll the plans P.T. had made to finesse Pope in case of a possible Chancery injunction. In a gesture meant to look like one of trust, he gave Curll some details of P.T.’s identity and the provenance of the letters: he was, according to the story, a friend of one of Pope’s lords, and had creamed off some extra copies when Pope’s correspondence with Wycherley was sent to the press, and had managed to acquire a volume’s worth from the same source.

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This seems to have been an attempt to feed Curll false information in the event that he continued to talk openly of P.T.’s involvement, though Pope scarcely needed to point Curll in the direction of the Wycherley correspondence, and his ‘apparent incaution in including these details is another puzzle’.27 Curll was perhaps too cocky to notice, at least to begin with. His reply, on 15 May, began Dear Sir, I am just again going to the Lords to finish Pope. I desire you to send me the Sheets to perfect the first fifty Books, and likewise the remaining three hundred Books,28 and pray be at the Standard Tavern this Evening, and I will pay you twenty pounds more.

He did however pick up, and defend himself against, some of the charges, with a certain gloating self-confidence: My Defence is right, I only told the Lords, I did not know from whence the Books came, and that my Wife receiv’d them. This was strict Truth, and prevented all further Enquiry. The Lords declar’d they had been made Pope’s Tool. (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 342–3)

Johnson’s account of Curll’s behaviour before the Lords, partly derived from contemporary witness among members of the book trade, probably fits this part of the hearing: ‘Curll appeared at the Bar, and, knowing himself in no great danger, spoke of Pope with very little reverence. He has, said Curll, a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him.’29 After this hearing, on 15 May, De La Warr reported that the committee could find nothing in the volumes they had that was contrary to the relevant Standing Order, and it was ordered that Curll’s books be returned to him. R.S. wrote again to Curll that evening to congratulate him on his escape from the evil designs of Pope’s friends and encouraging him to make much of it in public (‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 445–6). But shortly afterwards30 Pope had P.T. accuse Curll, through R.S., of betrayal: I have seen P.T., from whom I hoped to have had the MSS. But I found him in a very different humour from what I left him. He says you did not follow the instructions he sent you, in not owning the printing . . . further, we are certainly informed that you have named me as the hand that conveyed them. This you have said, that I was a clergyman belonging to C. Church in Southwark. Judge you whether we can think of you as you have reason to think of us, whether this be honourable usage, after you had known what P. T. had done, and what a sum he paid to get you the whole impression. P. T. had reason to think you would betray him as soon as you had it. Judge, too, if you have done wisely to hazard, by your blabbing, the loss of a future copy of immense value, which I much doubt he will let you have. . . .

Curll was asked to send another twenty pounds for the remaining books, ‘to show P.T. that you trust him as absolutely in that small sum, as he has done you in a much greater’. Curll was warned ‘your answer ought to be very satisfactory’. At this Curll lost his temper, as Pope presumably intended, and he set out his grievances in full.

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Sir. I. I am falsly accus’d, 2. I value not any Man’s Change of Temper; I will never change MY V for Falsehood, in owning a Fact of which I am Innocent. 3. I did not own the Books came from across the Water, nor ever nam’d you, all I said was, that the Books came by Water. 4. When the Books were seiz’d I sent my Son to convey a Letter to you, and as you told me every body knew you in Southwark, I bid him make a strict Enquiry, as I am sure you would have done in such an Exigency. 5. Sir I H A J in this Affair, and that is what I shall always think wisely. 6. I will be kept no longer in the Dark: P.T . is Will o’ the Wisp . . . nor will I be concern’d with any more such dark suspicious Dealers. But now Sir I’ll tell you what I will do; when I have the Books perfected which I have already receiv’d, and the rest of the Impression I will pay you for them. . . . I always say, Gold is better than Paper, and 20l. I will pay, if the Books are perfected to morrow Morning, and the rest sent, or to Night is the same thing to me. But if this dark converse goes on, I will Instantly reprint the whole Book, and as a Supplement to it, all the Letters P.T. ever sent me, of which I have exact copies, together with all your Originals, and give them in upon Oath to my Lord Chancellor. You talk of Trust; P.T . has not repos’d any in me, for he has my Mony and Notes for imperfect Books. Let me see, Sir, either P.T . or your self, or you’ll find the Scots Proverb verify’d Nemo me impune lacessit Your abus’d humble Servant, E. Curl. (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 343–4)

Yet even after this litany of complaint, Curll could not resist adding a selfcongratulatory postscript: ‘L I attend this Day. L D I S W To Night. Where Pope has one Lord, I have twenty.’31 Still Pope did not let Curll go. On 19 May R.S. wrote to Curll promising the rest of the impression shortly, ‘For I am really tired with this capricious temper of the old gentleman; he suspects his own shadow. I shall leave it to your generosity to consider me for the copy. I am just sent for to him, and told he is in a good humour.’ Publicly, however, Pope decided it was time to denounce Curll’s proceedings, and he placed a haughty advertisement in the Daily Post Boy of 20 May to put himself in the clear: W a Person who signs himself P.T. and another who writes himself R. Smith, and passes for a Clergyman, have transacted for some time past with Edm. Curll, and have in Combination printed the Private Letters of Mr. Pope and his Correspondents (some of which could only be procured from his own Library, or that of a Noble Lord, and which have given a Pretence to the publishing others as his which are not so, as well as Interpolating those which are;) This is to advertise, that if either of the said Persons will apply to Mr. Pope, and discover the Whole of this Affair, he shall receive a Reward of Twenty Guineas; or if he can discover the Whole of this Affair, he shall receive a Reward double that Sum.32

Curll came out fighting. He responded in the same paper on the next day with renewed cheek: This is to give Notice, that another Person who writes himself E.P. was likewise concerned with Edm. Curll in the said Important Confederacy, who have all jointly and severally

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agreed to oblige Mr. Pope, if he will make it worth their while, and let E. Curll print his Works for the future . . . (‘Appendix’ to ‘Initial Correspondence’, pp. 29–30; quoted Prose Works, ii. 351)

On 22 May he issued two ‘manifestoes’, one to the ‘Peers of Great Britain’ and one to the Booksellers. To the Lords he was affable: My Lords,—This day se’en-night I was in the same jeopardy as Mr. Dryden’s Hind:— Doomed to death, though fated not to die. But, till the hour of my death, I shall, with the most grateful acknowledgments, always remember both the justice and honour your lordships have done me on this occasion.

After some digs at Pope’s Jesuitical prevarications, he stated his intention to publish the complete text of the correspondence, including those missing from the copies seized by Black Rod and the ‘conspiracy’ letters ‘which, as Mr Bays says, shall both Elevate and Surprize the Public’. To the Booksellers, Curll was a tough man of business: they were bullishly warned to deal with Curll and Curll alone in copies of Pope’s letters. He was offering good deals by way of exchange but would take reprisals against any infringement of his rights (EC vi. 436).

VO LU M E T H E F I R S T The fruits of these ‘rights’ were soon to appear. On 23 May Curll, having had several printers working on it concurrently, advertised Mr Pope’s Literary Correspondence For Thirty Years; from 1704 to 1734, a fully reset printing of the text of the letters, and the first to come out over the Curll imprint.33 It was to be the first of a series (it says ‘V the First’ on the title page) and Curll resumed his fancy title-page monogram with his initials interwoven into a pattern, another sign of renewed vigour and self-confidence (see Figure 7). (This had appeared on Jacob’s Poetical Register in 1718.) There were prints of Pope, Swift, Addison, and Congreve, with Bolingbroke in some copies. Of all Curll’s ‘Pope’ volumes, this was the one with the most substantial content: a version (at least) of Pope’s correspondence with Wycherley, Walsh, ‘several ladies’, Addison, Steele, Gay—and of course, the Cromwell letters once more. Pope now appeared to dissolve the ‘conspiracy’ by having P.T. and R.S. advertise in the Daily Journal of 24 May their dissatisfaction with Curll’s machinations. In fact, of course, this kept going the idea that there had actually been any conspiracy outside Pope’s knowledge and control. The villainous Curll was challenged to produce any sort of title to the copyright of the letters, and accused of short-changing his partners with notes of hand which ‘prov’d not Negotiable’. Curll had artfully tricked P.T. into printing the edition at his own expense; and as for his threat to publish the letters of P.T. and R.S., they were happy to publish the letters of E. Curll, ‘which will open a Scene of Baseness and

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Figure 7. Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, volume 1 (1735), reproduced from a private copy. Curll’s ‘EC’ monogram.

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Foul Dealing that will sufficiently show to Mankind his Character and Conduct’ (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 344–5). Curll’s response, an extended, fulminating narrative of the events of 12 May, came in the Daily Post Boy of 27 May. ‘The Scurility of your Advertisement I despise; Falsehood under your own Hands I shall here prove upon you; and as to your Scandal in affirming that my Notes of Hand proved not Negotiable, I will take proper Measures’. He quoted from the letters, totted up the accounts, and asked ‘if this does not open a scene of Baseness and foul Dealing, that sufficiently shew to Mankind the Character and Conduct of P.T . and R.S.?’ (‘True Narrative’, cited in Prose Works, ii. 355). Using this self-incriminating diatribe as a springboard, Pope had Cooper advertise a new edition of the letters on 28 May, making capital out of the deficiencies of Curll’s copies which were, in truth, down to Pope’s own processes: We hope it is sufficient to prefer this Edition, to say it is N printed for Edmund Curll, and it is entirely free from his Notes and Impertinencies; it contains, First, The Preface, which Curll, with good Reason suppressed, as shewing by what Conduct, both to Mr. Pope, and Mr. Cromwell, he obtained these Letters. Secondly, It hath all those Letters, which were also omitted in the Books he first published, and shew’d to the Lords; it is in every respect more perfect than any other Edition can be, unless the Author himself be pleased to give us one: As for Mr. Curll, every Bookseller may be assured, that he has not the least Title to the Copy, nor could have any from his Anonymous Confederates, who must have got the Papers out of Mr. Pope’s, or a Noble Lord’s Library.34

Pope here gives the first public hint of his own ‘authorized’ text, as well as a sort of taster for his Narrative.

VO LU M E T H E S E C O N D This advertisement was also present in the Daily Post Boy of 28 May, which carried in another column a taunt from Curll: Edmund Curll’s Follies and Impertinence Will prove a Match for Pope’s Satiric Sense

Curll denounced the Cooper edition of the letters as a piracy and, in an effort to steal a march on the competition, shortly afterwards claimed ‘the receipt of a packet of Bishop Atterbury’s letters from Paris, to Mr. Pope’. These would form the basis of a second volume.35 In the press Cooper issued a challenge (LEP, GSJ, 12 June): And whereas he advertises a second Volume of Letters between Mr. Pope, the Lord Bolingbroke, and Bishop Atterbury, T. Cooper hereby promises to give to the said Edmund Curll the sum of ten Pounds, as much as he gave his Confederates for 200

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Books, for every Letter either of them to Mr. Pope, or Mr. Pope to them, or to any other mention’d in his Advertisement, for which he can produce any Original or Voucher.

In a further paragraph (GSJ, 12 June), Cooper sets out the legal basis for his claim: ‘In the mean Time he hopes every fair Trader will give the Preference to this Edition enter’d in the Hall Book according to the Act of Q. Anne, which is not (as some imagine) expired, but remains unrepeal’d, and in full Force, and upon which Edmund Curll shall be prosecuted, or any other Pyrates of this Book.’ For his part Curll insisted that: ‘Bishop Atterbury’s Letters to Mr. Pope I am ready to shew any Gentleman, and the Original Letters under Mr. Pope’s own Hand, which are to be in this Second Volume’ (PB, 16 June; Corr, iii. 468 n.) Meanwhile, matters took a new turn with the publication of A Narrative of the Method by which the Private Letters of Mr. Pope have been procur’d and publish’d by Edmund Curll, Bookseller, issued by Cooper on 10 June (Griffith 382). In a Curll-like gesture, it was promised: ‘NB. The Original Letters in Curll’s own Hand, relating to this Transaction, may be seen at the Publisher’s, T. Cooper.’ The Narrative sets out the position Pope wished the public to believe. He had, naturally, resisted the calls of his friends to publish an authorised collection of his own letters, but he had caused some of them to be preserved in copy books, with some replies and other material. Pope recounted (from his point of view) the publication of the Cromwell letters in 1726, and his subsequent efforts to fend off Curll’s insidious attempts to acquire further Popeana; he accused Curll of trying to establish rights in Pope’s unofficial second volume of Wycherley’s Works.36 Every disloyal servant in the country was being encouraged by such practices to steal private letters from their masters. The rest of the pamphlet consisted of Curll’s correspondence with Pope himself and Curll’s dastardly agents, the imaginary E.P., P.T. and R.S., and Pope rounded the whole thing off with a few choice sentiments about the low moral standard of a bookselling profession which had ‘conspired to assist the Pyracy’ of ‘a Gentleman’s P L’. In a final postscript, Pope noted that ‘so many Omissions and Interpolations have been made in this Publication’ that it was ‘Impossible for Mr. P. to own them in the Condition they appear’. They would, it appeared, just have to appear in a more authorised form. Privately the story was the same. On 17 June Pope wrote to the Earl of Oxford, whose library he was using as a kind of official reference point for manuscripts of the letters, to make sure he was ‘onside’ in the current state of the story: Since I saw you, I have learn’d of an Excellent machine of Curl’s (or rather, his Director’s) to ingraft a Lye upon, to make me seem more concern’d than I was in the affair of the Letters: It is so artfull an one, that I long’d to tell it you: Not that I will enter into any Controversy with such a Dog, or make myself a publick antagonist to a T[o]m

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Tu[rd]man. But I believe it will occasion a thing you won’t be sorry for, relating to the Bish. of Rochester’s Letters & Papers.37

The ‘machine’ is obscure and may be as much Pope’s invention as Curll’s, though Pope does appear to be wriggling in response to a genuine worry here. The next move Curll is known to have made was actually through the courts. Some time around 22 June, Pope wrote to Fortescue to ask his legal advice, as Curll had ‘servd a Process upon Cooper’ (Corr, iii. 469), presumably in an effort to prevent Cooper from distributing the rival edition. Somehow Curll found time to put together a new, and surprisingly irrelevant, assault on the poet. On 26 June he published The Poet Finish’d in Prose over his own imprint, an eighty-page onslaught on Pope’s epistles of the 1730s, accusing them of obscurity, vulgarity, and obscenity (see Chapter 8). More damagingly, Pope was assaulted biographically: his father was a mechanic, he was hypersensitive and used spies; he plagiarized jokes from his servant. Sexually, he was afraid of being raped by Lady Mary (the pamphlet ironically praises his preference for self-abuse). Direct connection with the Correspondence is slight, but there is one hit: ‘name Curl, or the House of Lords, and he runs full butt at you as far as his Rope will give him Leave’ (p. 39). But in the same issue of the same paper that announced this pamphlet, the General Evening-Post, appeared a further advertisement for a ‘3rd edition’ of Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, against Cooper’s much-advertised text: ‘N.B. This contains the Whole of what T. Cooper advertises Vol. I and II. there being not any Second Volume but what I am now Printing.’ In a bizarrely elitist gesture Curll refused to sell this second volume ‘to any Person but those who have bought the first of me’. Even before it emerged, characteristically, he was claiming ‘I have large Materials for a Third Volume’.38 In the St. James’s Evening Post on 12 July 1735, Curll published an advertisement disguised, threateningly, as a letter to Pope: We were very lately of one Mind; and, as you say, Never had, nor ever intended to have any private Correspondence with each other. . . . What has been the Consequence, the Town is now well acquainted with. A P Correspondence, in Justice to myself, I will hold with you, to convince Mankind that you are not like Achilles, invulnerable.

** Curll stated his intention to publish the second volume of Pope’s Literary Correspondence, and that he was ready to produce the originals in Pope’s hand. The volume would include, in accordance with P.T.’s suggestion, Pope’s correspondence with Atterbury, and ‘some other pieces of that great Man, which I had of his Son’, as well as ‘State-Letters’ from Prior, Addison and Harley, opening ‘some Scenes, which, I dare say, some People had much rather should have remain’d closed up, and been eternally forgotten’. Curll also promised Whig-pleasing letters between William III and Lord Somers, the ‘DeisticalRemains’ of Peter Le Neve, Norroy King at Arms, and a translation of the

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Cena Trimalchionis —‘and to his Entertainment you are heartily welcome as not being a Stranger’. These items, which of course had nothing to do with Pope’s ‘literary correspondence’, were offered to his patronage: ‘I hope, Sir, you will not send me empty away’. In the same vein of mock-courtesy Curll promised ‘your Picture from [Jonathan] Richardson I intend for the Frontispiece of the Third Volume of your Literary Correspondence, which is now actually in the Press’ (Corr, iii. 471–2). Pope immediately wrote to Fortescue, anxiously enquiring about legal redress and the possibility of some swift stong-arm tactics: Curl has reprinted my Letters with the addition of a great deal of Scandal of his own putting upon me, which he advertizes to be published to morrow. I apprehend as it is just after the Term, an Injunction can’t be got out against him. But this you know best, & pray tell me Nevertheless as I understand, his pyrated book may be seized and damaskd & made waste paper of, by my authority, or by his who has Enterd them in the Hall book as his property, according to the Act of Queen Anne yet subsisting. If so, I would by all means have T. Cooper & Gilliver who enterd it, search in the Printing houses, & at Curl’s own Shop to morrow & destroy all they can. If, to this end, there be any Writing or Powers necessary from me to them, pray let it be sent to me by an Express Messenger to Twitnam, & I’ll sign & return it with all speed. . . . Curl certainly publishes to morrow, or I would not have troubled you so suddenly: I knew not of it till yesterday. Gilliver shall wait on you this afternoon for Instructions . . . (Corr, iii. 472–3)

It was probably the mention of Atterbury which caused this panic, Pope having indeed continued to correspond with the Jacobite leader after he went into exile. Pope could never be entirely sure that Curll was bluffing, and Curll had perhaps been less cowed by events than Pope was expecting. Legal force was one option. Pope also wrote to the printer Samuel Buckley to have him insert an advertisement in London Gazette (it appeared on 15 July): Whereas several Booksellers have printed several surreptitious and incorrect Editions of Letters as mine, some of them which are not so, and others interpolated; and whereas there are Daily Advertisements of Second and Third Volumes of more such Letters, particularly my Correspondence with the late Bishop of Rochester; I think myself under a Necessity to publish such of the said Letters as are genuine, with the Addition of some others of a Nature less insignificant; especially those which pass’d between the said Bishop and myself, or were any way relating to him: Which shall be printed with all convenient Speed. (Corr, iii. 473 and note)

This represented a more commercial form of redress and a new stage in the evolution of the plot: gradually, the promise an ‘authorized’ edition became more and more firm. So far as the potential for embarrassing evidence to emerge in Curll’s volume was concerned, Pope need not have worried. Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence. Volume the Second, duly appeared on Curll’s birthday, 14 July, with very little by Pope, but much about him, in it (Griffith 386). It is a gallimaufry of vaunting triumph. In a prefatory ‘To Mr Pope’, in which Curll retold the story of their

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antagonism from the 1716 emetic onwards. Curll had by now tracked the main lines of the plot, even back to the Wycherley volume of 1728. Perhaps he picked up a hint from the P.T./R.S. correspondence, but he claimed Pope’s bookseller had spilled the beans: Lawton Gilliver has declared that you bought of him the Remainder of the Impression of Wycherley’s letters, which he printed, by your Direction, in 1728, and have printed Six Hundred of the additional Letters, with those to Mr. Cromwell, to make up the Volume. Yet still it must be given out that a Nobleman has been robb’d, and his innocent Servant must be discarded, to support Your most flagrant Falshood.

Pope’s Narrative is then reprinted, with Curll’s quibbling, sniping commentary and asides. ‘P.T . is Trickster Pope, R.S. is Silly Rascal’. We have in the course of this chapter found occasion to quote much from Curll’s ‘Initial Correspondence; or, Anecdotes of the Life and Family of Mr. Pope’, which first appeared in this volume. This section began with further parodies of Pope’s satiric works, applying them to himself. Here Curll reprinted the entry on Pope from Jacob’s Poetical Register, E.P.’s 1733 letter about Pope’s punishment at the hands of his schoolmaster, and the two initial letters from P.T. There was also a poem dedicated to Curll in imitation of the 17th epode of Horace, attacking Pope for his covert publication of the mucky Sober Advice from Horace, not yet acknowledged by the poet. In his own view, Curll ‘fully made good his Promise, to the Lords, of being a Match for Mr. Pope in Prose. . . . And he may really say, in regard to all the Attacks which have been made upon him, by this petulant little Gentleman, especially the last, V V V’. The introductory material concluded with a poem in Curll’s best Toad of Toad Hall manner: C T; A P O-W Pope, meditating to disgrace Those, whom his Satire jeers Not long since to a wildgoose chace Entic’d Great-Britain’s Peers. He led ’em to pursue a Wight Egregious—Curll his name, Who not surpriz’d, and in no Fright, By this pursuit reap’d Fame. He undeceiv’d the Nobles all, More cou’d he wish or hope? While Pope had thus contriv’d his Fall, He triumph’d over Pope. The Vomit foul, the Dunciad keen, Vex’d Curll —but all admit, Tho’ Pope twice shew’d he had most Spleen, Curll once has shewn most wit.

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There was even a little bill, totting up the victories so far: Mr. Alexander Pope, Debtor to Mr. Edmund Curll. To an Advertisement in the Post-Man, 1717, promising Three Guineas to discover the Publisher of his Version of the First Psalm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 0 To a Promise of Ten Pounds, on producing one of Bishop Atterbury’s Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 0 0 To discover the Publishers of Mr. Pope’s Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 0 0 Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 3

0

The ‘correspondence’ in the volume included much material by Dryden, Addison, and Steele that Curll had, for the most part, printed elsewhere already. We encounter ‘Mrs Long’s Cabinet’ once more, and the ‘Receipt to make Soup’. Popeana included the first Psalm version, ‘To the Ingenious Mr. Moore’ yet again, and a few other old faithfuls. There were ‘Castrations made by the Editor of Mr. Pope’s Letters to Henry Cromwell’, ‘A Key to the First Volume of Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence’, a description of his house, and a reprint of the dialogue between Pope and the Ordinary of Newgate, already noticed by the poet (above, p. 245). There was a section (100 pages) of material by and about Atterbury, some papers relating to Prior, and a piece by Swift, but nothing much in the way of actual correspondence.

VO LU M E T H E T H I R D ( A N D F O U RT H , A N D F I F T H ) Curll’s boasts continued to be considerably in excess of his materials. Seeking something (anything) for the already-announced third volume, Curll wrote privately to William Broome, Pope’s collaborator on the Homer translations, now estranged from the author. Doubting not ‘but you have heard of the late affair, of which more than our country rings, between Mr. Pope and me, concerning the printing his letters’, Curll attempted to ingratiate himself with William Broome on the sensitive point of Pope’s alleged lack of acknowledgement and financial generosity to his helpers on the translation of The Odyssey. Curll frankly asked Broome for a contribution, promising ‘if you have any letters which passed between you and Mr. Pope, they shall likewise be inserted, and acknowledged in whatever manner you please’ (22 July 1735, Corr, iii. 475). But Broome knew who was the more useful friend, and sent the letter straight to Pope, apparently winning some form of reconciliation (Corr, iii. 478–9). No matter: on 26 July Curll printed an open letter to ‘The Public’ in Fog’s Weekly Journal, reiterating his version of events and blustering ‘I shall have recourse to a legal remedy’ for the deficiency of the copies he had bought. Having disposed of Pope’s machinations before the House of Lords and his ‘very idle

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narrative of a robbery committed upon two manuscripts’, Curll seized on Pope’s advertised intention to print the letters himself and declared that any letters Pope ‘or his Tools’ published ‘shall be instantly reprinted by me’.39 Curll’s intention was to use Pope’s plot as a sort of copyright gift: if Pope had nominated him publisher of the letters, then publisher of the letters he would be. He listed the contents of the second volume and claimed that the third would be out the next month, ‘Os being every Day sent me, some of them to a certain D, which I am ready to produce under his own Hand’ (Corr, iii. 477). This provided an opportunity, from Pope’s point of view. On 2 August he wrote once more to Fortescue to show him this advertisement and ask if there was enough libel in it to get an injunction; that day’s issue of Fog’s Journal in fact contained an apology to Pope, put there (as the printer told Curll when he went to the shop to remonstrate) ‘to oblige Mr. Pope, who, with some of his pettifoggers, threatened to bring an information against the paper’ (Corr, iii. 477 n., EC vi. 448). But Pope still had concerns: on 6 August he wrote to Lord Bathurst: ‘Pray can you find any thing about the Duchess of Buckingham’s Letters, or does she know what they are, which that Rascal Curl has advertised? I cannot conceive the least of ’em’ (Corr, iii. 481). It looks as if other friends were being gently prodded for information, for on 19 August David Mallet wrote to him: ‘Believe me I am not in treaty with Curl, to furnish him any letters for his second [sic] volume; and if he has no more influence with the clerks of the Post-office than with me, yours will come very safe . . .’ (Corr, iii. 485). The third volume came out about 20 September, with a ‘second’ edition in smaller format shortly afterwards and alongside a small format ‘second edition’ of the second volume (Griffith 402–4). In a letter ‘To the Subscribers’, Curll announced his happiness with the present publishing arrangement: Mr Pope’s Project to usher his Letters into the World by my Means, was the Foundation of this Scheme of A Literary Correspondence; which has been so well received, that is shall be continued while People of Taste approve of it: And that will be as long as People of Taste, who have valuable Performances in this Kind in their Power, contribute their Stores to the Emolument of Mankind. Not but that I am always ready and willing to purchase any Genuine Pieces from such Possessors as expect a Premium.

In a dialogue between Curll and ‘Squire Brocade’ concerning the low Pope content of the series, Curll avers that ‘some of my Customers, whose Judgment is much esteemed among their Acquaintance, have said that Mr. Pope’s share in this Second Volume is the very worst Part of the Book’. The third is (it is argued) well worth its five shillings for its political letters from great statesmen, and other state materials, such as the hagiographical ‘Memorial to the Duchess of Ormonde’, stitched in alongside some Memoirs of Thomas Hearne, to which we shall return. (In the duodecimo version, amongst other rearrangments and increments, these biographies were replaced by a ‘fifth edition’ of Miscellanies Written by Jonathan Swift, D.D., a reminder that the Dean was never to be neglected.) Curll had

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advertised in the Daily Journal of 8 January 1734 the memoirs of the Duchess of Ormonde, second wife of James Butler, the second Duke of Ormonde, exiled for Jacobite plotting in 1715, adding mysteriously: ‘N.B. I have received a very curious Letter, consisting of four Sheets of Papers, concerning this noble Family; for which Thanks are hereby return’d to the Lady who sent it. And it shall be faithfully inserted as desir’d. E. CURLL.’ A Short Memorial, and Character, of that most Noble and Illustrious Princess Mary Dutchess of Ormonde came out separately in 1735; it has nothing to do with Pope or Swift, the main topic of the narrative lying in an unsuccessful attempt upon the honour of the Duchess by the young Earl of Mulgrave, later Duke of Buckinghamshire. Yet here it was, part of the omnium gatherum that the Correspondence was becoming. Curll added yet another letter to Pope in this volume, accusing the poet of plagiarizing letters from Voiture (Corr, iii. 495). In the same letter he reprinted Pope’s advertisement of 15 July, with his own commentary interpolated into it. Further, he claimed to have exhibited a Bill in Chancery against ‘this nominal R. Smythe’, as well as Gilliver and Pope, in order to press for delivery of the original 600 copies Curll claimed the agreement was for, ‘not in the least doubting, but from such an equitable Triumvirate I shall obtain Justice’.40 The volume contained even less correspondence than the second volume, though the title page was liberal in its distribution of names: the Duke of Shrewsbury (who appears to have written to Curll in 1708), Sir Berkeley Lucy (recipient of a long letter from by Locke, perhaps a relic of material advertised by Curll in the Daily Journal of 16 December 1729), William Walsh (a couple of whose squibs are included), Lady Chudleigh and Elizabeth Thomas, among others. There were verses relating to the death of Mrs Manley, a version of her Stage-Coach Journey to Exeter, scraps from Amhurst and Pack, a speech of Atterbury from 1711. There were portraits of Pope and Lansdowne (the latter represented also by a section of letters), and a slight essay about the asses in The Dunciad. In an unusual twist Curll printed ‘An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Mr. Gay’ and reascribed it to Samuel Wesley of Westminster School, who had written the mocking poem about Curll’s degradation there. Two Pope poems were reprinted. There was one letter from Pope to the Duchess of Buckingham, as trumpeted, and four letters supposedly from Pope to Martha Blount which Curll had in fact generated from his edition of Voiture’s letters, then being reissued—with, naturally enough, Pope’s poem on the subject prominently included (Corr, iii. 487).41 Pope denied these letters privately in a letter to Lord Bathurst of 8 October (Corr, iii. 501). He also began recalling his letters from correspondents, ostensibly to keep them out of Curll’s hands, but also with a view to his own authentic edition. Swift (as likely as anyone to divine what Pope was up to) responded to Pope’s warning about ‘that profligate Rogue Curl’ by procrastinating: ‘You need not apprehend any Curll’s meddling with your letters to me; I will not destroy them, but have ordered my Executors to do that office’.42 Evidently Curll’s threatened lawsuits were still in the air, for Pope wrote to Fortescue in November

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1735 to suggest that ‘the man whom Curl served with a process, just before you went out of town, I suppose should have the assistance of an attorney, to appear for him the first day of term, to know what it is for? (Corr, iii. 508). But nothing appears to have come of these manoeuvres, and Curll was soon back on the familiar turf of publication. On 9 December 1735 he published Post-Office Intelligence, a collection of love-letters supposedly returned undelivered to the general post office and published for public delectation, with ‘Rational Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Letters’. These ‘Remarks’ retail the standard charges against Pope: that he was an inveterate and incurable libeller, that the crookedness of his body indicated the crookedness of his nature, and that he was blasphemous and indecent throughout the letters—a point which was of course really an advertisement for Curll’s edition of them. On 25 March 1736, Curll published ‘Volume the Fourth’ in the series, with a smaller format version shortly afterwards (Griffith, 415 and 416; Guerinot, 264–6). The frontispiece was an Atterbury portrait. The book included a section of ‘Muscovian Letters’ (a section available separately, as was becoming the norm with these volumes) and some letters between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. But despite this, and the liberal use of the names of various bishops on the title page, the book is really a further reverse homage to Pope, with a new insistence on obscenity. The preface ‘To the Sifters’ keeps up the familiar duel with Pope: a postscript refers contemptuously to Pope’s failure to visit ‘Lucretia’ (identified as ‘A noted Cast-off-Punk, of his pious Saint-John’). Curll tells Pope that he ‘may hear of his Deary at the Old Place’. Following the Henry VIII letters, Curll addresses a letter to Pope containing an obscure anecdote about a ‘New Year’s Gift’ of a specially bound French book sent by Curll to feed Pope’s prurient appetite. Some of the ‘Court Poems’ are reprinted, with some jaunty verses of Curll’s own, alongside Sober Advice from Horace, with additional notes and scandal. Some lines on Curll from The Dunciad (ii. 53–4) are parodied: Before the Lords, Alone, untaught to fear, Stood dauntless Curll (and spoke to ev’ry Peer.) He triumph’d, Victor of the high wrought Day!

A final catalogue of ‘New Books’ advertises Curll’s Pope stock, including supposed editions of Pope’s work, pictures of him ‘in Different Attitudes’ and of his house, and new attacks such as Giles Jacob’s Liberty and Property: Or, a New Year’s Gift for Mr. Pope, a quasi-legal treatise addressed to Pope’s friend Bathurst and fronted by a further jaunty Curll preface claiming legal rights over Pope’s correspondence. At about this time Curll published Seven Select Pieces Written by Mr. Pope (1736). This included several early canonical pieces, such as An Essay on Criticism and The Temple of Fame, which Curll had not previously published; but it was actually a stitched-together compilation of sheets from Lintot’s editions of these poems from the early 1720s. This might have made for an interesting

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copyright question: did Lintot still own the rights, or had they reverted to Pope? As a piracy, it was probably calculated to sit in a grey and untested area. But officially, Pope was now above all this. The day after publication of this ‘fourth sham volume’, Pope wrote a carefully self-protecting note about the letters to Fortescue: Your too partial mention of the book of Letters, with all its faults and follies, which Curl printed and spared not . . . makes one think it may not be amiss to send you, what I know you will be much more pleased with than I can be, a proposal for a correct edition of them; which at last I find must be offered, since people have misunderstood an advertisement I printed some time ago, merely to put some stop to that rascal’s books, as a promise that I would publish such a book. (Corr, iv. 7)

The official edition was now clearly going to happen, and war entered a new phase. The London Gazette of 12 February 1737 carried a splendid advertisement for ‘The Works of Mr. Pope in Prose’ which shows that Pope could profit from Curll’s model of publicity: ‘And first, an Authentic Edition of his L, with large Additions of several never before printed, between Him, the late Bishop Atterbury, and other Eminent Persons’ (Corr, iv. 41). The edition was on sale by 19 May 1737 (Griffith, 454–7). Actually, it had been ready by 22 March but Pope held it back while another copyright bill, which did not in the event pass, was being discussed (Corr, iv. 65). Naturally the prefatory material exuded righteous indignation: A Bookseller advertises his intention to publish your Letters: He openly promises encouragement, or even pecuniary rewards, to those who help him to any; and ingages to insert whatever they shall send: Any scandal is sure of a reception, and any enemy who sends it skreen’d from a discovery. Any domestick or servant, who can snatch a letter from your pocket or cabinet, is encouraged to that vile practise. If the quantity falls short of a volume, any thing else shall be join’d with it . . . which the collector can think for his interest, all recommended under your Name: You have not only Theft to fear, but Forgery. (Prose Works, ii. 371)

Pope’s ‘Preface’ states his version of the cultural significance of the encounter: against the textual anarchy of freebooting booksellers like Curll is set an image of the author as a certain type of responsible private individual (‘gentleman’): As an Author, you are depriv’d of that Power which above all others constitutes a good one, the power of rejecting, and the right of judging for your self, what pieces it may be most useful, entertaining, or reputable to publish, at the time and in the manner you think best. As a Man, you are depriv’d of the right even over your own Sentiments, of the privilege of every humane creature to divulge or conceal them; of the advantage of your second thoughts; and of all the benefit of your Prudence, your candour, or your Modesty. As a Member of Society, you are yet more injur’d; your private conduct, your domestick concerns, your family secrets, your passions, your tendernesses, your weaknesses, are expos’d to the Misconstruction or Resentment of some, to the Censure or Impertinence of the whole world. (Prose Works, ii. 371–2)

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In this way Pope used Curll as a negative example in order to establish a role for the modern author, careful negotiating a seamless transition from private man to public figure. Curll knew exactly where the seams in this argument were and cheerfully unpicked them. His ‘Volume the Fifth’ was another assault on Pope’s lofty concept of authorship. When it appeared in June 1737 (Griffith, 462; Guerinot, 267) it incorporated the sheets of a volume of New Letters (the significance of which we shall examine in the next chapter), Madame Dacier’s ‘Remarks’ on Pope’s Homer from 1724, and some material by his friend William Walsh—the latter already issued, with the Walsh material from volume three and a spattering of barbed notes, under the title The Works of William Walsh, in about May 1736. ‘Volume the Fifth’ also contained an advertisement dated 8 June (which Curll seems to have thought, mistakenly, was Pope’s birthday) denouncing Pope’s own edition as full of omissions and interpolations.43 No end was in sight, so far as Curll was concerned. AKIN BY TRADE Pope clearly derived some benefit from this elaborate charade. He now had a good excuse to publish an artfully-edited defensive image of himself through his letters to set against the abuse of his enemies, and he had bamboozled the wily Curll. He had also succeeded in making the trade of bookseller look unreliable at a time when the booksellers were petitioning for advanced copyright protection. In the background of the controversy in 1735 he was issuing 2-volume editions of his Works, new editions of The Dunciad (with its continued battering of Curll), new Horatian imitations and further issues of An Essay on Man. Authorship had never looked so nobly monumental. Pope resolutely maintained the position that the publication of his letters was all down to Curll, and he managed to convince many people.44 Mather Byles wrote to commiserate with Pope but to commend the letters themselves.45 Swift declared to Lady Elizabeth Germaine, who had warned him that ‘Mr Curll will rake to the Dunghill for your Correspondence’: ‘I detest the House of Lords, for their indulgence to such a profligate prostitute villain as Curle’.46 The poet James Thomson wrote to William Cranstoun in August 1735 concerning Pope: ‘His Letters were pyratically printed by the Infamous Curl. Tho Mr Pope be much concerned at their being printed, yet they are full of Wit, Humour, Good Sense, and what is best of all, a Good Heart.’47 Hogarth had a small picture of Pope beating Curll hang above the hack’s head in the second state of The Distrest Poet (1737) (see Figure 8). The matter even made it (via the Atterbury connection) into the discussions of Jacobites abroad, as when Ezekiel Hamilton wrote to the Earl Marishcal: ‘Curll a Bookseller Who is a very impudent Fellow publish’d a great many Letters to and from

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Figure 8. Detail from William Hogarth, The Distrest Poet, second state (1737), reproduced courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library.

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Mr Pope, He got those Letters from a Servant of Mr Pope’s without his Master’s Knowledge.’48 The Grub-street Journal naturally scented more blood. It carried a number of Pope’s defensive advertisements, and the issue of 17 July 1735 printed a long poem about the second volume. When Curll began advertising the third volume, the Journal offered a traditional sniggering comment: C..l, let me advise you whatever betides To let this third Volume alone; The Second’s sufficient for all our backsides, So pray keep the Third for your own.49

In the issue of 8 January 1736 a correspondent denounced Curll’s ‘insufferable assurance’ in publishing as Pope’s correspondence material that had nothing to do with him, and suggested that Curll should be sent back to the pillory.50 This was a prompt for a further letter, in the next week’s issue: I beg leave to say a few words in defence of that eminent Stationer; who, far from attempting to impose on any one, hath ingenuously prefix’d his Name to every Book which he hath publish’d; besides a pretty Picture of the Initial Letters E. C. curiously interwoven in Cyphers; and who cannot be said to have deceived any one Purchaser. Since who is there in the Kingdom that sees Mr. C ’s Name in the Title Page, and is not from that circumstance enabled to form a perfect judgment of the Book.

Curll’s stylish monogram had been noticed, at least. Not quite everyone believed Pope’s account of the transaction, though it took longer for Curll’s version to make headway.51 In Sawney and Colley: A Poetical Dialogue (1742), Pope’s manoeuvres over the letters were the stuff of common derision, according to ‘Colley’ (Cibber): But with the Wizard, C—, to juggle, And, Hocus Pocus, help him smuggle Thy Correspondence with thy Betters, Theirs, extemp’re, Thine studied L, Cloath’d in a stiff, pedantic Dress, Each Line corrected for the Press; Intending thus to let us see They’re but, at best, a Foil to Thee! Fye, S, fye!—but that’s not all, In Publick ‘gainst the Deed you bawl; You C , and C  you Villain, call. . . . Nay, more, to rivet the Deceit, Thy Lord must consecrate the Cheat; An insult on the House of P—rs, For which you ought to’ve lost your Ears, , Akin by Trade, Then thou and C Had been par nob’le Fratrum made. (pp. 17–19)

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Sawney (Pope) is made to protest at this kinship with Curll,52 leading Colley to re-examine the question of Curll’s ears: Odso, your Pardon let me see Oh, no, Friend C , I wrong you there, You vow you never lost an Ear; And, tho’ oft pillory’d, have still, Both your Auriculars at will.

But under this banter, the note explains what was being said about the letters: Upon the Whole, it was universally deem’d, that the first Appearance of these Letters was owing to S’s own Contrivance, he having just Modesty and human Prudence enough to conclude, that it would draw down upon him an Accusation of most unparalleled Vanity as well as Treachery to be publickly known in it.

But this was from an enemy, of course, and one not especially sympathetic to Curll. A further note likens Pope’s ‘having lately turned Bookseller to himself’ to Curll’s ‘lowest Craft of the Trade . . . such as different Editions, in various Forms, with perpetual Additions and Improvements, so as to render all but the last worth nothing; and, by that Means, fooling many People into buying them several times over’.53 From the bookseller’s point of view, indeed, the whole affair was largely beneficial, probably more so than Pope had estimated. Once past the hurdle of the House of Lords, Pope had handed him a licence to print Popeana. Not content with advertising an edition of Pope’s Essay on Man, supposedly delivered to him ready printed, Curll published a further poem, An Essay on Human Life, as ‘by the author of the Essay on Man’, knowing that it was not.54 In his declaration to the Lords he announced, as part of his rejuvenated self-image, a change of shop sign: ‘I have engraven a new plate of Mr. Pope’s head from Mr. Jervas’s painting; and likewise intend to hang him up in effigy, for a sign to all spectators of his falsity and my own veracity, which I will always maintain’ (‘Initial Correspondence’, Appendix, p. 31; EC vi. 435–6). As Tonson had Congreve for his sign, Gilliver Homer, and Dodsley Cicero, so Curll now had Pope. But in Curll’s case it represented a symbolic capture or decapitation, not just a classy literary brand: an underlining of the limpet-like symbiosis between bookseller and author that Curll now claimed.55 A couplet in the second volume of the Literary Correspondence reads ‘A fitter Couple, sure, were never hatch’d. | Some marry’d are, indeed, but we are match’d’ (xvi). In the same volume he inserted a parody of the closing lines of Pope’s Essay on Man in which the friendship between Bolingbroke and Pope is replaced by the symbiosis of Pope and Curll (‘And shall thy verse to future age pretend, | Thou wert Curll’s enemy, but now his friend?’). In the third volume Curll printed another impudent letter addressed to Pope, indicating his contentment ‘That our Name and Fame may be equally transmitted to Posterity’. Some copies of the fifth volume of the Literary Correspondence have a ‘Parodie’ on Pope’s recently issued Imitation of

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the Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, which maintained the diabolical threat of eternal literary companionship; in Curll’s view there was no way to separate author from purveyor.56

I M PA RT I A L M E M O I R S Curll did have interests—and problems—outside Pope, even at the height of the Correspondence drama, though everything else naturally has the look of an also-ran. His son, not quite the ‘worthy son of his father’ as Pope has him in the notes to the Dunciad (ii.159) appears to have made one last effort at managing the business with an issue of Edward Roman’s The Gentleman’s and Builder’s Director, effectively a calculator for bricklayers, in 1734.57 The son may, or may not, be the ‘Henry Curle’ who appears to have broken out of the Fleet prison in the summer of 1735 and failed to appear before Westminster justices on an unknown charge. He was formally discharged from the Fleet on 18 September 1736. As we have suggested, Curll’s son was probably dead by July 1737, when his father erased his name from his will.58 These years in fact represented a burst of activity on Curll’s part, only partly because of the increased publicity accruing from Pope’s Correspondence. We know that Curll was prosperous enough to buy books and some copyright shares at the Wilford and Bowyer sales of 24 Feb and 18 May 1736.59 A lot of books, from Centlivre to The Rape of the Smock, were ‘reprinted’ at this date, alongside were new printings of work by Voltaire (Alzira) and a set of poems on smoking in the style of various authors (Pope included) by Isaac Hawkins Browne. A four-book mini-series of allegorical tales about the royal family, The History of Prince Titi, was translated from the French of Th´emiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe by one Eliza Stanley.60 If this was risky, Curll could set against it his Rarities of Richmond (1735–6), a guide book to Queen Caroline’s symbolic garden building, Merlin’s Cave, and stuffed with ‘cheerful xenophobic Protestant bigotry’.61 There were other lives, other reputations. The soldier and politician George, Baron Carpenter, for example, notable for his service in the War of Spanish Succession and against the Jacobites in 1715, was treated to a substantial biography, complete with Curll’s now customary title-page vignette: he had developed a sparer, more elegant style of cover.62 But by now it mattered little what was actually in the books. Savage had mocked Curll’s talent for producing keys in a poem of 1735, and in ‘Of false Historians’, of about the same date, he declared: Peace be with Curll —with him I wave all strife, Who pens each felon’s and each actor’s life; Biography that cooks the devil’s martyrs, And lards with luscious rapes the cheats of Charters.63

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The following year Elizabeth Singer Rowe wrote to Lady Hertford in 1736 about Curll’s proposed edition of her life and works: I am entirely ignorant of Curll’s romance of my life and writings, only what I have seen is an advertisement. I was told of his design indeed, and wrote, and positively denied him the liberty of printing anything of mine. But they tell me he is a mere savage, and has no regard to truth and humanity; and as he has treated people of greater consequence in the same manner, I am advised to suffer no friend to take the least notice of his collection; and for my own peace, if it ever comes my way, I never intend to see what is in it.64

This is, to say the least, in marked contrast to the letter from Rowe to Mr Roffey, dated 30 August 1736, that Curll claimed to have; this read simply: ‘Sir, Assure Mr. Curll, that in Printing my Poems, no Body will Dispute his Right; or give him any Opposition. Yours, &c. Eliz. Rowe’.65 But she was dead (1737) by the time Curll published this. Pope’s Correspondence scheme found Curll already, in fact, at the height of his powers. Just before it began to take effect, a letter of May 1734 from Curll to his old antiquarian friend Richard Rawlinson shows him busy with a number of projects old and new which Rawlinson was curious about: Sr : I had ye favr . of yours, but am wholly a Stranger to what you mention as to poor Geo. Sewell’s Life, his Grave I can assure is Tombless nor do I know what more can be said of him than is in the Lives of the Poets. I should be glad to know where this Intelligence came from. His only generous friend Mr Goode of Kingston being Dead as well as He. As to Macky’s Characters, I printed it [them interlined ] and gave your Brother Tom’s widow 5 Guineas and 25 Books for the MS. I wrote to his son at Portsmouth who is the Editor. The Preface to it is my own, & founded upon Strict Truth. Old Sarum left 3 Volumes of his History wch archdeacon Echard assured me he had seen, but how they come to be reduced to 2 Squire Thomas best knows. The Supplement will not be out till Winter and when it appears it will a little surprize the Public. I request you to have an Ear towards any Materials that may be of use, and I have a second request to make w.ch is that you would lend me Sewells Letter, w.ch he wrote against Burnet for I have not a Copy left, but know you have them in your Etonian Repository. Whenever Covent Garden falls in your Way, pray let me see you who am on all occasions Y.rs to Comd E Curll.66

As we saw in the last chapter, Rawlinson had certainly resumed contact with Curll by 1728. The two seem also to have been involved in The History of . . . Sir John Perrott in that year and Rawlinson is most likely the ‘Gentleman late of St. John’s’ who contributed to Curll’s The Clarendon-Family Vindicated (1732).67 While the series Anglia Illustrata appears to have finally dropped from the radar, Curll was still actively publishing antiquarian and historical material: Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Laici and Hydriotaphia (with a plate dedicated to Sloane) came out in 1736, with dire warnings to ‘beware of a paltry, piratical Edition of this Book, impos’d upon the Publick . . . full of gross Blunders in almost every Page, and loaded with silly Notes, wholly useless . . .’; Curll, by contrast, could produce Sloane and Rawlinson to testify that he was ‘acting

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by Direction of the Family’.68 Thomas Hearne (who was also quoted in The Clarendon-Family Vindicated ) had continued to track and traduce Curll on all occasions and Curll evidently knew enough of this to respond in kind.69 When Hearne died (in June 1735, during the controversy over Pope’s letters) Curll began advertising for materials for a biography (GEP, 26 June 1735). One of the antiquarian’s closest friends was John Loveday of Caversham, near Reading; Hearne had written to him in 1729 to express surprise that Browne Willis had spoken well of Curll given that Willis had often criticized Curll’s antiquarian books. Loveday grew anxious when he saw what Curll was threatening, in part because John Bilstone, the chaplain of All Souls, had written against Hearne in 1731 and might have contemplated further revenge now that Hearne could no longer answer him.70 Loveday wrote to Curll on 30 June. As you intend to publish the Life of that eminent Antiquary, Mr Thomas Hearne, it is to be wished that it might be compleat and just; not in that Manner in which it was set out about four years ago by a Chaplain of All-Souls College, which was intended rather as a sneer upon Mr Hearne than to give us an impartial Account of his Life and Writings.

Curll asked Loveday to contribute something about his friend, but this he declined in a second letter, saying he had promised not to do so. He hoped that Curll would do Hearne honour and that nothing trifling or injurious would be handed to the world. Two days later, on 10 July, he wrote again, in a further attempt to block Curll: As to the Gentleman’s Character you intend to attack, I must desire to be excused, if I don’t concern myself. He is dead, and has answered elsewhere, and how far his Censures are just, I know not; he cannot now defend himself, De Mortuis, nil nisi bonum. As to the Gentleman to whom the MSS are left, I will not encourage you, or any Body, to apply to him. By the W, you’ll find he had Directions from the Testator as to that Affair, and he is a man of too nice Honour not to strictly adhere to them; so that all manner of Application, there, will be ineffectual . . . .

By November of that year, the inaptly-titled Impartial Memoirs of Hearne ‘by several hands’ had appeared, complete with an engraved picture of Hearne in his study, surrounded by the notorious lines on Wormius ‘in Closet close y-pent’ from The Dunciad. In need of text, as usual, Curll published the correspondence with Loveday (without naming him), adding a note to say that far from being a sneer Bilstone’s account had contained many judicious remarks and was a full detection of ‘Our Antiquary’s gross Errors’. As for Loveday, ‘Our Correspondent . . . is very tenacious of the Antiquary’s Character. We hope he will not find any Thing mean, trifling, or injurious; unless doing justice may be mistakenly so deemed’.71 Hearne’s non-juring politics received prominent mention, and Curll’s defence of Walter Moyle against Hearne is once more reprinted. The pamphlet, though available separately, was also stitched in to the third volume of Pope’s Literary Correspondence, with perhaps the faint justification

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that it quotes Pope fairly widely. But by now Curll had given up even pretending that there was a conventional logic to his use of Pope’s name: it had become the new ‘Altar of Love’, a catch-all title. Pope made Curll the unwitting publisher of an edition of private correspondence; Curll’s hostile interpretation of that covert invitation was to make Pope synonymous with textual production of any kind. Curll was his undifferentiating bookseller: a version of harmony, for one of them at least.

14 Gold from Dirt (1737–1742) As he aged, Curll found his life growing no more placid or respectable. He had now reached his mid-fifties, but all ideas of retirement had again receded from his mind. True, things did calm down after the mad frenzy of 1735 and 1736, with their repeated public brawls over the matter of Pope’s letters. The year 1737 displays a considerably slower pace in publishing and advertising. Only a few new books came out in the next three years, and hardly any advertisements have been recovered. This affords a strong contrast to the Napoleonic scale of publicity in 1735–6. Perhaps Curll suffered an illness; perhaps he had financial troubles; perhaps he was affected by the death of his son. At any rate, the survival rate for the books of his last years drops much lower than that for those of his first decade, a fact which implies lower initial print runs. In several cases it has proved impossible to locate copies of books advertised by Curll. Others exist only with earlier title pages, suggesting that he was reduced to advertising as ‘new’ certain older books from stock which he did not even bother to dress up with a cancel title page. Many of the things he issued took the form of straight reprints, or bundles of old pamphlets under a collective title page. Despite this Curll did contrive to maintain a schedule of new publications at a more relaxed gait: his annual output slowed to ten or even fewer items, until a renewed surge in 1740 and 1741 carried the total up to thirty or so a year. He started to issue catalogues again, and acquired some valuable new property at auctions. The bookseller still had unfinished business with his old antagonists, most importantly a struggle over the correspondence between Pope and Swift, which led in the end to a ground-breaking legal case. Besides this, he had not abandoned the quest for sexually titillating materials. Late in his career Curll found one of his most appetizing works in this genre, which sold and sold. A New Description of Merryland went through a rapid series of editions in 1740–2, and must have provided the publisher with a timely nest-egg for his old age. G E N U I N E TO M E S It was never likely that Curll would give up on the struggle against Pope without a fight, especially as he still claimed his action in the House of Lords as a ‘victory’. In November 1738 he brought out an abridged translation by Charles

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Forman of the Commentary on the Essay on Man by the Swiss writer Jean-Pierre de Crousaz in a short duodecimo volume. For a time Crousaz made something of a figure in the intellectual world on the basis of his critique of Pope, and Elizabeth Carter and Samuel Johnson both undertook translations. However, Curll’s version does not seem to have sold well, since it reappeared as part of a multi-part compendium, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, By the Honourable Lady Margaret Pennyman, issued in 1740. Following the appearance of Pope’s One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight (better known today as the first dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires), a sequel called One Thousand Seven Hundred Thirty Nine was published by ‘J. Cooper, in Fleet Street’, the latest in a long line of Curllian masks. The poem, which came out in November 1739, proves to be a political satire only briefly relating to Pope: it focuses more on the opposition between Bolingbroke and Walpole (see Guerinot, 278–9). Equally The Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian, &. (July 1740) aims its fire chiefly at Cibber’s recent Apology for his own life, thus reviving an old quarrel. The book has no more than passing references to Curll’s old adversary, indicting Alexander Pope of Twickenham, Esq. ‘for not exerting his Talents at this Juncture’. Within a couple of years Pope would provide a conclusive answer to this charge, when he cast Cibber as king of dunces in the revised Dunciad.1 In this publication Curll had several partners, the most noteworthy being a neighbour in Covent Garden and a former antagonist, William Lewis. Another of Curll’s long-term opponents, Henry Fielding, returned to the fray in the summer of 1740. His journal The Champion had already identified One Thousand Seven Hundred Thirty Nine, the riposte just mentioned, as Curll’s, despite the name ‘J. Cooper’ on the title-page. On 1 July the paper contained an attack on an unmistakable target: ‘Posterity may possibly doubt whether there ever existed an impudent Bookseller, who kept Grubstreet Scriblers at his own Expence in a Garret, to traduce the Reputations of the best Men, and the Writings of the greatest Authors of his Time.’ Six weeks later came a further broadside, harking back to old events and old nicknames: ‘The Case of Kirlœus, who was convicted at some Court at Westminster for stealing certain Latin Poems, the Property of some Westminster Scholars, for which the said Kirlœus had Judgment to be whipt ’till his B–ch was bloody, which Sentence was executed with such exemplary Rigour, that he became hopper br-ch’d ever after.’2 Fielding’s anger had been raised by the illicit use of some Champion papers in The Trial of Colley Cibber, Comedian, together with some choice Curllian addenda—notably the idea that Fielding should acknowledge himself the author of eighteen ‘strange things’ called tragical comedies and comical tragedies. A more discreet man might have called off hostilities at this point, but neither Curll nor Fielding ever earned high marks for discretion. We could recall, too, that the heroine of Shamela (1741) has a copy of Venus in the Cloister among her few possessions. In 1739, partly through the agency of Pope, one of Swift’s finest poems made its belated appearance, several years after the Dean first composed it. Security

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arrangements had proved effective in the case of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, and Curll did not manage to obtain an advance copy of the full poem, though he might have guessed what lay store for him. Once again the Scriblerians had impaled their victim with merciless precision: Now Curl his Shop from Rubbish drains; Three genuine Tomes of Swift’s Remains. And then to make them pass the glibber, Revis’d by Tibbalds, Moore and Cibber. He’ll treat me as he does my Betters. Publish my Will, my Life, my Letters. Revive the Libels born to dye; Which P must bear, as well as I.

Of course, Swift had never really quarrelled with Theobald, Moore Smythe or Cibber, who figured rather in Pope’s battles. However, the Dean had his own long-standing issues with Curll, and the notes do not spare him: ‘Curl hath been the most infamous Bookseller of any Age or Country: His Character in Part may be found in Mr. P’s Dunciad. He published three Volumes all charged on the Dean, who never writ three Pages of them: He hath used many of the Dean’s Friends in almost as vile a Manner.’ Actually, the comment about the volumes of miscellanies was not strictly true, but Curll could only rebut it by acknowledging the clandestine manner in which he obtained authentic manuscripts. Another note reads, ‘Curl is notoriously infamous for publishing the Lives, Letters, and last Wills and Testaments of the Nobility and Ministers of State, as well as of all the Rogues, who are hanged at Tyburn.’ (As we have seen, Curll took little interest in the last category of publication.) Then the annotator moves on to cite Curll’s criminal record in excruciating detail: ‘He hath been in Custody of the House of Lords for publishing or forging the Letters of many Peers; which made the Lords enter a Resolution in their Journal Book, that no Life or Writings of any Lord should be published without the Consent of the next Heir at Law, or Licence from their House.’3 Despite their occasional scepticism about the operations of the law, the Scriblerians delighted in reminding the public of Curll’s judicial humiliations. For his part Curll had a small retaliatory gesture in reserve. In 1740 he brought out an early work by Swift, disguised in the usual obfuscating fashion. The book in question was named Dean Swift’s True, Genuine, and Authentic Copy of that most Strange, Wonderful, and Surprizing Prophecy Written by Saint Patrick, Translated from the Irish Original in the reign of K. Henry VII. Now Publish’d with Explanatory Notes. The Second Edition. As for the imprint, this ran ‘Dublin printed, by W. Faulkener. Reprinted at London, by E. Curll’. Almost everything about this title-page would mislead a potential buyer, apart from the ascription to the Dean. In fact it is a concealed reprint of A Famous Prediction of Merlin, the British Wizard, written by Swift under the sobriquet of ‘T. N. Philomath’ at

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the time of the Bickerstaff hoaxes in 1708. No bookseller called ‘W. Faulkener’ operated in Dublin, and George Faulkner had not produced an edition—though Abigail Baldwin, who sometimes worked with Curll at the start of his career, had done so long ago. Perhaps the publisher thought he owned some rights in the poem, which had surfaced again in the Pope–Swift Miscellanies. After the prophecy in this new volume came William Walsh’s Hospital of Fools, which carried its own bibliographical baggage. It had first appeared as Aesculapius, a Lucianic dialogue set at the head of Poems and Translations by Several Hands (1714), one of the very first documents in the case of Pope versus Curll. Some old ghosts were stirred into life as the shadows closed in on the two men. Others in the world of literature had not forgotten the bookseller’s offences. As we saw in Chapter 6, Richard Savage recalled to Elizabeth Carter in 1739 how Curll had once tried to foment a quarrel between Savage and Richard Steele. The two authors reconciled in due course, small thanks to Curll. Meanwhile the bookseller still had an eye for a good deal. As his diary reveals, the antiquarian William Stukeley saw to it that the papers of a surgeon and antiquarian named William Becket, who died on 25 November 1738, were bought back from Curll.4 A series of Becket publications including A Collection of Chirugical Tracts (1740), appeared as ‘printed for’ Curll but sold by eight leading members of the trade, headed by Thomas Longman. A similar team marketed Practical Surgery Illustrated and Improved in the same year, dedicated to the great scientific impresario, Sir Hans Sloane: appended to some copies is a fifteen-page catalogue, Bibliotheca Beckettiana: or, The Small but Curious Library of Books collected by Mr. William Beckett, Sold at Reasonable Rates, by E. Curll. Typically for Curll’s ambivalent manner of business, the respectable-looking surgical tracts included a work by ‘Luke Ogle’, entitled The Natural Secret History of both Sexes: or, A Modest Defense of Public Stews. With an Account of the Present State of Whoring in these Kingdoms, with a dedication to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners signed Philo-Porney. This work, originally published by ‘A. Moore’ in 1724, may or may not be the work of Bernard Mandeville.5 In spite of this inclusion, the bookseller had made a fairly concerted effort to clean up the medical list, even if A Collection of Chirugical Tracts did include a work on venereal disease. The Collection also contains letters from Curll to the dedicatee Sloane, who is credited with commanding Curll to put the book out. Apparently a proposed edition of lives of the British physicians in two volumes was shelved, and the material from Beckett due to appear there went instead to Dr Edward Milward for his Universal History of Physic (which never emerged). Of course, this is all Curll trying to sound serious and worthy. In 1740 he also republished an old war-horse, Francis Fuller’s Medicina Gymnastica, in praise of exercise, and here he advertised all the Becket material, along with New Discoveries and Improvements in the most considerable Branches of Anatomy and Surgery, by Alexander Stuart (‘printed for the author’, 1738).

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The year 1739 saw the publication of Bibliotheca Recondita: or a Collection of Curious Private Pieces; Some of which Great Endeavours have been used To Conceal from Public View, two volumes supposedly printed ‘by the Direction of a Society, for the Encouragement of Learning’. With calculated vagueness the title-page specifies ‘a’ society, not the society of this name currently active in the public sphere. The declared aim of the series is to rescue books which have been censored or suppressed by arbitrary authorities. Fundamentally, however, the volume contains a lot of the old political, legal, and sexual material, with the title-pages extracted, although it does ingeniously feature a letter in praise of Ker’s Memoirs. The named editor, John Chambers of Hereford, might be a mythical cousin of Ephraim Chambers, who had produced the highly successful Cyclopedia (1728; second edition, 1738). An advertisement in other volumes retails predictable news from the Society that ‘Mr. Curl . . . is appointed our Bookseller’. Slivers of correspondence remain to show that Curll had lost little of his importunate energy. In September 1738 he wrote to the historical compiler Thomas Birch about publishing the works of an unnamed author, confident in his opinion that Birch ‘would readily accept’ the proposal.6 We know nothing more of this project: Birch, a confirmed joiner who had a finger in many pies, may have wished to keep his distance from the highly individualistic Curll. The veteran had never shown any inclination to join cooperative organisations and he remained outside the activities of the Stationers’ Company. He did not align himself with the ‘Conger’ or association of booksellers, who came together to share the costs on expensive works from the late seventeenth century onwards, although he would occasionally enter a joint enterprise on an ad hoc basis. For the bulk of his career, the most he did was to act from time to time in concert with a limited number of colleagues, especially where a lot of capital was tied up on elaborate antiquarian books. On the other hand Birch liked to get involved in big projects, especially reference books: he was a leading contributor to General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, published in ten volumes between 1734 and 1741. Two years later, Curll wrote a somewhat fussy letter of introduction to Sir Hans Sloane, on behalf of Robert Pearce, vice-principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.7 Memories of an earlier dispute were stirred at the end of the decade. Curll planned an edition of the poems of Edward Young, who had tangled with him over twenty years before. Young had yet to emerge as a major literary property, something that would come after the success of Night Thoughts (1742–5). But Curll had already published some of Young’s earlier poems, which doubtless counted as excuse enough to claim rights over the whole, at any rate in the bookseller’s mind. When the two volumes of The Poetical Works of Edward Young, LL.D. appeared in January 1741, the title-page carried a who’s who of the leading London publishers, with the legend, ‘Printed for Messieurs Curll, Tonson, Walthoe, Hitch, Gilliver, Browne, Jackson, Corbett, Lintot and

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Pemberton’. But the initiative this time clearly lay with Curll. Two years earlier he had entered into correspondence with an understandably nervous Young, who gave him clearance but declined to carry out any revisions. In the dedication of the Works to Lord Carpenter, Curll printed a letter from Young to this effect, but as usual he had improved on sober reality. The supposed letter had been cobbled together from three separate messages Young sent him.8

D I V E RT I N G A N D D E F R AU D I N G T H E TOW N At this juncture the simmering battle between Curll and Pope boiled over once more. A volume of New Letters dated 1737 amounts to a recast version of the fifth volume of the Literary Correspondence. It contained some of the habitual braggadocio: The Controversy between  and Mr. P will never be ended till the Eyes of one of Us are closed (I mean by Death, not by [the oculist] Dr. Taylor) if Mine are open longest, to the last Volume of Literary Correspondence shall be prefixed A faithful Account of Mr. P’s Life and Writings, with a true Copy of His Last Will and Testament, if he makes one.9

The comments here come from a prefatory announcement, taking the form of a dedication ‘To my subscribers encore’, and dated 5 November 1736. In the event, the bookseller was not able to do quite as much as he hoped. This time the major episode hinged on the correspondence between Pope and Swift, a portion of which Curll had been able to obtain. For a summary of the complicated background we can turn to George Sherburn: Curll brought out a pamphlet called New Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, which contained a letter from Pope to Swift and another from Bolingbroke to Swift . . . . Curll’s prefatory address . . . contained a statement perfectly adapted to Pope’s purposes: ‘Beside what is here represented to you, I have several other very valuable originals in my custody, which, with these, were transmitted to me from Ireland ’. Similarly, Curll in The London Evening Post, 11 November 1736, had advertised that his volume of New Letters (it seems to have consisted of sixty pages) printed the letters to Swift from ‘original manuscripts transmitted from Ireland’. Armed with this evidence that his letters, if they remained in Ireland, were in danger of publication by undesirables, Pope redoubled his efforts to persuade Swift to return them. (Corr, i. xvi)

In truth, of course, Pope meant to include these letters in a collection of his own he was planning. His disingenuous explanation, a few years later, ran along these lines: ‘Upon what had happen’d to me from the famous Curll, and upon finding one or two Letters of Lord Bolingbrokes & mine to the Dean, in print, which could have come out only thro’ his channel, I prest him to destroy or return me the rest, if he had kept any’ (Corr, iv. 263). Calmly, Swift had assured Pope that there was no chance the publisher could lay hands on letters he had received,

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and in any case he had formed an intention at one point to commit them to the flames. Later Swift indicated he might return letters Pope had written him, but he teased his friend with delays, knowing how this would rile Pope in his anxiety to bring out a major edition of his correspondence. In 1737 Pope came to arrangement by which he would get the letters thanks to the help of Lord Orrery, a common friend and later Swift’s biographer, and by 23 July the transfer had been made (see Corr, iv. 54, 59–60, 263). The Earl had formed his own view of Curll, as emerges from his letter to Swift on 18 March 1737: ‘I likewise send you part of a fifth Volume of Curl’s Thefts, in which you’l find two Letters to You (One from Mr Pope the Other from Lord Bolingbroke) just publish’d with an impudent Preface by Curl. You see, Curl like his Freind the Devil glides thro’ all Key holes, and thrusts himself into the most private Cabinets’ (Corr, iv. 60). Others had made the same comparison. In these transactions a key role belonged to Martha Whiteway, a first cousin once removed of the Dean, who had increasingly taken over the management of his affairs in Dublin. For the next few years Martha retained a strong influence over the fate of her cousin’s highly marketable manuscripts. However, the Dublin bookseller Faulkner alarmed Pope in 1740 by suggesting that he would shortly publish the letters (possibly transcripts which Swift had authorized, unknown to Pope). Immediately Pope sent a reply through a mysterious undercover agent, and succeeded in getting Faulkner to desist from his project, as the publisher subsequently informed Orrery, using the slightly thin excuse that Pope ‘had been ill-used by Curll and other booksellers’ (Corr, iv. 270–1). Yet a small portion had in fact been printed off, and the edition would ultimately go ahead. Meanwhile, Pope had engineered the first printing of these famous letters in April 1741. Again, the easiest way to convey what happened is to draw on Sherburn’s encapsulation of events: When selection and revision of the correspondence was completed, Pope printed secretly an edition in small octavo, one copy of which he circuitously sent to Swift by the agency of Samuel Gerrard, who, shortly before he was leaving for Ireland, received from an anonymous sender at his lodgings in Bath a packet for Swift with an unsigned letter inside. Pope was not in Bath at the time. This was in May or June of 1740, just after Pope had . . . covered his tracks by writing to Gerrard that he had nothing to send to Swift. Rather promptly Swift must have set to work making some small revisions in the volume and one major insertion . . . . Mrs. Whiteway protested against the publication, but she cannot have concealed the volume (as she said she did) for long, since by 29 July Faulkner with Swift’s permission had begun to reprint the letters and sent off to Pope the first two sheets as printed by him.

Naturally the hidden agent had to conceal his true feelings: Pope pretended extreme amazement and chagrin, and protested strongly against publication, affecting to wonder that it should be undertaken by desire of Swift. His pretences almost succeeded in stopping the edition; but, tactfully, he did not go so far as that. His willingness to cast false blame upon Mrs. Whiteway and her son-in-law Deane Swift is

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the most discreditable part of the whole evasion; but the blame got no public attention. Pope saw to it that his London edition of the correspondence, called The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope in Prose, vol. ii, appeared just before the Dublin editions, thus protecting his copyright—from all except Curll. (Corr, i. xvii–xviii)

In this welter of deception and bluff, predictably blame was laid at the convenient door of Curll, yet the wily bookseller saw the chance to make a coup.10 The outcome was one of his most interesting volumes, entitled Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence, For Twenty-four Years, from 1714 to 1738, issued on 30 May 1741 (Griffiths, 534, Sherburn’s ‘1741 Lb’). Curll would claim that he had followed the Dublin edition, a mere ruse to blur copyright issues, when in fact he took his edition from the one published at Pope’s behest, that is The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, In Prose. Vol. II. (Faulkner’s Dublin edition was not even out yet.) The title-page carries its usual blandishments, with a promise of letters to and from Gay, Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot, Atterbury, and others—a sign that the old hand was as lavish and cunning as ever. In the preliminaries Curll asserts that the Dublin printing constitutes ‘Lawful Prize here’, a claim which, as we shall see, the Lord Chancellor would shortly invalidate. He goes on: Mr. Pope’s mean Artifice of tacking eight O Pieces and  New one, for the Sake of a Guinea, or even Half-a-one, is scandalously mean, and may be thus justly reprehended: P will at length, we hope, his Errors own, ’Tis C diverts, but P defrauds the Town. The false Charge, relating to the Publication of Mr. P’s L by Mr. C, are herein fully refuted, and the Calumny is despised.11

As well as the full gamut of correspondence, Curll contrived yet again to supply an additional scoop: he printed at the end Pope’s epitaph on himself (‘Under this marble’), which had previously seen only one fugitive appearance in a weekly magazine. This follows a totally irrelevant space-filler, namely a friendly letter to the bookseller from the coast of Guinea by David Crichton, dating back to 1737 (Crichton inquires after Pope’s letters and floats a possible book about his travels). Another filler would get Curll into hot water once more, when he printed Dr Arbuthnot’s attack on John Woodward, ‘A Philosophico-Critical History of the Deluge’. Later the doctor’s son George claimed in Chancery that this had infringed his father’s copyright (see below, p. 290). In annotating the main correspondence Curll takes the opportunity offered to get back at his tormentor, especially when his own name crops up in the letters. Naturally he delivers other blows, on the basis he always favoured that the best form of defence is attack: N .B. Four Letters . . . being printed in Mr. P’s Literary Correspondence, Volume the Fifth, we have omitted them here, that the Purchaser might not buy them twice; according to Mr. Pope’s Practice of re-printing a Heap of Old Pamphlets and News Papers joined to these Letters.

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The Irish Editor owns, That Mr. C first obliged the Public with Dr. S’s and Lord B’s Letters abovementioned, but with an equal Impudence and Ignorance calls them Stolen Copies. This is so far from True, that we know they were given to Mr. C by a Peer of the first Rank . . . Verum est. E.C.12

In contests of name-calling, Curll rarely yielded ground to anyone. On some points the bookseller could set the record straight. Annotating a comment by Swift that his letters ‘escaped being Published, because I writ nothing but Nature and Friendship’, the publisher let loose a sharp volley in riposte: ‘This is all Pretence! Mr. Curll bought Mr. Pope’s Letters of an Agent, ready printed.’13 So he probably did, even if the intermediary was an agent of the poet himself—something Swift did not know, and Pope did not wish him to know. The volume retailed at five shillings bound, considerably cheaper than the authorized version, and may have sold well. However, its ultimate interest hinges less on its contents as such than on the major case in copyright law to which it immediately gave rise. I N C H A N C E RY The Chancery suit of Pope v. Curll (1741) holds great significance on a number of different levels. It remains a leading case in English law as the first important test regarding copyright in personal letters.14 In fact, Lord Hardwicke’s judgment constituted one of the first major interpretations in court of the celebrated Copyright Act of 1710. Additionally, the suit provides evidence of Pope’s increasing willingness to go to the law in his final years—a development which may be associated with his friendship with William Murray (the future Lord Mansfield), his counsel in this instance.15 Most obviously, it affords yet another chapter in the continuing battle with Curll. On one occasion, as we have seen, the bookseller had threatened to have recourse to ‘a Legal Remedy’ against Pope or his agents (Corr, iii. 476), but only at this late stage did Pope deign to apply to the courts for redress. The episode throws a little light on the complex publishing history of the letters of Pope and Swift, and it offers a number of bibliographical clues regarding Curll’s methods and scale of operation. Regrettably Straus did not mention the case, nor does it appear in the extensive collections of W. J. Thoms, while none of Pope’s biographers describes it. The Lord Chancellor’s judgment is found in Atkins’s reports (1781) and has been abstracted by biographers of Hardwicke.16 Subsequently Harry Ransom used the report in his valuable article, ‘The Personal Letter as Literary Property’, and assessed the importance of this judgment in the history of copyright.17 Ransom’s coverage of the matter is admirable, but it rests wholly on a printed version of the decision by Hardwicke. However, Pope’s original bill of complaint, drawn up by Murray, survives, as does Curll’s reply.18 These give a more detailed picture of the issues at stake. Mark Rose provides a complete transcript in his book on copyright, along with some excellent analysis.19

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In a letter to Ralph Allen dated 14 May 1741, Pope refers obliquely to the episode. George Sherburn annotates the letter as follows: Pope perhaps foresees the probability of a suit in Chancery against Curll for pirating the Swift–Pope letters. The suit was entered on 4 June, Curll’s answer was sworn on the 14th; and the Chancellor on the 17th laid down the revolutionary decision (made for the first time in the Pope v. Curll suit) ‘that a letter is not a gift to the receiver, and that he has no right to publish it’ . . . Since Curll’s piracy is not now a really rare book, one assumes that its sale went on.

A few pages later, Sherburn offers a number of reasons for dating a letter to Allen (headed 14 June by Pope) ‘[14 July 1741]’. One of these concerns Pope’s observation in the letter: That Rascal Curl has pyrated the Letters, which would have ruin’d half my Edition, but we have got an Injunction from my Lord Chancellor to prohibit his selling them for the future, tho doubtless he’l do it clandestinely.

Sherburn comments that Pope’s Chancery suit ‘was decided 17 June, and the injunction mentioned could not antedate 14 June’.20 Although this is inaccurate in two minor particulars, Sherburn’s dating of the letter may none the less be correct. Actually, Curll swore his reply on 13 June, and not 14 June. Moreover, it is clear from what he says that an injunction had already been obtained before this time. In his plea he asks the court to have the injunction lifted. A copy of the original document survives, dated 6 June.21 The decision by Hardwicke on 17 June simply embodied a refusal to dissolve the injunction, as requested by the defendant: in effect, he renewed it as the plaintiff wished. Curll’s plea makes it apparent that, ostensibly anyway, he had bowed to the terms of the injunction. He had been ‘stayed in the sale’ after disposing of only sixteen copies out of 500 printed. Perhaps, as Pope surmised, he went on distributing the edition by clandestine means. But Sherburn’s argument from the present-day situation is not wholly clinching: the court would make no order for the physical destruction or impounding of the books, something Pope had suggested to Fortescue at a similar juncture in 1735 (above, Chapter 13; Corr, iii. 472–3). Curll ceased to advertise the edition, as far as we know. Possibly the books survived because he left them safely in a warehouse and sold them off, months or years later, as remaindered stock. At the heart of the suit lies the publication of Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence for Twenty-Four Years. As we have seen, ‘Curll announced this as a reprint of the Dublin edition [by Faulkner], but actually he reprinted the London quarto [by Knapton, Bathurst and Dodsley]’ (Corr, i. xxiv). In the preface Curll made much of his title to the work: It is well known, that the Dublin Edition of these Letters is Lawful-Prize here, and whatever we print is the same there. The safe hand to whom Dean Swift delivered them, conveyed

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them safely to Us; so that all Pretences of sending a Young Peer to go in Search of them, or the Attempts of an Old Woman to suppress them, was arrant Trifling.22

Unfortunately, the major contention is false. But in any case the decision in Chancery would establish that the supposed common law right was a myth; and Curll’s reference in his bill to ‘the Practice of Booksellers in both Kingdoms’ availed him nothing. It seems odd that Pope did not seek to demonstrate that the material was reprinted from the London edition, but presumably he had not realized that fact. In the event, this aspect of the case proved inconsequential. One other small anomaly deserves notice. The dates of the letters, as laboriously cited in the bills, correspond of course to those given by Pope, whether imperfectly remembered or concocted. Thus, to take a single example among many, the letter dated in his bill of complaint 14 April 1730 was so located in the printed editions; but, as Sherburn shows, it must date from around 4 March of that year. In an age when the law was particularly literal-minded, it seems probable that Curll would have greatly strengthened his case if in his reply he had been able to point out these inaccuracies; but of course he could not. Such technicalities then carried a lot of weight.23 We can now look briefly at the main contentions on either side. Pope’s bill of complaint alludes to the provisions of the Copyright Act (8 Anne, c. 19) and specifically to the first section. He claims protection not only for his own letters, but also for those addressed to him by Swift. Further, he contends that Curll was well aware of the true ownership of the title. He asserts that he has no redress through common law and must consequently appeal to the court of equity. He asks for Curll and his unknown associates to be interrogated as to what arrangements they have made and what profits have accrued. Pope’s bill also requests that Curll should reveal how many copies of the book remain unsold in his possession. Such measures turn up in a routine, even formulaic, manner whenever cases regarding copyright come before Chancery. The plaintiff seeks no specific penalties beyond a restraint on further distribution. Finally, Pope asks through his advocate that Curll be summoned by writ to answer the charges. There is no mention of the Irish printing. Curll replied with a mixture of bluster, injured innocence, and shrewd calculation—the qualities we find in his work at large. Much of the time he simply pleads ignorance: he does not know whether Pope has sold his copyright to anyone, and so on. He argues that the letters sent to Pope were ‘not to be Considered’ as the recipient’s property. Additionally, he contends that such letters did not amount to ‘a work of that Nature’ for which protection had been afforded by the Copyright Act. Whilst he never had any express licence to print the letters in dispute, he is advised that he could legally do so, as they had been first printed in Dublin by Faulkner. Curll further points out that one-third of the book consists of material written by other authors (Atterbury, Arbuthnot, et al.),

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the rights to which he had obtained through gift or purchase. Naturally he denies unlawful confederacy, as charged by Pope, and refuses to supply details of publishing arrangements or profits. He reveals that he had only 500 copies printed, of which he claims to have sold a mere sixteen. Finally, Curll asks to have the suit dismissed and to be allowed to continue the sale of the book. He had produced a somewhat confused defence, but not in every respect an insubstantial one.24 Since both Ransom and Rose have cited the Lord Chancellor’s judgment, we need dwell on it here. In outline, Hardwicke rejected one ground of Curll’s defence totally, whilst he declined to accept another, though with some qualification. He observed that it would be mischievous if letters passing between the learned should have no protection whatsoever from an Act designed ‘for the encouragement of learning’, and instanced sermons as a possibly analogous case. He considered the view that a letter is to be regarded as a gift to the receiver; but concluded that sending conferred partial ownership at most. The law might perhaps look on the actual paper on which the missive was written as an outright gift; but this did not carry with it freedom to publish the letter. The Lord Chancellor reviewed Curll’s assertion that it was lawful to reprint material which had appeared in Ireland. He decided against this, too, on the grounds that an unscrupulous pirate could simply arrange to publish material in Ireland, and would then be free to bring it out in England, with no redress possible.25 Finally, he met the objection that letters on familiar subjects do not strictly constitute ‘learned works’ with the assertion that such works may none the less be of great service and value to the world. He even ventured into something like literary criticism: ‘For I must confess, for my own part, that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little worth any person’s reading.’ Ransom calls this ‘paradoxical’: some might see the whole argument as sophistical, especially in view of Pope’s careful doctoring of his correspondence.26 But Pope got most of what he wanted. The Lord Chancellor accepted Curll’s plea that Pope had no title to the letters addressed to him. For the rest, the injunction was continued, and the edition as it stood effectively prohibited.27 As it turned out, Pope obtained more satisfaction from this legal encounter than he did from many bouts with Curll, in life and in books. An important legal principle was laid down, but more than that Pope, who had earlier abjured the law, found that he could bring even so slippery a customer as Curll to order with its aid. The incident formed part of the professionalized way of life to which Pope committed himself in his later career.28 Understandably, when the verdict was announced, there was a hint of triumph in his letter to Ralph Allen (quoted on p. 286 above). The poet died in May 1744, but there remained a posthumous court battle, which scholars have overlooked up till now. On 19 November following, an

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action in Chancery was brought by the poet’s executors, Lord Bathurst, the Earl of Marchmont, William Murray and George Arbuthnot, along with his literary executor William Warburton. Pope’s will, proved on 14 June, had named all of them.29 In a long repetitive bill, the plaintiffs set out their case against Curll for breaching the rights in An Essay on Man, now held by Warburton. They complain more than once that the bookseller, together with his colleagues James Hodges and Esther Palmer, has offended against the Copyright Act of 1710. They seek the usual disclosures and undertakings from the defendants, with a view to suppressing publication. Murray signed the bill, although George Arbuthnot almost certainly took a leading role. The doctor’s son, who had become a lawyer, showed himself assiduous in policing Pope’s works, at the same time as he maintained a close contact with the book trade. On 6 December Curll swore his own reply, much shorter and more interesting, as he engaged in his usual game of bluff and denial. He claims he does not know if Warburton truly had permission from Pope in his lifetime to reprint works, as the bill claims. Further, he states that it is usual for booksellers to print all saleable and inoffensive books offered to them—indeed the whole trade depends on it. Curll bought ‘some few’ copies from Lawton Gilliver, presumably ordinary trade editions published in Pope’s lifetime, ‘to serve his customers’. He has not seen bought or sold any surreptitious edition, or any version edited by Warburton. In short, he has not produced any clandestine editions, he does not deny Pope’s rights, and he does not contest Warburton’s actions—he just hasn’t done anything wrong really, and doesn’t understand what rights Warburton has. He asks for the suit to be dismissed and, naturally, for his costs to be paid.30 The action supposedly relates to the text of the Essay on Man edited by Warburton from Pope’s last revisions (Griffith, 589). However, it is impossible to identify the offending piracy which the plaintiffs alleged to have occurred. None of the three booksellers specified in the suit brought out an edition of the Essay under his or her own name. Several illegitimate editions had appeared, such as one by ‘J. Witford’ in 1736 (probably this is what Curll was advertising in May of that year, as in Griffith, 420). A version also containing the ‘Life and Genuine Character of Dr. Swift’ came out in the same year: this was allegedly published in Dublin and resold by the booksellers of London and Westminster—generally a mark of piracy. Obviously, these items could not have used the new materials provided by Warburton. So far as we can judge, Curll never advertised an edition which fits the terms set out in the legal bill. Hodges was a well-established member of the trade, operating from a shop on London Bridge, although he worked only very rarely with Curll, as in the sixth edition of The Compleat Gamester in 1739 and Becket’s Tracts (1740). On the other hand the name of Esther Palmer never appears in imprints of the period, and she may have operated purely as a retail bookseller or even a mercury.31 On the face of it, Curll would

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seem to have had a strong case, but his prevaricating answer leads to a suspicion that something really did lie behind the plaintiffs’ claim. One other case, equally overlooked, has now come to light, linking Curll with the Scriblerians. Again it involved George Arbuthnot as legatee of his father, Pope’s friend the doctor. On 30 June 1741 he brought an action against the bookseller concerning an infringement of his rights in Philosophico-Critical History of the Deluge (1741). Curll had published this work by means of a degutting operation on Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence, the notorious publication from the same year. This meant that it still contained John Arbuthnot’s ‘Examination of Dr. Woodward’s Account of the Deluge’. The plaintiff cites his father’s will, dated 5 November 1733, and quotes Curll’s advertisement for the work from the Daily Advertiser of 25 June 1741, which lists, in addition to the pieces by Arbuthnot and William Wotton some other ‘curious pieces’, including ‘A Letter to Lady Clifton’ by Barnham Goode. The advertisement also mentions other items to be had from Curll, entitled Spanish Italian and French Amusements, which are obviously made up volumes of translations. The bill asks for the usual examinations of defendant and his servants, as well as seeking the usual remedies and penalties in formulaic style. Again it is signed ‘W. Murray’. No response has emerged.32 However, a copy of the Deluge survives, bound with a new catalogue of Curll’s books, beginning with a modernized version of The Canterbury Tales. The old soldier had not yet allowed himself to fade away. Meanwhile Curll had found another mythical ally to advance his campaign. In 1745 he began to advertise [Thomas Gordon?], The Tryal of William Whiston, Clerk, evidently the book printed by ‘A Society for the Encouragement of Learning’ (see p. 281 above) and sold by ‘J. Cooper’ in 1740. This volume contains a list of Curll books at the end: and, almost as revealingly, it reprints Pope’s burlesque of the first Psalm—now a quarter of a century old. J. Cooper became a useful surrogate for Curll in this last phase: his shop was said to be located in Fleet Street, ‘where may be had All Mr. Pope’s Works’. Once more, the mysterious Cooper features on the title-page of A Primitive Discourse upon Prayer (1740) by Edward Johnson, but again the booklist at the end is Curll’s. More than two full pages of the list are taken up by a detailed description of the volumes of Pope’s Literary Correspondence, on the excuse that ‘The Public having been egregiously imposed on for four Years past, it is now thought proper to recite the particular Contents of these Volumes, to distinguish them from all pyratical and castrated Editions.’ The entry ends with a puff by a certain J. Gunston. As for this correspondence, ‘printed only for Mr. C’, it must be acknowledged that ‘we have not anything in our Language so entertaining and instructive. For herein is not only the History of Mr. Pope’ s Life, but also of his Writing.’ Curll did not go in much for understatement.

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V I S I TS TO M E R RY L A N D After more than thirty years in business, Curll enjoyed a spectacular late success with the Merryland series. These employed the tradition of learned wit to provide a guide to the female body under the cloak of a geographic survey. The works have always been attributed to one Thomas Stretser, or Stretzer, about whom simply nothing is known. This attribution rests mainly on two assignments of rights preserved among Curll’s financial documents (see Appendix 2). On 10 November 1740 the bookseller paid Stretser an unspecified sum for the opening volume in the series, the Description of Merryland. Almost a year later on 17 October 1741, the rights for a sequel, Merryland Display’d, were conveyed to the bookseller. Further information remains lacking, but we can be virtually sure that ‘Stretser’ was a pseudonym, though he had an address: the ‘Forrest Coffee house, Charing Cross’.33 Unquestionably he possessed some technical competence as a writer, with a good grounding in the classics, and a broad range of reading in contemporary literature and the sciences. A preface to the Description pretends that the manuscript derives from ‘Roger Pheuquewell, Esq.’, the scion of an ancient Irish family. According to this narrative, Pheuquewell came to London to seek his fortune, married a rich widow, and after losing his fortune retired to Boulogne, where he died on 19 April 1738 N.S. This was indeed a locality where ruined individuals commonly ended up: Curll’s old adversary Nathaniel Mist, who fled to Rouen in 1728, had died as recently as 20 September 1737, and according to press reports this event took place at Boulogne. However, Pheuquewell emerges more as a representative type than as the portrait of a real individual. The preface goes on to assert that the manuscript had been published in Paris by a friar and had then gone through six French editions; that it had been ushered into print by Don Juan Compostella il Tarragona at Madrid; and that an Italian version had been issued in 1739 by an eminent paragon. Further versions in Polish, Danish, German, and Dutch exist, too tedious (the writer claims) to enumerate. All this amounts to a mere sleight on the part of the publisher. In reality, the dodge is used to obscure the immediate source of the text by ‘Pheuquewell’, and to claim a spurious ‘authenticity’ for the English printing. We can associate Curll with four of the works on Merryland. The original item is A New Description of Merryland, first advertised in October 1740. The imprint reads, ‘Bath: printed for W. Jones, and sold by S. Lobb there, and by the booksellers of London and Westminster’. Curll nowhere shows his hand openly. By the end of the year a fourth edition was announced. Not until the fifth edition does the bookseller’s name appear in the formula, ‘Bath: printed: and sold there by J. Leak; and by E. Curll’. A similar form (with the name changed to the more usual ‘Leake’) is used for the sixth and seventh editions, advertised in June and

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October 1741 respectively (Straus, 310). All these from the outset had carried the date 1741. A putative reply, also by Stretser, followed, with the title Merryland Displayed: or, Plagiarism, Ignorance, and Impudence, Detected. Being Observations upon a Pamphlet Intituled A New Description of Merryland. This carried the imprint, ‘Bath: printed for the author, and sold by J. Leake; and the booksellers of London and Westminster’. It was published around 7 November 1741, with a second edition in due course, also dated 1741. The pamphlet contains several thrusts at Curll, accusing him of ‘downright CURLISM’ in adding a frontispiece to Merryland which was nothing other than the one used in Rowe’s Callipædia (1712). Another snide comment appears in this passage: The celebrated Mr Curll was thought the fittest Hand for that Purpose and, in all Probability, was the only one of his Profession who would undertake it. His eminent Ability and Industry in bringing Works of this Kind into the World, as well as his Art of nursing them afterwards, were so well known, that he was pitched on without Hesitation as the properest Person for this Jobb.

Another section intimates that Curll had tricked Fielding’s paper The Champion into puffing the New Description of Merryland; while another quotes Pope’s comment that Curll had been taken notice of by the state, the church, and the law, with the gloss, ‘It is pity but he should be taken Notice of again on this Occasion.’34 Additionally, the work gives a handsome compliment to a work named Scamnum (see below, p. 301). Curll doubtless shrugged off the criticism for the sake of this product placement. During this same year two editions also appeared of The Potent Ally: or Succours from Merryland, the first of them in January. This volume contained some poems apparently not by Stretser, as well as an older work attributed to Charles Cotton, Erotopolis: The Present State of Betty-land, first published in 1684. The title-page states that the book had been printed for the author at Paris; but the Gentleman’s Magazine lists Curll as the responsible party, and his advertisements figure at the end. In addition the Potent Ally contains Armour: An Imitation of the Splendid Shilling, by the Rev. Mr. Kennet, son of the Bishop of Peterborough (White Kennett, now dead for more than a decade, who had long ago tangled with Curll). ‘Armour’ here means a contraceptive. The poem mentions as a scene of intrigue and pick-ups the well-known Rose Tavern, in Covent Garden, which figures in criminal narratives of the period as often as any other location in London. Not for nothing did Hogarth have his rake commit his prime debaucheries here. One example out of scores from this era is provided by the trial at the Old Bailey in 1739 of James James, alias Jemmy the Drummer, for the theft of a silver sword outside Covent Garden theatre. A witness began his evidence, ‘On Wednesday Night, the 20th of December, I was in Russel-street, against the Rose Tavern Door, when the People were coming out of the Play-house . . . . I have seen the Prisoner at the Play-house, almost every Night, picking Pockets.’ The court found Jemmy guilty and sentenced him to death.35 Such a scene, and others

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more violent, passed week after week before the eyes of Curll and his neighbours, as the bookseller plied his trade within a stone’s throw of the tavern, just across the market from his shop. The next instalment came in December 1742 with A Short Description of the Roads which Lead to that Delightful Country called Merryland. To which are Subjoined, An History of the Gallantries of Bettyland. With some Carnal Recreations in Prose and Verse. This time Curll set his name to the work, a sure sign that he felt he was safe to go ahead without disguise. In fact the Description contained scarcely any new material, with the feeble exception of ‘An History of the Gallantries of Bettyland’. Bizarrely the material is prefaced by a poem addressed to Pope’s friend Ralph Allen, which begins with a famous couplet from the Epilogue to the Satires, but then takes its own Curllian route: Let low-born A, with an aukward Shame, Do good by Stealth, and blush to find it, Fame. Let him survey these R, Cross-Posts erect, The Wild, Unskilful Trav’ller to direct; To warn from Whirlpools, Rocks, immerging Sands, More dreadful far than those of other Lands: Then shall our Youth steer safe, and in Him hope, Fearing no C serving them like P. Then, A, shall thy Bard thy Praise proclaim, And Thou and He acquire an equal Name.36

Apart from these items, an advertisement in the Craftsman during February 1742 announced The Merryland Miscellany —no doubt a made-up collection, untraced.37 As always with publications that were both clandestine and successful, Curll managed to muddy all the bibliographical waters. W. Jones may possibly have existed: his name appears in a similar formula on The Bath Miscellany. For the Year 1740, except that an authentic London publisher, Jacob Robinson, also figures in the imprint. So does Samuel Lobb or Lob, listed as a bookseller in Bath from 1730 to 1741, after he had moved from Chelmsford: incongruously, he seems to have otherwise been involved chiefly in religious books. Together with Roberts and other members of the London trade, Lobb and James Leake published Mary Chandler’s well known poem A Description of Bath in 1733.38 For certain, Leake existed—as a bookseller in Bath, the son of Samuel Richardson’s former master, John, a London printer, and the brother of Elizabeth, whom Richardson had married, also in 1733.39 Almost a contemporary of Curll, James Leake (1686–1764) was bound in the Stationers’ Company in 1705 and freed four years later. A high proportion of his output at Bath after he moved to the city in 1722 had a respectable enough feel to it. Still, he had collaborated with Curll’s old colleagues, Roberts and Anne Dodd, and his family showed some of the initiative in business the older bookseller had always displayed. It is a pity they would link up so late in the day. According to Richardson, Leake had ‘one of the finest Booksellers Shops in Europe’. Through his agency, the luminaries

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of Bath such as Ralph Allen and William Warburton received consignments of books from the capital. In addition he subscribed to the works of Henry and Sarah Fielding, both of whom he knew well. He published several books by Dr George Cheyne, who was introduced to him by Richardson, but the physician could not forbear describing him as ‘the worst judging, wrongheaded, insolent Fellow living’. On another occasion Cheyne blamed Leake for printing too many copies of An Essay on Regimen, no less than 3,000 indeed. He told Richardson of the severe reflections on booksellers which he had heard: ‘specious Curls was the gentlest Expression I had of them all’.40 If Curll ever had a spiritual descendant in the trade, Leake may have filled the role. All this has a particular relevance to The Description of Merryland, addressed to Cheyne. The doctor can scarcely have relished the fact that the publisher singled him out as ‘the properest patron’ for the work. He would encounter a dedication couched in terms laudatory to a degree, even by the eulogistic standards native to this form of writing: nevertheless it must have shocked Cheyne to find himself set conspicuously at the head of such a book. His relations with Leake were always uneasy, and when he found the bookseller’s name appended to later editions this could only add insult to injury. He had no means of knowing the identity of the editor, who signs the dedication from Bath on 20 October 1740. It must have confirmed the doctor’s worst fears when he saw that Leake had been inveigled into sponsoring the project by none other than the hated Curll. Most attention has concentrated on the key item, the Description, for the other volumes merely try to exploit the original success by phoney replies and rejigging of the material. Some recent commentators, mostly male, have found the book inoffensive comedy. Other writers, mostly female, have applied techniques of feminist scholarship to provide a subversive critique of patriarchal attitudes. In truth the Description relies on just one joke, since it takes twelve chapters to set out the topography of female genital apparatus in conventional terms of map-makers, geographers and travel authors. The breasts are briefly mentioned, and the phallus is occasionally introduced as a coral plant. However, the greater part of the ‘survey’ involves an iteration of words such as harbours, bays, creeks, rocks, tides, currents, rivers, canals and so on. The author intersperses a few references to condoms, douches and other sexual aids. Bodily parts are often disguised by abbreviations, as ‘Lba’ for labia, ‘Cltrs’ for clitoris, ‘Nmph’ for nympha or labia minoris, ‘Mnsvnrs’ for mons Veneris, and ‘Utrs’ for uterus. The main basis for the humour lies in parody of a familiar genre of descriptive writing so as to allude to sexual functions. No reader of ordinary urges can have been inflamed by anything in the text. Like other varieties of soft porn, it seems to choose as its target audience the armchair devotee of mildly prurient fare, rather than vigorous young bloods who might wish to pursue real sexual action. The joke works best if the reader can decode literary references. Thus, an allusion to a map of Merryland, prepared

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by the learned Mr. Moriceau, invites readers to call to their mind the treatises on obstetric surgery of Franc¸ois Mauriceau, especially the Trait´e des Maladies des Grosses Femmes (1668), with its plethora of engravings illustrating the process of pregnancy. This book had been translated into several languages, and the English version by Hugh Chamberlen, first issued in 1673, had come out numerous times garnished with ‘divers fair figures’. The seventh edition, ‘augmented with several new figures’, had only just appeared in 1736. Another passage points to Sir Richard Manningham, the most famous obstetrician of the day, now best remembered for his part in the affair of the rabbit woman, Mary Tofts, and for the fact that he was not available when Tristram Shandy’s mother needed help with her lying-in. More references occur to mapmakers such as Herman Moll or John Senex, or geographers such as Patrick Gordon. In general, the parade of easy allusiveness to these sources makes for an impression of gentlemanly badinage, hardly dispelled by the show of pseudo-science in the dedication. If the Merryland books do not give unbearable offence, they are without question silly and shallow. But Curll would not have cared. He had finally discovered a hot seller, one to rank with all those cases of unnatural lewdness, trials for impotence, and treatises on the whole art of kissing that he had been able to dredge up in years gone by.41 In the time left to him, he never found another work with the same appeal.

15 Closing the Books (1741–1747) When Pope exited the scene in 1744, his departure set the stage for the last round of an encounter which had lasted more than three decades. In particular, his death would prompt the appearance a year later of the promised biography—a prospect which Curll had held over his adversary in terrorem for the length of his days. What remains unclear is exactly how much the bookseller had to do with this eagerly awaited work. Meanwhile Curll stuck with his old habit of cobbling together lives of the recently deceased, and in 1741 he produced a choice specimen with a biography of Alderman John Barber, the friend of Swift and protector of Delarivier Manley. While assembling this book, he engineered a meeting with Laetitia Pilkington, the Irish writer, which formed the basis of a notable passage in her memoirs. Indeed the scene described by Pilkington supplies the most expressive picture of Curll in full action which we possess. Soon afterwards Curll’s energies seem at last to have flagged. He could not find another hit on the scale of the Merryland pamphlets, and was reduced to even more recycling of older items. In 1746 his list started to run down, and then it petered out completely. The rest is silence until the bookseller died, without any apparent fuss, at the end of 1747. A N O D D A DV E N T U R E On the second day of 1741 occurred the death of Alderman John Barber, a printer, a big wheel in the Stationers’ Company, and a major power in the City of London who had served as Lord Mayor. He had been a close friend of Swift for thirty years, and an ally of Pope for almost as long. A strong Jacobite, Barber obtained the warrant to produced the ‘authorized’ version of the works of Buckingham, in opposition to Curll, but himself ran into trouble with the Whig establishment on account of this work. His literary and political alliances would range him against Curll on most issues. Nevertheless, he provided some good copy. Before Curll could get in his first blow, the bookseller Thomas Cooper launched a pre-emptive strike with a short Life and Character of Barber, which figured in the announcements of the Gentleman’s Magazine for February. According to Curll, this book was written by Benjamin Norton Defoe, the

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scapegrace son of Daniel who made a precarious income supplying material generally of a scandalous to the press—just the sort of thing Curll himself was always after. Along his usual lines, Cooper probably acted here simply as a trade publisher or distributor. For the true instigator we may need to turn to William Rayner (d. 1761), a Jacobite bookseller imprisoned at the King’s Bench court a few years earlier for a libel on Robert Walpole in the Craftsman. In many ways Rayner’s extraordinary career serves as a mirror image of Curll’s, as he operated in the capacity of newspaper proprietor, promoter of a magical elixir and an informer, while his brushes with the law ended up in his alleged involvement in a plot to blow up parliament at the time of the 1745 rising. He often entered into competition with his more famous rival, for example in the matter of impotency trials or the biography of Robert Wilks. The Life and Character takes a reasonably sympathetic approach to its subject, and presents an orderly account of the main course of his life. Quite possibly, indeed, the work served as a semi-official biography, in which Barber himself may have collaborated.1 Naturally Curll’s version, which did not appear until July, took an altogether different form. Its title-page reveals a good deal to an experienced eye: An Impartial History of the Life, Character, Amours, Travels, and Transactions of Mr. John Barber, City-Printer, Common-Councilman, Alderman and Lord Mayor of London. Written by Several Hands. Curll almost certainly provided the leading ‘hand’ at work, and he accumulated the usual jumble of materials from disparate sources. He placed advertisements in the Daily Advertiser for information, but though he received some interesting scraps from various quarters the material does not seriously aspire to hang together. According to the preliminaries, Curll had refused an offer of assistance from Norton Defoe, ‘being unwilling to deprive Messieurs Cooper and Rayner of so faithful a Writer.’ The writer, signing himself ‘Philalethes’, devotes much of his space to attacking the Rayner life, as well as explaining the delays necessarily involved in producing such a superior volume as the present one.2 He claims to be writing ‘fairly Pro and Con’, in assessing the virtues and vices of the deceased—an unusual procedure in an age when only the most heinous criminals were normally exposed to any biographic judgment on moral grounds. But what follows is a medley of irreconcilable views, interspersed with affidavits and documents of the kind with which Curll loved to stuff his text. Debate has surrounded the authorship of the main section of ‘Life and Character’ (almost fifty pages, but plagued by digression). On the basis of statements made by Laetitia Pilkington, the work has been attributed to her former husband Matthew, at one time chaplain to Barber as Lord Mayor and a man used by Swift in his dealings with the London book trade. However, the picture is a little less clear, as the scrupulous editor of Laetitia’s Memoirs, A. C. Elias, Jr., has revealed. The author certainly had a firsthand acquaintance with Barber’s circle, and indeed the book contains an unpublished letter from Swift to Barber dating from 1732, which the former’s editor believes to be authentic (Swift, Corr, iii. 510–11). The source may be a transcript by Matthew Pilkington. According to

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his custom, Curll printed the subject’s will, which contained bequests to both Swift and Pope, and made great play of Barber’s inhumanity towards Delarivier Manley. He also spells out in detail the circumstances of the printer’s trip to Rome to supply funds for the Pretender. Moreover, we have to take Mrs Pilkington’s testimony seriously, since she undoubtedly knew Barber well, and just prior to his death she had even tried to extort money from him, having been ‘once a kind of Favourite’ with the Alderman.3 If we can trust her account, Laetitia also had a curious encounter with Curll. The background to this episode goes back to the time which Matthew spent with his wife in England, seeking the preferment which had eluded him in Dublin. Matthew attempted to trade on his acquaintance with Swift, and made some useful contacts. However, he managed to achieve only one significant post, as chaplain to Barber during the latter’s mayoralty, on the nomination of Swift. Worse, he got into trouble as a result of Swift’s dangerously frank poem, ‘An Epistle to a Lady’, which Pilkington had given to the bookseller John Wilford for publication in London. Following Wilford’s arrest, he incriminated other members of the trade, much in the way of his ally Curll, so that Matthew eventually found himself tracked down as the source. It became clear to the authorities that the true author of the ‘Epistle’ was Swift, and for a while they made half-hearted efforts to obtain a prosecution against the Dean. These ultimately came to nothing, but the part Pilkington had played in the affair led to a widespread loss of trust in him. ‘The Notion of [Matthew’s] having betray’d Doctor Swift incens’d the whole Kingdom of Ireland against him’, and he never regained his former reputation. Once back in Ireland, Matthew turned Laetitia out of his house and then contrived to find grounds to divorce her for adultery. Soon afterwards, in the latter part of 1738, she herself went over to England and tried to pursue a career as a writer, adopting the name of Meade. It was to this point that she carried her story in the first volume of her popular Memoirs when they came out in 1748. Still in store for her lay further years of hardship and reverses, scarcely ended by the time of her death in 1750 at the age of 38. A lively section in the second volume of Laetitia’s autobiography describes her meeting with Curll. She relates that just after Barber’s death she received a strange visitor at her lodgings, ‘an ugly squinting old Fellow, who said, he had Business of the utmost Consequence, and must speak to me’. He had been told to enquire for Mr Pilkington’s wife, and on confirmation of her identity he spins what appears to be a practised tale about something to her advantage—specifically, a legacy of five hundred pounds to which she may be entitled. Although tempted, Laetitia does not immediately fall for this con-man’s story, but soon she learns the reasons why the stranger has approached her: While I was lost in musing on this odd Adventure, the old Fellow asked me very gaily, if I would give him my Company to Richmond, and take a Dinner with him? I told him,

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I never went abroad with Persons I did not know, especially Men; he told me, he was very capable of being serviceable to me, and, that it was also in my Power to be so to him; in what, Sir? Why, I have received from Ireland, from your Husband, the Life of Alderman Barber, wherein there is an Account of the Amours of Cadenus and Vanessa, to which the Alderman was privy, and related them to Mr. Pilkington: Now I have been informed you have some Letters of the Dean’s, which may embellish the Work; and also, a true Character of the Alderman, written by his Chaplain; I will make you a handsome Consideration for them, if you will give them to me to publish. This Discourse surprised me almost as much as the first; I therefore begged, he would not hold me any longer in Suspence, but let me know who I conversed with? He answered, his Name was Edmond Curl, upon which, in spite of Vexation, and the Disappointment of my new-born Hope, I could not forbear laughing at the fine Scheme he had laid, to trick me out of any valuable Manuscripts I might possibly possess; so making him a Courtesy, I said, farewell Legacy!

Laetitia goes on to explain why she has included this tale in her narrative: I should not trouble the Reader with this Story, but that I have been charged with writing the Life of the Alderman; and, as I shall answer it to God, I never even saw it in my Life, not but Curiosity would have engaged me to read it, especially as I heard it was very well wrote; but, at the Time it was published, I was a Prisoner in the Marshalsea, and really had not a Crown to spare for a Book . . . However, I comforted myself that Mr. Curl had not made a Fool of me, as he has done of many a better Writer, and secured me a Prisoner in his poetical garret, which the ingenious Mr. Fielding charmingly ridicules.4

The final sentence gives rise to a suspicion that Laetitia is simply retailing some of the old canards about ‘Bookweight’, as he is portrayed in The Author’s Farce. We should be rash to take this anecdote as literally accurate in all respects, but it provides one of the very few portraits from the life which have come down to us. Probably some level of human truth survives in the story Laetitia tells.

D E PA RT U R E S F RO M T H E S C E N E For a time things went very quiet. Merryland proved a hard act to follow, and some of Curll’s efforts would flop. In November 1741 he produced a squalid effort entitled Consummation: or, the Rape of Adonis, described as ‘an original Poem, describing the mutual Pleasure of both Sexes’. A makeweight was provided by two items, ‘Damon and Amoret’ and ‘The Resurrection’. This short volume also advertises as ‘in the press’ an edition of the Whole Works of Lucian, which turned out to be no more than bluster. The Confederacy: or, Boarding-School Rape (February 1741) merely reproduced the evidence used in court for a rape allegedly committed by a Jew on a twelve-year old girl as far back as 1704. It grew harder to find the sure-fire hits. In 1742 only half a dozen works came before the public, disregarding the Merryland items. While Curll had no obvious connection with the third edition of A Complete Collection of State-Trials and Proceedings for

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High-Treason, and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, printed for the ‘undertakers’, J. Walthoe, Thomas Wotton, the Tonsons and others, some advertisements list over thirty additional booksellers linked with the venture. These included Samuel Richardson, James Roberts, Henry Lintot, Andrew Millar, Thomas Longman, John Pemberton (the younger), John Knapton, and many other leading figures in the trade. Curll’s name occurs among this number. What share exactly the larger group of booksellers held in the venture remains uncertain. A mood of desperation may have prompted the choice to bring out a volume ungrammatically titled L’exile [sic] de Ciceron: or, the History of Cicero’s Banishment. This derived from work by Jacques Morabin (Paris, 1725), immediately issued by Jonas Bowyer in translation as The History of Cicero’s Banishment. The English version contained a dedication to Philip, Duke of Wharton, singling out the ‘English Cicero’ (plainly Francis Atterbury) for praise. A rendering so tendentious in its Jacobite implications might seem to have outlived its usefulness when the Atterbury affair faded from people’s awareness: but in 1736 Curll elected to bring out An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Cicero: including the History of his Banishment. The publisher must have bought up the rights or, more probably, the sheets of the first edition, for Bowyer’s advertisement leaves remain intact. Now, in 1742, Curll issued yet another version, still consisting of the original printed pages. The title-page now gives the translator as the Reverend George Kelly, though Curll had already hinted at this in Memoirs of the Life, Travels and Transactions of George Kelly (1736). This ascription makes more intelligible the prompt translation in 1725, for Kelly, a priest deeply implicated in the Atterbury affair, had been tried and sent to the Tower. In October 1736 Kelly managed to escape and found his way to Avignon, after which he took up arms with the Pretender in the 1745 Rebellion. He eventually died in exile as late as 1762. No one could have more perfectly embodied the Jacobite view of recent history, in which the banished Bishop Atterbury played the part of a lost leader condemned by a tyrannical authority to fret away his talents abroad. The book could be seen as timely in 1725, and it would have served a purpose in 1745. Curll’s Memoirs of Kelly had been issued promptly on the prisoner’s escape and were as promptly savaged in the final issue of 1736 of the Grub-street Journal. Why Curll chose to reissue the Cicero volume in 1742 we cannot say, unless he aimed to cast Walpole (who had been forced to resign his premiership on 2 February) in the martyr’s role. It does not seem likely; but the bookseller’s sense of political timing had always been capricious. 1743 represented another fallow year. In an attempt to revive the glory of former days, Curll brought out Ebrietatis Encomium once more, with a new title-page proclaiming the ‘second edition’, but its original author, Albert-Henri de Sallenge, and its translator, Robert Samber, had now left the stage. It seemed a tame production by comparison with Stretser’s triumphant success. Then 1744 went past with equally few publications: by now Curll had lapsed into semi-retirement. One venture which faintly recalls his former initiative and brio

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came with the appearance of a ‘tenth’ edition of Poems Attempted in the Style of Milton. By Mr. John Philips —reassembling items he had issued in various forms across the decades. Of course, the material had all been published in the first part of Curll’s career. What this volume actually contains is first, Sewell’s life of the poet (reset but unaltered); second, ‘The Splendid Shilling’, ‘Bleinheim’, and the ‘Ode ad Henricum St John, Armig’, seemingly based on the versions used in Philips’s Poems in 1715; and third, what is called the fourth edition of Cyder. The last section has a separate title-page, bearing the imprint ‘Printed for J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper in the Strand’. As far as letter-press goes, this follows the type-setting of Tonson’s third edition (1727), and the same frontispiece is used. However, the headpieces found at the start of the each book, together with ornaments at the close, have been replaced. Otherwise Curll lay low. He had not quite finished with Pope, all the same. In October 1743 (dated 1744 on the title-page) came the second edition of Scamnum, ecloga: or, The Pastoral Politicians. Translated from the Latin of Dr. King. This was a political satire in verse by Dr William King (1685–1763), the prominent Oxford Jacobite.5 The Latin original dates from 1740, the English translation from the following year. Curll adds to this volume Pope’s ‘Description of his Grotto at Twickenham’, that is verses on the grotto first drafted in 1740 and published a year later. In October 1742 the Gentleman’s Magazine had mentioned in its book-list a work called The Grotto; or the Assembly, By Mr. Pope, together with King’s poem (Griffith, 577). No copy of such a book has surfaced, and despite the misleading title we believe that the entry refers to the item described just now entitled Scamnum. The ‘assembly of patriots’ makes a plausible alternative name, since Pope’s lines invoke the spirit of Opposition worthies, Bolingbroke, Sir William Wyndham, and the Earl of Marchmont at his riverside shrine. Once again the bookseller had managed to obtain a copy of one of the poet’s works before it appeared in an authorized collection, although Robert Dodsley had issued a presumably sanctioned version in October 1743, with renderings into Latin and Greek. As well as this, Samuel Johnson had turned the work into Latin verse in the same year. Even without these various printings, Curll would not have had to stir far on this occasion to get hold of the text, since the piece had circulated freely in manuscript (see TE vi. 382–5). An element common to the experience of all men and women as they get older is the loss of contemporaries with whom they have interacted at an earlier stage. Friends and enemies, spouses and lovers, critics and eulogists, debtors and creditors—some of these are bound to fall by the wayside in our declining years. Curll had already suffered the bereavement of his son, and now the cast of characters with whom he had enacted the crucial episodes of his personal comedy began to depart from the scene. The melodramatic demise of Eustace Budgell in 1737 served as a prelude to the death of Breval, Joseph Mitchell, and others in quick succession. Among his own corps of writers, Nicholas Amhurst and John

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Oldmixon died in 1742, followed by John Ozell in the next year, with Giles Jacob and Lewis Theobald in 1744. Time had taken its toll on colleagues in the book trade: after Lintot, Tonson, and Mist in the mid-1730s; Benjamin Motte went in 1738; John Pemberton, Arthur Bettesworth, and Anne Dodd in 1739; Alderman John Barber in 1741, Robert Gosling the same year, William Mears in 1741 or 1742, and Thomas Cooper in 1743. As for those he had encountered in his battles with authority, Lord Townshend died in 1738, and the bookseller turned spymaster Samuel Buckley in 1741: finally, four years on, came the death of Robert Walpole, in whom he had placed such optimistic trust. Even a man as resilient as Curll must have wondered sometimes if his turn might not come next. Once numbered among the most youthful and vigorous members of the trade, he had now, at barely 60, attained pretty well the role of father of the house. T H E T RU S T Y S QU I R E AY R E The death of Pope on 30 May marked a watershed in English literature. Swift vegetated in a state of terminal dementia over in Dublin, although he would cling on to life for sixteen months longer, and all the other Scriblerians had gone several years before. This event signalled the fact that the great age of Augustan satire had come to an end, despite a few sputters from Charles Churchill in the following generation. For Curll, it meant the removal of his major opponent in public controversy: even in his prime, he would not have found it easy to replace a man who had helped to generate so much of his notoriety, along with much of his business. On the other hand, it provided some short-term opportunities. The biography which Curll had long threatened now became more possible and more urgently needed. Two pamphlet lives quickly appeared, from the publishers Weaver Bickerton and Charles Corbett respectively. But everyone in the literary world awaited the full Curll treatment, with emotions which must have ranged from high expectation to a feeling of total dread. Meanwhile, the old man went on trying to milk all he could from any works by Pope that he already had on his list. The poet’s death afforded just the kind of newsworthy episode which lit up the bookseller’s eyes. As we have seen, he soon had to defend an action in Chancery brought by Pope’s executors, concerning his editions of An Essay on Man. Although Curll’s chief tormentor no longer remained on earth, commerce in his literary property lived on, and so inevitably did litigation. Early in 1745 (perhaps as early as 8 January) the long-awaited biography appeared. Its title-page is a thing of wonder: large in its claims, and quite worthy of a major contribution to literary history. The entire page repays attention: Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope, Esq; Faithfully Collected from Authentic Authors, Original Manuscripts, and the Testimonies of many Persons of

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Credit and Honour . . . Adorned with the Heads of divers Illustrious Persons, treated of in these Memoirs, curiously engrav’d by the best Hands. In Two Volumes. By William Ayre, Esq; London: Printed by his Majesty’s Authority, and Sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster. M DCC XLV. It does not emerge at once what ‘authentic authors’ means, but the manuscripts had certainly once been original, and the testimonies stolen from many creditable sources. The absence of an identifiable publisher gives some pause, especially as ‘the booksellers of London and Westminster’ was most commonly the formula employed by pirates. Curll’s own name is nowhere revealed, although he very likely had some share in the proceedings. Incidentally, the Gentleman’s Magazine entry for January 1745 promises ‘critical reflections’ on Pope’s writings, an addendum to the title-page. Anyone opening the volumes would certainly have anticipated a work of some moment. As for the phrase, ‘Printed by his Majesty’s Authority’, this serves as the prelude to an elaborate patent. After this comes the main text, with the royal coat of arms placed at its head, before it rehearses at length a document ‘under His Majesty’s royal signet’, dated 18 December 1744, and signed by the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of State. It authorized ‘Our Trusty and Well-beloved, W A. Esq;’ who has devoted great expense and labour to the task, to retain the sole right of printing, publishing, and vending, the Memoirs for a term of fourteen years. Despite the use of the phrase ‘under Our Royal Privilege’, this amounts basically to the standard coverage of the 1710 Copyright Act. The warrant goes on to issue solemn warnings against anyone who dares to reprint the book anywhere in the King’s dominions. Nobody appears to have tried, but that may not have much to do with this patent (Mary Cooper eventually brought out a reprint in 1751, after Curll was safely out of the way). What we may first recall is the mock warrant from the Lord Chamberlain which Pope had placed at the head of The Dunciad in 1743. That had been a satiric stroke: Ayre’s patent looks like a serious attempt to add some dignity to his undercooked performance.6 But what of this author, our trusty and well beloved William Ayre? Within a very few weeks came a response which addressed Curll as the individual behind the Memoirs, and ever since then most people have accepted this attribution without demur. In fact, although Curll qualifies as a possible candidate, it is nothing like certain that he composed the book, even if he made materials available to another writer. From day one, it has been assumed that Curll plucked an identity for the author out of nowhere. ‘Curious: one did not seem to have heard the name’ (Straus, 195). This overlooks a poem attacking Pope published in 1739, Truth. A Counterpart to Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, where the same author’s name appears. But there existed a real William Ayre, Esquire, right on the doorstep. A gentleman of St Martin’s in the Fields so named made a will on 16 August 1747, proved on 21 April following.7 This individual was real flesh and blood: he had a wife Charity and a daughter Mary, married to Richard Lyford.8 In his

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will he names brothers and sisters, living and dead. Still more to the point, he bequeathes the family home (probably held on a long lease) to his wife—and it was situated in St Paul’s, Covent Garden, Curll’s own parish. The fact that this Ayre died three years later, a few months after Curll, would explain why scarcely anyone in the literary world heard of him again (from the 1730s onwards, we can trace three other items allotted to Ayre, including one dated 1753). Of course, Curll could simply have borrowed the name from his neighbour; nonetheless, we should be cautious in assuming this. Undoubtedly the writer had access to the publisher’s back-list, but he avoids crowing about these items as Curll usually did. Little significance can be attached to the fact that Curll appears in the third person as character when the narrative reaches The Dunciad, since everything is thrown in, whether good or bad from the bookseller’s perspective. So the Memoirs reprint all the most damaging verses and notes from Pope’s epic, without any serious attempt to confute what the poet had said. The work uses a scattergun technique which extenuates nothing that Curll had done. He had seldom in the past adopted an approach of qui s’excuse: but this made for a more substantial biographic undertaking than his usual fodder. In addition, the author has harsh things to say about many of Curll’s own authors and projects: thus on reactions after The Rape of the Lock, ‘And now a Rabble-Rout of Scribblers appear’d in Arms, Mr. Dennis at their Head; and as they strove to destroy Mr. Pope’s Temple of Fame, destroy’d their own, and firmly establish’d his’.9 If Curll wrote the book, he shows as little loyalty to those with whom he had enjoyed an intimate association for decades as to does to his own reputation. Proceedings get under way with a dedication to four peers who had been especially close to Pope: Bolingbroke, Burlington, Marchmont, and Bathurst. In addition, a plate of the first-named follows the plate of Pope used as a frontispiece. A preface serves to justify the biographer’s methods, notably his decision to incorporate into his relation assorted sketches of major figures encountered along the way. He writes: Besides this, I thought it highly proper, writing of Mr. Pope’s Patrons and Friends, not barely to mention their Names, but to give so much of their Character as might show of what Class (not only as to Quality, but Taste and Understanding) they were in: This I have done in the Duke of Buckingham, pretty much at large, as well as the Bishop of Rochester; I have taken Notice of Dean Swift, Mr. Dennis, Mr. Rowe, Mr. Cibber, Mr. Walsh, Sir William Trumbull, Sir Richard Blackmore, Mr. Oldmixon, Mr. Eusden, Dr. Garth, Mr. Welsted, Mr. Gay, Mr. Bloome, Mr. Digby, Mr. Theobald, Mr. Moore Smith, and have not forgot a great Number more, some Friends and some Enemies, to Mr. Pope, keeping as near as I could to their true Story of Life, and carefully avoiding such Circumstances as have been reported upon slight, or no Authority.10

Notionally this approach could have forged an innovative biographic technique, anticipating Boswell in its rich contextualization of the subject’s career. As it turns out, the book operates much like most of Curll’s cut-and-paste lives: there

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is simply more of it. To take the most favourable view of the Memoirs, they do at least assemble a large body of materials: quotations from Pope’s poetry, prose, and letters, as well as contemporary responses (positive and, more often, negative). Looking at the obverse of this situation, we find the contents dispersed in a ragbag fashion, with only the loosest of chronological organization. Straus declares that ‘amongst the hundred worst books the Memoirs must be given a high place—though not, I hasten to add, for what they contain as for what they are alleged to be’ (Straus, 194). That seems too hasty a verdict, for Curll produced many worse books almost every year. As a repository of information, the two volumes easily outdistance anything produced on Pope up to this time, including Jacob’s Lives of the Poets and the two instant lives from 1744. Much of the information happens to be accurate, too. For the most part, the book expresses a high admiration for Pope’s poetry, with a rare exception such as the ‘Ode for Musick, on St. Cecilia’s Day’, which Ayre calls ‘as to the Poetical Part, the worst of our Poet’s Performances’.11 But no consistent viewpoint, critical or otherwise, can be maintained in a book where voices shift in and out of range as the writer moves from quotation to paraphrase to assertion. In this narrative Babel we can never be sure whether Ayre himself or some second-hand reporter is addressing us, and so the issue of his possibly pseudonymous identity ceases to matter very much. Suddenly, near the end, the author devotes thirty pages to the story of Richard Savage, culled from existing biographies. In its concluding sentences, the book rises to a pinnacle of encomiastic rhetoric: Thus we have gone . . . with this great Genius, from the Cradle to the Tomb, and as no Objection can be rais’d against Mr. Pope as a Man, a Scholar, or a Critick, above all must be rever’d and venerated for his Muse, for it must be confess’d, that not only of this Age, but speaking of all former Ages, in our Language, he was   .12

Curll had at his command many subtle forms of duplicity, but even he seldom disguised his true feelings as comprehensively as this. In February came the reply mentioned earlier, in the form of Remarks on Squire Ayre’s Memoirs (see Chapter 1). It bears Mary Cooper’s imprint, with the author signing himself J.H. The writer, who addresses the publisher as ‘Friend Edmund’, confidently asserts that Curll was indeed behind the venture, despite concealing his name. J.H. focuses his most apt criticism of Ayre’s account on irrelevancies, complaining that the reader has to wade through the lives of Theobald, Eusden, and Moore Smythe along with that of the subject himself. We could add that most of these narratives derive from what Pope tells us in the notes to The Dunciad. But where would Curll have been, for the last few decades, without Pope’s text to cannibalize? Predictably J.H. fastens on to Curll’s skill in composing title-pages to beguile the public, once more a skill which Pope had observed long before. Then, in the final ten pages of the tract, come brief ‘Memoirs’ of Curll himself,

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rough and sardonic in tone. Much of this material the writer has borrowed from Pope’s Full and True Account, published almost thirty years before; other bits come from the notes to The Dunciad. At times the note resembles a mock panegyric: ‘He not only carried the Mystery of his Business farther than it had ever been carried before, but excell’d every one of his Contemporaies (sic) even in their own way: All Authors were at his Service, those who would write for him he paid, those who would not, he oblig’d to do it gratis, publishing a thousand Things under their Names, which they had never so much as seen’.13 For all his resilience, Curll could scarcely have enjoyed getting quite so much of his own medicine. Still, a notice which appeared in the Daily Advertiser on 4 February may have been no more than a hoax, inserted by his enemies. ‘We hear’, it stated, ‘that the Author of the Remarks on ‘Squire Ayre’s Memoirs . . . having there in grossly reflected on William Ayre, Esq; and Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller, they are determined to prosecute him with the utmost severity the Law prescribes’ (quoted by Straus, 197). It is the sort of joke Fielding might have perpetrated. All the same, the bookseller did use the Advertiser regularly, and the notice may have represented one last promotional effort. We can perhaps identify Curll’s last small blow against his oldest adversary. A newspaper advertisement on 12 September 1745 (Straus, 313) announced a volume of Miscellaneous Poems, ‘approved and prepared for the press by the late Mr. Pope’. Six items are listed, including ‘several Translations from Virgil, Statius, &c.’, and some divine poems. It does not take much research to uncover this as a reprint, in whole or part, of Poems on Several Occasions, brought out by Bernard Lintot in 1727 and reissued by John Cecil in 1739. The poems came from the hand of Walter Harte, who at the first appearance of this volume was a young prot´eg´e of Pope (a subscriber for four copies, much above his usual undertaking). Curll may have figured that all the copyrights belonging to Lintot, who died in 1736, had become fair game. Harte did indeed claim to a friend that ‘Mr. Pope was pleased to correct every page with his own hand’ (Corr, ii. 249): but how could Curll have known this much? (Unless he heard it from William Pattison, a close friend of Harte.) No trace of a publication bearing the bookseller’s name survives—conceivably he bought sheets of the edition from Cecil, but never actually released the volume. ENDING UP For a second time, the bookseller experienced the upheaval of a major dynastic struggle, when the rebellion of the Young Pretender broke out in the late summer of 1745. On this occasion he did not find himself so well positioned as he had been in 1715, when the first rising brought forth a deluge of pamphleteering. He confined his response largely to spilling out edition after edition of an old war-horse on his list, that is the retelling by John Oldmixon of the story

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of Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy, originally prompted by events leading up to the invasion of the Old Pretender in 1715. To begin with, Curll and his co-publisher Charles Corbett were claiming only the ‘thirteenth’ edition: by the end of the year the tally had risen to twenty-one. This was far from the end of the line for this bizarre work, which remained a standard item in the stock of pamphlet sellers as late as 1800. Along with his Merryland items and Ayre’s biography, the Prophecy evidently did enough to keep Curll’s show on the road. His other publications included reissues of earlier books: thus A Collection of Seven Most Surprising Trials before the Parliament of Paris for Rapes, advertised in May, almost certainly included the old case of the Abb´e des Rues, with his alleged rapes on 133 victims. Equally, Pervigilium veneris: or The Nightly Sports of Venus. Containing the Pleasures of Coition; with all the Love-Poems of Bonefonius. Translated from the Latin Original, by Mr Markland, and Others (dated 1746, probably issued around October 1745) simply presented the old favourites in a new guise. Jean Bonnefons had constituted one of the firm’s most loyal servants over the years: luckily he died over a hundred years before, and being French had never caused any copyright troubles. Curll may just have been re-branding other unsold titles in his advertisements. A book he had started to promote on its first appearance in 1734 was Peruvian Tales, translated from the French by Samuel Humphreys, better known later as a librettist for Handel.14 The fourth volume, which Curll announced in September 1744, promised ‘a consolatory Dedication to Mrs Blount, on the Death of Mr Pope’ (GM ). His insolence knew no end. In the course of this year, for strangeness nothing can equal Delirium poeticum: or, The History of Poetical Lunacy, advertised on 2 July: a single copy survives at the Bodleian Library. The subtitle gives a poor idea of what it contains: Being Critical and Rational Remarks on some of the most Considerable Pieces of Poetry, which have been Published within these Ten Years past, Chiefly Satire; by Dr Young, Mr Pope, the Laureat, Messieurs Feilding, Ralph, and other less Considerable Writers. In fact the work operates as political allegory, treating recent history as a form of collective madness along the lines of A Tale of a Tub. It has no more than the wobbliest hold on irony, and the only mention of Pope occurs in a concluding postscript. The identity of this eccentric author remains unknown, and few will wish to devote any great labour to solving the mystery. Almost the same bizarre level is reached a year later by Achates to Varus: An Epistle: Describing some late Wonderfull Appearances That ensued from a Touch of Ithuriel’s Spear (1746), which Curll took the trouble to have entered at Stationers’ Hall, the last time he did this—and the first time for many years. The book contains a vicious attack on Isaac Watts (not explicitly named), describing his works of the previous ten years as ‘childish, romantic, and contemptible’ in their reasoning. Its author could well be the individual responsible for Delirium poeticum. At the start of the volume Curll advertises six works, with items by Pope, Prior, Young, and Addison still on the list. The old man did not give in easily.

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He was up to his familiar tricks almost until the end. A few years before his death, as the Revd William Warburton informed his clerical colleague Richard Hurd in 1757, Curll had written a letter with some unwelcome news. He had acquired the rights in an early work by Warburton, A Critical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Causes of Prodigies and Miracles as Related by Historians (1727), and had made plans to reprint it. As Curll must have expected, this appalled Warburton—by now a sober churchman bent on clerical advancement, as well as Pope’s literary executor. Promptly he sent his main contact in the book trade, John Knapton, to deal with the ‘fellow’ and buy him off.15 Authors caught in this situation could not afford to dismiss Curll’s overtures as a mere bluff. If they refused to play his game, he happily went through with the promised reprint (as Young for one discovered), safe in the knowledge that his adversaries would find it hard to disprove any claim that he had bought the copyright at some vague point in the past. The Stationers’ Company no longer maintained a close oversight of the disposition of rights, and the Act of 1710 had done nothing to make it easier for authors to find out what had happened to their property, once they had initially sold it. Two titles neatly bookend the opening and the conclusion of the bookseller’s career. In 1706 Curll had brought out an anthology of improving pieces called The Devout Christian’s Companion, one of his first ventures into print (see Chapter 1). Now in the last year of his life he reissued the second part of the same work, under the title of The Domestic Temple: or, Family Preacher. Over the intervening years he had published several editions of both parts, generally in partnership with Sanger and Gosling. The bookseller can have had few steadier sellers in his entire catalogue, for piety sometimes outperformed lubricity. But, virtuous or otherwise, his career was coming to a close. We lack any medical file on Curll’s declining years. One intriguing hint comes from William Rufus Chetwood, who ought to have known, since he had been a colleague of Curll in the trade at one stage. He had also worked as prompter at Drury Lane, just round the corner from the bookseller’s establishment. In his compilation A General History of the Stage (1749), Chetwood referred to Curll in his entry on the minor actor Charles Hulet. He states that Hulet was apprenticed as a bookseller, later identified as Curll, and supplies this note: Mr. Curll was a Person of extraordinary Talents, very pleasing in Conversation, and could extract Gold from Dirt. He had the Art of forming a Title to a Book beyond the rest of the craft, or even the Authors themselves. I have forgot how he came to stumble over Mr. Pope; for Mr. Curll was a little purblind, and lost his Sight some Years before his Death.16

There follows a hazy account of the emetic episode. Overall Chetwood’s work displays more interesting anecdote than reliable analysis, and we cannot be sure he recollected the publisher’s career accurately. Moreover, he spent many of his later years in Dublin, after suffering financial failure in London, and he may

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not have seen Curll towards the end. A few years later, as will shortly emerge, the novelist Thomas Amory also described Curll as ‘pur-blind’, but he almost certainly took this detail from Chetwood.

D E AT H O F A S A L E S M A N Errors have accumulated around Curll’s death, as they have around so much of his life. On 12 December 1747 the General Evening Post announced tersely: ‘Yesterday died, aged 72, Mr. Edmund Curl, Bookseller, in Rose-Street, CoventGarden. His Character may be found in Pope’s and Swift’s Works’. This would put the date of death as 11 December. The age was clearly a guess. On 16 December the Penny London Post and Morning Advertiser declared that Curll (‘aged near 72’) had been buried the previous Saturday night (that is, 9 December). His modern biographer gives the date of death as Tuesday, 8th December and his burial on the Sunday following (Straus, 198). In fact the 8th was a Friday. The date of 11 December (a Monday) seems to be correct, while the registers of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, show that he was buried on the 13th (a Wednesday). The Gentleman’s Magazine picked up on newspaper reports and repeated the estimate of his age as 72, which has led to the general assumption that he was born in 1675. Actually, Curll had lived half a year beyond 64. If his death took place at home in Rose Street, his body would have had the shortest of journeys to Inigo Jones’s parish church, standing two hundred feet to the east. In fact he must have passed the churchyard (still surviving as a small oasis in the heart of London’s entertainment district) almost every day on his way to Covent Garden, Bow Street or Drury Lane.17 Only in quite recent years has the name ‘the actors’ church’ been bestowed on St Paul’s, but the connection already existed: like Curll, William Wycherley was interred there in 1716. The exact burial place is unknown: by the 1830s an observer was forced to write, ‘On a recent occasion, the grave digger had to make several trials before he could find room for a new tenant, and he assured me that on several occasions, he had been driven from the attempt of digging a grave, and compelled to throw back the earth, owing to the dangerous effluvia he experienced from the soil. The vault underneath the church is also crowded.’ Still, it seems a suitable resting-place for a character as stagily impressive as Edmund Curll. Like most things that he composed, the bookseller’s will displays some remarkable features. It was proved on 21 July 1747, a delay which remains mysterious in view of its simple nature, unless the papers had somehow got hidden away in Curll’s notorious escritoire. Along with its provisions, the testament contains some lines of doggerel in a codicil: I have no Relatives; my Son is dead,

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Closing the Books (1741–1747) He left no Issue, and his Wife’s re-wed; Therefore no Legacys at all I leave But all I’ve got to my dear Wife bequeathe.

The complete document is transcribed in Appendix 1 below, but a few points require notice here. First, Curll writes of entering his sixtieth year on 14 July 1742: in modern reckoning this would imply a birth-date in 1683, the date Curll himself gives in The Curliad, but according the more common usage then this points to 1682. Second, it emerges that Henry Curll had died by July 1737. Third, it is confirmed that Elizabeth Curll became the bookseller’s second wife prior to March 1734, and since probate was granted to her we know that she survived her husband. Fourth, one of the deponents concerning Curll’s signature was Christopher Norris (d. 1763), a bookbinder questioned by the authorities over the Ker Memoirs in 1727. He had once appeared in the imprint of a book along with Curll junior. It looks as if the two men had remained on good terms, despite the information which Norris had provided to the ministry. Disappointingly, we learn of no final auction, no last grand sales drive, no sign of what became of the books to which Curll had clung on for so long.18 The size of his estate remains a mystery: he had done well at some stages of his career, but he had never made the transition to the status of a gentleman. In this he contrasts sharply with men like Tonson and in particular Lintot, who came from yeoman stock but married his son to the daughter of a baronet. A few more brief notices of the bookseller’s death appeared in newspapers and magazines. The Jacobite Journal, run by Henry Fielding, picked up on the event; and five years later he would return to the case of Curll in his new paper, the Covent Garden Journal (see p. 315). But by that time the old reprobate’s name was starting to fade a little. The vivid cameo appearance he made in Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs brought him public notice for a time, as did the fictional portrait in Thomas Amory’s John Buncle (1756–66), which gave rise to some durable legends, notably the story that his translators lay ‘three in a bed in the Pewter Platter Inn at Holborn’. This was just mischievous myth-making: the only Pewter Platter inn now traceable which existed in Curll’s lifetime stood on the west side of St John’s Street, 300 yards to the north of Holborn—too far to be accidentally confused.19 Even though the account Amory gives contains obvious inaccuracies, it has come down to us as the most graphic picture of the bookseller surviving, and thus merits quotation. The hero describes his sojourn in London after the accidental death of his young wife: For some days I lived at the inn I set up at, but as soon as I could, went into a lodging, and it happened to be at the house of the famous Curl the bookseller; a man well known in the Dunciad, and Pope’s letters to his friends, on account of Curl’s frauds in purchasing and printing stolen copies of Mr. Pope’s works. It is in relation to these tricks, that Pope

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mentions Curl in his Dunciad and Letters. A succinct history of him I shall here give: but had I complied with his requests, it would have been a long relation, to the advantage and glory of this extraordinary man: For he came one morning into my closet, with an apron full of papers; being letters, memorandums, parodies, and notes, written by or concerning himself; and requested I would, on a good consideration, write his life, to his profit and honour, and make it a five shilling book. That I said was not then in my power to do: but I would, one time or other, give the public a true account of him, and make it conclude I hoped to the glory of his character.

Amory’s description comes next, a formidable setpiece. Curll, he relates, was in person very tall and thin, an ungainly, aukward, white-faced man. His eyes were a light-grey, large, projecting, gogle and pur-blind. He was splay-footed, and baker-kneed. He had a good natural understanding, and was well acquainted with more than the title pages of books. He talked well on some subjects. He was not an infidel as Mrs. Rowe misrepresents him in one of her letters to lady Hartford, (afterwards Dutchess of Somerset). He told me, it was quite evident to him, that the scriptures of the Old and New Testament contained a real revelation. . . . So far Curl was right enough. His fault was, that with such a belief, he took no pains with his heart. Trusting intirely to the merits of the Saviour, like too many other mistaken christians, he had no notion of religion as an invisible thing within us, called the kingdom of God : He did not even consider it as a good outside thing, that recommends a man to his fellow-creatures.

The publisher’s moral failings infect his practice in the trade: He was a debauchee to the last degree, and so injurious to society, that by filling his translations with wretched notes, forged letters, and bad pictures, he raised the price of a four shilling book to ten. Thus, in particular, he managed Burnet’s Archiology: And when I told him he was very culpable in this, and other articles he sold, his answer was, What would I have him do? He was a bookseller. His translators in pay, lay three in a bed, at the Pewter-Platter Inn in Holborn, and he and they were for ever at work, to deceive the Public. He likewise printed the lewdest things. He lost his ears for the Nun in her Smock, and another thing. As to drink, he was too fond of money, to spend any in making himself happy that way; but at another’s expence, he would drink every day till he was quite blind, and as incapable of self-motion as a block. This was Edmund Curl: But he died at last as great a penitent, (I think in the year 1748) as ever expired. I mention this to his glory.

That Amory should have got the date of Curll’s death wrong, besides inventing the detail of the loss of ears, suggests that this amounts to less than a scrupulous rendition of the facts. There is more to come in the pages that follow. Amory goes on to describe the bookseller’s knowledge of the town: As Curl knew the world well, and was acquainted with several extraordinary characters, he was of great use to me at my first coming to town, as I knew nobody, nor any place. He gave me the true characters of many I saw, told me whom I should avoid, and with whom I might be free. He brought me to the play-houses, and gave me a judicious account of every actor. He understood those things well. No man could talk better on

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theatrical subjects. He brought me likewise to Sadler’s Wells, to the night-cellars, and to Tom King’s, the famous night-house at Covent Garden. As he was very knowing, and well-known at such places, he soon made me as wise as himself in these branches of learning; and, in short, in the space of a month, I was as well acquainted in London, as if I had been there for years. My kind preceptor spared no pains in lecturing.

John Buncle profits from this experience when he meets a young lady at Curll’s house: ‘But what of all things I thought most wonderful was the company I saw at the Sieur Curl’s. As he was intimate with all the high whores in town, many of them frequented his shop, to buy his dialogues, and other lively books. Some of these girls he often asked to dine with him, and then I was sure to be a guest. Many very fine women I thereby saw, but none worth mentioning, till Carola Bennet arrived . . . ’20 This affords the narrator an opportunity to tell a fashionably sentimental tale. Curll figures obliquely in the subsequent narrative, presented as a good-hearted rogue, ‘fond as he was of a girl and a flask’, and an habitu´e of the brothels in London’s red-light quarter. No real evidence exists to support this view of his character. Amory has simply constructed his own Curll, based on old tales and projections from the bookseller’s literary output. The publisher earned a mention in Sterne’s Political Romance (1759), but with no more than a casual flick of disdain aimed at him: ‘In case any of the Descendents of Curl should think fit to invade my Copy-Right, and print it over again in my Teeth.’21 He figures occasionally in the poetry of the mid-century, and becomes the butt of a story in Joe Miller’s Jests, where he is supposed to have defended himself from the charge of printing Buckingham’s posthumous works by saying that if the Duke were alive his Grace would readily pardon the offence.22 It makes a much lamer jest than many of Curll’s own. A more sympathetic note was struck by John Nichols, who probably wrote commendations by the Gentleman’s Magazine of Curll for his assiduous searches after literary documents.23 As a member of the book trade, antiquary and obsessive manuscript-hunter himself, he had much sympathy with Curll’s activities: The memory of Edmund Curll has been transmitted to posterity with an obloquy more severe than he deserved. Whatever were his demerits in having occasionally published works that the present age would very properly consider too licentious, he certainly deserves commendation for his industry in preserving our National Remains. And it may perhaps be added that he did not publish a single volume but what, amidst a profusion of base metal, contained some precious ore, some valuable reliques, which future collectors could no where else have found.24

But this was a lone voice. From now on Curll entered the domain of legend. Thomas De Quincey’s short study of Pope refers to ‘the den of Curll, the universal robber and ‘‘blatant beast’’ of those days’.25 By the time that the bookseller gained a brief mention in Macaulay’s essay on Johnson, he had long been stranded in a world of mythology, where the ‘lean, ragged, unwashed poet’ caroused in taverns and then slept in night-cellars. In Thackeray’s amusing

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burlesque of the novels of Bulwer Lytton, the anti-hero George Barnwell ‘dines with Curll at St John’s Gate’. Bulwer’s own eighteenth-century pastiche, Not so Bad as We Seem (1851) also refers to the bookseller, and indeed the hero (performed originally by Dickens) disguises himself as Curll in order to outwit Tonson. The troupe of actors with Dickens at their head mounted this play in aid of a literary charity, with a cast including Wilkie Collins, Douglas Jerrold, John Forster, R.H. Horne, Mark Lemon, John Tenniel (illustrator of Alice) and the painter Augustus Egg. It might have flattered Curll to find himself recalled by such a gathering of the Victorian talents. Meanwhile Dr Dryasdust, with his fellow antiquarians, got to work on the bookseller in Notes and Queries, and the living breathing Curll receded into a distant past.

Afterword Curll knew better than most that the devil can always quote scripture, and a favourite dodge on his part was to enlist time-honoured sayings as a justification for his least respectable actions. As he pointed out to his readers in the episode involving Henry Hoare, ‘whatever is not condemned is approved; a standing maxim this, in civil, canon, and common law’. Needless to add, he took full advantage of the licence thus afforded. In this way he stood on the cusp of modernity, recognizing that scandal flourishes where boundaries wait to be tested. Some of his contemporaries grasped what he had started to do. In HarlequinHorace James Miller advised aspirant authors to remove all moral intent from their works, and let ‘Ribaldry, and Scandal lawless reign’. The benefits were immediate: ‘Thus shall you reap the Profit you pursue | And Curl get Money by the Copy too’. The bookseller went a little further, celebrating his own notoriety in the public prints, and capitalizing on his recurrent brushes with the law. James Bramston had sagely reflected, ‘Can Statutes keep the British Press in awe | While that sells best, that’s most against the Law?’. But it was not until 1744, at the end of Curll’s career, that the author of a pamphlet entitled A Trip from St. James’s to the Royal Exchange set out a full rationale for this way of conducting business: There are such Contrasts in the Business of Authors, Printers and Publishers, that to the rest of Mankind are amazing. If the Government chastises them for any Misdemeanor, it is accounted the greatest Blessing that can befal them; Punishment being a real Benefit, and Confinement the boasted Liberty of the Press: A Book or Pamphlet ordered to be burnt by the Hands of the common Hangman, being the most agreeable News that can come to the Proprietors of the Copy; and I have been credibly inform’d, that if this Favour was to be purchased, there is not a Bookseller in London, but would give an handsome Sum to have all the Books in his Shop fir’d in the same manner. A Warrant now and then from the Secretaries Office, is a singular Advantage to a young Beginner; a Book having many Times been brought to the Ninth Edition, by the Printer’s only taking Coach with a Messenger to the Cockpit; when, perhaps, six single Copies had not been sold fairly off, but for this Assistance.

The passage continues with an amusing instance: I remember a Pamphleteer in the late Reign, sentenc’d to a heavy Fine and Imprisonment, for treasonable Practices, when almost one half of the Stationers Company went down to Westminster to give the Man Joy, and ask what County he design’d to purchase in.

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The Pillory is an Estate certain to any one, who will accept of the Post; for the Sale of a Libel always rises in proportion with the Sufferings of its Author. I knew a Printer who obtain’d a pretty tolerable Fortune, by only procuring a State Messenger to call and take a Dinner with him, two or three times a Month, at his House in the City; and another, who was every Day expected to be sent to Goal for Debt, that luckily chanc’d to be sent for to Whitehall, to receive a Reprimand. The Thing proved the making of the Man, for he soon retrieved his Affairs, and now lives in extraordinary good Circumstances. But now, alas, these Golden Days are over: the Ministry seem determined to take no notice of the Libels daily propagated, and by this Neglect to starve both Authors and Printers.1

Exaggerated as this is (it would be hard to point to many booksellers who actually got rich by these means), the use of notoriety to sell things would today strike us as commonplace. For people in the first half of the eighteenth century, it came over as a disturbing novelty. Among the first to recognize what was going on, and to lay it at the door of Curll in particular, was Henry Fielding. In The Covent Garden Journal on 27 June 1752, he described the traditional cheats practised by booksellers abroad, and then went on to isolate some innovations which had stolen into the English trade: The first of these Methods was for the Merchant himself to mount in the most public Part of the Town into a wooden Machine called the Pillory, where he stood for the Space of an Hour proclaiming his Goods to all that past that Way. This was practised with much Success by the late Mr. Curl, Mr. Mist and others, who never failed of selling several large Bales of Goods in this Manner.2

This clearly draws on Swift’s treatment of ‘Oratorical Machines’ such as the pulpit and the gallows in the introduction to A Tale of a Tub. But the new bookselling mountebanks have found an even more effective stage on which to promote their wares, for they do more than attract attention, as Swift’s orators had—they sell. What had been an ideological venue has become, at least to the satirists, a site of consumerism. From the Elizabethan age, disreputable individuals on the fringe of the book trade had gone around scavenging for any surreptitious copies they might purloin. At the time Curll set up in trade, he had the example of the dedicated pirates, Henry Hills and Benjamin Bragge—who conveniently were just quitting the scene. During the span of his own career, other unscrupulous men showed themselves economical with the truth in regard to authorship, editions, or place of publication. They included James Watson, ‘T. Johnson’ in the Hague, George Risk in Dublin, and on Curll’s doorstep the elusive ‘A. Moore’, who escaped prosecution by never existing—a circumstance mirrored in The Dunciad, where the booksellers vie for their prize, ‘the phantom, More’ (ii. 46).3 Yet no one really competed with the master in this contest, year in and year out, partly because of his never-relinquished aspirations to maintain a classy list. While Hills brazenly printed and sold cheap reprints of books to which he had no conceivable title (including some of Curll’s), Curll always sought to present his publications as

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in some way legitimate. He was helped in part by the disputed nature of what exactly constituted legitimacy. Booksellers and printers always found themselves at the heart of any case involving alleged sedition, despite the risk-free picture of their operations given by Fielding. They could not run so far: they had plant and shops, and unlike authors had to leave their calling cards when books were published. Legal dogma recognized their role, as set out for example in Coke’s Institutes: the great jurist cited a case in the Star Chamber, indicating that ‘every one who shall be convicted [of a seditious publication] ought to be a contriver, procurer, or publisher of it, knowing it to be a libel’.4 Those in Curll’s position suffered from another handicap: when a criminal charge was brought for a ‘public’ libel (one threatening to disturb the peace, as opposed to one brought as a civil action between individuals), no defence existed on the grounds of the truth of the allegations. As Blackstone stated it, ‘in a criminal prosecution, the tendency which all libels have to create animosities, and to disturb the public peace, is the sole consideration of the law’ (our italics).5 As a result, Curll had no chance to defend himself in the Ker trial by claiming that the book’s assertions were accurate. Of course, some people thought Pope as culpable as his enemy, which further obscures the ostensibly clean lines of the case. Take the charge to the Westminster jury delivered by Sir John Gonson on 24 April 1728, recommending that the jury should present (bring an indictment against) the authors and printers of libels: It is a Shame to our Nation, that there should be any Persons belonging to it so little sensible of the Happiness which we enjoy, as to libel and disturb such a King, and such an Administration; yet this Offence is now grown so common, that if a Man goes into a Coffee-House, it is uncertain whether he lays his Hands upon a News-Paper, or a Libel. I would not have any imagine, that there must be express Words of Scandal, and Persons Names at length, to make a Libeller Criminal; if our Laws require this, they are very weak; and it would be strange, that all Mankind must understand a Libeller’s Meaning, except the Court and the Jury, who are to try him. Indirect or Oblique Scandal hath in all Times (especially since the Abolition of the Court of Star-Chamber) [16 Car. I c.10] been prosecuted, and the Offenders convicted and punished in the ordinary Courts of Justice; and if it were otherwise, the subtle or cunning Contrivance, which aggravates the Crime, would prevent the Punishment. And therefore it is, that Ironical Scandal, nay, even Dumb Scandal, (Scandal by Pictures or by Signs) as is mentioned in the Case de Libellis Famosis, in my Lord COKE’S Fifth Report, is indictable in this Court. The only Caution necessary in these cases is, that the Interpretation be not forc’d or strain’d. [Coke’s 5th Report.]6

If this suggests anything, it is surely the first version of The Dunciad, with all its obliquity, its subtle contrivances, and its use of blanks instead of full names. Yet the poem did not appear until 18 May, more than three weeks later. We might speculate that Gonson had got wind of its contents, and that he had

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some informant within the book-trade: but no evidence exists to support this. However, the magistrate could have had the Pope–Swift Miscellanies in mind, since the third volume appeared on 8 March, with Peri Bathous prominent at its head. Gonson led a strongly puritanical campaign against vice, a fact which earned him a place in Hogarth’s series The Harlot’s Progress (1732) and many mentions in the Grub-street Journal. Equally, Pope found him a niche in the imitation of Donne’s fourth satire, referring once to ‘the Storm of Gonson’s Lungs’, and then later writing, ‘Peace, Fools! Or Gonson will for Papists seize you . . . ’7 Part of the animosity derives from Gonson’s vehement evangelical Protestantism, which went along with a strong devotion to the Hanoverian cause. His horror of blasphemy and profanity would have led us to expect that he had Curll within his sights; but in fact Gonson seems never to have pursued him. All this suggests rather that the magistrate had lined up Pope and his allies. We instinctively think of Curll as the outsider, throwing dirt at the privileged and relatively invulnerable Pope, safe in his retreat at Twickenham and protected by influential friends. For many contemporaries, however (Gonson perhaps among them), it was Pope who constantly trod the line of sedition, and whose dangerous libels were made the more pernicious because of the indirect means employed in this ‘Ironical Scandal’. Curll owes his special notoriety to his development of the tools of publicity, which is perhaps his most ‘modern’ feature. It happens that the first extensive use of press advertisements was made by practitioners of two professions: booksellers and proprietors of quack medicines. Sometimes the functions overlapped, as in the case of John Newbery, who hawked indifferently newspapers, children’s books like Goody Two-Shoes, and Dr James’s fever powder. Proprietary medicines and new books similarly conjoin in Pope’s prose satires on Curll, especially A Further Account of the most Deplorable Condition. (That pamphlet itself carries on its title-page a revealing imprint: ‘Printed, and Sold by all the Publishers, Mercuries, and Hawkers, within the Bills of Mortality’—a parody of Grub Street production methods.) In these squibs, Curll’s promotion techniques come in for repeated mention: Pope has the bookseller speak of ‘the second Collection of Poems, which I groundlessly called Mr. Prior’s, will sell for Nothing, and hath not yet paid the Charge of the Advertisements, which I was obliged to publish against him’. Curll also tells one of his understrappers that he has ‘several Taking Title Pages that only wanted Treatises to be writ to them’ (Prose Works, i. 263, 265, 273). The joke here rests on the practice of using the title-page as we today employ a dust-jacket: books were displayed in shop windows or on rails, with the title-page uppermost. Hence the elaborate trailers carried on the title-page of a book such as Moll Flanders. Every paragraph of these pamphlets displays the intimate knowledge Pope had acquired of the contents of Curll’s advertisements. This fact becomes even more important when we turn to The Dunciad, where the notes and appendices depend heavily on this source. The Dunciad dramatizes Grub Street mores, and

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appropriately it makes telling use of the new publicity channels which Curll had exploited. One reference after another shows how keenly Pope studied advertising columns: the poem displays ‘dauntless Curll’ as he competes in attention-seeking with fellow-booksellers. For this reason, in Pope’s casting of events, Curll belongs in the company of Colley Cibber, John Rich, and Orator Henley, because like them he had pioneered new modes of winning public notice. The furore which greeted The Dunciad on its first appearance—with crowds of authors ‘besieging’ the shop, and booksellers and hawkers clamouring to get hold of copies—reflects this set of circumstances: but so does the text of the poem itself. A key moment of the booksellers’ contest in Book 2 comes with the award to Curll of a consolation prize: A shaggy Tap’stry, worthy to be spread On Codrus’ old, or Dunton’s modern bed; Instructive work! whose wry-mouth’d portraiture Display’d the fates her confessors endure. (ii. 135–8)

The worsted carries effigies of Defoe, Tutchin, and others: it is to Grub Street’s empire of signs what the shield of Achilles is to the world of Homeric heroes. Its barbaric heraldry suggests the crude but vigorous popular art of Hanoverian London: signs rattling above people as they went about their business, playbills, and posters. We recall that Martinus Scriblerus had been mesmerized by ‘a large square piece of Canvas’ portraying the sights at a freak show: that Swift depicted himself as ‘fasten’d by the Eyes’ to the ‘painted Monsters’ at Charing Cross: and that Gay mentions in Trivia swinging signs, painted booths, and breathless hawkers. An obvious link exists here with the show-cloths in Hogarth’s early works. Thus, near the centre of Masquerades and Operas, the artist displays a large cloth hanging out, illustrating operatic affairs, whilst a harlequin who may represent John Rich points up to a poster for the current pantomime at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Southwark Fair depicts at least five show-cloths in addition to painted signs. The new entrepreneurs of popular culture had sensed the value of a symbol, a banner, or a logo. Hence perhaps Curll’s repeated manoeuvres with his shop sign, which transformed itself over the years, as a protean effigy of marketing.8 What, finally, did Curll contribute to the development of the book trade in England? Unlike Jacob Tonson, he could scarcely claim to have raised the status of the publishing profession—quite the reverse. He achieved nothing comparable to Tonson’s social success, which saw the bookseller consort on terms of virtual equality with the grandees of the Kit Cat Club. Nor was he responsible for significant advances in the circulation of books, such as the use of subscription campaigns; and he did little to enhance the canon of English literature through major editions of writers such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Despite his reputation, he largely ignored the emergent field of crime writing, unless there was a sexual angle to it; the specialist publisher in that area was John Applebee. Music he left alone; periodicals and newspapers he largely eschewed. All his major

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innovations lay in the field of promotion and publicity: at least he ensured that books and authors got talked about. Posterity has divided Curll’s output into two segments. On one hand stands the strong antiquarian list, the commendable range of works on history, the translations of classical and modern texts, some fair-to-middling poetic specimens, a few medical and scientific books of genuine merit. On the other, works of shameless exploitation—pirated texts and secretly purloined manuscripts, lubricious tales of nuns in the cloister, mysteries of the marriage-bed, trials for divorce, pseudo-technical titles on impotence, surveys of Merryland which turn out to be descriptions of human anatomy. The instant biographies made up the most notorious category, and what they amounted to was worse than a crime—rather a publishing blunder. It may be argued that Curllian lives impeded the course of serious inquiry and a substituted a brokenbacked medley of disjointed fragments, dragged from any available trash-can, for a proper appraisal of the subject’s achievement. At any rate, such items, good, bad or indifferent, certainly brought him to public attention, and presumably helped the higher quality books to sell. Yet there is little sense that Curll himself would ever have admitted that there was any substantial difference, in terms of legitimacy or cultural value, between high and low, major authors and minor, pornography and medicine, history and scandal, theology and dirt, authorized copy and surreptitious acquisition. It was all text to be printed and promoted. Perhaps this was an attitude particular to its historical moment at the gradual handover between the age of literary patronage and the dominance of respected booksellers such as Dodsley and Millar. In the uncertainties of that transition, compounded by the slow decay of the power of the Stationers’ Company as a regulatory body, Curll’s brand of opportunism thrived. Greater moral sanctions and a lower degree of satiric interaction with popular culture in the latter half of the century, probably also diminished the likelihood of a second Curll. Johnson, the author who most nearly replaces Pope as the single most visible writer, was himself a book trade figure, more sympathetic to commerce, and less in need of a tangible enemy like Curll. And one other obvious difference exists between Curll’s business and Tonson’s firm: Curll lacked the opportunity to found a lasting publishing dynasty. Unlike many members of the trade, he did not have a family background in the business, he married (apparently) out of the bookselling profession, and he left no heir—since his son Henry had died and his daughter-in-law remarried.9 Once he was gone, no one could quite replicate his career. For a potential successor, we must search out obscure figures such as William Rayner, who failed hopelessly to match their oracle in cheek or resourcefulness. At the end of the day, there will never be another Curll.

APPENDIX 1

Curll’s Will Rose Street Covent Garden 10th March 1733/4 Whenever called upon by nature I freely resign my Spirit to the Supreme being. As to my Worldly Goods of all kinds whereof I stand possessed I hereby Constitute my most dear and Affectionate (Second) Wife Elizabeth my sole and whole Executrix of [deleted : both and my Son Henry sole and joint Executrix and Executor of] this my last Will and Testament being well assured that may dear Wife (if she Survive me) will be the best Friend in this World to my Son and his Family & desire to be Interred in a decent manner wheresoever they shall think fitt to all herein contained written with my own hand & Subscribe my Name The above alteration made this 27th day of July 1737 E Curll Edmund Curll A Continuation of my within mentioned Will to my Wife I have no Relatives; my Son is dead, He left no Issue, and his Wife’s re-wed; Therefore no Legacys at all I leave But all I’ve got to my dear Wife bequeathe. Written and Signed by me this 14th day of July/1742 Entg . my 60th Year Edmund Curll Christopher Norris of the Parish of Saint Gregory London Bookbinder and William Norris of the Parish of Saint Faith London Bookbinder severally make Oath That they these deponents severally knew and were acquainted with Edmund Curll late of the Parish of Saint Paul Covent Garden in the County of Middlesex Bookseller deceased and with his manner and Character of Handwriting and Subscription for several years before and to the time of his death happening (as these deponents have been informed and believe) about Six Month last past and these deponents now carefully viewing the Paper & Writing hereunto annexed (purporting to be his Will) dated 10th March 1733/4 and Subscribed Edmund Curll, and also a Continuation to the said Will dated 14th July 1742 and Subscribed Edmund Curll they these deponents severally make Oath That they do in their Consciences verily believe that the said Will and Continuation thereof were and are (as these deponents verily believe) totally wrote and subscribed by and with the proper hand of the said Edmund Curll deceased Christopher Norris William Norris 22d June 1748 The said Christopher Norris and William Norris were Sworn to the Truth of the Premisses before me Robert Chapman Surrogate Present me Wm . Legard Notary Publick. This Will was proved at London before the Worshipful Robert Chapman doctor of Laws Surrogate of the Right Worshipful John Bettesworth also doctor of Laws Master Keeper or Commissary of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury lawfully constituted on the Twenty first day of July in the Year of our Lord One thousand seven hundred

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and forty eight by the oath of Elizabeth Curll Widow the Relict of the deceased and sole Executrix in the said Will named to whom Administration was granted of all and singular the Goods [?Chattels] and Credits of the said deceased being first Sworn duly to administer Exd National Archives, PROB 11/763

APPENDIX 2

Curll’s Payments to Authors The materials in this list derive from BL, Add. MS 38728. They are found in the ‘Upcott papers’, collected by William Upcott (1779–1845), librarian of the London Institute, and partially published by him in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February and March 1824. Add MS 38730 contains mostly trade dealings and exchanges of copyright, including some Curll material on which we have drawn in the text, whilst Add MS 38728 records payments to authors. Upcott’s arrangement was alphabetical by author; the order of receipts here is chronological. f. 120 [b]: 30 May 1709; Edward Holdsworth, 5 guineas and fifty copies for Muscipula. f. 33: 13 and 20 March [1712]; Francis Bragge, 3 guineas for the first 1000 copies of ‘Proceedings against Jane Wenham’, and one further guinea for reprinting. f. 185 [b]: 2 June 1713; Thomas Rowell, ‘valuable consideration’ for The Christian’s Support under all Afflictions. f. 120 [a]: 30 April 1715; Francis Hewerdine, £6 for ‘The Abridgement of Nelson’s Works and Kettlewell’. f. 36 [a]: 15 May 1715; Jonas Browne, 12 guineas for translating Dr Gregory’s Elements of Catoptrics and Dioptricks with Addendum. f. 34: John Durant Breval, 4 guineas for ‘The Progress of Dress’. f. 36 [b]: Jonas Browne, £5 7s and 6d for a quarter share of ‘a translation of Heliodorus’s Ethiopics’. f. 41: 4 July 1716: Francis Chute, ‘full satisfaction’ from Curll and Hooke for ‘the Petticoat’. f. 187 [a]: 19 November 1717; Robert Samber, 10 guineas for Eunuchism Display’d. f. 157 [b]: 23 April 1718; Charles Molloy, 5 guineas for The Coquet, with a note for 5 more upon sale of 900 [?] copies. f. 37 [b]: 17 February 1719; Robert Busby, ‘full satisfaction’ for The German Atalantis: Or, Hanover Tales. f. 25: 13 November 1719; Charles Beckingham, £52 10s for The Tragedy of King Henry the Fourth of France and translation of Rapin’s Christus Patiens. f. 127: 28 November 1719; John Leigh, 45 guineas for Kensington Garden: Or The Pretenders. Witnessed by Samber. f. 185 [a]: 6 October 1721; John Rook; £12 for translating Hobbes’s Ecclesiastical History, 2 guineas for ‘Teaching Harry and Correctg 5 Sheets Ant. Westmr ’. f. 196 [a]: 16 September 1723; Thomas Stackhouse, 10 guineas for ‘Life of Bishop Atterbury’.

Appendix 2: Curll’s Payments to Authors

323

F 187 [b]: 20 February 1724; Robert Samber, 4 guineas and 12 bound copies for ‘The Praise of Drunkenness’. f. 37 [a]: 3 March 1725; Ann Brome, 1 guinea for ‘The Gentleman Apothecary’, property of her dead husband, Charles Brome. f. 52: 4 April 172[5?]; Thomas Cooke, £5 for ‘writing Mr Marvell’s Life procuring some of his Letters, & Publishing his Works’. Witnessed by Edward Minshull. f. 196 [b]: 11 October 1725; Thomas Stackhouse, ‘full Satisfaction’ for translating Curll’s ‘Share of Chinese Tales’. f. 102 [b]: 24 December 1725; Thomas Foxton, £5 10s for translating ‘the Second Part of the Joys of the Blessed, and 10s part payment for translating Laus Ululae. f. 102 [a]: 1 January 1726; Thomas Foxton, £2 10s, rest of payment for Laus Ululae. f. 102 [c]: 20 June 1726; Thomas Foxton, £1 1s and ‘several Books’ for The Tower. f. 49: 13 and 18 October 1726; John Clarke, 2 guineas for ‘The Virgin Seducer’ and ‘The Batchelor Keeper’. f. 56: 8 February 1728; Matthias Earbery, 8 guineas for third part of Burnet’s De Statu Mortuorum. f. 102 [d]: [1728?]; Thomas Foxton, £7 7s for translating ‘the second part of Burnet’s Archæologia’. f. 103 [a]: 15 and 29 August 1728; Thomas Foxton, 3 and a half guineas for translating the Dedication, Preface, 9th and 10th chapters of Burnet’s ‘Archeologiæ Philosophicæ’. f. 103 [b]: 1 November 1728; Thomas Foxton, £2 17s 6d for translating Burnet de Futura Judaeorum Restauratione. The receipt adds 5s 6d against the word ‘Books’, to give a total of £3 3s. f. 103 [c]: 27 May 1734: Thomas Foxton, 7 guineas for translating fourteen sheets of ‘Dr. Burnet De Origini[bus] Rerum’. f. 121: 6 September and 21 December 1734: Samuel Humphreys, 2 guineas per sheet for translating ‘all those Tales of Monsieur De la Fontaine into English Verse, as have not been already translated by such other Hands are are [sic] approved of by the said Mr Curl’. 2 guineas received. The later receipt acknowledges ‘full Satisfaction’ for the ‘first Volume of Fontaine’ containing 5 tales translated by Humphreys. f. 197 [a]: 10 November 1740: Thomas Stretser, ‘Full Satisfaction’ for ‘A New Description of Merryland’. f. 197 [b]: 17 October 1741: Thomas Stretser, ‘full Satisfaction’ for ‘Merryland Displayed’. f. 141 [undated]: John Markland, £2 2s for Fryar’s Tale, ‘Retaliation’ and ‘other Poems’. Note: This receipt probably dates from 1723, as it concerns items included in Cythereia, published in April of that year. A different sequence of Upcott papers, Add. MS 78686, includes at art. 68 Susanna Centlivre’s receipt for Curll’s payments of 20 guineas for The Wonder, The Cruel Gift, and The Artifice, dated 18 May 1715.

Notes I N T RO D U C T I O N 1. Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 157–72. Mudge states that ‘he [Pope] poisoned Curll in part because the latter had identified the former as the author of poems that took satiric pot shots at the Court’ (p. 163). He omits to add that this was a misidentification, since Pope had no share in the Court Poems. 2. Bradford K. Mudge (ed.), When Flesh Becomes Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. ix. 1 BE G I N N I N G S ( 1 6 8 3 – 1 7 0 6 ) 1. The will (registered copy) is PROB 11/763/209, transcribed below, Appendix 1. The memorandum is BL Add. MS 38730, fol. 63. The date of birth sometimes given, 1675, derives from the notice of his death in GM xvii (1747), 592, where his age is estimated as 72; this is followed in the New and General Biographical Dictionary (1798), vol. iv, and all nineteenth-century biographical dictionaries. There is no reason to doubt Curll’s dating. 2. Mackenzie, ‘Edmund Curll’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 154: The British Literary Book Trade, 1700–1820, ed. James K. Bracken and Joel Silver (Detroit: Gale, 1995), 81–92. An Edward Curle bought a share in the manor of Cresswell, near Maidenhead, in 1649: see The Victoria History of the County of Berkshire, ed. William Page and others, 5 vols. (London: St Catherine Press, 1906–27), iii. 101. The suggestion of an origin near Maidenhead seems to come from Edward L. Ruhe, ‘Edmund Curll and his Early Associates’, in English Writers of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 72: but Ruhe bases this assumption on a passing claim by Curll of an association with the scholar Henry Dodwell, who lived at Cookham. 3. London Inhabitants Within the Walls, ed. D. V. Glass (London: London Record Society, 1966), 79. 4. National Archives, PROB 11/774/277. Our Curll is not mentioned in the will. 5. See Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500–1714, ed. Joseph Foster, 4 vols. (Oxford: Parker, 1891); Alumni Cantabrigienses . . . Part I: From the Beginnings to 1751, compiled by John Venn and J. A. Venn, vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922); J. Charnock, Biographia Navalis, 6 vols. (1794–8). 6. Mackenzie says his knowledge of Greek and Latin was ‘sound’ and Peter Murray Hill agrees (Two Augustan Booksellers (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1958), p. 21); but there is no evidence that his knowledge was more than elementary. Dunton, from an educated background, claims to have managed fluency in Latin but could make no headway at all with Greek; Life and Errors, ed. John Nichols, 2 vols. (1818),

Notes

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

325

i. 27. For Curll’s challenge to John Spinke about Latin translation, see Chapter 2 below. ‘J.H.’, Remarks On ’Squire Ayre’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. Pope. In a Letter to Mr. Edmund Curl, Bookseller (London: M. Cooper, 1745), 43–4. Henley had a strong connection with Curll, but the pamphlet is not included in the list of Henley’s writings in Graham Midgley, The Life of Orator Henley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). John Hill was much younger and had much less connection with the relevant circle. In the Chancery case cited below, n. 32. Curll is not listed in The Poll of the Livery-Men of the City of London (1710), either as a stationer or anything else; neither was Smith, though many of Curll’s associates, such as Gosling, Pemberton, Sanger, and Bettesworth, were. An Edmund Curle was a member of the livery company of cordwainers in 1713, when he voted for 3 Whigs and one Tory in the London election; but this seems unlikely to be our Curll: London Politics 1713–1717, ed. H. Horwitz, W. A. Speck, and W. A. Gray (London: London Record Society, 1981), 80. Curll’s solitary mention in Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1701–1800, ed. by D. F. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1978) occurs on 5 March 1711 (no. 2260) when Thomas Dyer, an apprentice bound in 1706, was ‘turned over’ to him; but Dyer was freed by his original master, Andrew Bell, in 1713. Curll’s own ‘apprentices’ were probably not formally bound. See further Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 169. For general accounts see Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books, 3rd edn. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), especially Part One; and John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm, 1988), especially Part Two. Particularly relevant for Curll’s period is David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); see also Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1675–1750’, The Library, 6th ser. 4 (1982), 99–134. Dunton, Life and Errors, i. 204–63. Plant, The English Book Trade, 85–6, quotes contemporary evidence to show that in 1724 there were 75 printing houses in London, and in 1750 about 128 publishers or booksellers in London. Blagden, Stationers’ Company, 166–77. Quoted in Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson: Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 35. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 28–9, and see pp. 182–3, 206–7. Life and Errors, i. 62, 72, 187, 214. Life and Errors, i. 38–9, 158; see however ii. 751. Life and Errors, i. 52, 61–2, 184. A Richard Smith is listed as resident in the City in 1695 with his wife Mary and sons Thomas and Richard, but beyond the fact that our Smith’s wife was called Mary, the identity cannot be confirmed: London Inhabitants, 272. See Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641–1700, ed. D. F. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1974), nos. 3382, 1918, 3752.

326

Notes

21. See PM, 1 April 1707, for an example of his subscription appeals. 22. The Notebook of Thomas Bennet and Henry Clements (1686–1719) with some Aspects of Book Trade Practice, ed. Norma Hodgson and Cyprian Blagden, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications,  vol. vi (Oxford, 1956), 72 n. 1. See also Plant, English Book Trade, 245. 23. ‘Mr. Smith’ is one of the distributors of Millington’s catalogue Bibliotheca Woodwardiana of 1702. 24. See British Book Sale Catalogues 1676–1800: A Union List, compiled and ed. A. N. L. Munby and Lenore Coral (London: Mansell, 1977), 20–2; PM 9 October 1707, noting that Smith has removed from ‘without Temple Bar’ to the Inner Walk of Exeter Exchange; and ESTC t141312, t21623, t30074 and t21606. Exeter Exchange was ‘a Place which is said formerly to have furnish’d the Men of Quality with most of their Mistresses’, according to A Ramble Through London (1728), 22. 25. Brown’s poem is quoted in Straus, 18. Ward’s remarks in A Step to Stir-Bitch-Fair with Remarks upon the University of Cambridge (1700) are reprinted in Philip Pinkus, Grub St. Stripped Bare (London: Constable, 1968), 199. 26. Life and Errors, i. 235–6, ii. 496–529. 27. Life and Errors, i. 43–60, 112. For general comment on book trade apprenticeships see Plant, English Book Trade, 131, 151–2. 28. Quackery Unmask’d, 2nd ed. 48; Straus, 30. Smith had moved to Exeter Exchange by this point; he had acted as an auctioneer at that address since 1703. Spinke’s suggestion may derive from the Chancery case of 1708; see n. 32 below. 29. BL, Sloane MS 4039 f. 69. 30. Document supplied by the Society of Genealogists. The allegation specified St Martin Outwich as the location of the wedding. The marriage is recorded in the International Genealogical Index, with the date of 13 August, and the licence for it is noted in the Calendar of Marriage Licences Issued by the Faculty Office 1632–1714, ed. George E. Cokayne and Edward A. Fry (London: British Record Society, 1905) under 12 August 1704. 31. He co-published with Benjamin Bragge in 1706 and was involved with John Marten’s publications on venereal disease in 1709, as well as the notorious Onania; all these feature in Curll’s career. Isted’s will was proved on 28 September 1743. 32. R. L Haig, ‘ ‘‘The Unspeakable Curll’’: Prologomena’, Studies in Bibliography 13 (1960), 220–3, citing National Archives, C5/350/27. Curll’s answer has not been found. 33. Advertised, without Curll’s name, in DC, 4 January 1706. The auction was still being advertised on 14 January, and a second part began on 16 January. The catalogue itself bears Curll’s name. 34. Advertised in DC, 28 January 1706, again without Curll’s name; catalogues (which do name Curll) were available from Charles Smith. Several other anonymous auctions were advertised during these early months of 1706, and Curll may have been involved in some of these; without catalogues, however, there is no way of telling. 35. Advertised in DC, 27 February to 5 March; Curll’s name becomes increasingly prominent in the advertisements. 36. Munby and Coral, Union List, 21; Straus, 203–4.

Notes

327

37. A copy of the catalogue, with somewhat confusing manuscript alterations, is in the British Library (S.C.388(4)) and dated [1707] by ESTC (t21617); but the advertisements in DC (26 to 30 November and 2–3 December 1706) show that the sale took place in 1706. 38. The book was reprinted in 1712, 1719, 1726, 1732, 1737, and later, but Curll has no further ostensible connection with it. Gosling, however, one of his associates, is named in the imprints of several of the later editions. Curll quotes from the book in The Case of Dr. Sacheverell (1710), 4, so he had actually read it. 2 IN BU S I N E S S ( 1 7 0 7 – 1 7 1 0 ) 1. See the advertisements in DC, 19 and 21 March, 17, 18, 19 and 21 April, 8 May, 20, 24 and 25 June, 10 and 12 December 1707; PB, 18 and 20 March, 28 August 1707; DC, 15–26 March, 17–23 April, 30 April and 3 May, 17–25 June, 8–14 July, 1–2 November and 31 December 1708; 3, 5, 13–15 January 1709; PB, 28, 30 April, 3 May 1709. Richard Smith made similar, but lower-key offers: see for example PB, 5 June 1708. 2. PB, 23, 25 and 28 June 1709; DC, 7 to 12 November 1709. 3. He retained his warehouse in Exeter Exchange (EP, 13 February 1713). His Royal Patent was printed in Beveridge’s Exposition of XXXIX Articles of the Church of England (1710), a specimen of the whole Beveridge project. 4. The Life of Bull was completely destroyed, and 1,000 copies of one gathering of Bull’s own work. Bowyer made good the paper himself, though Smith had released him from doing so, and he paid Smith the same dividend as other creditors: Nichols, LA i. 55–6. Curll contributed a guinea to Bowyer’s relief fund. For Smith’s dealings with Bowyer see The Bowyer Ledgers: the Printing Accounts of William Bowyer, Father and Son, reproduced on Microfiche: with a Checklist of Bowyer Printing, 1699–1777, ed. Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (London: Bibliographical Society, 1991) nos. 134, 137, 139, 165, 169, 185, 275 etc., and for dealings with the bookseller Thomas Bennet, see The Notebook of Thomas Bennet and Henry Clements, 1686–1719, ed. by Norma Hodgson and Cyprian Blagden (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1956), 101 n., 123–4, and 210. 5. See Bowyer Ledgers for 14 May 1718 and 14 July 1721. Mary held half-price sales of old Beveridge stock in 1718 (EP, 28 January 1718, DC, 27 November 1718); Smith was clearly ‘deceas’d’ by then. She held similar sales in 1719 (MWJ, 31 January) and in 1720, according to an advertisement in Louis Ellies Du Pin, A Compleat Method of Studying Divinity; her last publication appears to have been John Smith, A Short and Direct Method of Painting in Water-Colours (1730). 6. On Halsey see his entry in Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641–1700, ed. McKenzie, and Dunton, Life and Errors, 217; Ruhe’s article (cited in Chapter 1, n. 2 above) is the fullest account of these early associations. 7. See the entry on Smith in Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1701–1800, ed. McKenzie. 8. Technically, Rochester was another Tonson brand: see Nicholas Fisher, ‘Jacob Tonson and the Earl of Rochester’, The Library, 7th ser., 6 (2005), 132–60.

328

Notes

9. Quoted in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), ii. 899–900. ‘Mouse’ is The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d. 10. Curll advertised a ‘second edition’ of his volume against Tonson’s publication, but nothing of this date is recorded in ESTC. For the date of Tonson’s edition see Foxon, English Verse, 641. 11. PB, 6 December and PM, 9 December 1707. It appeared in 1709 for R. Bonwicke, J. Tonson and nine others, including R. Smith. Advertisements for this and the Memoirs of Langallerie included Sanger alongside Curll. 12. A native of Hamburg, Crull trained as a doctor and settled in London. He was elected FRS but was unable to pay the fees, and had for some years been working as a freelance historian 13. In Whitelocke’s Memorials of 1709. 14. Burrough(s) was bound to Thomas Parkhurst in 1697 and freed 1704. Dunton praises his personality in Life and Errors, 218. Baker was bound in 1687 to Brabazon Aylmer and freed in 1694. See Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641–1700, ed. McKenzie, and Foxon, Book Trade, 3–7. 15. Bentley, A Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, in William Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, second edition (1697), 7–10, and J. A. Farrer, Literary Forgeries (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 13–25. 16. LG, 13 November 1707. Wale was bound to Samuel Smith, 1698, but freed by redemption in 1703; see Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641–1700 and Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1701–1800, ed. McKenzie. He bound his own apprentices from 1704, apparently until 1709. Briscoe had issued a translation of Petronius, with the fragments, by William Burnaby in 1694. He and Sanger advertised The Satyrical Works at least twice. 17. BL, Add. MS. 38730, f. 63. 18. Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), 60. Curll’s network outside London was limited, though one may note that Poetical Miscellanies on Several Occasions by Samuel Jones of Whitby was printed (probably on a ‘for the author’ basis) for Bettesworth and Curll and also distributed at York, Hull, Durham and Newcastle. Bowyer, acting as a retail dealer, sent at least a dozen Curll books to the Revd. John Lister of Rochford, Essex; see Bowyer Ledgers, Appendix 2. 19. Not to Lintot, as Straus, 20 has it, nor to Jacob Tonson as TE vi. 38 has it. See Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641–1700, ed. McKenzie, and Marjorie W. Barnes, ‘The Firm of Lintot’, MA thesis (University of London, 1942), 16. 20. For example, the advertisement in Blackmore’s The Kit-Cats (1708) lists ten substantial books. 21. It was announced by Briscoe and Bragge in PM, 20 November 1707, though they do not appear in the imprint; advertisements for its actual publication (PM, 9 December 1707) drop them and add Burrough, Baker and Cliffe to Curll and Sanger—an instance of the complex arrangements for publication and distribution obtaining at the time. The work is now ascribed to Jean Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde. 22. The copyright assignment for Gerhard is BL, Add. MS. 38728, f. 185 (dated 1713). Rowell apparently engaged with Curll for a translation of Sallust, handing out, gratis, a Specimen of a New Translation of Sallust with vehement denunciations of

Notes

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

329

a rival version published by Richard Sare (Caius Crispius Sallustius the Historian made English). The ‘specimen’ appears not to have survived and the project came to nothing. See PB, 18 and 29 January, 19 February 1709. We have not been able to trace a link between Thomas Rowell (b. c.1670) and Curll’s first wife Anne. Quoted in Straus, 228. TE vi. 37. Pope did not acknowledge authorship but included the piece anonymously in his abortive edition of Wycherley (1729); Curll, characteristically, printed it as Pope’s in 1727. See Foxon, H279–288 and the translations listed thereafter. Holdsworth’s copyright assignment for the poem, dated 30 May 1709 and acknowledging receipt of 5 guineas and fifty copies from Curll, is BL, Add MS 38728, f. 102b. Holdsworth left Oxford rather than take the oaths in 1715, and devoted himself to the study of Virgil. Curll’s official translation was by Samuel Cobb, whose Poems on Several Occasions he and Sanger reissued as a slightly extended second edition in 1709 from the edition for R. and J. Bonwick of 1707. Cobb, an alcoholic teacher at Christ’s Hospital in London, became one of Curll’s first regular authors until his death in 1713. See Foxon H237–241. There was also a translation (Foxon T442). It is possible that Curll came to an arrangement with Hills, since his Works of John Philips (1713) contained copies of Blenheim and Cyder which Hills had printed in 1709. DC, 29 June 1709, announcing the volume for a fortnight hence. Tonson had advertised for materials for Rowe’s biography of Shakespeare: LG, 17 March 1709. Curll’s volume was announced again on 15 July, just after Lintot had announced his much cheaper volume (1s 6d as against Curll’s 5s —or 7s 6d if you wanted it in format to match your six Tonson volumes). It appeared, at 6s, on 6 September (DC ). See Tatler no. 51, 6 August 1709; no. 57, 20 August 1709; and no. 63, 3 September 1709, for Curll’s advertisements. The dedication of Curll’s volume is signed ‘S.N.’. Works of Shakespear, pp. i–ii. See Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1701–1800, ed. McKenzie. A promissory note from Sanger to John Toland of 1711 survives in BL, Add. 4295, f. 21. See further Notebook of Thomas Bennet, 202, and FP, 21 March 1713. Sanger’s name is last found in an imprint in 1713, in the second edition of The Works of the Rev. Samuel Johnson. Gosling was apprenticed to Samuel Keble, 1699–1706, and called to the livery 3 July 1710, the same day as Sanger; Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1641–1700 and Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1701–1800, ed. McKenzie. For the various forms of ‘Erle Robert’s Mice’ see Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ii. 927–8. It was printed by Dryden Leach, who sold Curll and Sanger 500 copies on 4 September 1708: BL, Add. MS 38730, f. 116. Pemberton was apprenticed to William Rogers, 1700–1707, and called to the livery 5 June 1710; Stationers’ Company Apprentices, 1641–1700 and Stationers’s Company Apprentices, 1701–1800, ed. McKenzie. Welwood also translated The Banquet of Xenophon, which appeared ‘for John Barnes . . . and Andrew Bell’ (1710), but was claimed by Curll in an advertisement (Straus, 211). ESTC t172071; t117435; t172070. The actual books are otherwise virtually identical.

330

Notes

36. BL, Add MS 61620, ff. 15–16; Smith’s (much neater) petition for the Beveridge patent is at f. 19 in the same volume. See also Shef Rogers, ‘The Use of Royal Licences for Publishing in England, 1695–1760: a Bibliography’, The Library, 7th ser. 1 (2000), 133–92, no. 23 (p. 152). 37. The licence also featured prominently in advertising the book: DC, 17 May, and LG, 23 May 1709. In addition, Whitlock’s manuscript could be viewed (PB, 21 May 1709). 38. Hewerdine’s name appeared only on the second edition of 1708. Hewerdine assigned to Curll the copy of an abridgement of work by Robert Nelson and John Kettlewell on 30 April 1715: BL, Add. MS 38728, f. 120. 39. No. 120, 14 January 1710; advertised in no. 119, 12 January. 40. No copy of this first edition has been found; the second edition (1709) is the one from which textual quotations are taken. 41. ‘Advertisement’, Charitable Surgeon, p. xvii. 42. See PM, 15 January through to 15 March 1709; the second edition was announced 31 March and repeatedly advertised through to 27 August 1709 in the same paper. 43. Charitable Surgeon, 73. 44. See ESTC, R184535, R231692, R231957 and R232043. 45. Advertised in The Observator, 26 March 1709, and at least ten further times there in the months of April and May; also in DC, 26 March 1709. 46. Quoted from Spinke, Quackery Unmask’d, 2nd edn., part III, and Straus, 29. 47. Spinke, Quackery Unmask’d, 2nd edn., part II, p. 16. Spinke advertised the feat in PB, 14 April 1709. 48. Quackery Unmask’d was advertised as ‘Just Publish’d’ in the Review of 18 April, and sporadically for a month thereafter; Spinke began advertising his own ‘Antivenereal Pills’, alongside the book, on 7 June. The sixth edition of Marten’s Treatise was advertised in the issue of 16 June and the advertisements for the opposing products alternated until 28 July. See also PB, 16 April 1709, and Observator, 20 April 1709 through to 14 May. 49. LG, 30 July 1709. Spinke used the occasion to push Quackery Unmask’d : Observator, 5 November 1709 (and throughout November). 50. See PB, 27 October 1709 and Spinke, Quackery Unmask’d, 2nd edn., pt. III, 44 and 68–9. 51. Quotations from Spinke, Quackery Unmask’d, 2nd edn., ‘Scourge’, 17 and Straus, 31–2. 52. The standard account of the matter is Holmes, Sacheverell. 53. F. F. Madan, A Critical Bibliography of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, ed. W. A. Speck (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Libraries, 1978); hereafter cited as Madan–Speck by item number. 54. Madan–Speck 43. 55. BL, C.28.b.11(1). 56. See Madan–Speck 107, which gives the date of publication as 26 December 1709 on the authority of White Kennett. No bookseller is named in the imprint but the advertisement in PM, 23 March 1710, names J. Holmes, a bookbinder, as the agent. See further Straus, 37–8; Holmes, Sacheverell, 95, 115.

Notes

331

57. Madan–Speck 165 and 166–72, White Kennett, The Wisdom of Looking Backward (1715), 7, and Holmes, Sacheverell, 108; Curll is identified from a later advertisement. 58. Madan–Speck 260. For the question of authorship and the ‘official’ version see Holmes, Sacheverell, 196, 215. 59. Straus, 212; for the protest itself see Holmes, Sacheverell, 222. 60. The individual in question was probably John Lambert (1663–1720) of Woodmansterne, Banstead; less probably Thomas Lambert of Perrots Manor (1679–1747); see The Registers of Banstead, in the County of Surrey, 1547–1789, ed. F. A. Heygate Lambert (London: Parish Record Society, 1896) and BL, Add MS 12492. 61. See Holmes, Sacheverell, 192, and Madan–Speck 90, 319, and 326–30. A second edition of Some Considerations was advertised in early May (Madan–Speck 324), and a third, under the title The Art of Confuting Scripture by History, was apparently available in June (Madan–Speck 325). 62. See Holmes, Sacheverell, 220–1; Madan–Speck 339. 63. Kennett, Wisdom of Looking Backward, 87. A ‘white crow’ normally signifies a rarity; Morris P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), C859. Other proverbs suggest lying and delusion: C850, C851, C853. There may also be a suggestion of Robert Greene’s ‘upstart crow’ jibe against Shakespeare. The white is perhaps suggested by the surplice: see further The Tale of a White Crow, that is Drest in a Female Habit in a White Surplice in Fine Scotch Linen, and is Daily to be Seen Betwixt the House of Lords and Commons (London: printed for I. Baker, 1711). 64. He quotes from Josephus (p. 8), Prior (p. 28), and misquotes the ‘parturient montes’ tag from Deuel Pead’s sermon of 1709 (p. 27). 65. See the Appendix, p. 108, referring pointedly to ‘a late Impeachment’. Danby showed up to support Sacheverell; Holmes, Sacheverell, 103. See also A Vindication of his Grace the Duke of Leeds (Morphew, 1712), a Curll item (Straus, 217). 3 T H E F O U R L AS T Y E A R S O F QU E E N A N N E ( 1 7 1 0 – 1 7 1 4 ) 1. Madan–Speck 804, 805, 831, 854, and 876; 919 and 920. 2. See JTS i. 265, in which Swift mentions the Harley preamble as if reading it for the first time (9 May 1711); he praised Harley’s elevation in The Examiner no. 41 (10 May 1711). The preamble apparently incurred criticism for its pompous style and indeed the fact that it was published at all. In Swift vs. Mainwaring: The Examiner and The Medley, ed. Frank H. Ellis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), the editor contends (p. 461 n.) that Curll’s publication was a piracy of Morphew’s ‘authorized’ text, but this seems overly complex; there were three states under Morphew’s imprint, and one Edinburgh piracy (t170519). 3. A Collection of Preambles, stitching most of these separate items together, was also available, printed openly for Curll and Gosling. Harley and Swift are also credited with the Harcourt preamble, but both the Swift items are regarded as doubtful: Teerink, 849 and 850. Prior wrote two preambles, but not for Curll: Literary Works, ii. 764–5 and 770.

332

Notes

4. Hilkiah Bedford, another non-juror, was prosecuted for these writings. See ODNB entries on Higden, Harbin and Bedford, and the preface to A Vindication of her Majesty’s Title and Government (for Richard Smith, 1713), 3–5. Higden was accused of being a ‘Swearing Jacobite’ and a careerist trimmer (he was awarded a DD on his change of political views). 5. As MP and one of the commissioners of the Board of Trade and Plantations, Bladen was the addressee of Hemp. A Poem (1739), and may have been in Pope’s thoughts in Dunciad iv (TE v. 397). 6. See also Will With a Wisp: or, the Grand Ignis Fatuus of London (Curll and others, 1714), an attack on William Whiston. 7. Harley’s name was removed in favour of Walpole’s in Sewell’s Posthumous Works of 1728, probably by Curll. Utrecht was another publishing festival, Pope’s WindsorForest being the celebrated tip of the iceberg; Curll published Samuel Adams, To the Queen upon the Peace and anon., Stanzas to the Lord Treasurer upon the Peace (both 1713). See also Charles Dive, On the Duke of Marlborough. A Poem (Curll, 1712). 8. See also The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 14 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939–68), iv. xx–xxii, where the editors speculate that Sewell ‘appears to have been employed regularly by the ministry to answer Burnet’. 9. Curll put the whole oeuvre together under the title A Complete Collection of all . . . Tracts written in Defence of the Church and Constitution shortly after Queen Anne’s death in 1714. 10. Swift kept Stella informed about another case publicized by Curll in An Account at Large of the . . . Tryal of Richard Thornhill (1711), which told the story of how Thornhill had killed Sir Chomley Dering in a duel, and was convicted of manslaughter at the Old Bailey (18 May 1711). He was subsequently himself murdered. See JTS i. 264–5 (9 May 1711) and i. 337 (21 August 1711), as well as Spectator 84 (6 June 1711). 11. Swift, JTS i. 83–4. 12. Swift was on reasonable terms with William Lloyd, Bishop of Killala from 1691 to his death in 1716; for references see JTS i. 2–3, 28, 49, 63, 70, 88. The title page is reproduced in Prose Works of Swift, i. 237. The British Library volume C.28.b.11 contains this and the Complete Key, and the four Sacheverell items annotated by Curll, and may be his own ‘personal’ collection; but the binding is nineteenth century. See also the volume produced in court, below, p. 225. 13. See Swift, A Tale of a Tub, edited by A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), xiv, 326 and 342; the Key is reproduced at 325–42. Curll’s copy contains some corrections, including one to a Latin quotation, which perhaps indicates at least some basic scholarly ability. 14. Tale of a Tub, ed. Guthkelch, 29 (original in italic). Notes approved by Swift were added to the fifth edition of 1710. 15. Tale of a Tub, ed. Guthkelch, 336. 16. The Key is not in the Bowyer Ledgers, but no. 22 is the Life of Betterton and no.33 may be The Devout Christian’s Companion, both from 1710. Numbers 27, 33, 87, 122, 123, and 187 of Keith Maslen, The Bowyer Ornament Stock (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975) are very similar to the ornaments in the Key; 123 appears inverted on the title page.

Notes

333

17. Tale of a Tub, ed. Guthkelch, 343. Swift thought his ‘little Parson–cousin’, Thomas Swift, was ‘at the bottom of this’ and was appropriating credit for the Tale on the basis of a loaned manuscript. Several early readers transcribed notes from Curll’s Key into copies of the Tale; see Swift, PW i. xxx and Tale of a Tub, ed. Guthkelch, 297. 18. Tale of a Tub, ed. Guthkelch, 20–1; original in italic. 19. JTS i. 269. See also Archbishop King’s letter to Swift, 1 November 1711: ‘You see how malicious some are towards you, in printing a parcel of trifles, falsely, as your works’; Swift, Corr, i. 390–1. Kennett put the publication in the ‘Tory’ column of Wisdom of Looking Backward, 127–8. 20. Swift to Pope, 30 August 1716; Swift, Corr, ii. 177. 21. See also Tony Aston, Pastora . . . An Opera. As it was Perform’d by His Grace the Duke of Richmond’s Servants, at Tunbridge Wells, in the Year 1712. Straus, 39, dates the opening of the Tunbridge Wells shop as 1712 and suggests that it might have been one formerly owned by Richard Smith ‘at the upper end of the Walks’, but cites no reference. It appears to have closed by 1717. 22. BL, Add. MS 38728, f. 33. 23. Wenham survived for twenty more years, the last person to be sentenced to death for witchcraft in England; see Christina Hole, Witchcraft in England (London: Batsford, 1977), 18–19, 165–6. 24. Curll had already issued an Account of the Life and Writings of Jean Le Clerc in 1712. 25. Curll annotated a copy of this (now in the British Library) with the claim that he had sold 20[00] copies; Straus, 222. Baldwin’s name only is on the title page. 26. This was published by Curll and Sanger in 1711; Curll issued a further volume of Posthumous Works in 1713 and the three volumes were put together as a set in 1714. 27. The letter is transcribed in full from BL, Add MS 7121, f. 39, in Pat Rogers, ‘John Oldmixon and a translation of Boileau’, Revue de Litt´erature Compar´ee 43 (1969), 509–13. Oldmixon and Curll restored some sort of amicable arrangement from about 1715 onwards. 28. The book had been produced in a Latin version by Jonah Bowyer in 1708, and there were a number of rival versions on the market. 29. Straus, 219, unreferenced but dated 4 November 1712. 30. See Kathryn R. King, Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), esp. chapters 4 and 5; and below, Chapter 8. 31. The papers are reprinted in Manley, Adventures of Rivella, ed. Katherine Zelinsky (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999), 115–17. Gildon was also dead by this time. 32. In 1714 Curll was one of the agents for John MacGregory’s abortive An Account of the Sepulchers of the Antients, designed as a taster for a subscription venture which failed to materialise, and a rare example of Curll looking outside England for antiquarian material. It breaks off after ‘part one’, monuments in Asia. It was dedicated to the Duke of Beaufort. 33. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iii. 284 and 288, quoted in Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne Kt. M.D., 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 109. Hearne later added a note dismissing the ‘very poor Book’. 34. GM lxxxii.ii (November 1812), 435, quoting Bodleian, Ballard MS letters iv. 58.

334

Notes

35. Keynes, Bibliography, 109. See also BL, Add MS 38730, ff. 123 and 184, for Curll’s dealings in Browne copyrights in 1712 and 1720. 36. Elizabeth Lyttelton to the Countess of Buchan, 19 April 1713; quoted in Keynes, Bibliography, 109. 37. Samuel Johnson later used the Whitefoot material in his Life of Browne, in Browne’s Christian Morals (1756). 38. ‘Preface’, unpaginated; original in italic. 39. Notable subscribers, many with a Curll connection, were John Ayliffe, Ofspring Blackall, John Conant, Laurence Echard, Gosling, Lord Harcourt, Peter le Neve, Ralph Noden, Richard and Thomas Rawlinson, John Woodward, and Browne Willis. 40. Brome was jailed in 1715–16 for non-compliance; Hearne, Remarks and Collections v. 170 (5 February 1716). 41. Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 107, ff. 90–1. 42. Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 107, ff. 92–3. Ottley also had close links with the Philips family. When The History and Antiquities of the City and Cathedral-Church of Hereford was eventually published under the editorship of Richard Rawlinson, in 1717, it did not contain plates; Brome’s list of bishops and deans is there, with some other officers. 43. Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 107, f. 94. 44. Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 14, f. 398; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iii. 478. 45. Hearne to Curll, 9 November 1712, and to Woodward, same date: Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iii. 479. 46. Whitehouse to Hearne, 11 November, Hearne to Woodward, 13 November, Steele to Hearne, 13 November, Woodward to Hearne, [?13 November]; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iii. 480–1. 47. Hearne to Woodward, 17 November, Woodward to Hearne, undated; Hearne to Woodward, 8 December 1712; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iii. 482–3, 487–8, 497. 48. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iv. 144. 49. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iv. 154, and see 176 (14 May 1713). 50. Browne Willis to Arthur Charlett, 2 March 1714; Bodleian MS Ballard 18, f. 105; quoted in J. G. Jenkins, The Dragon of Whaddon: Being an Account of the Life and Work of Browne Willis (1682–1760) Antiquary and Historian (High Wycombe: Bucks Free Press, 1953), 161. 51. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iv. 324–5. 52. Hearne to Anstis, 18 July, 12 September and 26 September 1714, Remarks and Collections, iv. 381, 404, 409. 53. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, v. 6 (23 December 1714). Ashmole’s book on the Garter was published in 1672. For Curll’s edition see below, Chapter 4, and Elias Ashmole, 1617–1692, ed. C. H. Josten, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), iii. 1251. 54. BL, MS Harley 5995 (64). Given the low survival rate, there may well have been other instances. 55. Curll’s appearances in the advertising columns of The Tatler can be found in the edition by Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), iii. 411–25. Richard Smith also advertised there and in the Term Catalogues.

Notes 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

335

15–26 March, 17, 19 and 23 April; 30 April and 3 May; 21 June 1708. DC, 5 April 1708; PB 10 April 1708. Crull, Antiquities of Westminster Abbey (1713), 347. Another example is The Present State of the Court of France, and City of Paris, in a Letter from Monsieur M***, To the Honourable MATTHEW PRIOR, Esq (Curll, 1712). Bragge, Witchcraft Farther Display’d (1710). The same phrase is used in PB, 30 April 1709. The Gentleman’s Accomptant made it on to the last page, having been ‘Just Publish’d’. Advertisements in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. Volume the Seventh and Holdsworth, The Mouse-Trap (1712). Bowyer Ledgers, A128. See e.g. A Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets, Printed for, and Sold by, Edmund Curll (1712). 4 T R A D I N G B LOWS (1 7 1 4 – 1 7 1 6 )

1. An exception is afforded by the chapters in Straus, 49–76. These are lively and for the most part even-handed, although they represent an old-fashioned annalist’s approach. 2. A ‘third’ edition followed in 1714. 3. JTS i. 269. 4. This calculation is based on an unpublished index to The Monthly Catalogue compiled by the late Michael Treadwell. Examination of the Catalogue shows that Roberts was sometimes involved in up to a dozen items in a single month. During September 1715, for example, with the Jacobite rising coming to a head, he is entered for nine books and during October and November jointly for nineteen. The tally for Curll in the Catalogue is never more than about four or five in a month; but this does not of course mean that his output was never higher. ESTC lists no fewer than 221 works and editions associated with Roberts in the year 1715. 5. National Archives, SP 35/61/14; SP 35/64/33. See also Curll’s letter to Delafaye in 1727, Chapter 9 below. 6. For example, a typical Roberts pamphlet, A Vindication of the Earl of Oxford (1715), bears no sign of Curll’s handiwork, other than the presence of the leaves of his advertisements commonly bound in with this volume. The same is true of William Bedell’s A Protestant Memorial, announced in the Monthly Catalogue for November 1714. 7. A son of the bookseller, Sir Francis Gosling (1702–68) began in his father’s trade, but went into the family bank, to become one of the most important bankers of the age, with his office on the same site as the shop (later 19 Fleet Street). He ended up as Lord Mayor of London. Gosling’s bank survived as an independent firm until its merger with Barclay’s in 1896. Robert Gosling had become one of the leading law publishers of his day. 8. Curll and Bettesworth reissued this under the title Hanover Tales (now simply ‘done from the French by a Lady’): it turns up more often in this guise. Bettesworth (d. 1739) had been apprenticed to John Back, 1690–8, and was called to the livery on 9 June 1707; he bound apprentices from 1714 to 1736 (Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1641–1700 and Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1701–1800, ed. McKenzie). Bettesworth was one bookseller who did trade from Paternoster Row, at the sign of the Red Bull.

336

Notes

9. The book had originally been published by the firm of Churchill: Curll had recently bought some copyrights at an auction of their literary property. 10. The Case of Dr. Ayliffe, at Oxford (1716), 97. See also RWJ, 1 November 1718. 11. Pemberton actually advertised the book as Original Poems and Translations, published ‘this day’, in PB, 13 April 1714. Advertisements mentioned ‘Advice to Mr. P ’ as a selling-point. 12. This work, Aesculapius: or The Hospital of Fools, a dialogue in Lucianic style, was printed at the end of the volume. So far as can be ascertained, the item never appeared by itself, though it is separately paginated. It is also found bound in with The Court of Atalantis (1714). 13. Poems and Translations, p. iii. The poem itself appears on 211. 14. Norman Ault, New Light on Pope (London: Methuen, 1949), 104; Corr, ii. 28–9, 34, 46–7; iii. 492, 508; Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), i. 211. Hughes was a crony of Addison and the circle at Button’s coffee-house. 15. See Daniel A. Fineman, Leonard Welsted; Gentleman Poet of the Augustan Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1950), 37–40. Apple-Pye had first appeared in ‘Captain Bland’, The Northern Atalantis: Displaying the Secret Intrigues and Adventures of the Yorkshire Gentry, published by Abigail Baldwin in 1713. Straus, 22 includes this work in his checklist, but we have not discovered any evidence that Curll had any share in it. 16. TE vi. 100. 17. Curll published a second edition of the Elements in 1735, with an appendix attributed to no less a figure than John Theophilus Desaguliers. 18. Another volume which Curll brought out in April was Some Account of the Life and Writings of the Right Reverend Father in God, Thomas Sprat, D.D. Sprat, the Bishop of Rochester, had died in 1713, and was succeeded by Pope’s later friend Francis Atterbury. 19. Curll had advertised in the press for materials to include in the life of Radcliffe (PB, 7 May 1715). 20. For the authorship of these works, see Pat Rogers, ‘The Memoirs of Somers and Wharton: Authorship and Authority in Eighteenth-Century Biography’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 77 (1974), 465–86. The life of Wharton appears in Pemberton’s catalogue in 1715. 21. Straus, 236 suggests that the third edition, published in November 1715, may be the first with which Curll was connected. Later Curll said that Oldmixon provided the new edition in 1719, which is certainly out by four years (The Rarities of Richmond (1735), ‘The Cheshire Prophet’, p. viii). 22. About 1 June Roberts issued Pope’s own satirical Key to the Lock: but this time there is no direct relevance to the quarrel with Curll. 23. Around the beginning of April Roberts brought out A Complete Key to the Late New Farce The What d’ye Call it. This satirizes Pope and Gay: it may have been written by Lewis Theobald and another. See Guerinot, 28–9. Curll never advertised this particular item, but could possibly have had some involvement: Theobald was a regular author of his, and ‘keys’ were his specialty.

Notes

337

24. George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 166. Sherburn canvases the possibility that the reference is to William Oldisworth, but the nature of the text renders this impossible. 25. Senex (c. 1680–1740) was an engraver, surveyor and geographer to Queen Anne as well as a publisher. He was especially well known for road maps and also for his pocket globes. He moved around 1724 to the sign of the Globe opposite St Dunstan’s church, immediately adjacent to the premises Curll was occupying in 1716. 26. See Richard Steele’s Periodical Journalism, 1714–16, ed. R. Blanchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 238, 306. In the following summer Desaguliers was giving demonstrations of his invention, jointly with the engineer Nicholas Dubois (DC, 3 May 1716). 27. For a contemporary account, see The Diary of Dudley Ryder 1715–1716, ed. William Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 196–9. 28. The pamphlet and documents are found in HL/PO/JO/10/6/261/3967. Around June 1715, in connection with an earlier political investigation, Popping had produced An Index to the Report of the Secret Committee, also an abridgment (but much longer) which challenged the official version published by Tonson (the government printer), Lintot, Taylor, and T. Goodwin. Curll may have had some share in the Popping issue. 29. See Journal of the House of Lords, xx. 334–56; and A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell et al. (London, 1812), xv. 896. For the affair of the Flying Post, see House of Lords Record Office, HL/PO/JO/10/6/269/4016; and Journal of the House of the Lords, xx. 439–45. 30. Panshanger MSS, Hertfordshire Record Office, MS D/EP FSS. 31. For this sense of ‘slip’, OED cites Abel Boyer: ‘Lardon (supplement de la Gazette de Hollande) the Slip that comes from Holland with the Gazette’. 32. The History of England, during the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I (London, 1735), [627]. 33. Quoted from Straus, 25–6 (original press notice not located). 34. DC, 30 April 1716; Straus, 240–1. 35. The title-page mistakenly (or accidentally on purpose?) reads ‘MDCCVI’, with the digit X omitted. 36. See, however, Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 104, where the possibility is left open that Lady Mary was also responsible for the Friday poem. The fullest analysis of this episode remains Robert Halsband, ‘Pope, Lady Mary, and the Court Poems (1716)’, PMLA 68 (1953), 237–50. 37. He calls Jacob ‘an honest well-meaning man’: History of England, 258. Curll tells more or the less story in the Literary Correspondence (2: viii), although here he states that Oldmixon sent the pieces to be published by James Roberts. 38. Just four months later the tavern would figure in the notorious ‘mughouse’ riots, when Tory hotheads from the Swan battled with Whigs from the Roebuck in nearby Salisbury Square. The landlord of the Roebuck shot one of the attackers dead, but gained acquittal when he came to trial. Five of the Tories were hanged at the end of the street in accordance with the new Riot Act. 39. Quotations follow Prose Works, i. 259–66.

338

Notes

40. Conceivably this incorporates a sly reference to an epigram ‘Upon the Duke of Marlborough’s House at Woodstock’, an unflattering allusion to Blenheim, which was published in a volume of Original Poems and Translations, by Mr. Hill . . . & c., put out by Curll in July 1714. (This should not be confused with the Pemberton volume of the same year, discussed on p. 68.) These lines have often been attributed to Pope, but their authorship remains disputed: see TE vi. 412. However, Curll had published plenty of political material that might have offended the Duke and his family, especially during the time of the Tory administration. 41. Anne Oldfield (1683–1730), the actress, had been the mistress of Arthur Maynwaring. Curll’s sketchy biography of her (1731) is discussed in Chapter 12 below. 42. One more dig against Oldmixon runs, ‘Your Protestant Packet might have supported you, had you written a little less scurrilously’ (Prose Works, i. 265). This may refer to a short-lived periodical, which survived for only four issues between 21 January and 11 February 1716. It was distributed by Roberts and Anne Dodd: one of the printers was Daniel Bridge. Among the current news stories is an account of the movements of the Pretender during his short stay on the Scottish mainland, while among new books noted is Gay’s Trivia. Richard Steele may have had a hand in the Packet. However, there is no evidence that Curll, who seldom got embroiled in the periodical press, had any direct involvement. Roberts also published the Evening Weekly Packet, which succumbed after ten issues on 10 March 1716. 43. The Curliad (1729), 20–1. 44. Sherburn, Early Career, 170. 45. TE vi. 163. 46. For the background, see Guerinot, 36–8. 47. Curll once indicated that Gildon was the author, but in The Curliad, 7–8, admits that Dennis was responsible. Internal evidence confirms this fact. 48. Guerinot, 41. 49. Sherburn, Early Career, 179. 50. For fuller analysis of the background to the work and of its content, see Pat Rogers, ‘The Catholick Poet (1716)’, Bodleian Library Record, 8 (1971), 277–84. 5 T H E D EV I L’ S S C O U T ( 1 7 1 6 – 1 7 1 8 ) 1. Notes & Queries, i. 47 (1856), 403; Yale University Library, MS Osborn C. 4096. A ‘hidden’ item around this time is a pamphlet entitled An Impartial Account of the Behaviour of the Tories, published by Roberts in September 1716, with advertisements by Curll on the last page. 2. The Poetical Works of Elijah Fenton (Edinburgh, 1779), 51–2. See also Earl Harlan, Elijah Fenton 1684–1730 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia, 1937), 83–4. 3. Three works are advertised at the end of the poem, including The Catholick Poet and Francis Chute’s The Petticoat, both of which can be positively linked to Curll (he paid Chute for the latter work on 4 July: BL, Add MS 38728, f. 41). The third item is A True Character of Mr. Pope, by John Dennis: see p. 88 above. Yet another Burleigh production was Chute’s Beauty and Virtue, an elegy for the Countess of Sunderland which came out soon afterwards (DC, 24 July). The sheets of this poem are reprinted in Curll’s The Ladies Miscellany (1718), as is Breval’s The Art of Dress (Burleigh, 1717), for which Curll paid Breval four guineas in February 1716: BL,

Notes

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

339

Add MS 38728, f. 34. Like The Art of Dress, Beauty and Virtue is also advertised as Curll’s, within The Ladies Miscellany, at the end of one of the reissued sections. It would be safe to assume Curll had a stake in Chute’s poem from the beginning. [Samuel Wesley,] Neck or Nothing: A Consolatory Letter from Mr. D-nt-n to Mr. C-rll upon his being tost in a Blanket (London: King, 1716), 13, 15. As always Curll was undeterred: he brought out a life by William Pittis of Robert South, dated by Straus in October 1716, but listed in the Monthly Catalogue under January 1717. Prose Works, i. xcix–c. The identity of Pope’s sources of information is uncertain. However, he obviously got a great deal from Lintot: around November, the poet rode with the bookseller from Windsor Forest to Oxford. They gossiped about various matters, including Lintot’s dealings with his authors. Among those mentioned are William King, Richard Blackmore and William Oldisworth. Lintot tells Pope that the horse he was riding was borrowed from his ‘publisher’, who in turn had it from Oldmixon for a debt. This was most likely Roberts. See Corr, i. 372–5. A Letter from Sir J B (1716), 2. Quoted in Prose Works, i. civ–cv (original not seen). J. W. Bowyer, The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952), 208. The title-pages asserts that the play was printed for ‘Curl’ and Bettesworth; press notices state also that it was sold by Mrs Burleigh. One of Curll’s earliest mainstays was the devotional manual The Devout Christian’s Companion, partly culled from Tillotson, which he issued at intervals until 1722. The bookseller had told Thoresby in May 1716 that the life of Tillotson was ‘not yet done’; see above, p. 91, and Straus, 68. For this poem, see Ault, New Light, 176–82; and Pat Rogers, Eighteenth-Century Encounters (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), 56–74. Sherburn, Early Career, 195. The Key was reprinted in the edition by Curll of the fictitious Joseph Gay’s Miscellanies, upon several Subjects (1719). Most, if not all, of the items in this volume were the work of Breval, who was probably also behind the similarly-attributed Ovid in Masquerade (1719). Joseph Gay provides a sneering new dedication to ‘Sir James Baker’. The Gay pseudonym appeared again in The Church-Scuffle: or, News from St. Andrews (1719), on Sacheverell’s attempts to keep William Whiston out of his church. The farce later appeared in the volume of Breval’s Miscellanies (1719). John Durant Breval, ‘The Confederates’, in Miscellanies (1719), 33. The Works, in Verse and Prose, of Leonard Welsted . . . Now First Collected. With Historical Notes, And Biographical Memoirs of the Author, ed. John Nichols (London: Printed by and for the Editor, 1787), 37–9. The longest and most famous of London’s maypoles stood at this date in the Strand, but it would be taken down in 1718, five years before Curll moved to this site. John Gay, Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing and Charles E. Beckwith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), i. 217. See Ault, New Light, 21; and Sherburn, Early Career, 191–2. The surviving fragments have been published as The Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham, ed. W. A. Aiken (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941).

340

Notes

20. The material is found in the Finch MSS, deposited at Leicester Record Office. For a fuller analysis of the entire episode, see Pat Rogers, ‘The Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham: Curll, Oldmixon and the Finch Family’, Review of English Studies, 21 (1970), 175–81. 21. Swift, Corr, i. 405–6. ‘I never was more afflicted at any death’, he wrote to Stella (JTS, ii. 445). 22. See Prose Works, i. cxvii–cxxiv. 23. At the end of 1718 this reappeared bound in with a volume called The English Theatre for the Year 1718 (see Griffith, 96b). The name Joseph Gay is attached to a pamphlet without title page known as To Mr. Cibber. Dear Colly (?1720), a further complaint about Cibber’s plagiarism. 24. See Curll’s own A Compleat Key to the Dunciad (London: A. Dodd, 1728), 13. 25. These lines had already appeared in the periodical press, but had not been acknowledged by Pope: see TE vi. 199–200. The volume, though naming Burleigh in its imprint, carried advertisements for books by Curll and Bettesworth at the end. 26. Naturally Curll went on printing, or reissuing, his old stock of Pope works. In 1719 a poem, almost certainly spurious, was published by S. Huddleston as News from Court . . . By Mr. Pope.This was included in Curll’s short-lived Court Miscellany around April in the same year, but was there attributed to an unknown ‘Mr. Caley’; for him, see also Curll’s advertisement in EP, 7 March 1719. 27. Stimulated in part no doubt by the publication of his Carmina by Jacob Tonson and John Watts late in 1719 (DC, 25 November). 6 C U R L I C I S M D I S P L AY E D ( 1 7 1 7 – 1 7 2 0 ) 1. Prideaux to Tonson, 1 March 1717, BL, Add. MS 28275, f. 34. 2. Pemberton had been involved in the fourth edition of 1708; the book first appeared in 1697. Tonson’s imprint does not appear in any edition. 3. See The Correspondence of Edward Young, 1683–1765, ed. Henry Pettit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 7, 10–11. The answer also appeared in MWJ, 31 August, and LEP, 3 September. 4. LEP, 1 September 1717, quoted in Correspondence of Young, 11–12. 5. LEP, 7 September 1717, quoted in Correspondence of Young, 12. 6. Correspondence of Young, 11–13. 7. To Tickell, 14 September 1717, Correspondence of Young, 13–14. 8. To Tickell, 19 September 1717, Correspondence of Young, 14–15. For an overview of the matter see Helen Leek, ‘The Edward Young–Edmund Curll Quarrel’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 62 (1968), 321–35. 9. See P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 95; and their Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (London: Hambledon Press, 1994); J. R. Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 67–8. 10. Defoe, The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff (1715), 23–4, 34. Furbank and Owens accept Defoe’s authorship: no.167, pp.150–1. 11. Queen Anne Vindicated (1715), 12–15; National Archives, SP 44/77/159. The statement was taken by Horatio Walpole. The King’s Bench case itself has not been

Notes

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

341

traced but clearly Pittis was in trouble for having written something, and Reasons for a War with France is a possible cause; so however is The Purse and the Mitre, which Defoe ascribes to Pittis. Moore, Checklist, 389; dated by Straus 25 February. Moore, Checklist, 401, March–May 1718. The writer attacks biographies of the Duke of Hamilton, such as Memoirs of the Life and Family of the most Illustrious James late Duke of Hamilton (London: T. Warner, 1717), though Curll had published material on Hamilton in 1712. There was a rival Life and Character of Charles Duke of Shrewsbury (for J. Roberts, 1718) but this also attacks ‘Garret Grub-street Authors’ and their biographies of Halifax, Wharton, Hamilton, and the Bishop of Salisbury (pp.1–2), all Curll subjects. The pamphlet is ascribed in a manuscript annotation in the Liverpool University Library copy (Thomson 87(2) ) to the ‘scoundrel Rascal’ John Macky, later a Curll author. Charles Talbot, first Duke of Shrewsbury, was a friend of Pope’s. See One Hundred Court Fables (1721), an edition by Roger Greaves of Curll’s book of that title (n.p.: Bilingua GA Editions, 2000). Publicity for this edition describes Samber as ‘un e´crivain a` gages, un des plagiaires stipendi´es du prolifique et malhonnˆete libraire londonien Edmund Curll’. Onanism Display’d appeared on 22 March (PB), having been pre-announced in PB 8 March. Only the second edition, dated 1719, is known to survive. It was a good year for masturbation manuals: The Horrid Nature, and Most Miserable Consequences to Ones Self and Posterity, of Self-Abuses was furtively advertised in PB and The White-hall Evening Post of 25 November 1718: ‘Given gratis up one pair of Stairs at the Rose in Dark Lane, within a Door or two of the Crown Tavern in West Smithfield’. See also Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 25–37, and Michael Stolberg, ‘The Crime of Onan and the Laws of Nature: Religious and Medical Discourses on Masturbation in the late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Pædogogica Historica, 39 (2003), 701–17. See William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings (London, 1869), ii. 30–3. Ozell contested the grammatical correctness of ‘Curlicism’ in a newspaper quarrel with Woodward: ‘Curlicism . . . which I am told was coin’d by this very Woodward to abuse an honester man than himself . . . tho’ after all, it is but duncically done: for the true Cast wou’d have been Curlism not Curlicism, unless his name had been Curly instead of Curll’. See Mr Ozell’s Defence against the Remarks publish’d by Peele and Woodward, under the name of The Translators, on his Translation of the Roman History (T. Edlin, 1725), 88. Curll was named as Edlin’s ‘partner’ in the book that gave rise to this dispute, even though it appears to post-date Ozell’s association with Curll; MWJ, 28 August 1725. MWJ, 12 April 1718; Lee, Defoe, ii. 34–6. ‘Tom-turd men’ were haulers of excrement. A further attack, identifying masquerades as a kind of bodily Curlicism, appeared on 19 April in the same journal. A Treatise of the Use of the Use of Flogging is advertised in AWJ, 7 June, but it is mentioned in Curlicism Display’d, out by 31 May. Treatise of the Use of Flogging, Preface, unpaginated; dated 5 May 1718. The Curliad, p.14. Four people were aquitted of Motteux’s murder at the Old Bailey, 23 April 1718.

342

Notes

21. Bartholin (1616–80) was an anatomical writer. For commentary on the links between medical discourse and erotica see Peter Wagner, ‘The Discourse on Sex—or Sex as Discourse: Eighteenth-century Medical and Paramedical Erotica’, in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 46–68, and Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 22. See the sequence of advertisements in PB, 6 February to 22 March; AWJ, 5 April, and 7 June to 5 July 1718; MWJ, 22 February 1718. When the Treatise of the Use of Flogging came out you could get seven volumes for 18 shillings. The advertising continued: e.g. WEP, 5 March 1719. 23. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, ed. by George Harris Healey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 459. 24. Further comments on Mist’s fighting abilities appeared in RWJ, 28 June and 18 October 1718. 25. Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 432; Maximilian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 491–2. 26. Straus, 261; Moore, Checklist, 432. William Bond is sometimes credited with having written the book; if Defoe had anything to do with it his connection would have ceased by 1717. 27. Straus, 93 n., speaks of Chetwood as Curll’s apprentice, but again there appears to be no formal record of this and Straus cites no evidence for it. Chetwood and Curll are rivals for the novelist Eliza Haywood in the pissing contest in the first version of The Dunciad (ii. 159–82): see Chapter 10. 28. He was however one of the publishers of Thomas Willis, A Preservative from the Infection of the Plague, which like Defoe’s historical novel was published on the outbreak of plague in France in 1720. 29. In February 1721 Curll advertised Honour, the Victory; and Love, the Prize. Illustrated in Ten Novels by Mrs. Hearne, which appears to be a reprint of the two earlier books: unfortunately no copy has been located. Curll glosses Pope’s line about ‘yon Juno of Majestic size’ as a reference to Mary Hearne, in his Compleat Key to the Dunciad (1728), 13. See further Joan Rose Reteshka, ‘A Scholarly Edition of Mrs. Hearne’s ‘‘The Lover’s Week’’ and ‘‘The Female Deserters’’ ’, Ph.D. thesis, Duquesne University, 1998. 30. For instance, EP, 1 November 1718, PB 13, 18 and 22 November 1718. 31. PB, 2 December 1718. 32. PB, 4 December 1718. 33. Of Delacoste nothing is known. The title takes its cue from a bestseller of Richard Smith’s, Bishop Beveridge’s Private Thoughts upon Religion, published and much reprinted from 1709, and taken over in 1719, after Smith’s death, by William Taylor. 34. The History of the Revolutions that Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic (Taylor, Pemberton, Symon, 1720 and much reprinted). 35. PB, 5 July 1721; Straus 271–2. Ozell died in 1743. 36. p. v. This also sounds very much like Pope’s later charge against Curll, in the Preface to the Miscellanies of 1727; Prose Works ii. 89–93. Curll cockily advertised the

Notes

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

343

preface, DC, 22 January 1719. Sewell’s ‘Epistle from Hampstead to Mr. Thornhill’ was advertised for Pemberton and others (not Curll), DC, 11 May 1719. Pack, Religion and Philosophy: A Tale. With Five other Pieces (20 February 1720). BL, Add MS 38729, f. 102a. BL, Add MS 38728, f. 102b. BL Add. MS 38728, f. 25. National Archives, SP 35/31/121, anonymous letter to Lord Townshend dated 28 May 1722; Beckingham can be apprehended at several coffee houses ‘or at one Mr. Curl’s a Bookseller in the Strand, with whom, he either does, or has lately lodged’. A further collection, Poems on Several Occasions (Curll, 1720), tacked on ‘A Letter to Mr. Law’, of uncertain authorship. Mist took occasional potshots at Amhurst on Curll’s account: MWJ, 3 June 1721. Amhurst introduced some good-natured references to Curll in his well-known satire on Oxford, Terrae Filius (1721). Francklin apparently paid for Amhurst’s funeral (he died at Twickenham in 1742), and was himself given sanctuary by the son of the man he had published so much against, Horace Walpole, an irony the latter greatly enjoyed. He published Centlivre’s The Artifice through T. Payne in October 1722; she died in December 1723. Molloy got ten guineas in all for his play: BL, Add MS 38728, f. 157(b). DP, 8 February 1720; the publication was ‘occasion’d by the silencing of the Drury Lane players’. The play was advertised in AWJ, 26 July 1718, and puffed by Chetwood in the same journal, 9 August. Savage to Carter, 10 May 1739, in Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, ed. the Revd Montagu Pennington, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (1808), i. 59. The Life of Mr. Richard Savage refers to the quarrel as the fault of ‘some malicious Person’ (p. 11). Johnson gives a more measured account of the matter, and also does not name Curll; Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 16, 39. Steele’s observations on duelling were prominently reprinted in The Court of Honour (Roberts, Jauncy, Graves, and Stagg, 1720), apparently a book in which Curll had an interest (Straus, 268). PB, 31 January 1721, with Curll as first of four named publishers. It probably relates to an obscure periodical, The Spy, which was being distributed by E. Morphew from 16 November 1720 to at least 8 February 1721; this was concerned with religious power and thus in a similar area to Place’s pamphlet. There are fewer references to Curll’s shop than one might expect, but Manley’s Adventures of Rivella is assigned to Curll, p. 168. Poetical Register, i. 297–8. In PB, 9 November 1721 Curll advertised Parnell’s Poems on Several Occasions ‘now first published from his Original Manuscripts’ as ‘added’ to Cupid’s Bee-hive, one of the Bonnefons anthologies; no edition of Curll’s advertised title survives and he may have meant no more than the Parnell pieces he had already inserted in such miscellanies. Pope’s edition was published on 7 December 1721 (DC ). Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, ed. Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 25.

344

Notes

54. The signature is dated from St James’s, 26 December 1718. The sale of Rowe’s library alerted buyers to a stock of manuscripts, but Curll appears not to have bitten at this: DC, 17–28 August 1719. 55. The comments (p. 156) came from Le Clerc’s Remarks on Addison’s Travels through Italy, which readers were reminded was available from Curll. 56. The poem was also likened to Young’s The Last Day, another Curll publication. 57. Straus, 250. 58. Two Poems (1718), sig. A2r . Curll also published Newcomb’s ten-book poem, The Last Judgment, in 1719. 59. Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 373, 446. 60. Doom’s Day: or, The Last Judgment. A Poem, by ‘William, Earl of Sterline’ (1720), Preface. 61. Lady Katherine Hyde became the Duchess of Queensbury in 1720 and was friendly with Swift and Gay. For the editorial history see Literary Works of Prior, ii. 1073–5. 62. In the Historical Account of the Lives and Writings of our most considerable English Poets, or the second volume of The Poetical Register (1720). Prior’s will was included. Curll still had a lot of biographical stock, as the list at the end of Prior’s Some Memoirs shows. 63. Beckingham’s Verses on the Death of Mr. Prior appeared not (ostensibly at least) for Curll, but for Roberts and J. Graves. 64. Both appeared for James Roberts initially. Ars Punica: or, The Art of Punning is regarded as mostly the work of Sheridan (Teerink 895); the Right of Precendence (Teerink 899) is regarded as doubtful, largely on the evidence of the letter next quoted. 65. Swift, Corr, ii. 327. Woolley conjectures that the ‘Gentleman’ may be Dr. Helsham. 66. ‘To Stella, who collected and transcribed his Poems’, lines 43–52. 67. The Defence (Teerink 614) included the Elegy on Demar, regarded as genuine; The Swearer’s Bank (Teerink 616 and 617) is regarded as doubtful. 68. Teerink 16, 19, 19 n. and 906. Curll advertised a ‘very curious print of the Rev. Dr. Swift’ in Daily Post, 13 March, which has not been found; it is possibly the same as the frontispiece. 69. Printed with Addison’s Scating, and separately advertised as ‘The Second Eve’. Griffith Add.111a; rejected by TE vi. 423. 70. Corr, ii. 31. A Strange but True Relation is reprinted in Prose Works, i. 315–22. Ault (cvii–cix) dates the pamphlet to early April on the evidence of an announcement in DP, 12 April 1720 for a collection containing five items in the Curll–Pope quarrel, including this one, with notes and various readings, ‘written by Mr. Curll’. The nonce-collection was to be called The POPE-ish Controversy compleat but there is no evidence that it actually appeared, or that Curll was responsible for the advertisement; indeed there is no other evidence that Pope’s Strange but True Relation was actually published before the text of Miscellanies. The Third Volume (1732). 71. It might also count as one of Pope’s ‘smart Things on Curle’ referred to in An Answer to Duke upon Duke (22 August 1720), a poem for the most part favourable to Pope and professedly written in the voice of Nicholas Lechmere: Guerinot, 79.

Notes

345

7 AN T I QU I T I E S A N D P O L I T I C S ( 1 7 1 7 – 1 7 2 2 ) 1. Hearne to Browne Willis, 1 May 1715; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, v. 53–5 and Bodleian MS Rawl. 27a.41. Willis’s response (6 May) was soothing: ‘All the Respect I had for Curlle was on acct of his pretending to Love antiq: & encourage the publication of them, but this I retract when they are done imperfectly & incorrect.’ 2. Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 114*, f. 102. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, v. 264, records a note, apparently from Thomas Rawlinson in relation to the Life of Dugdale, that ‘Mr . Curle, the Booksellr , is a very wicked & impudt Stationr ’. 3. Thoresby to Hearne, 2 November 1715, responding to a letter from Hearne of 28 October; Hearne, Remarks and Collections, v. 130–2 and Bodleian MS Rawl 17.12. 4. Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 4, ff. 521–2; and Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vi. 14. 5. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vi. 14. 6. This is not the same volume as Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, apparently edited by Sewell for Mears and Brown in 1717, which also included poems by Wyatt. Subsequently Curll’s edition had an edition of Wyatt tacked on to it. See Sir Egerton Brydges, Censura Literaria, i (1815), 90–2. 7. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vi. 45–6; and see Hearne to R. Rawlinson, 19 March, ibid. 30, E. Burton to Hearne, 21 March, ibid. 31, and Hearne to Rawlinson [June ?1717], ibid. 66. As we noted in Chapter 5, Rawlinson was indeed the editor of Sampson Erdeswicke, A Survey of Staffordshire, which appeared for Curll on 14 March 1717; Rawlinson sent him a copy (see vi. 24 and 30). For Brome see Chapter 3. 8. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vi. 55. ‘Willis’ is Browne Willis, the antiquary who had already complained about the Hereford book (Hearne to Rawlinson, 21 June, ibid. 64). ‘Slyford’ is William Sliford. See also Bodleian MS Rawl. 33.78. 9. Hearne to Rawlinson, 16 July 1717, Remarks and Collections, vi. 72. 10. Hearne to Rawlinson, ibid. 11. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vi. 131–2. ‘S’ might be the previously mentioned Sliford, and ‘Mr. W’ is probably Browne Willis. 12. Hearne to Rawlinson, 18 November 1718, Remarks and Collections, vi. 251. The poem must be Neck or Nothing. Hearne had noted the events nearer the time; Remarks and Collections, vi. 28. 13. Bodleian MS Rawl. B400F, ff. 84–5. Mapledurham was the home of Pope’s friends the Blount sisters until 1716. Curll’s notes are transcribed in B.J. Enright, ‘Rawlinson’s Proposed History of Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia, 16 (1951), 57–78. 14. Remarks and Collections, vi. 21 (Hearne to Rawlinson, 12 February 1716/17), indicates that Hearne knew about the edition many months before it came out; see further 117 (to Rawlinson, 12 December 1717), 127–8 (to Rawlinson, 7 January 1717/18), 131 (diary, 19 January 1717/18). 15. There was no list of subscribers, and no proposals or advertisements for subscription have been found; ‘subscribed for’ here probably means (if it means anything) that some copies had been ordered in advance. 16. Memoirs of the Life of that learned Antiquary, Elias Ashmole, Esq; drawn up by himself by way of Diary had already appeared for J. Roberts in 1717, but it is identified as Curll’s by Straus, 247, and in Bliss’s edition of Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, iv. 363.

346

Notes

17. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vi. 297 (15 February 1719); on 20 February Hearne tells R. Rawlinson he is looking forward to seeing the book (ibid. 298); and Browne Willis asks his opinion of it, 2 April (ibid. 326). Noting some proposals put out by a Mr. Tristram of Pembroke, Hearne kept his resentment up, even though this was nothing to do with antiquarian matters: ‘This Mr. Tristram hath had something printed at London by that great Knave, Edm. Curl’; vi. 328 (6 April 1719). Thomas Tristram’s poem ‘To Mrs. A. C. with Mr Young’s Poem on the Last Day’ was published in Curll’s Letters, Poems and Tales (1718, pp. 39–43). Hearne had also noted, neutrally, Curll’s publication of poems by Amhurst on 9 January 1719 (vi. 285). 18. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vi. 334 (18 April 1719). Ashmole’s modern editor blames Curll in like fashion, and seems unaware of Rawlinson’s role in the series: Elias Ashmole, 1617–1692. His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, ed. C. H. Josten, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), i. 155 and iii. 1000–1. 19. See PB, 26 May and 30 June 1718; and EP, 21 May 1719. 20. One manuscript is now Bodleian Aubrey 4. For an account of the Surrey volumes see B.J. Enright, ‘Richard Rawlinson and the Publication of Aubrey’s ‘‘Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey’’ ’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, 54 (1956), 124–33. 21. Bull’s text was published by his son; the paper is referred to in Nelson’s Life of Bull, a Richard Smith publication. Rawlinson is named in the preface. Hearne to Rawlinson, 28 May 1719, Remarks and Collections, vii.14; to Thomas Rawlinson, 21 July 1719, ibid. 31; diary, ibid. 54. 22. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, vii. 30. Samuel Gale had contributed to Curll’s Winchester volume of 1715; Roger Gale is not known to have helped Curll with anything. 23. He did not return until the death of his brother, settling in London in 1726 in order to sort out the morass of debt he had inherited; at that point, however, he did resume contact with Curll (below, Chapter 11). 24. It is definitely his, however: PB, 28 June and 21 July 1720. 25 copies on superfine royal paper were available at a guinea. 25. Nichols, LA iv. 535, gives a list of the antiquarian books published by Curll and promoted by Rawlinson; this includes the Norden and Glastonbury volumes, but the latter seems most unlikely. 26. Curll paid £6 10s. for his share; see the annotated catalogue, Bodleian John Johnson Trade Sales Catalogues 16 (6), and BL, Add MS 38730, f. 15. 27. Dart was identified as the author by Pope: see ESTC n108. 28. Hooke shared at least eight imprints with Curll from 1715 to 1723; Rivington, a major religious publisher and friend of Samuel Richardson, shared nine imprints with Curll, mostly between 1718 and 1721. 29. Curll bought copyrights at four sales over this period: see the annotated catalogues in Bodleian John Johnson Trade Sales 16 (5, 6, 8 and 12), and for Osborne, BL, Add MS 38730, ff. 124–5. 30. An annotated copy of the catalogue survives in the Bodeleian John Johnson Trade Sale Catalogues (16). Curll was offering some general book stock and 26 ‘lots’ of shares in his backlist, including The Devout Christian’s Companion, Lex Mercatoria,

Notes

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

347

Cases of Impotency and Divorce, and so on; edition sizes are given normally as 1,000 copies. The catalogue entries exhort booksellers to buy in before new editions are produced, and Curll did manage to sell some shares to Bettesworth, Batley, Mears, Walthoe, and others. A Venison-Treat offers ‘a small Parcel Return’d from Mr. Jauncy’s Country Chapmen’. PB, 9 July 1720. PM, 23 July and 8 September 1720; Mr. Arundell, The Directors (1720), 33–5; Ramsay, Grubstreet Nae Satyre: in Answer to Bag-pipes no Musick, an undated singlesheet ballad, identifies Cowper as ‘late Kirk-treasurer’s man of Edinburgh; now his ghaist studying poetry at Oxford, for the benefit of Ethert Curl’. See The Works of Allan Ramsay, ed. Alexander Kinghorn and Alexander Law, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1961), 32–3, and vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1974), 106–7. Jauncy, having arrived from nowhere in 1719, disappeared almost completely after 25 May 1721, when he disposed of many copyrights: Bodleian John Johnson Trade Sales Catalogues 16 (13). DC, 8 April 1717. National Archives, C11/690/5. Further documents in the case were signed by J. Browne and Thomas Peachall. The dispute seems to have dragged on into the late 1730s: see National Archives, C11/946/7. Curll’s source was Le Clerc’s Biblioth`eque Ancienne et Moderne, tom. xvi pour l’Ann´ee 1721, part 2, p. 366. In the advertisement AWJ, 17 March 1722, the translator is said to be ‘L.T.’, probably Lewis Theobald. DP, 10 January 1722. The correspondence is BL, Landsdowne MSS 1038, ff. 48–9; Straus, 88–91. See e.g. The Conduct of the Reverend White Kennett, Dean of Peterborough (A. Dodd, 1717), a pamphlet apparently edited by Richard Rawlinson. It appears that Curll partially backed off: Kennett’s Witt against Wisdom, or a Panegyrick upon Folly, a version of Erasmus’s Moriae Encomion published in 1683 and reprinted in 1709 (J. Woodward) and 1713 (C. Rivington), reappeared for J. Wilford (1722, 1724, and 1735). The Pliny version, edited by John Henley, appeared for Mears in 1724 with the ‘panegyrick’ ascribed to ‘Mr. Bond’. Any Curll connection is hidden. Pope tells the story in his Narrative of the Method (1735), reprinted with Curll rebuttal in Prose Works, ii. 333, 349–51. The events must date from before 1723, when John Robinson, bishop of London from 1714, died. Robinson’s character was comprehensively demolished in Thomas Stackhouse’s Memoirs of Atterbury (Curll, 1723), 70–1. Henry Hoare was son and successor in business of Sir Richard Hoare (1648–1718), Lord Mayor of London in 1712. Curll’s A Venison Treat offered several sixteenth shares in a ‘new edition just finish’d’, supposedly in 4,000 copies, and claimed that ‘it sells an Impression every two Years’ with profits of over £20; none of these shares was sold. Earbery was apparently outlawed for The History of the Clemency of English Monarchs (1717), and was arrested again in 1723 (MWJ, 5 January 1723); in the British Journal of 4 December 1725 it was announced that the outlawry was reversed. He later did translation work for Curll.

348

Notes

43. Waterland, formerly Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and still Master of Magdalene College there, thought Staunton’s scheme was in the main Socinian. Whiston had been expelled from Cambridge for similar views. 44. The pamphlet was published on 6 November 1719 (DC ). Loggin seems to have put his case also in The Loyal Subject (‘sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster’, 1719) and The Case Fully and Truly Stated (no imprint, 1720?). 45. National Archives, T 1/230 (part 1, item 3, no. 12); Calendar of Treasury Papers 1720–1728, 29. Letters on the matter from the junior secretary to the Treasury, Charles Stanhope, dated 19 November 1719 and 12 February 1720, are T 27/23/38, 59. 46. PB, 14 and 19 March 1719. For Clarke’s earlier protests, see his The Sheep in his own Cloathes (for the author, 1708). 47. Party Revenge, 6, 40. Published 5 May (PM ). There is no trace of such a prosecution in the printed Old Bailey ‘Sessions Papers’, nor would that court have been the obvious place to bring it. 48. The last shop was perhaps a corner building on the southern side of the Strand; Straus 92, referring to The Curliad . Catalogues dated to 1718 are t127842 and t77315; catalogues of 1720, from both addresses, are t18555, t78891, and t71522. Catalogues from 1721 are n64745 and t75032. 49. The paper was produced by E. Berrington, an occasional Curll associate (above, Chapter 5), and distributed by Morphew. 50. See Thomas Wright’s rival (and old) version, No Fools like Wits: or the Female Virtuosoes (1721). MWJ, 25 November 1721 prints a purported exchange of letters between Cibber and Curll in mock-courteous style in continuance of the quarrel. 51. PB, 29 September 1720; and see Roberts’s advertisement, ibid. 4 October. Straus, 262, has misread the advertisement; Curll was not for once the target of the supposed prosecution, of which no trace has been found. For the examined copy see National Archives, SP 35/23/50. 52. ‘Mr. Stanhope’ is sometimes regarded as a pseudonym for William Bond on the grounds that in The Curliad Curll ascribes to Bond the anti-Pope satire The Progress of Dulness (1728), in which the lead poem is signed ‘H. Stanhope’. This poem was also included in The Supernatural Philosopher (1728), a Curll reprint of the biography of Duncan Campbell. But since one of the other Stanhope-Curll poems is Verses Sacred to the Memory of the Right Honourable James Earl Stanhope (1721), it is just possible that such a person existed; Amhurst’s Protestant Session shared the dedicatee. James Stanhope, A True Copy of the Political Queries, relating to the constitution of the Roman Senate (Curll, 1721) is another document in this confused history. Foxon S706–715 retains Stanhope as an authorial identity. See also MWJ, 6 May 1721. 53. For an account of the poem, which was praised by Defoe, see Bowyer, Celebrated Mrs Centlivre, 226–9. 54. ‘With a huge Mountain-load of Heroical Lumber, | Which from Tonson to Curll every Press had groan’d under; | Came Bl e’ [Blackmore] . . .’. 55. The line (p. 30) is annotated to indicate the availability of Curll’s series of volumes on sexual deviance; the Bonefonius material is also puffed. The poem on Buckingham House may be by Bond; the other two are thought to be by John Markland, whose

Notes

56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

349

undated receipt for other Chaucerian material for Curll is BL, Add MS 38728, f. 141. PB, 18 May 1721. PB, 19 and 26 December 1721, 4 January 1722; PM, 4 January 1722; DP, 10 January 1722; DJ, 12 January 1722. Straus, 268–9, seems to think there was an actual edition of the poems before the edition of the works in prose and verse that got Curll into trouble; but the advertisements show that this was a single, evolving project which had not even been published by the time Curll was summoned to the House of Lords. Journal of the House of Lords, xxi. 659–60 (22 and 23 January 1722); on 31 January (p. 667) the rule was confirmed, with a slight change in phrasing which allowed for republication of work already in the public domain. This case was remembered by Thomas Carte in 1737 and used to get an injunction against Dublin printers who were pirating his biography of the Duke of Ormonde: see Nichols, LA ii. 475; and Tenth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1885), 485. The rule was not repealed until 1845. A very similar advertisement announcing the books as published ‘This Day’ had appeared in PM, 4 January 1722. Curll paid John Rook £12 for translating this: BL, Add MS 38728, f. 185 (a). The receipt also claims two guineas for ‘teaching Harry’, an unexplained reference which might refer to tutoring for Curll’s son Henry. Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence. Volume the Second (Curll, 1735), p. x. National Archives, SP 44/80; Copies taken from the Records of the Court of King’sBench, at Westminster (London, 1763), 26. Barber was before the Lords in February 1721 (Read’s Weekly Journal, 25 February), but this seems to have been on South Sea matters. The evidence for Curll’s involvement is not strong, and ‘castrations’ had been used the previous year by Mears and others in Castrations of the last Edition of Holinshead’s Chronicle. 8 TRIALS (1722 – 1728)

1. On 20 November 1724 Curll embarked on what was seemingly a new venture as an auctioneer on behalf of a provincial bookseller. The Norwich Gazette for 14 November printed an announcement: ‘This is to give notice, that on Friday next, being the 20th of this instant, will begin to be sold by auction by Edmund Curll of London Bookseller, for James Carlos Bookseller in Norwich a collection of curious books in most faculties, arts & sciences. Beginning precisely at five a clock every evening. Catalogues will be delivered gratis on Thursday next by James Carlos in the Dove Lane, and at Brathwaites & Woolfes Coffee House in Norwich’. We are indebted to Dr David Stoker for this information. 2. Straus, 94–6, quoting GM lxviii (1798), 190. 3. National Archives, SP 35/31/39. The letter also purports to give details of a key to that day’s Freeholder’s Journal, ‘privately handed about’, which named major figures in an allegory including the Duchess of Kendal. The Journal, founded by Thomas Carte, was a strongly Jacobite organ. Thomas Sharpe, its printer, was regularly in trouble at this time: see for example RWJ, 5 May 1722; National Archives, SP

350

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

Notes 35/30/63; SP 35/31/123; SP 44/123/221. Curll claims that 8,000 copies of the issue were printed. National Archives, SP 35/42/72. The letter enclosed passed between ‘R’ and Robert Green; it referred to ‘the Gentleman at St Bride about his Book[:] he assures me the printer may be trusted.’ Straus, 96, quoting GM lxviii (1798), 190: see also National Archives, SP 44/81/389. All the Wonders of the World Out-wonderd: In the amazing and incredible Prophecies of Ferdinando Albumazarides (1722), 17; The Free Masons: An Hudibrastick Poem (London, 1723), 15. BL, Add MS 4295, f. 25. In 1718 Curll reprinted Toland’s Description of Epsom (1711) in his edition of John Aubrey’s Natural History of Surrey. Curll had published Tristram Risdon’s Survey of Devon in 1714; a reissue in 1724 with a cancel title-page bears only the names of Mears and Hooke, but some copies contain a leaf with Curll advertisements. BL, Add MS 4465, f. 41. See Alan Harrison, ‘Notes on the Correspondence of John Toland’, I Castelli di Yale, Anno IV, John Toland torna a Dublino (1999), 182–200. For information concerning Toland, we are indebted to Professor Harrison. Toland’s chatty letter reveals that he had been in correspondence with Curll previously: he discusses the possibility that Lord Chief Justice Parker might provide ‘encouragement’. Curll had evidently provided a warm recommendation of Parker as a benevolent patron. John Toland, A Collection of Several Pieces, ed. Pierre Des Maizeaux, 2 vols. (London: J. Peele, 1726), ii. 484. The writer’s letters were directed from Putney in the last three years of his life, January 1719 to March 1722. See also Pierre Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. John Toland’, in Toland, Collection, i. lxxxviii. See TE vi. 142–5; Ault, New Light, 125–7. Cythereia was printed by Samuel Richardson, who was also responsible for Atterbury’s Maxims (1723), part of Curll’s edition of the works of Sidney (1724–5), and the preface added to Manley’s History of her own Life and Times (1725). See Keith Maslen, Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: A Study of his Printing Based on Ornament Use and Business Accounts (Dunedin: University of Otago, 2001), items 13, 186, 463, and 766–7. The Curliad (1729), 5–6. Nobody knows anything much about Markland, who matriculated at Peterhouse in 1719, and may have died in 1799. He was apparently a brother of the more famous Jeremiah, a classical scholar, who suspiciously is credited with defending Addison against Pope. See Chapter 7, n. 55. The Poet Finish’d in Prose (1735), 35. Alexander Pettit, ‘Rex v. Curll: Pornography and Punishment in Court and on the Page’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 34 (2001), 63–78. In his article Pettit consistently writes of Curll as a ‘printer’, and of works ‘printed’ by him. It should be stressed that the offences in question all involved his activity as a publisher and bookseller, and there is no evidence at all that he played any other role in the trade, other than auctioneer. For the court cases, see also Sir John Strange, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer from Trinity Term, 2 Geo. I. to Trinity Term 21 Geo. II, 2 vols. (London, 1755),

Notes

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

351

ii. 788–92; and T. B. Howell et al., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809–26), xvii. 153–60. Another craze at the time sprang up for pantomimes. On 4 January 1724 Mist informed his readers that Curll had bought the rights to a popular ‘Entertainment’, Harlequin Dr. Faustus, by John Thurmond. In fact the book as published carries the name only of William Chetwood, Curll’s former ‘apprentice’. So far as we can tell, Curll never advertised this item. National Archives, SP 44/80/175–6; SP 35/49/50. Curll’s sureties were William Rawlinson, merchant, and Thomas Edlin, ‘bibliopola’, who each entered into a recognizance of £50: Curll’s own surety for his good behaviour was £100. (The first-named may be the wine merchant William Rollinson, known to Pope.) In addition, the unnamed author of the Heidegger Letter was taken into custody by the messengers a few days later (BJ, 2 May 1724). This may be the mysterious Power or Povey named newspaper stories (see RWJ, 2 May 1724). It appears that this prosecution was still hanging over Curll when the scandal broke about the obscene books. Political State, xxviii (August 1724), 207. As late as 1733 he was informing against Eustace Budgell: see Chapter 12, below. National Archives, KB 10/19. Charges against Woolston were regularly processed alongside those against those against Curll, often in the same bundle and file, once even in the same sentence (SP 55/102). This confirms the fact that the ‘campaign’ against Curll was not mounted in a vacuum: he was one of a small group of offenders whose activity was thought to endanger the public peace. National Archives, SP/44/81/394, 399–400; SP 35/55/102. According to the Whitehall Evening Post of 2 March, it was the other secretary of state, Townshend, who issued warrants against Curll and other publishers of obscene books (Straus, 101). Curll’s sureties were William Rawlinson again and Thomas Arne: the latter may be the ‘political upholsterer’ satirized in the Tatler. He ran an undertaking business in King Street, Covent Garden, while his children included the composer Thomas Augustine Arne and the singer Susanna Cibber. He also kept a number of lodgers, which would have been useful to Curll when his authors needed farming out. National Archives, SP 35/58/75, 99, 101. Possibly Charles Stanhope, a former secretary to the Treasury who had been under a cloud since the South Sea episode. He had dealt with the Loggin case. Edward Stanhope, a minor Treasury official, had died in May 1724. For Curll’s claim regarding his imprisonment, see The Curliad (1729), 17. BL, Add MS 38728, f. 187b. The publisher named Samber in his defence as the translator of Venus in the Cloister: he had also produced Eunuchism Display’d (1718) and other versions from French for Curll (see Chapter 6 above). He translated Castiglione’s Courtier in 1724, with a dedication to a fellow Freemason, the Duke of Montagu: on this occasion Curll, Bettesworth and three other booksellers shared in the undertaking. Curll alone reissued the volume in 1729. Edlin, a ‘newly started bookseller’, had been a surety for Curll in regard to the Heidegger pamphlet (above, n. 15) and once in 1726 they appeared in a joint imprint. On top of this Edlin was involved in yet another dispute then coming to a head, regarding a volume on Roman history: see n. 16 to Chapter 6, and Straus,

352

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

Notes 102–3. Edlin had been charged with publishing the ‘infamous’ pamphlet In Praise of Drunkenness (SP 44/81/394). In fact Curll alone is listed on the title-page, but a manuscript note in a copy of the work in the British Library shows that a messenger acquired the copy at Edlin’s shop. National Archives, SP 43/75; EP, 18 November 1725; BJ, 20 November 1725. Of course it was not only the poem which was on trial. Thomas Hearne got wind of the proceedings from the Northampton Journal, and gleefully recorded the misfortunes of his bˆete noire Curll on 9 December (Remains and Collections, ix. 67). Rawlinson MSS, C 195. This is printed by W. J. Thoms, ‘Stray Notes on Edmund Curll’, Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. 60 (1857), 141–4, and Straus, 104, with minor variants. This is Philip Rose, MD, a relative by marriage of Sir Hans Sloane, who became a licentiate of the College of Physicians in 1691. He wrote to Sloane in 1726, in connection with an Essay on the Small-Pox, which Curll published for him in 1724. See E. St John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and his Circle (London: Batchworth, 1954), 167. Curll refers to him as ‘a very learned and worthy Member of the College of Physicians, London, and of near forty Years standing,’ which may have been true by the time the words were written. See The Curliad (1729), 14. MWJ, 4 December 1725. Mist wrongly conflated two of the pamphlets Curll had published, stating that he had been ‘cast . . . upon two Informations against him, for publishing two vile and scandalous Books; the one call’d De usu Flagrorum, and the other A Poem in Praise of Drunkenness, or The Nun in her Smock’. In fact the work on inebriation seems to have disappeared from the charges at this point. See e.g. RWJ, 7 December 1725; 28 May and 26 November 1726: Taunton Journal, 17 June and 1 July 1726. The newspaper refers to just ‘two’ obscene pamphlets. It also asserts that ‘judgment’ was deferred, whereas it seems that the conviction had been obtained and only sentencing remained. Straus, 106. The other book still unpublished was an edition of Andrew Marvell, which was delayed until the following April. It was one of the few editions of Marvell prior to the nineteenth century. Thomas Cooke was paid £ 5 for his work on the volume, in writing the life, ‘procuring some of his Letters’, and ‘Publishing his Works’; BL, Add MS 38728, f. 52. The Humble Representation of Edmund Curll, Bookseller and Citizen of London, Concerning Five Books, Complained of to the Secretary of State [London, 1725], 4–11. Curll could have argued that Venus in the Cloister had already been translated into English and published without complaint in 1683; but at this stage he was apparently unaware of the fact, and only brought up this defence near the end of the legal proceedings. Humble Representation, 6. The ‘eighth’ edition of Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution was published by Thomas Crouch in 1723. The Case of Seduction: Being, an Account of the late Proceedings at Paris, as well Ecclesiastical as Civil, against the Reverend Abb´ee, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for committing Rapes upon 133 Virgins (1726), p. iv. Straus, 277 dates publication as 23 December 1725. National Archives, SP 43/76. Newcastle had ordered a search for the publisher on 10 November (SP 44/80/225–7). According to BJ, 18 December 1725, ‘On Saturday

Notes

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

353

last several of his Majesty’s Messengers seized two Books at a noted Bookseller’s in the Strand. We hear one was the Theological Tracts of the late Mr.Staunton of Hampton, relating to the Doctrine of the Trinity; the other was the Gentleman’s Apothecary, a Novel’. The latter was The Gentleman ’Pothecary . . . Done out of the French by Sir Roger L’Estrange, Knt., in the Year 1678. On 3 March 1725 Ann Brome, widow of Charles Brome, was paid one guinea for the rights, belonging to her late husband (BL, MS 38728, f. 37). This ‘second edition’ may have been a mere feint, to suggest that the item had passed scrutiny before. National Archives, SP 35/61/9, 9(i), 14. National Archives, SP 35/61/14, 30. The church stood immediately to the south of the King’s Bench prison. Straus, 108–11, gives long and entertaining extracts from The Prisoner’s Advocate. RWJ, 2 July 1726. Straus, 113 states that he was bailed on 2 July; in addition Straus reprints the letter of 1 June cited above, from GM lxviii (1798), 190. National Archives, TS 11/944, item 3430; SP 44/81/423–4. Ker’s Memoirs had been hawked around publishers before. In 1718 Nathaniel Mist had been given a ‘written book entitled ‘Mr Ker’s Secret Memoirs’, apparently passed on to him by the Jacobite agent John Plunkett. Mist was examined by the authorities on this and other matters in October (National Archives, SP 35/13/32). Thoms, ‘Stray Notes’, 141. Pember had signed Curll’s defence document with respect to the obscene pamphlets. The letters from Ker to Townshend on 17 June and, presumably, Walpole on 22 June were included by Curll in the third volume of the Memoirs, pp. 60–2. Ker requests the return of fifty copies taken from ‘*****’, one who ‘is not concerned in the Affair’. This last can only be Curll. The deponents included Ker’s servant, William Beaumont. This was probably George Harcourt, Chief Clerk of the Crown Office (d. 1731). Curll also swore an affidavit before Lord Chief Justice Raymond (who presided over the King’s Bench court) on 14 November: but this relates to another matter entirely, a book called The Case of Impotency, now fifteen years old. Curll daringly placed the responsibility for this work on Sir Clement Wearg, who had been solicitor-general from 1724 but died in early 1726. See Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 44, f. 86. Curll himself printed the affidavit in The Flying Island &c. (1726), 13–14—one of his ‘keys’ to Gulliver’s Travels. The Curliad (1729), 19. National Archive, SP 44/81/460. National Archives, SP 35/64/20–32(27); RWJ, 11 February 1727. Again the second volume contains an obvious clue, when the writer (p. 180) deplores the ‘paultry Account’ which Thomas Tickell had given of Addison, and cites instead the Memoirs published by Curll. National Archives, SP 44/80/227–8; RWJ, 18 February 1727. National Archives, SP 35/64/33. National Archives, SP 35/64/35. National Archives, SP 44/80/220–1. National Archives, SP 44/80/220–1. According to MWJ on 18 February, he was now being charged in connection with the third (not second) volume of the Memoirs: see Thoms, ‘Stray Notes’ (1857), 143. This seems to represent a change of mind

354

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

Notes on the part of the government. Thoms prints a record of the prosecution from the Court Roll, but this short document in abbreviated Latin reveals nothing more than that Curll was tried and sentenced. National Archives, TS 11/944/3430. Curll gives his son’s sureties as George Sewell, a watch-maker in St John’s Lane, Clerkenwell, and Henry Amy (?), a bookbinder in St Clement’s Lane. His own sureties were Thomas Hughes, a bookbinder, and William Osborne, doubtless the printer of this name who subscribed to Pattison’s poems that year. Strange, Reports, ii. 791–2. The documents in National Archives, TS 11/944/3430 show how carefully the case was prepared for trial. Witnesses were called to prove that the first volume of the Memoirs was bought at Curll’s shop on 11 June and 15 June 1726. The messenger for the press took it to Curll, who was then in the King’s Bench gaol with Ker. According to the messenger, Curll admitted publishing the book and pointed to Ker as the author. Quoted in State Trials, vol. 1, Treason and Libel, ed. Donald Thomas (London: Routledge, 1972), 143. For a full transcription of the report, see Treason and Libel, ed. Thomas, 135–43. For Fortescue’s dissenting view, see John Fortescue-Aland, Reports of Select Cases in all the Courts of Westminster-Hall (London, 1748), 100. Pettit, ‘Rex v. Curll’, 68. The Proceedings on the King’s Commission of the Peace, and Oyer and Terminer, and Goal-Delivery of Newgate, held for the City of London, and County of Middlesex, at Justice-Hall in the Old Bayly [on 11–14 September 1717] (London, 1717), 8. Treason and Libel, ed. Thomas, 143. The broadside survives in a single copy in the John Johnson collection at the Bodleian library and is reproduced in The John Johnson Collection: Catalogue of an Exhibition (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1971), 26. This was William Burton (d. 1733), a printer who was being sought by the authorities in connection with an issue of Mist’s Journal for 24 August 1728, which had included a seditious item in the guise of a Persian allegory. Newcastle wrote to Hutchins on 30 August naming Burton among those wanted (National Archives, SP 44/82). There were numerous inquiries and examinations in the following weeks, involving Yorke among others. Details can be found in more than twenty documents, located in SP 44/77; SP 44/79; SP 44/80; SP 44/81; SP 44/126; SP 44/362; SP 36/7; SP 36/8; SP 36/9; SP 36/11; SP 36/13; SP 36/151; and TS 11/157, 424, 577. See also Copies Taken from the Records of the Court of King’s Bench, at Westminster, ed. P. C. Webb (London, 1763), 30, citing a warrant to apprehend Burton on 1 September. As a result of the investigation Mist’s press was destroyed by order of the government. Curll knew many of the principals in this affair. National Archives, SP 36/8/110. This was the letter in which Curll claimed Samuel Richardson was ‘much more the Object of the Resentmts of our Govt ’ than he was. He wrote further on allied matters to Townshend on 29 September 1728 (Gentleman’s Magazine, lxviii (1798), 191). 9 T R I BU L AT I O N S ( 1 7 2 6 – 1 7 2 8 )

1. Howard Weinbrot, ‘Alexander Pope and Madame Dacier’s Homer’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (2000), 1–23, provides the fullest account of this episode.

Notes

355

2. See Griffith 178–80. A copy in the possession of one of the authors (PR), signed on the front end-paper ‘Rawlinson’, corresponds closely with Griffith 178. All copies examined contain at 1 67a title-page for Swifteana: Consisting of Poems by Dean Swift, and several of his Friends, also dated 1727: this is not mentioned by Griffith in his description. For the original letters to Cromwell, used by Curll, see Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. Lett. 90. 3. Whartoniana (1726), 1: iii–iv. 4. BL, Add MS 38728, f. 52. In 1727 Curll reissued Rev. Thomas Stackhouse’s Memoirs of Atterbury, first published in 1723. Stackhouse received the large sum of ten guineas for his pains (Add MS 38728, f. 196). Stackhouse (1677–1752), long a poor curate, eventually gained a vicarage in Berkshire through Bishop Gibson, but continued to spend much of his time in London writing for the booksellers. 5. See Ault, New Light, 225–31; TE vi. 253–5. 6. Another sign of the uneasiness felt in Pope’s circle comes in a letter from his coadjutor Elijah Fenton to William Broome in August 1726. Fenton refers to Lintot as a scoundrel, adding ‘An excellent blade to converse with when it is really a misfortune to be known to Curll or him barely by sight’ (Corr, ii. 385). 7. The preface to the first volume of the Miscellanies contains a passing thrust at the renegade publisher: ‘having both of us been extreamly ill treated by some Booksellers, especially one Edmund Curll’ (Prose Works, ii. 89). 8. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 655–6. 9. A Compleat Collection (1728), 2–3. 10. Two Lilliputian Odes (1727), 24–5. 11. [Corolini di Marco], Gulliver’s Travels Compendiously Methodized (1726), 35. 12. National Archives, SP 35/64/27. Susannah Gray is also recorded as the author of a book entitled The Lady’s Preservative, advertised in 1729 (DJ, 16 April) but now lost; supposedly it was presented to the Princess Amelia on 6 March 1729, according to a note in Curll’s Mr. Congreve’s Last Will and Testament. ‘S. Gray’ signed an affidavit in the third volume of Ker’s Memoirs, stating that she or he had been entrusted with all of Ker’s papers. It was signed 11 January 1726[/7] before Robert Price (see Chapter 8 above). A Susanna Curll was married at St Giles’s, Cripplegate, in 1737, and conceivably this is the same individual. If so, she may have married Henry in the mean time, for Edmund’s will says that his widow remarried. 13. Various news reports cited by Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (London: Hutchinson, 1970), 288. The marshal survived his spell in Newgate, but he lost his job and died not long afterwards: his widow was forced to apply to the council for relief. For Hitchen’s grubby career as a precursor of Wild, see J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 252–6. 14. The contents differ greatly as between the two editions, and even between separate copies of the same edition: the 1731 volume in the University of Kansas collection bears almost no resemblance to the one described in ESTC n16438. In some ways Henry displayed more initiative than his father: he obtained some material from the notorious Dutch pirate, T. Johnson, and made obvious efforts to unload old stock he had inherited.

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Notes

15. The Velvet Coffee-Woman: or, The Life, Gallantries and Amours of the late famous Mrs. Anne Rochford (Westminster, 1728), 36. The biography alleges that the former prostitute Nancy Rochford, successful as keeper of a coffee-house, was ruined by an Irish adventurer named MacDermot, celebrated in a poem by Breval which Curll had published in 1717. 16. Joseph M. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 258–61. 17. See Pat Rogers, ‘A Cambridge Chatterton: William Pattison and his Poetry’, Cambridge Review, 29 February 1964. 18. According to a note in Cupid’s Metamorphoses (p. 244), Pattison ‘left behind him a most unnatural Father, Brother and Sister.’ 19. Poetical Works of Pattison, 44–5. 20. Corr, ii. 440. Pattison made the visit as an intermediary in the affair of the letters to Cromwell purloined by Elizabeth Thomas and sold to Curll. 21. Poetical Works of Pattison, 199–201. 22. ‘Iscariot Hackney’, An Author to be Lett (1729), 3. 23. Barbara Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 125. 24. BL, Sloane MS 4058, f. 211. 1 0 THE DUNCIAD ( 1 7 2 8 – 1 7 3 0 ) 1. Emrys Jones, ‘Pope and Dulness’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 54 (1968), 232–63, reprinted in Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. M. Mack and J. A. Winn (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1980), 614. 2. Prose Works, ii. 198. 3. James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95. The sheets of Jacob’s Lives were reissued in 1723 as The Poetical Register, this time without Curll’s name among the numerous booksellers on the title-page. However, references in some later Curll books show that he was heavily involved in the preparation of Jacob’s manual, and he went on advertising the work well into the 1730s. 4. McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning, 96. 5. Pope’s editor is not sure whether the phrase ‘his neighbour’s shop’ (ii. 68) refers to Curll or Lintot: in fact, the latter’s business was located near Temple Bar, a quarter of a mile east, and lay in Fleet Street. The context points unmistakably to Curll. 6. The Proceedings at the Sessions of Peace, Oyer and Terminer, for the City of London, and County of Middlesex [4–9 December 1740] (London, 1740), 16. 7. Sawney. An Heroic Poem. Occasion’d by the Dunciad (1728), xiv. 8. See e.g. Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 58–76. Curll’s own Key to the poem (p. 13) identifies the figure as that of Mary Hearne. 9. Codrus: or, The Dunciad Dissected (1729), 10. 10. The title poem had first appeared in Mr. Campbell’s Packet for the Entertainment of Gentlemen and Ladies (1720), a supplement to Curll’s Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell in that year, but published by T. Bickerton. It also figures in the new

Notes

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

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edition of Campbell’s life which Curll brought out in 1728 as The Supernatural Philosopher. See Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993). Richard Savage, An Author to be Lett (1729), 3–4, 11. In his much revised poem The Battle of the Authors (first published in 1725) Cooke portrayed Pope as fuming at his defeat by Ambrose Philips: ‘Shall I, O! Gods, submit to you, or you, | Curll’s Authors, Blockheads, Ribbands red and blue!’ On the interest of the Key, see David L. Vander Meulen, Pope’s Dunciad of 1728: A History and Facsimile (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 20–2. The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, ed. B. Dobr´ee, 6 vols. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932), ii. 49. John Gay, Poetry and Prose, ed. V. A. Dearing and C. E. Beckwith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), ii. 339. Swift, Corr, iii. 144. See James Sutherland, ‘Polly among the Pirates’, Modern Language Review, 37 (1942), 291–303, which reviews a number of the actions Gay brought in defence of his rights. Quoted by Guerinot, 134. Two Epistles to Mr. Pope, i. 17–20. A Trip through London 8th edn. (London, 1728), 21. With something less than sincerity Pope wrote to Swift on 29 November 1729, ‘I smile to think how Curl would be bit, were our Epistles to fall into his hands, and how gloriously they would fall short of ev’ry ingenious reader’s expectations?’ (Corr, iii. 79). This pose would lay the groundwork for the great scheme to publish his correspondence, from 1733 onwards. Hereditary Right Exemplified (1728), 18–21. The Author’s Farce, ed. C. B. Woods (London: Arnold, 1967), pp. 29, 32–3. Spelling normalized.

1 1 G O I N G I T A LO N E ( 1 7 2 8 – 1 7 3 2 ) 1. For the original documents in the case, see National Archives, C 11/242/45. George Burnet claimed that his brother had written the work in Latin as he was seeking to reach only the learned, and that he would not have wished an English version to appear. The plaintiff also asserted that Chetwood had conspired with Francklin and William Taylor to produce a translation by ‘Mr. Rousillon’, to be issued by subscription. He states that he has been advised that the terms of the Copyright Act of 1710 apply. Chetwood entered a rejoinder, dated 19 October 1721, on behalf of the defendants. They seek to avoid making discoveries about the book in case they become liable for penalties under the Act, and deny that they are involved in a version of Burnet’s book De statu mortuorum (Curll would be, a few years later). Their major claim was that the translation was not the same book as the original, to which the plaintiff had maintained his rights; but they did not argue this case with the aggression Curll would have displayed.

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Notes

2. For useful discussion of Macclesfield’s judgment, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 49–51. The will of Francis Wilkinson, barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, was proved on 20 May 1728. The author of a prefatory letter to Thomas Foxton, the translator of The Future Restauration of the Jews (1729), 3–6, describes the will in detail. This writer can only have been Curll. 3. For Fowke, see Clio: The Autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom (1689–1736), ed. Phyllis J. Guskin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), an edition of her memoirs with an introduction and notes; and Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muse’s Projector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 88–96. Most of Hill’s wider circle, including at times Fowke, Savage, Hammond and Bond, had connections with Curll.. 4. The miscellany carries the name of T. Jauncy, as does a 1726 reissue, but it appears repeatedly in Curll lists, and the ‘second edition’ (another reissue, 1740) carried his imprint. Only a single item by Pope was used (see p. 130), but of course this fact is brandished on the title-page. 5. Bodleian Library, 8◦ Rawlinson 420–22; B. J. Enright, ‘Edmund Curll and the ‘‘Cursed Blunders’’ in Fresnoy’s New Method of Studying History, 1728’, The Library, 3rd ser., 9 (1954), 200–5. 6. For Curll’s Oxfordshire tour in 1718, see Chapter 7. The edition by Rawlinson of the letters of Heloise and Abelard (1728), with an imprint of the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, is found with Henry Curll’s booklist at the end. 7. National Archives, C 11/1878/23. 8. Not in August 1730, as has been stated: see William Congreve: Letters & Documents, ed. John C. Hodges (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 258. A second edition (or issue) was advertised on 13 January 1730. 9. This fact is noticed by Kathleen Lynch, A Congreve Gallery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 10. 10. Entries in the published lists confirm the fact that the book came out in August: see Monthly Catalogue, iii. 90–1; Monthly Chronicle, 185. Straus, 290, notes an advertisement by Curll on 12 August. See also Angus Ross, ‘The Correspondence of Dr. John Arbuthnot’ (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1956), ii. 504–5. 11. Memoirs, pp. ix–xiii. A marginal note in Malone’s copy, now in the Bodleian Library, Godwyn Pamphlets, 339(5), identifies ‘a certain Lady’ as Mrs Bracegirdle. Leigh Hunt and others have accepted the identification. 12. Memoirs, p. xiv: James M. Osborn, John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems (New York, 1940), 8 n. 15. 13. Letters, ed. Hodges, 230. 14. The claim seems to be admitted by John W. Bowyer, The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 4. It is questioned by Clarence Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953), 18. 15. For Moyle, see Chapter 9. His literary executor, Thomas Sergeant, was a friend of Oldmixon. 16. See, for one example among many, the adverse judgments in Congreve, Letters & Documents, 280.

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17. E. Bellchambers, ed., An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (London, 1822), 3. 18. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany, ed. Lady Llanover (London, 1861), i. 212; the letter by Mrs Pendarves is dated 23 August 1729. 19. Some sources have it that a manuscript note on the title page of Malone’s copy—Bodleian Library, Godwyn Pamphlets 339(5)—makes the identification. In fact this does not appear to be so. It may be that the copy has been cropped, for the text is supplied with many marginal notes in a hand that bears some resemblance, at least, to Malone’s. 20. Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), i. 347. 21. For fuller analysis of the authorship, see Pat Rogers, ‘The Identity of Charles Wilson: Congreve’s First Biographer’, Modern Language Quarterly, 31 (1970), 330–44. 22. The issue is discussed by John O’Brien, ‘Grub Street: The Literary and the Literatory in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, ASECS Teaching Pamphlet no. 6 (http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/obrien.html). This assumes that the Journal coined the term ‘literatory’, but as we have seen it was Curll himself who introduced the term in 1729 or 1730. For an interesting exploration of the term, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 124, though it is doubtful whether the shop in Bow Street constituted exactly a ‘club’, as Johns supposes. 23. Notes & Queries, ii. 78 (1857), 503, citing GM lxviii (1798), 191. 24. For instance, Samuel Buckley brought to Delafaye’s attention two days later, on 2 October, letters from a woman imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. She wished to be released so as to communicate information to the authorities (National Archives, SP 36/8/198–205). 25. Cambridge University Library, MS C(H) Corr 1839. 26. National Archives, IND 1/4624/428; T 1/176/14. The original proposal is dated ‘16 March 1730’, but this evidently means 1730/31. 27. The Proceedings at the Sessions of the Peace, and Oyer and Terminer, for the City of London, and County of Middlesex on Thursday the 25th, Friday the 26th, Saturday the 27th, and Monday the 29th of May 1732, in the Fifth Year of His Majesty’s Reign (1732), 144. 1 2 C OV E N T G A R D E N D RO L L E RY ( 1 7 3 2 – 1 7 3 4 ) 1. The Proceedings at the Sessions of the Peace, and Oyer and Terminer, for the City of London, and County of Middlesex, on Wednesday the 26th, Thursday the 27th, Friday the 28th of February, and Saturday the 1st of March, 1735, in the Eighth Year of His Majesty’s Reign (1732), 48; M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 83; George Augustus Sala, Twice Round the Clock, or The Hours of the Day and Night in London (London, 1859), 164–5. Although Curll’s books now bore the imprint ‘for E. Curll in Rose-Street, Covent-Garden’, the same volume might carry a list at the end still identifying his place of business as ‘Burleigh-Street in the Strand’. This combination occurs in the case of the fifth edition of The Compleat Gamester in 1734. 2. At one point the author, in the course of a long discussion of Oldfield’s protector Arthur Maynwaring, alleges that ‘Messieurs Pope and Arbuthnot often laid their

360

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

Notes Hands to the same Plow,’ that is contributed to the Tory journal The Examiner (p. 46). There is no evidence to support this statement. The biographer makes extensive use of Oldmixon’s life of Maynwaring (1715) in which Curll unquestionably had some involvement (see Chapter 4 above), and much of the material is simply transcribed verbatim from the earlier book. On 25 March the Grub-street Journal printed a satire on the Memoirs, which the magazine took to be Curll’s work. Curll wrote to John Webb on 10 April 1732, stating that ‘a Person, who had the Honr . of the Ld . Ch: Baron’s Acquaintance for above 20 years, has drawn up some secret passages of his Life, and Dedicated them to you’ (Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Lett. C.17, f. 99). The book was ready, but would not be advertised until Webb gave his approval. Old Curll hands will scarcely regard this as a disclaimer of authorship. Pengelly had died of gaol fever following Taunton Assizes in 1730. Webb was his clerk and the principal beneficiary of his will (first printed by Curll as part of The New Political State of Great Britain in 1730). The Clarendon-Family Vindicated (1732), 21–2. The Bee: or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet. Containing Something to hit every Man’s Taste and Principles, 9 vols. (1733–35), ii. 875. Cambridge University Library, C(H) Corr 1 2034. Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D. W. Hayton, The House of Commons 1690–1715, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), v. 204. Through his marriage to Lucy, Robert acquired the Rodd estates including Foxley. Price’s son Uvedale (1685–1764) married a grand-daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, Ann Somerset, who was known to Pope, and his grandson Robert was an early patron of Thomas Gainsborough. This Robert was the father of the famous landscape designer, Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829), who practised the picturesque style of gardening at the estate Lucy brought to the family. See the information summarized in Tracy, The Artificial Bastard, 38–40. Lucy Price may well have supplied the translation of another play by Calder´on, which formed the basis for Savage’s comedy Love in a Veil, performed at Drury Lane in 1718 and published by Curll, Francklin, and Chetwood in the following year. Lucy died in 1736: see her will, proved on 13 December in that year (National Archives, PROB 11/680), in which she names as executrix and residuary legatee not one of her children or grandchildren, but Susannah Cole, spinster. Gentleman’s Magazine, iii (September 1733), 499. For Budgell’s version of the transactions between Curll and himself over Tindal, see The Bee: or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet. Containing Something to hit every Man’s Taste and Principles (London, 1733–35), iii. 1417–22. Cambridge University Library, MS C(H) Corr 2086. It is possible that Budgell lived with old Matthew Tindal. In his will, proved on 13 August 1733, he was named as resident in St James’s, Clerkenwell (National Archives, PROB 11/684). The Bee, iii. 1181, 1417–22, 1459–60, 1466–7, 1504, 1636; ix. 372. Straus, 149–52, gives a brief account of the episode, but he had evidently not seen The Bee, where Budgell conducted most of his side of the quarrel. See also Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 48–50. National Archives, SP 44/82.

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14. The Harlot’s Progress. Being the Life of the Noted Moll Hackabout (1740), 46. 15. Poems on Several Occasions (1732), ii. 310. Pope had launched a brief thrust at Mitchell in the earliest versions of The Dunciad : Curll quickly identified him as ‘Mitchell—a most wretched Rathonian Poetaster’ (TE v. 163). The strange epithet relates to Mitchell’s birth at Ratho outside Edinburgh. 16. The Man of Taste (1733), 8: The Manners of the Age (1735), 125, 127. 17. Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence. Volume the Second (1735), iv–v. The short prose description appears late in this volume. 18. The catalogue is dated 1 December 1735 and appeals to gentlemen to send in ‘original letters’ for the ongoing Pope series. The publisher’s claims to various works, including State Tracts (1731) are set out in a document which must date from the first half of the 1730s (BL, Add. MS 38730, f. 64). Among books listed in the catalogue as published in 1734 is a new edition of the Abb´e Ren´e Aubert de Vertot’s History of the Revolutions of Portugal (dated 1735), on which Curll collaborated with seven booksellers including Knapton and Longman. This was one of the most significant historical works with which he was associated. 19. Achilles Dissected: being a Compleat Key of the Political Characters in that New Ballad Opera, Written by the late Mr. Gay (1733), 25. 20. Curll liked it enough to include it at the end of Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence. Volume the Second (1735), 82–92, the source of the note quoted.

1 3 M R P O PE ’ S L I T E R A RY C O R R E S P O N D E N C E ( 1 7 3 4 – 1 7 3 6 ) 1. The basic sequence is in Straus, 154–87. The most psychologically coherent and chronologically ordered account is in J. A. Winn, A Window in the Bosom: The Letters of Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 203–21. 2. Pope’s Narrative was published as a pamphlet (1735) and is reprinted in The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Whitwell Elwin and William John Courthope, 10 vols. (1871–89), vi. 419–32 (hereafter cited as ‘EC vi’), Corr, iii. 458–67 and Prose Works, ii. 317–56, from which last it is normally quoted in the present chapter. Curll’s material came out originally in the second volume of his Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1735), and is partially reprinted in EC vi. 436–48; Curll’s notes to Pope’s Narrative are incorporated in the editorial notes to the text in Prose Works ii; both of these sources are used for reference here. 3. The essentials are in Griffith, 374–404; see further Corr i. xix-xxi and James McLaverty’s brilliant bibliographic analysis in ‘The First Printing and Publication of Pope’s Letters’, The Library, 2 (1980), 264–80. 4. One surmise is that it might have been in breach of copyright: Prose Works, ii. 309. 5. McLaverty, ‘First Printing’, 268–9. 6. Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, 656. 7. Corr, iii. 359–60; ‘E.P.’ must be Pope. 8. Straus, 156, citing DJ, 30 March 1733. 9. Curll is supposed to have endorsed the letter with the assertion that he did place the advertisement, but it has not been found; see Prose Works, ii. 335, 352 (n. 39). 10. ‘Initial Correspondence’, p. 12; EC vi. 441.

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11. Corr, iii. 460; see further Prose Works ii. 350; advertisement also in GSJ of that date, and DJ of 4 April. 12. Reprinted in ‘Initial Correspondence’, Appendix 2, 28–9; Prose Works, ii. 350. Pope surely cannot have been so unwary as to write the letters himself. Who (if anyone) ‘directed’ Curll to give Pope notice is a mystery; Straus notes (159) that the Grub-street Journal of 20 March 1735 had included a mock-auction of love letters, from which Curll was specifically excluded because no one would trust his edition; this might have been some kind of Pope-sponsored reminder of the issue, but it is not obviously a forceful reason for Curll to dig the letters out. 13. ‘Initial Correspondence’, p. 13; EC vi. 441. 14. Initial Correspondence, p. 14; EC vi. 442. McLaverty suggests (‘First Printing’, 276–7) that Worsdale was Gilliver’s man, rather than directly Pope’s creature. Johnson reports him as one ‘employed in clandestine negotiations, but whose veracity was very doubtful’; Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), iii. 158. 15. Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 339–40. Curll might have been seeking time to copy the letters out, as Winn (A Window in the Bosom, 211) suggests, or trying to avoid returning them at all. He also asks for ‘fifty more books’, which is puzzling if he had not already received some. 16. Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 340–1. Winn (p. 212) is inclined to believe Curll’s assertions that he merely copied out and then returned an advertisement that had been sent him, on the grounds that it contains just enough to have the matter raised in the House of Lords; this remains a possibility, but why Curll should bother returning the text is a mystery. 17. Griffith, 374: printed as two volumes but always bound as one. ‘Initial Correspondence’, EC vi. 443. 18. The bibliography of these items is complex, and different bindings of what are essentially the same sheets exist: see McLaverty’s discussion of the extant volumes and their costings, ‘First Printing’. 19. This edition is Griffith, 375; the description there confirms and extends Curll’s account of what was missing from the volumes. 20. ‘BY THIS INCIDENT THE BOOKSELLERS BILL WAS THROWN OUT’, he recorded (Narrative, in Prose Works, ii. 341); see also Foxon, Pope and the Book Trade, 244. McLaverty (‘First Printing’, p. 276) argues that the hastiness of the whole procedure shows that Pope’s main motivation was actually the defeat of a measure that would increase the rights of booksellers at the expense of authors. 21. Journals of the House of Lords, xxiv. 550. 22. Corr, iii. 455. Curll claimed that Pope was seen hanging around the Court of Requests in Westminster on the actual day of publication: ‘Preliminary Epistle’, EC vi. 437. 23. If he had, it must either be one of the fifty that Curll had already received before the second delivery, or one supplied by Pope himself: either way Curll was quite clearly being set up. 24. Motte to Swift, 31 July 1735; The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. by Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963–5), iv. 373. 25. John West, First Earl of De La Warr, a court insider.

Notes

363

26. McLaverty, ‘First Printing’, 273–9. 27. Winn, A Window in the Bosom, 217. 28. This appears to mean that Curll had not in fact sold his first bundle of fifty (it is normally assumed that he had) and was asking for title pages and prefaces for them; otherwise he ought to be asking for extra sheets for the 190 seized copies, which had title pages and prefaces, but lacked several signatures of text. 29. Johnson says that Pope was present himself, and most accounts place him there; but it seems unlikely that even Pope could have gained access to a committee meeting of this kind, and Curll does not mention it; Lives, iii. 155–7. 30. Curll dates the letter 17 May (‘Initial Correspondence’), but his reply to it is dated 16 May in Pope’s Narrative; EC vi. 446. 31. Curll’s version (True Narrative) of this postscript is slightly different, and Curll explained that Lord Delawar having in fact gone to Holland with Lord Cowper, he spent the evening with Lord Haversham.; see Prose Works, ii. 354. 32. Also in DJ and GSJ ; reprinted PB, 22 May. 33. Griffith, 376, using Griffith 374 as copy for the main text and 375 for the preface. Again, copies differ in the way the sheets have been bound. Griffith cites an entry from the printer Woodfall’s ledger which suggests the first print run was 1,000 copies. 34. DJ, 28 May, repeated on 29 May with a duplicate in DC (for which Cooper was the chief agent) as well as The General Evening Post. Pope had got Thomas Cooper to deposit 9 copies of Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope at Stationers’ Hall, 21 May, but kept copyright himself. This ‘booksellers’ edition (Griffiths, 378) is made up of largely of the sheets used for the editions fed to Curll. 35. St James’s Evening Post, 3 June; apparently not true. 36. Pope accuses Curll of annotating a copy of the Wycherley; if so it has not survived. 37. Corr, iii. 468–9. ‘Tom-Turdman’ in relation to Curll dates back to the 1718 ‘Curlicism’ squabble with Defoe, though it also picks up Curll’s accident in The Dunciad. 38. For examples of Cooper’s campaign see Daily Gazetteer, 7 July, 20 August and 19 September; LEP, 28 August, 18 September. 39. Pope’s 15 July advertisement was appended to notices of the second volume of his Works (Craftsman, 26 July; London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 29 and 30 July; also LEP, 31 July). 40. Curll signed himself from ‘Peckham, Sept. 15, 1735’, presumably the source of Straus’s assertion (164) that Curll took a house there. 41. Sherburn (Corr, iii. 487) assigns responsibility for these fake letters to Curll; others have thought it was another trick by Pope. For the possibility that a member of the Blount family was pulling the strings, see Robert Carruthers, The Life of Alexander Pope, 2nd edn. (London: Bohn, 1857), 441–3. 42. Letters of 3 September and 21 October 1735; Corr, iii. 491, 505. 43. See William K. Wimsatt, Jr., ‘ ‘‘Amicitiae Causa’’: A Birthday Present from Curll to Pope’, in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (London: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 341–9. 44. See e.g. his letters to Mrs. Knight, 25 November, and Jacob Tonson, 4 December 1735, Corr, iii. 511, 513.

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Notes

45. Letter of [?1736], Corr, iv. 16. 46. Swift to Lady Elizabeth Germaine, 8 June 1735, in response to hers of 27 May; Correspondence of Swift, ed. Williams, iv. 342–4. His letter to Lord Oxford, 2 September 1735 (iv. 380), expressing similar sentiments, equivocates in a Popean manner about Faulkner’s edition of his own works of that year. 47. A. J. Sambrook, James Thomson, 1700–1748: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 138. 48. Tenth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1885), 477, letter dated 4 March 1737. Curll’s advertisement of 9 July 1735, in Fog’s Weekly Journal, had been interesting enough to be copied by the Earl Marischal to Hamilton, 30 January 1737; ibid. 474–5. 49. See issues of 29 July and 5 August 1735. 50. Curll’s preface to Jacob’s Liberty and Property was partly in response to this article. 51. The fact that Pope had also doctored the texts of his letters and readdressed some early letters (to his friend John Caryll) to more important figures such as Congreve and Addison, was not discovered until the nineteenth century. 52. It had been suggested before: ‘Mr Gerard’, An Epistle to the Egregious Mr. Pope (1734), 5, puts Pope in the pillory ‘With thy Friend Curl’; the work is sometimes attributed to Budgell. 53. Johnson’s account of the affair, evidently derived from book trade sources, is however not dissimilar in essence: Lives, iii. 155–7. Johnson also says that Lintot’s son told him that another parcel of the correspondence had been sent to Lintot, with the intention that Lintot should blow the whistle on the ‘surreptitious’ edition; but he did nothing. This is not substantiated, but it is clear that Johnson knew from his contacts in the book trade that Pope was behind the edition. 54. See ESTC t58810 and Griffith, 420, 423: the probable author was Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget. Curll’s edition of An Essay on Man (Straus, 301) is not easy to identify, but it may be the ‘seventh edition’ for ‘J. Witford’ (Griffith, 419). 55. For the episode see chapter 4 of Eric Van Deventer Chandler, ‘The Publishing Imagination: The Cultural Warfare of Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll’, Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (1998). The contents of the catalogue bearing the image are discussed in chapter 12. 56. Straus, 186–7 reprints this. 57. ‘Printed for H. Curll’; on the last page two other books are said to be printed for him, but no issue of them with his name in the imprint has been found. The subject was presumably inspired by his father’s marriage to the widow of a gentleman builder. 58. National Archives, Pris. 10/88; note from James Gambier [?], warden of the Fleet, dated 18 July 1735; failure to appear before magistrates, 18 June 1735; discharged from the Fleet, 18 September 1736, National Archives, Pris. 10/49/165. The presence of at least one other Henry Curle in the period complicates identification of documents such as these. 59. Bodleian John Johnson Trade Sale Catalogues 16 (49 and 50). 60. Her ‘Essay upon Allegorie’, in the first of the series, is dated ‘Whitehall, 20 February 1736’. She quotes, naturally enough, from Pope’s letters. A rival version, as noisily advertised as Curll’s, was published by Anne Dodd (Straus, 300–3).

Notes

365

61. Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 150–1; see also pp. 169–73. 62. The Life of the late Right Honourable George Lord Carpenter (1736); Curll manages to drag the Earl of Wintoun’s trial into this, pp. 22–32. 63. Poetical Works of Richard Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 192, 241. Curll is not known to have been involved in any of the many publications on the trial of Colonel Francis Charteris in 1730. 64. Letter dated [1736], in H. S. Hughes, The Gentle Hertford (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 137. Curll advertised the second edition of Philomela in LEP, 5 October 1736. 65. Advertisement for Mrs Rowe’s Poetical Works Completed, in Common Sense, 10 June 1738. 66. Bodleian MS Rawl. Lett. 114* f. 103. The date is given in the Bodleian catalogue as 29 May, which may be correct. The ‘Goode’ is not known: it probably cannot be Barnham or his brother Francis, who are thought to have lived beyond this date. A ‘Capt Goode of the City Militia’ died February 1734, according to GM. The Sewell material dates back to 1714; for the book by John Macky, see Chapter 11. ‘Old Sarum’ is Bishop Gilbert Burnet, Sewell’s old enemy from 1710, and the controversy mentioned here relates to editorial interference in his Whiggish History of His Own Time. The ‘Appendix’ was advertised as in production in DJ, 14 March 1734, with an offer to discuss ‘the Particulars’ with any interested parties. 67. Straus, 286 lists the Perrott text as Curll’s and Rawlinson is named in ‘To the Reader’. The book appeared without imprint, perhaps because of its potentially seditious reminders of the fall of ‘great men’ and the fickleness of sovereigns. The same might be said of Memoirs of the English Naval Affairs, ascribed to James II and published without imprint name in 1729; Straus, 290. 68. LEP, 5 June 1736, quoted in Straus, 302–3. 69. Hearne, Remarks and Collections, iii. 48: in September 1710 Hearne notes that Erdeswicke’s Antiquities of Staffordshire would be worth reprinting, but notes on 9 February 1732 that ‘One Curle a vile Bookseller in London hath since printed these Antiquities, but not for the credit of Mr. Erdeswicke’. Curll had reprinted the book, under Rawlinson’s editorship, in 1717. 70. See GSJ, 9 December 1731 and 6 January 1732 for satiric fallout from this affair, which involved the republication of an early work of the non-juring Hearne justifying those who took the oaths. 71. Impartial Memoirs, ‘Introduction’ by ‘Philalethes’, pp. iii–iv. See Sarah Markham, John Loveday of Caversham 1711–1789: The Life and Times of an Eighteenth-Century Onlooker (Wilton: Michael Russell, 1984), 208–9; Hearne’s letter about Willis is on p. 33. 1 4 G O L D F RO M D I RT ( 1 7 3 7 – 1 7 4 2 ) 1. In June 1741 Curll would bring out The History of the English Stage, from the Restauration to the Present Time, attributed on the title-page to Thomas Betterton, and now generally ascribed to William Oldys. This volume generally contains a version of the memoirs of Anne Oldfield, originally published ten years earlier.

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2. Henry Fielding, Contributions to the Champion and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 395, 422–3. The odd phrase ‘hopper br[eec]h’d’ seems to mean with a sharply indented posterior (shaped like the funnel of a mill). 3. The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), ii. 560–1. 4. ‘His papers were bought by the infamous Curl. My friend Dr. [Edward] Milward gave him 30 guineas for them’: The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, M.A., ed. W. C. Lukis, 3 vols. (Durham: Surtees Society, 1882–7), i. 97. Curll was still buying stock at trade sales in early 1740s. For example, he acquired volumes at Corbett’s sale on 16 October 1740, and at Pemberton’s ‘deceased’ sale on 8 January 1740: A Catalogue of Books in Quires, and Copies, Lately Belonging to Mr. John Pemberton, Deceas’d (1741). However, he bought nothing at Gosling’s on 27 October 1741: A Catalogue of Books in Quires, and Copies; Containing the Remaining Part of the Stock of Mr. Robert Gosling, Deceas’d (1741). See the annotations in Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection, Trade Sales Catalogues 16 (81, 84, 89). Conjunctions of Curll’s name with that of Pemberton or Gosling in imprints after 1720 are mostly on reprints where, presumably, copyright was shared. 5. The work has been republished with an introduction by Richard I. Cook (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1973). 6. BL, Add MS 4303, f. 211. 7. BL, Sloane MS 4506, f. 250. 8. The Correspondence of Edward Young 1683–1765, ed. H. Pettit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 74–7, 88–9. The dedicatee was the second Baron Carpenter, son of the general whose biography Curll had published in 1736. Curll may also have been involved in posthumous works by Matthew Prior, issued by Prior’s former secretary and literary executor, Adrian Drift, in 1740. 9. New Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends (1737), p. ii. Sherburn (Corr, i. 22) follows Griffith, 429, in dating this volume November 1736, but the true date appears to be more like May 1737. 10. See also Mack, Life, 664–70. 11. Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence (1741), sig. π4v . Straus, 193 misprints ‘taking’ for ‘tacking’ in the first sentence. 12. Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence (1741), 26. 13. Ibid. 200. 14. For citation of this case, see eg. Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 17 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903–72), xii. 283; Copinger and Skone James on Copyright (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 10th edn., 1965), 33; Goodeve’s Modern Law of Personal Property (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 8th edn, 1937), 398; and John Mews, Mews’ Digest of English Case Law, 24 vols. (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1925–28), v. 1251. 15. See Howard P. Vincent, ‘Some Dunciad Litigation’, Philological Quarterly, 18 (1939), 285–9. For Mansfield’s connection with the case, see C. H. S. Fifoot, Lord Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 222. 16. John Tracy Atkins, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, 3 vols, (London, 1781), ii. 356–7. See also P. C. Yorke, The Life and

Notes

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

367

Correspondence of Philip Yorke Earl of Hardwicke, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), ii. 464. Harry Ransom, ‘The Personal Letter as Literary Property’, Studies in English, 30 (1951), 116–31. National Archives, C11/1569/29. For a fuller discussion, see Pat Rogers, ‘The Case of Pope v. Curll’, The Library, 27 (1972), 326–31. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 60–6, 145–53. Corr, iv. 343, 349–50. Pope was intending to visit Murray on 28 May (iv. 345); this may indicate that Curll’s piracy was already before the public and that the bill of complaint was drawn up on that day. Society of Antiquaries’ Library, London, MS 780/24. Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence (London, 1741), sig. 4r : Corr, iii. 95. See Straus, 193. ‘The rules of pleading and of procedure were applied with rigorous precision; there was no power to allow the amendment of the most venial error. If a plaintiff spelled the defendant’s name incorrectly in his process, he was non-suited’. See Sir F. D. MacKinnon, ‘The Law and the Lawyers’, Johnson’s England, ed. A. S. Turberville, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), ii. 294. Pope’s bill has it both ways: Curll and Curl were equally common, so Pope uses each form of spelling in turn. Curll’s attorney was J. Browning, possibly John Browning of Hatton Garden, gent., who was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on 24 June 1724: Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, 2 vols, (London: Lincoln’s Inn, 1896), i. 386. His assertion that a third of the book consisted of material ‘not before published’ is demonstrably false in respect of the contributions by Arbuthnot and Wotton (pp. 229–82). See L. M. Beattie, John Arbuthnot Mathematician and Satirist (Cambridge, MA, 1935: Harvard University Press), 194. Samuel Richardson ran into the same trouble with Sir Charles Grandison a decade later; the Irish printers strongly asserted their right to bring out the work in spite of the author’s opposition. See T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 378–83. Ransom, ‘The Personal Letter as Literary Property’, 121. This paragraph draws on Atkins, ii. 356–7. For Pope’s self-fashioning in his professional life, see David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Pope actually died on 30 May: the Chancery bill vaguely states that he ‘departed this Life Some time in or about the Month of June’. The documents in the case can be found in National Archives, C11/830/29. She might possibly be the ‘Esther Palmer’, widow of St Andrew’s, Holborn (the parish named in the bill), whose will was proved on 3 January 1776: see National Archives, PROB 11/1015. National Archives, C 11/1153/1. BL, Add MS 38728, fol. 197. Merryland Displayed (1741), 9, 13, 25.

368

Notes

35. The Proceedings on the King’s Commission of the Peace, and Oyer and Terminer, and Goal-Delivery of Newgate, held for the City of London, and County of Middlesex, at Justice-Hall in the Old Bayly (1739), 32. 36. A Short Description of the Roads which Lead to Merryland (1743), pp. iii–iv. 37. The tenth edition (1742) was the first to append The Natural History of the Arbor Vitae, a work which had several printings in 1732 (none apparently by Curll). This may or may not be by Stretser. 38. The author of Merryland Displayed (p. 15) says of William Jones, ‘there is no such Man as I can find at Bath’. As for Lobb, he adds, there was a bookseller of that name, but he has many years ago entered into holy orders, ‘which makes it the more impudent for our Author to mention him as the Publisher of an obscene Pamphlet.’ Samuel Lobb was a subscriber to Oldmixon’s History of England. 39. Within a few years his son John Leake, Jr. was in trouble with the authorities for printing Aretinus Redivivus, when he claimed in April 1745 that Merryland had been among the first works he printed (National Archives, SP 44/83/460–1). As Foxon surmised, a relationship between Curll, Leake and a wholesaler involved in dubious publications, Daniel Lynch, ‘certainly existed’: David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England 1660–1745 (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1965), 17. Among the books Leake was shown to have printed we find Curll’s old favourite, Venus in her Smock.There was also a W. Lobb of Bath who subscribed to the Harleian Miscellany in 1744. 40. The Letters of Doctor George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson (1733–1743), ed. C. F. Mullett (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1943), 46–7, 65. 41. The School of Venus (1739) simply repackages what had previously appeared in The Ladies Miscellany, that is the old Joseph Gay items. 1 5 C LO S I N G T H E B O O K S ( 1 7 4 1 – 1 7 4 7 ) 1. Charles A. Rivington, ‘Tyrant’: The Story of John Barber 1675 to 1741 (York: William Sessions, 1989), 233. 2. An Impartial History of the Life of Mr. John Barber (1741), pp. iv-vii. 3. Memoirsof Laetitia Pilkington, ed. A. C. Elias, jr, 2 vols. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), i. 192. For a discussion of Matthew’s probable share in the composition of the book, see Memoirs, ii. 574–5. 4. Pilkington, Memoirs, i. 68, 193–4. 5. See David Greenwood, William King: Tory and Jacobite (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 110–18. 6. For the original warrant, dated 18 December 1744, see National Archives, SP 44/369/354–5. 7. National Archives, PROB 11/76. He may well be the William Ayre who died in London on 14 April 1748 (International Genealogical Index). 8. For the will of Charity Ayre, proved in 1765, see National Archives, PROB 11/914. The marriage of Mary Ayre took place at St Nicholas Cole, London, on 2 May 1742 (International Genealogical Index). 9. William Ayre, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope, Esg, 2 vols. (1745) i. 63.

Notes 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

369

Ibid. i. vii–viii. Ibid. i. 79. Ibid. ii. 389. J. H., Remarks on ’Squire Ayre’s Memoirs (1745), 47. Humphreys had carried out other translation work for Curll in 1734, principally versions of La Fontaine (BL, Add MS 38728, f. 121). Nichols, LA v. 535. W. R. Chetwood, A General History of the Stage, from its Origin in Greece down to the Present Time (1749), 172–3. In the following year Samuel Foote pretended that Fielding had died some time earlier and was replaced by an impostor, while the real body lay in the burial ground at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, alongside that of ‘his old Friend and Patron, Edmund Curll, Bookseller, in whose service he lived and died’ (Daily Advertiser, 23 April 1748). There is no evidence that Fielding ever wrote for Curll. At some point Richard Rawlinson must have acquired from Curll what is now Bodleian MS Rawl 90, a separately-bound book with the title ‘Original Letters’. It contains the Pope-Cromwell correspondence from 1708 to 1711, plus a few other Popeana, including a picture of Pope as a seated, laurelled bard with the note ‘This Figure is the Delineation of Mr: Pope’s Penmanship. E. Curll’; material from John Norris’s circle of literary ladies c.1700; the ‘S.E.’ letters of 1735 (Corr, iii. 487) and Young’s 1739 letters to Curll. Maybe Curll gave or sold to Rawlinson this bundle of material sometime from 1740 on, but it seems possible that Rawlinson applied to Curll’s widow for any interesting manuscripts the bookseller had left behind. See John Rocque’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1746); and Old Bailey proceedings for 11 October 1738, trial of John Machell and Richard Wilkinson. Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq., 2 vols. (1756–66), ii. 381–4. Laurence Sterne, A Political Romance (1759), 50. Joe Miller’s Jests: or, The Wits Vade-Mecum (14th edn., 1762), p. 40. GM 61 (1786) 93, 190. Nichols, LA i. 456–7. See also ii. 668 for a comment by Isaac Reed to the effect that Curll took liberties with the ‘miserable wretches’ he employed, but took care not affront ‘a person who has either character or respectability in the world.’ See De Quincey, Writings, vol. ii Biographical Essays, ed. J. T. Fields (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850), 117. N OT E S TO A F T E RWOR D

1. A Trip from St. James’s, reprinted in Tricks of the Town, ed. Ralph Straus (London: Chapman & Hall, 1928), 245–6. 2. The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. B. A. Goldgar (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 282–3. Nathaniel Mist, the printer and newspaper editor often locked in combat with Curll, had been sentenced to the pillory in 1721. 3. See TE v. 101, for Pope’s long note beginning, ‘C in his Key to the Dunciad affirm’d this to be James Moore Smyth,Esq’.

370

Notes

4. Sir Edward Coke, The Ninth Part of the Reports (London, 1613), 59. ‘Publisher’ here would cover one who disseminated the work as an editor and one who distributed it for profit. 5. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1769), iv. 150. 6. Charges to the Grand Jury 1689–1803, ed. Georges Lamoine (London: Royal Historical Society, 1992), 220. 7. TE iv. 363 notes, ‘His charges to the grand jury were much admired . . . They were said to have been written for him by Orator Henley.’ 8. These two paragraphs draw on the discussion in Pat Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), 26–7. 9. ‘Mrs. C, Bookseller, in Rose-Street, Convent-Garden’, did keep going for a few years, however; her retirement notice, following Edmund’s model, appears in the Public Advertiser, 10 February 1753.

Index of Curll’s Publications The short titles and dates relate to the earliest edition mentioned in the text. Account of Some Roman Urns (1713) 55–6 Account of the Life and Writings of John Locke (1713) 49 Achates to Varus (1746) 307 Achilles Dissected (1733) 245 Adventures of Pomponius (1725) 170 Adventures of Rivella (1714) 51, 70 Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia (1717) 65 Æsculapius (1714) 280 Altar of Love (1727) 87, 101, 126, 181–2, 241 Amorous Widow (1710) 49 Ancient and Present State of the University of Oxford (1714) 66, 137 Anglia Illustrata (1720) 137, 208, 274 Answer of Henry Sacheverell D.D. (1710) 39 Antiquities of Berkshire (1719) 135–6 Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Worcester (1717) 134 Antiquities of St. Peter’s, Westminster (1711) 53, 71, 138 Apology for the Writings of Walter Moyle (1726) 182 Appendix to the Ninth Chapter of the State of the Dead (1728) 206 Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1728) 205–7, 311, 323 Ars Pun-ica (1719) 129 Artifice, The (1723) 51, 323 Art of Kissing (1721) 218 Art of Knowing Women (1730) 215, 219, 241 Art of Midwifery Improv’d (1716) 91 Athenian Spy (1706) 23 Atterbuyana (1727) 150, 172–3 Bath Toasts for the Year 1715 (1715) 73 Bibliotheca Recondita (1739) 281 Brief Answer to a Brief State of the Question (1720) 145 Buckingham-House (1721) 146–7 Callipaedia (1712) 50, 59, 61, 83, 126, 218 Case at large of Duke Hamilton (1712) 45 Case of the Earl of Mar (1715) 75 Case of John Atherton (1710) 35, 60 Case of Seduction (1725) 159–60

Case of Sodomy (1708) 35, 60, 84 Cases of Divorce (1715) 73, 218 Cases of Impotency (1714) 35, 61, 84, 117, 218, 222 Cases of Impotency and Virginity (1732) 232 Cases of Polygamy (1732) 242 Catholick Poet (1716) 86, 89–90, 98 Cato: A Tragedy (Deschamps) (1716) 80, 83, 91 Character of a Fine Gentleman (1721) 127 Character of Dr. Robert South (1716) 94 Charitable Surgeon (1707) 35–6, 59 Chinese Tales (1725) 323 Chorographical Description of Devon (1714) 54 Christian’s Support (1709) 30, 75 Christus Patiens (1720) 108, 122 City Ramble (1715) 65 C. Julius Caesar’s Commentaries (1705) 17, 21, 23, 60 Clarendon Family Vindicated (1732) 274–5 Clue to the Comedy of the Non-Juror (1718) 108 Codrus (1728) 196 Collection of Chirurgical Tracts (1740) 280, 289 Collection of the Hermetic Philosophy (1733) 241 Collection of Original Papers and Material Transactions (1712) 123 Collection of Original Poems, Translations, and Imitations (1714) 67 Collection of Seven Most Surprising Trials (1745) 307 Commentary upon Mr. Pope’s Four Ethic Epistles (1738) 278 Companion for the Festivals and Fasts (1715) 66 Compleat Gamester (1734) 289 Compleat History of Magick (1716) (1715–16) 91 Compleat Key to the Dunciad (1728) 73, 188, 194–5, 200 Compleat System of Husbandry (1716) 91 Complete Collection of State-Trials (1742) 299–300 Complete Key to the Non-Juror (1718) 108 Complete Key to A Tale of a Tub (1710) 46, 51, 60, 63

372

Index of Curll’s Publications

Complete Key to Three Hours after Marriage (1717) 101 Conduct of the Earl of Nottingham (1716) 6, 85, 105–6 Confederacy, The (1741) 299 Congratulatory Epistle to Joseph Addison (1717) 122 Congratulatory Epistle to Dr. Snape (1718) 123 Consummation (1741) 299 Content (1720) 139 Coquet, The (1718) 123 , 322 Count of Gabalis (1714) 70 Court Ballad (1717) 100–1 Court Epigrams (1717) 100 Court Poems (1716) 80, 82–8, 90, 92, 100, 108–9, 152, 171, 181, 267; part 2 81, 87, 98 Court Tales (1716) 91, 241 Critical Examination of Prideaux’s Connection (1722) 141 Cruel Gift (1717) 99, 108, 323 Cupid’s Bee-Hive (1721) 125, 127 Cupid’s Metamorphoses (1727) 183–4 Curliad (1729) 10, 81–2, 89, 158, 173, 188, 193, 195, 197, 211, 310 Cythereia (1723) 152–3, 181, 323 Czar, The (1721) 146 Danger and Folly of Evil Courses (1707) 34 Day of Judgment (1719) 127 Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence (1741) 284–6, 290 Dean Swift’s True, Genuine and Authentic Copy (1740) 279–80 Debate at Large (1710) 42 Defence of English Commodities (1720) 129 Defence of the Proceedings against Jane Wenham (1712) 48 Detection of the Whole Management of the South Sea Company (1721) 146 Delirium poeticum (1745) 307 Devout Christian’s Companion (1706) 23, 26, 33, 59–60, 308 Directions to Church Wardens (1713) 140 Directors, The (1720) 145 Discourse concerning Treason and Bills of Attainder (1716) 75 Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds (1713) 55 Dissertation upon the Roman Poets (1718) 126–7 Diverting Works of the Famous Miguel de Cervantes (1709) 29–30 Domestic Temple (1747) 308 Dr. Gregory’s Elements of Catoptrics and Dioptrics (1715) 71, 322

Earl of Mar Marr’d The (1715) 75 Earl Robert’s Mice (1712) 79 Ebrietatis encomium (1723) 155, 158, 160, 166, 301, 323 English Particles Latiniz’d (1713) 65 English Topographer (1720) 137 Enquiry into the Nature and Original of the Fifty-fifth Canon (1718) 143 Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker (1719) 154 Epilogue Spoken by Mrs. Barry (1709) 31 Epistle from a Student at Oxford, to the Chevalier (1717) 122 Epistle to his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (1720) 145 Epistle to Joseph Addison, Esq; (1715), by Sewell 72–3 Epistle to Lord Viscount Cobham (1730) 215 Epistle to the Right Honourable Joseph Addison (1717), by Breval 107 Epistles and Poems of Clio and Strephon (1728) 101, 207 Essay on Human Life (1736) 272 Essay towards a True Account of the late Bishop of Salisbury (1715) 72 Essays upon several Subjects (1716) 84, 130 Essays, Relating to the Conduct of Life (1717) 124 Eunuchism Display’d (1718) 114, 117, 147, 322 Exile de Ciceron, L’ (1736) 300 Exilius (1715) 154 Fair of St. Germains (1718) 120 Faithful Memoirs of the Life of Anne Oldfield (1731) 227–8 Faithful Stewards (1710) 61 Fanatical Moderation (1711) 41 Fate of Traytors (1716) 75 Female Deserters (1718) 120 Female Dunciad (1728) 188, 196 Female Phaeton (1718) 128 Force of Religion (1714) 68 Foundations of the Present Government Defended (1709) 39 Full and Exact Relation of the Duel (1713) 45 Full and Impartial Account of Sorcery and Witchcraft (1712) 48 Full and Impartial Account of the Oxford Riots (1715) 132 Full View of the Bishop of Salisbury’s Principles (1711) 43 Futura Judaeorum Restauratione, De (1733) 323 General History of All Voyages and Travels (1707) 29

Index of Curll’s Publications Gentleman Accomptant (1714) 55 Gentleman ’Pothecary (1725) 323 Gentleman’s and Builder’s Director (1734) 273 Genuine Memoirs of the Life and Character of Sur Robert Walpole (1732) 230 German Atalantis (1715) 66, 322 Governor, The (1720) 145 Help and Exhortation to Worthy Communicating (1710) 61 Heydegger’s Letter to the Bishop of London (1724) 156, 161 Historical Account of the English Poets (1719–20) 125, 188, 195–6, 207, 213, 257, 263, 305 Historical Account of the Life and Writings of John Toland (1722) 152 Historical Dissertation upon Whig and Tory (1717) 120 History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Rochester (1717) 133 History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury (1719) 137 History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Winchester (1715) 54 History and Antiquities of the City and Cathedral Church of Hereford (1717) 133 History of Addresses (1710) 42 History of the most Noble Order of the Garter (1714) 58, 71, 137 History of his own Times (1727) 179 History of Prince Titi (1736) 273 History of the Revolutions in England (1711) 44, 139 History of that most Eminent Statesman, Sir John Perrott (1728) 274 Hob: or The Country Wake (1715) 66 Hob’s Wedding (1720) 123 Hoglandia (1727) 182 Homerides (1715) 73 Homerides (1716) 88 Humble Representation of Edmund Curll (1728) 159, 166, 181 Idylliums of Theocritus (1713) 45 Impartial Account of what Pass’d most Remarkable (1710) 40 Impartial Examination of the Bishops’ Speeches (1710) 40–1, 61 Impartial History of the Life of John Barber (1741) 297–9 Impartial Memoirs of Thomas Hearne (1735) 182, 265, 275 Inscriptions upon the Tombs in Bunhill Fields (1717) 134

373

Introduction to the Life and W ritings of Bishop of Sarum (1714) 45 Irish Tales (1716) 91 Jesina (1720) 122, 147 Jewish History (1708) 28 Joy of the Blessed (1721) 122, 127, 323 Junto, The (1712) 43 Kit-Cats, The (1708) 30, 33 Key to Gulliver’s Travels (1726) 178–9, 181 Kensington Gardens (1719) 126 Knowledge of Medals (1715) 123, 322 Ladies Miscellany (1717) 87, 108 Laus Ululae (1726) 122, 175, 323 Letter to his Grace the Duke of Beaufort (1711) 41 Letter to Mr. Prior (1706) 23, 26, 60 Letters, Poems, and Tales (1717) 107, 129 Lex Mercatoria (1718) 124 Liberty and Property (1736) 267 Life and Character of Mr. John Philips (1713) 45, 301 Life and Death of Lucius (1717) 107 Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Maynwaring (1716) 72, 84 Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D—De F —(1719) 119 Life, Character and Death of Lady Jane Gray (1714) 68 Life of Dr. John Tillotson (1716) 91, 100, 133 Life of John Gay (1733) 228–9, 247 Life of the late Honourable Robert Price Esq; (1734) 229 Life of the late Lord Carpenter (1736) 273 Life of that Eminent Comedian Robert Wilks (1732) 222, 228, 297 Life of T. P. Atticus (1718) 121 Life of William Dugdale (1713) 55, 58 Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726) 228, 297 Lives and Characters of the most Illustrious Persons who died in the Years 1713, 1714 and 1715 (1715) 72 Lives and Characters of the most Illustrious Persons who dyed in 1712 (1714) 52 Lives and Last Wills and Testaments (1727) 181 Love and Artifice (1734) 242 Love in a Veil (1718) 123 Love Intrigues (1713) 154 Love without Artifice (1733) 242 Lovers Week (1718) 120 Love’s Invention (1718) 87, 109, 156 Lutrin, Le (1708) 30, 49, 60

374

Index of Curll’s Publications

Mac-Dermot (1717) 107 Maid the Mistress (1708) 31 Major Pack’s Poetical Remains (1738) 212 Matrimony Unmask’d (1714) 64 Maxims, Observations and Reflections (1719–20), by Addison 127 Maxims, Reflections and Observations, Divine, Moral, and Political (1723) 150 Medicina Gynnastica (1740) 280 Medicina Practica (1707) 35 Meditation on a Broom-Stick (1710) 46, 80 Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland (1726–27) 161, 163–6, 168, 186, 196, 281, 310 Memoirs of Publick Transactions of the D. of Shrewsbury (1718) 113–14 Memoirs of the Earls of Nottingham, Portmore, Lord Trevor etc.(1731) 215 Memoirs of the Life and Eminent Conduct of Daniel W illiams (1718) 113 Memoirs of the Life and Times of Dr. Thomas Tennison (1716) 76 Memoirs of the Life and Times of Matthew Tindall, Ll.D. (1733) 234 Memoirs of the Life and Writings of John Friend (1731) 215 Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Richard Steele (1731) 216 Memoirs of the Life of John Lord Somers (1716) 72, 230 Memoirs of the Life of Lewis Maximilian Mahomet (1727) 164 Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison Esq; (1719) 127 Memoirs of the Life of Thomas, Late Marquis of Wharton (1715) 71–2 Memoirs of the Life of William Wycherley (1718) 108, 190, 247 Memoirs of the Life, Travels and Transactions of George Kelly (1736) 300 Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Amours of William Congreve, Esq; (1729) 211–15 Memoirs of the Lives of K. Edward IV and Jane Shore (1714) 68 Memoirs of the late Right Honourable John Lord Haversham (1712) 44 Memoirs of the Marquess de Langallerie (1707) 28 Memoirs of the Secret Services of John Macky, Esq; (1733) 230, 274 Memoirs relating to the Impeachment of Thomas, Earl of Danby (1710) 41–2 Memorials of the English Affairs (1709) 34, 47, 60 Merryland Display’d (1741) 291–2, 323 Merryland Miscellany (1742) 293 Milton Restor’d and Bentley Depos’d (1732) 231

Miscellanea (1726) 87, 126, 152, 162, 171, 173–4, 185 Miscellaneous Tracts in Defence of the Church and Constitution (1715) 73 Miscellaneous Works of Francis Osborn (1722) 138 Miscellanies by Dr. Jonathan Swift (1711) 47, 63–4, 130 Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1740) 278 Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1718), by Pack 121 Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1725), by Addison 154 Miscellanies on Several Curious Subjects (1714) 58 Miscellany on Taste (1732) 87 Moderate Church-man the best Christian (1710) 42 Modest Vindication of the Clergy of the Church of England (1721) 143 More News from Salisbury (1714) 45, 72 Mr. Congreve’s Last Will (1729) 211–12, 214 Mr. Le Clerc’s Observations upon Mr. Addison’s Travels (1714) 49 Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1735–37) 87, 220, 284, 290; vol. 1 257–8, 261; vol. 2 10–11, 81, 262–4, 272; vol. 3 262, 265–6, 275; vol. 4 267–8; vol. 5 269, 272, 282 Musae Britannica (1711) 47, 61, 107 Musarum lachrymae (1719) 126 Muscipula (1709) 29, 31–2, 47–8, 67, 74, 125, 322 Mysteries of Human Generation (1725) 156, 218 Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey (1719) 136–7 Natural Mortality of Humane Souls (1708) 30 Natural Secret History of both Sexes (1740) 280 New Atalantis for the Year 1713 (1714) 70 New Description of Merryland (1740) 277, 291, 294–5, 299, 323 New Discoveries and Improvements in Anatomy and Surgery (1738) 280 New Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope (1737) 269, 282 New Miscellany of Original Poems, Translations and Imitations (1720) 130 New Political State of Great Britain (1730) 215–16 New Rehearsal (1714) 68, 84 New Voyage to the East Indies (1715) 178 Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy (1715) 72, 205, 307 Nundinæ Sturbrigienses (1709) 31, 48 Nun in her Smock seeVenus in the Cloister

Index of Curll’s Publications Observations on Cato (1713) 49 Ode Inscrib’d to the Earl of Wharton (1709) 31 Ode Sacred to the Memory of the Countess of Berkeley (1717) 112 Onanism Display’d (1718) 114, 117, 147, 160 One Thousand Seven Hundred Thirty Nine (1739) 278 Original and Right of Tithes (1722) 141 Original Poems and Translations (1714), first item 63 Original Poems and Translations (1714), second item 69 Originibus Rerum, De (1734) 323 Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1716) 98, 121 Pancharis, Queen of Love (1721) 125–6 Paraphrase and Annotations upon all the Epistles of St. Paul (1708) 30 Parson’s Daughter (1717) 100, 207 Parturiunt Montes (1709) 34 Pastorals (1716) 97 Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) 154–5 Patriot, The (1712) 44 Peruvian Tales (1744) 307 Pervigilium Veneris (1745) 307 Petri Abælardi Epistolæ (1717) 135 Philippick Oration (1707) 33 Philosophico-Critical history of the Deluge (1740) 290 Pleasures and Mysteries of the Marriage Bed (1733) 241 Pleasures of Coition (1721) 125 Plot Discover’d (1718) 108 Poem on the Last Day (1715) 75 Poem upon the King’s Accession (1714) 64 Poems and Translations by Several Hands (1714) 68–9, 280 Poems Attempted in the Style of Milton (1744) 301 Poems on Several Occasions (1707), by Prior 27 Poems on Several Occasions (1714), by Roscommon 48, 67 Poems on Several Occasions (1714), by Rowe 49, 61, 64, 68, 84, 126 Poems on Several Occasions (1719), by Sewell 121, 124 Poems on Several Occasions (1719), by Addison 127 Poet Finish’d in Prose (1735) 153, 261 Poetical Register see Historical Account of the English Poets Poetical Works of Edward Young (1741) 281–2 Poetical Works of Nicholas Rowe (1720) 126 Poetical Works of William Pattison (1727) 183, 185 Political Poems (1719) 123 Pope-ish Controversy Compleat (1729) 197

375

Pope’s Miscellany (1717) 100–1 Popiad (1728) 195, 197 Popp upon Pope (1728) 197 Posthumous Works of Robert South (1717) 107 Posthumous Works of Thomas Browne (1712) 52–3, 55, 111, 231 Post-Office Intelligence (1736) 267 Potent Ally (1740) 292 Practical Surgery Illustrated (1740) 280 Present Management of the Customs (1719) 143 Pretender’s Flight (1716) 76 Primitive Discourse upon Prayer (1739) 290 Prince Eugene (1706) 23, 29 Prisoner’s Advocate (1726) 162 Proceedings of the House of Peers (1710) 40 Progress of Dulness (1728) 197 Protestant Popery (1718) 122 Protestant Session (1719) 123 Rape of the Bucket (1713) 60 Rape of the Smock (1717) 101, 108, 181, 273 Rarities of Richmond (1735–36) 273 Reasons for Writing against the Bishop of Salisbury (1714) 45 Reasons which Induced Her Majesty (1711) 43–4, 61 Receipt to make a Soop (1727) 172, 264 Reflections on Learning (1718) 120 Religio Laici (1736) 274 Remains of John Locke (1714) 49 Remains of the late learned William King (1734) 230 Remarks on a Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713) 44 Remarks on A Vindication of the Earl of Nottingham (1714) 45 Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homeromer (1717) 104 Resurrection (1718) 126 Richmond Beauties (1721) 129 Rights of Precedence (1720) 129 Roman Catholick Version of the First Psalm (1716) 93–4, 100, 108, 196 Satyrical Works of Titus Petronius Arbiter (1708) 29 Satyricon (1707) 28 Scamnum (1744) 301 Schism Destructive of Government (1714) 45 Search after Principles (1710) 40 Second and Last Part of the Case of Impotency (1714) 64 Second Collection of Miscellanies (1720) 129 Second Collection of Poems on Several Occasions (1716) 79–80 Second Letter to Sir Jacob Bankes (1711) 42

376

Index of Curll’s Publications

Second Letter to the Bishop of Salisbury (1713) 45, 61 Secret History of Europe (1712–15) 72 Secret History of Gertruydenberg Negotiation (1712) 44 Secretis Mulierum, De (1725) 156–7 Secret Memoirs of the Duke and Duchess of O--(1708) 28, 60 Serino (1721) 154 Seven Select Pieces Written by Mr. Pope (1736) 267 Short Description of the Roads (1742) 293 Short Memorial and Character of the Dutchess of Ormonde (1735) 266 Sir Orl. Bridgman’s Conveyances (1709) 33 Sir Walter Raleigh (1719) 121 Some Account of the Family of Sacheverell (1710) 41, 61 Some Considerations Humbly Offer’d to the Bishop of Salisbury (1710) 40 Some Free Thoughts by way of Censure (1718) 143 Some Memoirs of the Life and Employments of Matthew Prior (1721) 128–9 Some Memoirs of the Life of John Radcliffe,M.D. (1715) 71–2, 91, 132, 140 Some Private Passages of the Life of Sir Thomas Pengelly (1733) 229 Songes and Sonettes (1717) 133 South-Sea Pills (1721) 146 Spanish Amusements (1741) 205 Spanish Pole-Cat (1717) 120 Speculi Britanniæ (1720) 137 Spirit of Fanaticism (1710) 41 Stage-Coach (1718) 123 Stage-Coach Journey to Exeter (1725) 154, 266 Stanzas: To my Lady Sunderland (1712) 48 Stamford Toasts (1725) 171 State of the Nation (1714) 64 State of the Dead, Of (1727) 181, 206, 219, 323 State Poems (1716) 87–8 State-Tracts (1714) 64 Supplement to Mr. Prior’s Poems (1721) 128 Survey of Staffordshire (1717) 91, 133 Swearer’s Bank (1721) 129 Telemachus (1715) 74, 120 Ten New Poems (1721) 125 Thoughts of an Honest Whig (1717) 143 Three New Poems (1721) 146–7, 157 Threnodiæ Britannicæ (1707) 60 To his Grace the Duke of Marlborough (1713) 44 Tower, The (1726) 122 Tracts (1724) 160–1

Tracts Relating to the Impeachment of Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1710) 40 Tragedy of Henry IV of France (1719) 122, 322 Travels of the Learned Father Montfaucon (1711) 61 Treatise of Hermaphrodites (1718) 116–17, 124, 160 Treatise of the Use of Flogging see Usu Flagrorum Treatise upon the Usefulness of Eloquence (1721) 120 Trophy Bucket (1713) 49, 60 True Character of Mr. Pope (1716) 88, 100, 153, 190 True Copy of the Last Will of Matthew Tindall (1733) 233 True Ecclesiastical History (1721) 147, 322 True Nature of Imposture (1716) 111 True Peri Bathous (1728) 197 Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian (1740) 278 Tryal of Sir Edward Moseley, Bart.(1719) 144 Tryal of William Whiston, Clerk (1740) 290 Tunbridge and Bath Miscellany for the Year 1714 (1714) 48 Tunbridge-Miscellany (1712) 48 Tunbridge Miscellany for the Year 1713 (1713) 48 Twickenham Hotch-Potch (1728) 197 Two Poems (1718) 126–7 Usu Flagorum, De (1718) 116 , 121, 147, 157, 159–60, 162, 166, 168, 196, 216, 218 Velvet Coffee-Woman (1727) 182 Venison Treat (1721) 139 Venus in the Cloister (1724) 2, 4, 8, 10, 156–9, 162, 166–7, 215, 278, 311 Verses to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales (1718) 121 Verses to the Dukes of Marlborough (1713) 72 Very Ancient, Authentick, and Remarkable Testimony (1712) 50 View of the English Constitution (1710) 44 Victory and Success from God Alone (1709) 34 Vindication of the Church of England (1719) 136 Westminster-Abbey (1721) 138 Whartoniana (1726) 172, 181–2 Whig and Tory (1712) 43 White Crow (1710) 41, 43 Whole Works of Richardson Pack (1729) 212 Whole Works of Walter Moyle (1726) 182 Witchcraft Farther Display’d (1712) 48, 61 Woman’s Case (1720) 146

Index of Curll’s Publications Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, The (1714) 50, 323 Works and Life of Halifax (1715) 84 Works of Anacreon, and Sappho (1713) 45 Works of Andrew Marvell, Esq. (1726) 160, 165, 323 Works of Boileau (1712) 30, 49 Works of Buckingham (1722) 146–7, 149, 166, 170, 312 Works of the Celebrated Monsieur Voiture (1715) 65, 73, 204

377

Works of Dr. Alexander Pitcairn (1714) 66 Works of Mr. John Philips (1712) 45 Works of Monsieur de la Bruyere (1713) 50 Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon (1707) 26, 60, 68, 84 Works of Monsieur de St. Evremond (1713) 29, 65 Works of Mr. William Shakespear (1710) 31, 33 Works of William Walsh, Esq; (1736) 269 Worms, The (1716) 87–9, 100, 108–9, 156, 181, 196, 264

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General Index Booksellers and printers are grouped together under ‘book trade’. EC = Edmund Curll; AP = Alexander Pope. Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), author 19, 26, 49, 60, 82–3, 88, 112, 124, 152–3, 177, 189, 199, 214, 232, 251, 257, 261; Cato 49, 63, 80, 83, 126; AP’s lines on Atticus 152–3; works published by EC 125–7,154, 264, 307 Allen, Ralph (1693–1764), philanthropist and friend of AP 286, 288, 293–4 Amhurst, Nicholas (1697–1742), poet 107, 122, 125–6, 130, 266, 301 Amory, Thomas (1690/91–1788), novelist 309–12 Anne, Queen (1665–1714) 27, 34, 38, 42–3, 61, 64, 129, 146, 168–9 Applebee’s Weekly Journal 3, 94, 151 Arbuthnot, George (1703–79), lawyer 284, 289 Arbuthnot, John (1667–1735), physician and author 101, 103, 176, 200, 213, 251–2, 284, 287, 290; joke about EC 1, 229 Argyll, John Campbell, second Duke of (1680–1743), soldier and politician 75, 121, 147 Ashmole, Elias (1617–92), antiquarian 71, 107, 135–7 Atterbury, Francis (1662–1732), churchman 19, 125, 138, 147, 150, 217, 231, 263, 259–62, 268, 284, 300, 304, 322; works published by EC 150, 172, 264, 266, 287 Atterbury plot 148, 150, 155 Aubrey, John (1626–97), antiquarian 136–8, 241 Ayliffe, John (1676–1732), writer 66–7, 137 Ayre, William, putative author of life of AP 12, 302–7 Bangorian controversy 122, 142–3 Barker, Jane (c.1652–1732), author 51, 120, 124, 154–5 Bath, Somerset 73, 283, 291, 293–4 Bathurst, Allen, first Earl (1684–1775), friend of AP 147, 252, 265–7, 289, 304

Beaufort, Henry Somerset, second Duke of Beaufort (1684–1714) 39, 132 Becket, Willliam (1684–1738), surgeon and antiquarian 280, 289 Beckingham, Charles (1699–1731), writer 109, 122–7, 322 Beeston, Sarah, EC’s servant 214–15 Bentley, Richard (1662–1742), scholar 19, 28, 44, 217, 231 Berkeley, James, third Earl (1680–1736), admiral 112, 124 Betterton, Thomas (1635–1710), actor 31, 49, 53, 60, 124 Beveridge, William (c.1637–1708), churchman 25, 39 Blackmore, Sir Richard (1650–1729), physician and poet 19, 29–30, 33, 76, 84, 92–4, 101, 125, 130, 214, 304 Bladen, Martin (1680–1746), soldier and writer 17, 21, 44 Blount, Martha (1690–1763), friend of AP 176, 266, 307 Blount, Teresa (1688–1759), gentlewoman 94–5 Boileau, Nicolas (Despr´eaux) (1636–1711), poet 30, 49, 197 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, first Viscount (1678–1751), politician 43–4, 47, 76, 83, 172, 224, 253, 257, 259, 267, 272, 278, 282–5, 301, 304 Bond, William (c.1675–1735), writer 147, 181, 189, 193, 197, 199, 207, 215 Bonnefons, Jean (Bonefonius) (1554–1614), poet 110, 125, 147, 181, 307 book trade 13–15, 204–5; location of London trade 14, 65, 192 members of book trade: John Applebee (c.1690–1750), printer 3, 169, 318; Samuel Aris, printer 156–7, 165; John Baker, trade publisher 23, 27–31, 38–9, 41, 71–2, 82, 89, 113, 204–5; Abigail Baldwin (1658–1713), bookseller 29, 44, 79, 204–5, 280; John Barber (1675–1741), printer 51, 70, 94, 148–9, 195, 231, 296–9, 302;

380

General Index

book trade (cont.) Jeremiah Batley (d. 1737), bookseller 138, 209, 243; Andrew Bell (d. 1720), bookseller 71–2, 138, 204–5; Edward Berrington (b. c.1673), printer and bookseller 99, 101, 139; Arthur Bettesworth (d. 1739), bookseller 65–6, 73, 75, 123, 138, 154–5, 178, 204–5, 234, 241, 246, 302; Samuel Birt (d. 1755), bookseller 204, 241; William Bowyer (1663–1737), printer 26, 46, 61; Benjamin Bragg(e), bookseller 23, 26, 39, 315; Daniel Bridge (b. c. 1684), printer 77–8; John Brotherton (d. 1756), bookseller 139, 144; Daniel Brown(e), senior (d. 1727), bookseller 17; Samuel Buckley (1673–1741), printer and government official 150, 262, 302; Rebecca Burleigh, bookseller 81–2, 87, 89, 93–4, 97, 99–101, 107, 204; William Burton (d. 1733), printer 169, 209; William Rufus Chetwood (d. 1766), bookseller and author 120, 123, 128, 138, 152, 198, 207, 234, 308–9; Awnsham Churchill (d. 1728), bookseller 15, 49, 138–9; John Churchill (d. 1716), bookseller 74; Mary Cooper (d. 1761), trade publisher 303, 305; Thomas Cooper (d. 1743), trade publisher 259–62, 296–7, 303; Charles Corbett (1710–52), bookseller; John Darby, junior (c.1673–1733), printer 138, 205, 237; Charles Davis (1693–1755), bookseller 204, 210–11; Anne Dodd (c.1685–1739), pamphlet seller 195, 293, 302; Robert Dodsley (1703–64), bookseller and author 4, 272, 286, 301, 319; John Dunton (1659–1732), writer and bookseller 1, 4, 14–15, 17, 19, 28, 48, 124, 150, 171, 173, 182, 203, 214, 227, 264, 318; Thomas Edlin, bookseller 119, 158; George Faulkner (1699–1755), bookseller in Dublin 280, 283–4, 286–7; Richard Francklin, bookseller 109, 112, 123, 139, 224; Lawton Gilliver (c.1704–48), bookseller 201, 209, 216, 218, 262–3, 266, 272, 281, 289; Robert Gosling (d. 1741), bookseller 33, 40, 43, 65–6, 133, 137–9, 204, 302, 308; John Graves (d. 1726), bookseller 128, 138–9; Thomas Griffiths (d. 1722), bookseller 138–9; Robert Halsey, bookseller 21, 23, 26; Henry Hills (c.1654–1711), printer and bookseller 14, 31, 315; Charles

Hitch (d. 1764), bookseller 205, 281; John Hooke (d. 1730), bookseller 67, 91, 138, 207, 215; William Innys (d. 1756), bookseller 204–5; John Knapton (1696–1770) and Paul Knapton (1703–55), booksellers 205, 286, 300, 308; James Leake (c.1685–1764), bookseller 204, 291–344; William Lewis, bookseller 139, 195, 197, 278; Bernard Lintot (1675–1736), bookseller 5–6, 29, 31, 33, 49–50, 65, 70, 75, 83, 86, 88–90, 92, 95, 98, 101, 104, 106, 109, 121, 126, 153, 170, 185, 188, 193, 202, 231, 243, 267, 302, 306, 310; Henry Lintot (1703–58), bookseller 281, 300; Samuel Lobb, bookseller in Bath 291, 293; Thomas Longman (1699–1755), bookseller 204, 280, 300; William Meadows, bookseller 138–9; William Mears (1686–c.1740), bookseller 67, 119, 138, 151–2, 183, 189–90, 204, 215, 230, 232, 234, 239. 245, 302; Andrew Millar (1707–68), bookseller 204, 300, 319; Nathaniel Mist (d. 1737), printer 3, 94, 109, 115, 117, 119, 183, 222, 291, 302, 315; John Morphew (d. 1720), trade publisher 15, 29, 35, 39–41, 43, 47, 63–4, 70, 80, 82, 204; Benjamin Motte (1693–1738), bookseller 169, 174–5, 178, 302; Christopher Norris (d. 1763), bookbinder 165, 310, 320; Elizabeth Nutt, pamphlet seller 54, 71; John Osborn (d. 1734), bookseller 204–5; John Osborn (d. 1745), bookseller 204; Thomas Payne, bookseller 153, 155; John Pemberton (d. 1739), bookseller 34, 48, 54, 65–6, 68, 71, 73–5, 77–9, 81, 83–5, 91, 100, 105, 138, 140, 155, 199, 204; Sarah Popping, bookseller 76–7, 82, 89, 153, 190, 204; William Rayner (1699–1761), printer and publisher 228, 297, 319; James Read (d. 1740), printer 3, 94, 118, 201; Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), printer and novelist 2, 157, 204, 293–4, 300; Charles Rivington (d. 1742), bookseller 138, 154, 165, 209; James Roberts (c.1670–1754), trade publisher 15, 29, 65–6, 68, 72–3, 75–6, 79–80, 82–3, 85, 87, 89, 91–2, 98, 101, 106, 119–20, 126, 129, 139, 144, 151–2, 154–5, 166, 178, 188, 198, 201, 203–5, 216, 229, 247, 293, 300; Egbert Sanger (c.1684–1713),

General Index bookseller 23, 27, 29, 30–1, 33–4, 47, 60, 65, 83, 151, 166, 204, 237, 308, 322–3; John Senex (1678–1740), mapmaker and publisher 74, 295; Charles Smith, bookseller 21–2, 26–7, 30; Richard Smith, bookseller 13, 15–17, 19–26, 30, 39, 42, 44, 59, 61, 204; William Taylor (d. 1724), bookseller 66, 71–2, 74–5, 91, 120, 138, 204; Jacob Tonson, senior (1655/6–1736), bookseller 4–5, 14–15, 19, 26–8, 30–1, 33, 40, 48–9, 64, 76, 78–9, 92, 95, 98, 100, 105, 109, 111, 126, 140, 146, 188, 193, 226, 248, 272, 281, 302, 310, 313, 318–19; Benjamin Tooke (d. 1723), bookseller 43, 63, 100; Jeffrey Wale, bookseller 28–9; John Walthoe (d. 1744), bookseller 281, 300; Thomas Warner, printer and publisher 99, 190; John Wilford, bookseller 204, 208, 252, 273, 298; Thomas Woodward, bookseller 38, 55–7, 204 Boyer, Abel (1667–1729), journalist 74, 215 Bragge, Francis junior (b. c.1690), writer on witchcraft 48, 83, 322 Bramston, James (c.1694–1743), clergyman and poet 242, 314 Breval, John Durant (1680/1–1739), poet 101, 107–8, 124, 189, 193, 199, 205, 301, 322 Brome, William (1664–1735), antiquarian 54–5, 133 Broome, William (1689–1745), poet 264, 307 Brown, Tom (1663–1704), writer 18, 26, 53 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–82), physician and author 52–3, 231, 274 Buckingham, John Sheffield, first Duke of (1648–1721) 27, 48, 109, 125, 146–9, 252, 266, 296, 304, 312 Buckingham, Katherine Sheffield, Duchess of (c.1681–1743) 265–6 Budgell, Eustace (1686–1737), author 145, 183, 189, 217, 229, 232–7, 239, 301; The Bee 232–3, 236–8 Bull, George (1634–1710), churchman 26 , 136 Bullock, Christopher (c.1691–1722), dramatist 124, 234 Burlington, Richard Boyle, third Earl of (1694–1753), architect 153, 184, 253, 304 Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715), churchman and historian 40–2, 44–5, 71–3, 142, 216, 241, 274

381

Burnet, Thomas (c.1635–1715), theologian 122, 127 , 181, 199, 206–7, 323 Burnet, Thomas (1694–1753), pamphleteer and judge 70, 73, 88, 93, 205, 274 Butler, Samuel (1613–80), poet 91, 124–5 Cambridge 153, 183, 219 Caroline, Queen (1683–1737) 82, 184, 273 Carter, Elizabeth (1717–1806), writer 123, 278, 280 Caryll, John (1667–1736), friend of AP 69, 87, 130, 174, 252 Centlivre, Susanna (c.1669–1723), dramatist 19, 27, 50, 89, 98–9, 124, 126, 130, 146, 154, 189, 205, 226, 273, 323 Chancery 4, 95, 140, 200, 206–7, 210, 253–4, 266, 284–90, 302 Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340–1400), poet 33, 114, 124 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer, fourth Earl of (1694–1773), politician and writer 176, 200 Cheyne, George (1671/2–1743), physician and author 1, 294 Cibber, Colley (1671–1757), actor and playwright 19, 66, 108, 145, 189, 203, 214, 216, 226, 242, 271–2, 278–9, 293, 304, 318 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, first earl of (1609–74), statesman and historian 20, 231 Cobb, Samuel (c.1675–1713), poet 30, 33, 48–50, 125 Collins, Anthony (1676–1729), freethinker 40, 44 Concanen, Matthew (1704–49), writer 103, 177, 193, 217 Congreve, William (1670–1729), dramatist 14, 19, 104, 124, 129, 176, 182, 189, 226, 251, 257, 272; biography published by EC 211–14 Cooke, Thomas (1703–56), writer 161, 193, 198, 200, 323 ‘Cooper, J.’, mask for EC 278, 290 Copyright Act (1710) 5, 7, 140, 260, 285, 287, 289, 303, 308 ‘Corinna’ see Thomas, Elizabeth Cracherode, Anthony (d. 1752), solicitor to the Treasury 150, 158, 161, 163, 166 Craftsman, The 109, 123. 224, 297 Craggs, James, junior (1686–1721), politician 164, 251 Crawfurd, John, supposed editor 232, 239 Creech, Thomas (1659–1700), translator 45, 125

382

General Index

Cromwell, Henry (1659–1728), friend of AP 171–3, 185, 193, 196, 230, 246–7, 249, 253, 257, 260, 263–4 Crull, Jodocus (d. c.1714), writer 28, 53, 71, 138 Curll, Anne (Rowell), first wife of EC 21, 98 Curll, Edmund (1683–1747) : possible ancestry 11; date and place of birth 10–11, 310; marriages 21, 241; death 296, 309; burial 309; will 241, 309–10, 320–1 : squint 38, 191, 298, 311; possible blindness 308–9; allegations of sexual disease 194 : Curlicism 114–15, 117–20, 141, 147; satires on EC 95–6, 102–3, 151, 198–203, 242–3, 271; mentioned in Peri Bathous 187; as Kirleus 217–19, 223, 278; Signior Curillo 124; posthumous reputation 310–13  : tutelage to Richard Smith 16; joins the trade 12–13; early years in business 15–23; book auctions 22, 24; ambition to be print censor 7, 150, 224, 236–7; serves as government informer 7, 150, 157, 223–4; shop sign 131, 193, 215, 220, 226, 272; threats of retirement 159, 162, 170, 208, 213; sets up Literatory 189, 208, 222, 227; advertises properties and picture 239; quarrel with AP, see Pope, Alexander   : Covent Garden 21; near St Clement’s Dane, Strand 21–2; near St Dunstan’s, Fleet Street 31, 65; Tunbridge Wells 48; Paternoster Row 165; opposite Catherine Street, Strand 145, 180; Bow Street 208, 219, 227; Burleigh Street, Strand 226; Rose Street, Covent Garden 227  : summarized 1; advertising and publicity techniques 58–61, 86, 317–19; newspaper advertisements 58–9; cross advertising in books 59–61; marketing ploys 74–5; use of catalogues 61, 182, 208, 243–4, 280; deceptive title-pages 108, 177, 199, 279, 302–3; misleading attributions 170, 189; ‘Joseph Gay’ 108, 124, 199; ‘H. Stanhope’ 145, 187, 198; false imprints 278, 290; compared to Tonson’s 318–19 : scale of publication 25, 277, 296; piracies 27; works on quackery 34–8; antiquarian list 17, 52–8, 91, 132–8, 209–10; biographies 52, 71–2, 132, 319; drama 226–7; expensive editions

136–8; made-up volumes 48, 70, 73, 101, 108, 181, 293; obscene and pornographic books 8, 73, 110, 115–17, 119, 147, 156, 159–60, 242, 291–5, 319; payments 5, 77–8, 122, 173, 322–3; proposed life of AP 229, 282, 296, 302; suggested autobiography 10 : relations with the trade 5, 25, 204; outside the Stationers’ Company 13, 205, 281; partnerships 5, 25–6, 29, 65–6, 71, 75, 138–9, 204, 230, 281, 300; isolated role 204–5; avoidance of congers 281; little use of subscription publishing 318; contribution to the trade 318–19; main co-publishers see Book Trade: Baker, Baldwin, Betterton, Burleigh, Gosling, Mears, Morphew, Pemberton, Roberts, Sanger, Richard Smith : books attributed to EC 40–1, 152, 159–60, 162, 182, 195, 213, 227–8, 303–4; writes as Philalethes 12, 163, 230, 297  : general 3–5; Wintoun affair 76–79; Loggin episode 143–4; Works of Buckingham 147; Heidegger letter 156–7; trials in King’s Bench 157–69, 316; Staunton works 160–1; Pope letters 252–5; Chancery suits 140, 200–1, 277–9, 289–90, 302; suit of Pope vs. Curll 285–8 : emetic episode 1, 82–5, 99, 99, 102, 263, 308; tossed in a blanket 1, 94–7, 134–5, 194, 201, 217, 248, 266, 278; appears before House of Lords 78, 147, 149, 252–5; pillory 1–3, 10, 19, 94, 167–8, 180, 186–7, 191–2, 200, 236, 238, 315; alleged loss of ears 10, 311; incarceration 77–8, 158, 161–3, 165 Curll, Elizabeth (Bateman), second wife of EC 241, 310, 320–1 Curll, Henry (d. c.1737), son of EC 11, 21, 161–5, 178, 180–1, 183–4, 200–2, 206, 208, 210, 237, 272–3, 301, 319–20; arrested 161, 165; runs family business 161, 163, 174, 182, 239, 241; clashes with Budgell 237; apparently dead 273, 309–10 Curll, Walter (1575–1647), bishop 11, 52 Dacier, Anne (1651–1720), classical scholar 170, 195, 268 Daily Advertiser 229, 248, 290, 297 Daily Courant 24 , 27–9, 58, 59, 144

General Index Daily Journal 147,156, 161, 208, 212, 219, 234. 257, 266 Daily Post 139, 157, 213 Daily Post Boy 202, 210, 249–51, 256 Defoe, Benjamin Norton, journalist 296–7 Defoe, Daniel (c.1660–1731), author 1, 15, 19, 26, 38, 42, 109, 194, 227, 318; The Review 28, 36–7, 113; Robinson Crusoe 66, 119–20; controversies with EC 112–20, 141–2, 144–5 Delafaye, Charles (1677–1762), under-secretary of state 114, 157–8, 160–1, 165–6, 169, 239 De La Warr, John West, first Earl of (1693–1766), soldier and courtier 254–6 Dennis, John (1657–1734), author 19, 28, 94, 98, 102, 102, 108, 123–4, 176, 179, 188–90, 195, 198, 200, 205, 219–20, 229, 273, 304; works published by EC 88–9, 100, 104, 153 Desaguliers, John Theophilus (1683–1744), natural philosopher 74–5, 114 Diaper, William (1685–1717), poet 50, 171 Dodwell, Henry (1641–1711), theologian 17, 26, 30, 182 Doggett, Thomas (c.1670–1721), actor 66, 124 Dryden, John (1631–1700), author 14–15, 19, 28, 48, 124, 150, 171, 173,182, 203, 214, 227, 264, 318 Dublin 145, 179, 200, 287, 302, 308, 315 Duckett, George (1684–1732), politician and pamphleteer 73, 88, 205, 212, 214, 231 Earbery, Matthias (1690–1740), nonjuror 143, 182, 206, 219, 323 Echard, Laurence (c.1672–1730), historian 20, 274 ‘Egerton, William’, putative author 227–8 Erdeswicke, Sampson (c.1538–1603), historian 91, 133 Evening Post 10, 107–8, 123, 137,163, 174 Eusden, Laurence (1688–1730), poet 70, 184, 304–5 Farquhar, George (1678–1707), dramatist 19, 123 F´enelon, Franc¸ois de Salignac de la Mothe (1651–1715), bishop and author 74, 120, 154 Fenton, Elijah (1683–1730), poet 92, 146 Fielding, Henry (1707–54), author 1, 7, 202–3, 278, 292, 294, 299, 306–7, 310, 315; The Author’s Farce 202–3, 299; Covent Garden Journal 310, 315 Flying Post 76–7, 85–7, 93, 103–4, 157

383

Fog’s Weekly Journal 264–5 Fortescue, William (1687–1749), lawyer 245, 261, 265–6, 268, 286 Foxton, Thomas (1697–1769), poet 122,, 125, 127, 146, 154, 175, 196, 205–06, 323 Friend, John (1675–1728), physician and author 215–16 Furbank, P. N and W. R. Owens, scholars 113–14, 119 Garth, Sir Samuel (1661–1719), poet 30, 92, 98, 304 Gay, John (1685–1732), author 81–2, 875, 101, 103–4, 124, 172, 176, 189, 192, 200, 228–9, 236, 251, 257, 266, 284, 304, 318; biography published by EC 228–9, 247; The Beggar’s Opera 197, 200, 226, 229, 266 General Evening Post 261, 309 Gentleman’s Magazine 292, 296, 303, 309, 312, 322 George I, King (1660–1727) 44, 51, 119 George, Dorothy (1878–1971), historian 226–7 Gildon, Charles (c.1665–1724), writer 19, 51, 64, 91, 93, 98, 123–4, 148, 153, 205; works published by EC 33, 49, 65, 68, 84, 108, 119, 190 Gonson, Sir John (d. 1765), magistrate 316–17 Goode, Barnham, writer 150–1, 290 Gosse, Sir Edmund (1849–1928), author 211, 214 Gray, Susanna, companion of EC 164, 180 Grub Street 1, 46, 66, 72, 87, 97–8, 101, 109, 124, 184–5, 189–90, 192, 194, 196, 198, 201, 216, 222, 232, 278, 317–18 Grub-street Journal 199, 216–23, 228, 239, 244–5, 271, 300, 316; attacks on EC 217–23 Halifax, Charles Montagu, first earl of (1661–1715), politician 27–8, 30, 49, 71, 84, 125–6, 251 Halsband, Robert (1914–89), scholar 81–2 Hamilton, James, fourth Duke of Hamilton (1658–1712), Jacobite 44–5 Hammond, Anthony (1668–1738), editor 125, 130, 183, 207 Hanoverian accession 44, 64 Harcourt, Simon, first Viscount (c.1661–1727), politician 43, 61, 147, 252 Harcourt, Simon (1684–1720), friend of AP 128, 130 Harley see Oxford, first and second Earls of

384

General Index

Harte, Walter (1708/9–74), writer and clergyman 183, 306 Haywood, Eliza (c.1693–1756), author 120, 194–5, 198, 203, 207 Hearne, Thomas (1678–1735), antiquarian 52, 55–8, 67, 132–8, 158, 182, 220, 231, 265, 275; hostility to EC 52, 56, 58, 132–8; biography published by EC 182, 265, 275 Henley, John (1692–1756), preacher and writer 11, 147, 149–50, 183, 203, 217, 220, 222, 229, 242, 318 Hervey, John, second Baron (1696–1743), courtier 217, 244, 248 Hewerdine, Francis, theological writer 34, 322 Hill, Aaron (1685–1750), writer 70, 183, 200, 207 Hill, Thomas (1682/3–1758), poet 31, 48 Hitchen, Charles (c.1675–1727), thieftaker 180–1, 192 Hoadly, Benjamin (1676–1761), churchman 39, 42, 122 Hoare, Henry (1677–1725), banker 142, 314 Hogarth, William (1697–1764), artist 156, 222, 227, 242, 269, 316, 318 Holdsworth, Edward (1784–1746), poet 29, 31–2, 47, 74, 125, 322 Holt, Sir John (1642–1710), judge 159, 167 House of Lords 4, 77–8, 87, 147, 149–50, 155–6, 217, 246, 252–6, 261, 263–4, 272, 277, 279 Howard, Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk (1688–1767) 172, 200 Humphreys, Samuel (c.1697–1737), writer 323 Islay, Archibald Campbell, first Earl of (1682–1761), politician 252–4 Jacob, Giles (1686–1744), writer 101, 109, 117, 124, 127, 129, 160, 181, 188–9, 195, 207, 213–14, 234, 257, 263, 267, 302, 305 Jacob, Joseph (c.1677–1722), independent minister 81, 85 Jacobite rising (1715–16) 71, 75–6, 307 Jacobite rising (1745–46) 300, 306 James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender (1688–1766) 75–6, 171 Jervas, Charles (1675–1739), artist 171, 253, 272 Johnson, Esther (‘Stella’) (1681–1728), friend of Swift 63, 129 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), author 4, 7, 58, 198, 208, 278, 301, 312, 319

Kennett, Basil (1674–1715), antiquarian 45, 142 Kennett, White (1660–1728), churchman and historian 41, 141–2, 292 Ker, John (1673–1726), adventurer 161, 163–4, 168; EC publishes Memoirs 161, 163–6, 168, 186, 196, 281, 310 Kettlewell, John (1653–95), nonjuror 61, 322 King, William (1663–1712), writer 19, 70, 230–1 King, William (1685–1763), Jacobite 301 King’s Bench court 4, 113, 157–60, 163–4, 166–7, 169,172, 175, 180, 215, 239, 297 King’s Bench prison 162–3, 172–82 Kit-Cat Club 30, 318 La Bruy`ere, Jean de (1645–96), author 34, 50 Lansdowne, George Granville, first Baron (1666–1735), politician and poet 123–4, 266 Le Clerc, Jean (1657–1736), scholar 126, 147 Leiden Gazette 39, 79 Leigh, John (c.1689-c.1726), dramatist 123, 322 Leland, John (c.1503–52), antiquarian 55, 136 Le Neve, John (1679-c.1741), antiquarian 52–3, 133 Le Neve, Peter (1661–1729), herald 53, 261 Leventhorpe, William (d. c.1745), mercer and business partner of EC 215–16, 219 Locke, John (1632–1704), philosopher 49, 139, 79 Loggin, Robert, customs official 106, 143 London: distribution of book trade 14, 65,192; settings in The Dunciad 191–2 places: Bow Street 208, 219, 227–8, 309; Burleigh Street 226, 237; Catherine Street 145, 156, 180–1, 192; Charing Cross 1, 167–8, 180, 187, 192, 200, 291, 318; Covent Garden 13, 21, 152, 192, 195, 197, 208, 226–7, 243, 251, 274, 278, 292, 304, 309, 312, 320; Drury Lane 103, 180, 192, 208, 227, 309; Drury Lane theatre 66, 100–1, 123, 228, 234; Exeter Exchange 17–18, 20, 24, 226; Fleet prison 173, 238–9, 273; Fleet Street 16, 21–2, 24, 29, 31, 61, 65, 67, 82, 92, 95, 113, 131, 135, 145, 155, 178, 237, 278, 290; Holborn 95, 161, 310–11; Lincoln’s Inn theatre 234, 318; Ludgate 22, 36, 153; Old Bailey 144, 198, 224–6, 292; Paternoster Row 25, 64–5, 77, 145, 156, 210; Rose Street 224, 226–7, 241, 24 3, 251, 309, 320;

General Index Rose Tavern 250, 292; Royal Exchange 171, 203; Rag Fair 188, 232; Russell Street 227, 292; St Clement’s Dane 21, 23, 184; St Dunstan’s 21, 31, 61, 65–6, 102, 145; St Paul’s Cathedral 38, 157, 192, 203; St Paul’s Churchyard 13, 65; St Paul’s, Covent Garden 29, 304, 309, 320; Southwark 162, 255–6; Strand 13, 16, 20, 22–4, 92, 95, 145, 149, 156, 166, 178, 180, 182, 192, 196, 208, 215, 224, 226, 241; Temple Bar 21–3, 65, 92, 94–5, 102, 119, 181, 236, 241; Tyburn 97, 238, 279; Warwick Lane 64, 151, 155; Westminster Abbey 217, 227 London Evening Post 112, 282 London Gazette 39, 58–9, 80, 262, 268 Macclesfield, Thomas Parker, first earl of (1667–1732), Lord Chancellor 206–7 Mack, Maynard (1909–2001), scholar 174, 247 Macky, John (d. 1726), adventurer and author 170, 230, 274 Macky, Spring (b. c.1698), writer 170, 215, 230, 274 McLaverty, James, scholar 2, 188–9 Malone, Edmond (1741–1812), scholar 213–14 Manley, Delarivier (c.1670–1724), writer 27, 52–2, 66, 70, 91, 107, 124, 149, 154, 195, 205, 227, 266, 296, 298 Mansfield, William Murray, first Earl of (1705–93), judge 289, 301, 304 Marchmont, Hugh Hume, third Earl of (1708–94), politician 289, 301, 304 Markland, John, poet 153, 181, 307, 323 Marlborough, John Churchill, first Duke of (1650–1722), soldier 27, 29, 34, 44, 83, 177 Marten, John (d. 1736), surgeon 36–7, 114 Marvell, Andrew (1621–78), poet 125, 160 Maynwaring, Arthur (1668–1712), politician 72, 78, 84, 125, 228–9 Merryland series 277, 291–6, 319 Miller, James (1704–44), writer 201, 314 Milton, John (1608–74), poet 14, 20, 124, 231, 318 Mist’s Weekly Journal 3, 66, 114, 117–19, 141, 169–200, 222; attacks on EC 114–15, 118–19 Mitchell, Joseph (c.1684–1738), poet 242, 301 Molloy, Charles (d. 1767), dramatist 123–4, 322

385

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1689–1762), author 81–2, 103, 124, 130, 183, 244, 248, 261 Monthly Catalogue 75, 106, 156 Moore, A., false imprint 75, 124, 130, 196–7, 201, 280, 315 Moore Smythe, James (1702–34), writer 198, 200, 217, 279, 304–5 Morgan, Joseph, translator 215, 239 Morrice, Bezaleel (c.1678–1749), poet 189, 193 Motteux, Peter Anthony (1663–1718), writer 116, 124 Moyle, Walter (1672–1721), politician and writer 182, 214, 275 Nelson, Robert (1656–1715), nonjuror 50, 66, 71 Newcomb, Thomas (1681/2–1765), poet 112, 121, 124–7, 215, 243 Nichols, John (1745–1826), author 17, 312 Nottingham, Daniel Finch, second Earl of (1647–1730), politician 6, 45, 105, 106 Oldfield, Anne (1683–1730), actress 84, 222, 227–9 Oldmixon, John (c.1673–1742), writer 8, 19–20, 49–50, 64, 81, 83–5, 92, 98, 124, 189, 199, 205, 214, 301–2, 304, 306; work published by EC 42, 68–9, 72, 86, 89–90, 105–6, 306–7; Wintoun affair 77–9; satirized by AP 83–4, 98; satirizes AP 89–90 d’Orl´eans, Pierre-Joseph (1641–98), historian 44, 139 Ormonde, Mary Butler, Duchess of (1665–1733) 265–6 Otway, Thomas (1652–85), dramatist 26, 48 Oxford, Edward Harley, second Earl of (1689–1741), friend of AP 155, 189, 247–8, 260 Oxford, Robert Harley, first Earl of (1661–1724), statesman 34, 42–4, 47, 61, 253, 261 Oxford 52, 57, 66–7, 71,105, 121, 123, 134–7, 139, 209–10, 220 Ozell, John (d. 1743), translator 30, 49–50, 74, 70, 120–1, 124, 189, 205, 302 Pack, Richardson (1682–1728), writer 121, 124–5, 127, 154, 205, 209, 212, 214, 247, 266 Page, Francis (1660/1–1741), judge 166–7, 225 Parnell, Thomas (1679–1718), poet 104, 125–6, 170, 251

386

General Index

Partridge, John (1644–1715), almanac maker 71, 82, 207 Pattison, William (1706–27), poet 174, 183–6, 199, 205, 306 Paxton, Nicholas (d. 1744), solicitor to the Treasury 165–6 Pember, Francis, legal functionary 159, 163 Pengelly, Sir Thomas (1675–1730), judge 215, 229 Peterborough, Charles Mordaunt, third Earl of (1658–1735), soldier 33, 184 Petronius Arbiter, T. (d. 65 ), author 28–9, 58, 61 Philips, Ambrose (c.1674–1749), poet 27, 75 Philips, John (1676–1709), poet 19, 27, 45, 53–4, 75, 125, 301 Pilkington, Laetitia (c.1709–50), writer 191, 296–9, 310 Pilkington, Matthew (1701–74), clergyman and writer 297–8 piracy 315–16 Pittis, William (1673/4–1724), writer 72, 76, 82, 89, 153, 190, 204 Place, Conyers (1664/5–1738), clergyman and sermon writer 124, 143 Pope, Alexander   : general 1–8, 10, 12, 15, 317; inception of quarrel 63–4; anthology pieces 68–70; Homer translation 73–4, 85–7; Court Poems 80–2; AP’s pamphlets on EC 82–5, 97–9, 130–1; The Worms 86–7, 181; retaliatory pamphlets published by EC 88–90; Roman Catholick Version 93–4; Westminster school episode 94–7; critical pamphlets 100–1, 104; Conduct of Earl of Nottingham 105–6; pamphlet battles 108–9; Atticus portrait 152–3, 181; Prior poems 155; Chancery suit of Pope vs. Curll 157, 285–8; criticism by Anne Dacier 170; EC publishes Cromwell letters 171–4; EC’s Miscellanea 171–7, 186; Pattison episode 183–5; An Author to be Lett 185, 198–9; Peri Bathous 187;The Dunciad 187–203; retaliatory pamphlets by EC 195–200; prints and pamphlets on AP 243–5; publication of AP’s letters 1, 246–76; Pope-Swift correspondence 277, 282–5; pamphlet attacks by EC 278; Swift’s comments on quarrel 279; further Chancery suits 289–90; Ayre’s Memoirs of AP 302–6  : 19, 23, 26, 30, 33, 49, 62, 68, 75, 92, 123, 125–6, 128–9, 135, 144, 146–8, 166, 169, 183, 186, 209, 216, 22, 225, 229–32, 242, 289,

292–3, 296, 298, 301–2, 307–8, 316, 319 : The Court Ballad 100–1; Court Epigrams 100; The Dunciad 1, 5, 8, 10, 86, 89, 92, 103, 131, 152–3, 168, 173, 176–7, 185, 187–203, 211, 216, 223, 231, 245, 263, 266–7, 269, 275, 278–9, 303–6, 310–11, 315–18; Eloisa to Abelard 135; Epigram on Two or Three 69; Epilogue to the Satires 293; Epistle to Arbuthnot 152–3, 238–9, 248; Epistle to Miss Blount 73, 204; Epitaph on Craggs 164, 181; Essay on Criticism 88, 267; Essay on Man 269, 272, 289, 302; Full and True Account of Curll 8, 63, 82–5, 88, 105–6, 306; Further Account of Curll 97–8, 105, 152, 317; Imitations of Horace 245, 273; A Letter to a Noble Lord 244; Lilliputian verses 179; Narrative of the Method 246, 251–2, 259–60; Ode for Musick 305; On a Lady at Cato 70; One Thousand Seven Hundred Thirty Eight 278; Pastorals 26; The Rape of the Lock 68, 70, 84, 304; Receipt to make Soop 172, 181, 264; Roman Catholick Version of First Psalm 93–4, 108, 195–6; Sober Advice from Horace 263, 267; A Strange but True Relation 130–1; translation of the Iliad 73, 86–90, 104, 170; translation of the Odyssey 92, 155, 170, 172, 264; translation of Vetermnus and Pomona 98; The Temple of Fame 267, 304; Three Gentle Shepherds 171;Windsor-Forest 123, 133; Works (1717) 104, 121, 135, 147; Works of Buckingham 155 collaborative works: Peri Bathous 187, 317; Pope–Swift Miscellanies 87, 153, 171, 174–5, 187, 280, 317 Post Boy 26, 31, 37, 58–9, 71, 122, 140, 160, 252 Post Man 58–9, 87 Price, Robert (1665–1733), judge 143, 164–5, 229, 233–5 Prideaux, Humphrey (1648–1724), clergyman and author 111–12, 140–1 Prior, Matthew (1664–1721), poet 1, 8,14, 60, 83, 104, 125, 130, 176, 189, 193, 198, 241, 261, 264, 307; works published by EC 27–8, 33, 48, 63, 67, 79–80, 128, 155 Pulteney, William (1684–1764), politician 172, 176 Quillet, Claude (1602–61), poet 50, 83

General Index Radcliffe, John (c.1650–1714), physician 71–2, 91 Ralph, James (d. 1762), writer 193, 307 Rawlinson, Richard (1690–1755), nonjuror and antiquarian 52–3, 58, 91,132–8, 158, 171, 182, 209–10, 231, 274; tours with EC 135 Rawlinson, Thomas (1681–1725), antiquarian 132–5, 137 Raymond, Sir Robert (1673–1733), judge 165, 167 Read’s Weekly Journal 3, 118 Rich, John (1692–1761), theatrical manager 203, 226–7, 318 Ridpath, George (d. 1726), journalist 77, 103 Robinson, John (1650–1723), bishop 44, 142 Rochester, John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647–80), poet 8, 23, 26, 59, 84, 114, 151 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, fourth Earl of (1637–85), poet 23, 28, 84 Rose, Philip, physician 159–96, 216 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer (1674–1737), poet 19, 28, 274, 311 Rowe, Nicholas (1674–1718), author 19, 27, 30–1, 48–9, 60–8, 70, 83–3, 100, 108, 117, 124–6, 146, 171; Tragedy of Jane Shore 63, 68; Tragedy of the Lady Jane Grey 63, 68 des Rues, abb´e Claudius Nicholas, convicted rapist 159–60, 307 Sacheverell, Henry (c.1674–1724), incendiary preacher 24, 38–43, 61, 122 St.James’s Evening Post 219, 261 Sallengre, Albert Henri (Henrik) de (1694–1723), lawyer and writer 155, 300 Samber, Robert (c.1682–c.1740), translator 91, 114, 155, 158, 166. 300 Savage, Richard (c.1698–1743), author 123, 125, 185, 198–9, 225, 228, 234, 273, 280, 305 Sewell, George (1687–1726), author and physician 123, 125, 205, 274; writes for EC 44–5, 49–50, 61, 64, 66, 70, 72, 100, 116, 121–3, 130, 154, 214, 301 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), dramatist 11, 14, 31, 33, 49, 64, 188, 318 Sherburn, George (1884–1962), scholar 73, 82, 86, 89, 282–3, 286 Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, first Duke of (1660–1718), politician 113, 266 Sliford, William, amanuensis 133–4 Sloane, Sir Hans (1660–1753), physician and virtuoso 20–1, 185–6, 274, 280–1

387

Somers, John, first Baron (1651–1716), Lord Chancellor 74, 295 South, Robert (1634–1716), divine and theologian 94, 107 Southwell, Edward (1671–1730), politician 105–6 South Sea Bubble 129–30, 145–6, 149, 152, 178, 232 Spenser, Edmund (1552–99), poet 30, 125 Spinke, John, quack 20, 36–8 Stackhouse, Thomas (1681/2–1752), clergyman and writer 322–3 Stationers’ Company 2, 13–15, 25, 33, 140, 205, 282, 293, 296, 308, 314, 319 Stationers’ Hall 43–4, 145, 307 Staunton, William (d. c.1725), controversial writer 143, 161 Steele, Sir Richard (1672–1729), author 19, 26, 31, 56, 58, 74, 123, 215, 251, 257, 264, 280 Strange, Sir John (1696–1754), judge 166–8 Straus, Ralph (1882–1950), biographer of EC 2–3, 5, 9–10, 12, 23, 67, 114, 144, 151, 154, 159, 171, 214, 305 Stretser, Thomas, supposed author 291–2, 300, 323 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/7–47), poet 125, 133 Sutherland, James (1900–96), scholar 200–1 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), author disputes over EC’s publications 45–7, 63, 67, 107, 129, 170–1, 176–7, 266, 279–80; correspondence with AP 277, 282–5; Cadenus and Vanessa 171, 178; Gulliver’s Travels 178–9; A Meditation on a Broom-Stick 46–7, 60; A Tale of a Tub 15, 19, 46–7, 63, 307, 315; other references 1, 8, 15, 19, 26, 33, 43, 48–50, 61, 63–4, 69–70, 81, 83, 93, 97, 104, 125, 130, 149, 169, 178, 184, 186, 193, 198–200, 202, 229–31, 247, 253, 257, 264–5, 269, 277–8, 282–3, 285–7, 296–8, 302, 304, 318 Tanner, Thomas (1674–1735), bishop and antiquarian 52–3, 231 Tassoni, Alessandro (1565–1635), poet 49, 60 Tatler 26, 31, 35, 58 Theobald, Lewis (1688–1744), author 49, 124–5, 147, 188–99, 194, 198, 203, 216, 246, 279, 304–5 Thomas, Elizabeth (1675–1731), poet 171–3, 190, 193, 196, 214, 230, 238–9, 266 Thoresby, Ralph (1658–1725), antiquarian 91, 100, 132–3

388

General Index

Tickell, Thomas (1685–1740), poet 89, 112, 125, 127, 152 Tillotson, John (1630–94), archbishop 23, 91, 100, 133 Tindal, Matthew (1657–1733), freethinker 152, 222, 234–7 Tindal, Nicholas (1687–1774), historian 233–7 Toland, John (1670–1722), freethinker 20, 33, 151, 152, 205 Townshend, Charles, second Viscount (1674–1738), politician 53, 65, 150–1, 156, 161, 163, 167, 169, 186, 208, 223, 302 Trumbull, Sir William (1639–1716), diplomat 251, 304 Tunbridge Wells, Kent 48, 61, 98 Tutchin, John (c. 1662–1707), writer 194, 318 Twickenham, Middlesex 172, 176, 197, 200, 243, 250, 252, 262, 278, 301, 317 Voiture, Vincent (1597–1648), author 247, 266 Voltaire, Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), author 227, 273 Wake, William (1657–1737), archbishop 40–1, 77 Waller, Edmund (1606–87), poet 30, 124 Walpole, Robert, first Earl of Orford (1676–1745), statesman 7, 83, 149–50, 157, 161–3, 167, 172, 208, 211, 224, 233, 235–7, 278, 297, 300, 302 Walsh, William (1663–1708), poet 26, 68, 243, 251, 257, 266, 268, 280, 304 Warburton, William (1698–1779), bishop and author 289, 294, 308 Ward, Edward (1667–1731), writer 19, 30, 64, 189 Watts, Isaac (1674–1748), poet 48, 307 Welsted, Leonard (1688–1747), poet 48, 90, 101–3, 200, 304

Welwood, James (1652–1727), writer 34, 55 Wenham, Jane (d. 1730), alleged witch 48, 60, 83 Wesley, Samuel (1690/1–1739), poet 95, 135, 202, 266 Westminster school 1, 94–5, 97, 107, 134–5, 194, 201–2, 266, 278 Wharton, Philip, first Duke of Wharton (1698–1731), politician 112, 172, 300 Wharton, Thomas, first Marquess of Wharton (1648–1715), politician 71–2 Whatley, Stephen, writer 77, 79 Whitelock, Bulstrode (1605–75), historian 34, 47 Wilks, Robert (c.1665–1732), actor 222, 228, 297 Willis, Browne (1682–1760), antiquarian 57, 133–4, 137, 210, 219, 275 ‘‘Wilson, Charles’’, putative author 211–14 Wintoun, George Seton, fifth Earl of (d. 1749), Jacobite 76, 78, 87, 143 witchcraft 48, 60 Wood, Anthony (1632–95), antiquarian 57, 66–7 Woodward, John (c.1665–1728), natural scientist and antiquarian 133, 139, 216, 284, 290 Woolston, Thomas (1668–1733), theologian 157, 229 Wren, Sir Christopher (1632–1723), architect 56–7, 137 Wycherley, William (1641–1715), dramatist 19, 30, 108, 190, 228, 246–7, 251, 254–5, 257, 260, 263, 309 Yorke, Philip, first Earl of Hardwicke (1690–1764), Lord Chancellor 4, 157, 164, 167, 285–6, 288 Young, Edward (1683–1765), poet 1, 68, 75, 104–5, 111–12, 125, 201, 281–2, 307