The Poet and the Publisher

The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street

Pat Rogers

• Editore: Reaktion Books
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789144192
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Literary Criticism

"Drawing on deep familiarity with the period and its personalities, Rogers has given us a witty and richly detailed account of the ongoing war between the greatest poet of the eighteenth century and its most scandalous publisher."—Leo Damrosch, author of The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age "What sets Rogers's history apart is his ability to combine fastidious research with lucid, unpretentious prose. History buffs and literary-minded readers alike are in for a punchy, drama-filled treat."— Publishers Weekly The quarrel between the poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Edmund Curll has long been a notorious episode in the history of the book, when two remarkable figures with a gift for comedy and an immoderate dislike of each other clashed publicly and without restraint. However, it has never, until now, been chronicled in full. Ripe with the sights and smells of Hanoverian London, The Poet and Publisher details their vitriolic exchanges, drawing on previously unearthed pamphlets, newspaper articles, and advertisements, court and government records, and personal letters. The story of their battles in and out of print includes a poisoning, the pillory, numerous instances of fraud, and a landmark case in the history of copyright. The book is a forensic account of events both momentous and farcical, and it is indecently entertaining.

1

THE TIME and THE PLACE

It wasn’t just a tiff. While the contest involved a large dose of personal dislike, which culminated in some unedifying physical threats, there was more to it than a mere collision of competing egos. As with many historic rivalries, commonplace feelings such as malice and jealousy were overlaid by the wider cultural disparities between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll. The events could not have played out exactly as they did in a location other than London or a period other than the early eighteenth century.

1688 AND ALL THAT

The dispute brought under review major issues of literature, both elite and popular. At times it involved political or religious subjects that arose in the fraught climate after the Revolution of 1688. These years brought the end of the Stuart regime, the first Jacobite Rising, the South Sea Bubble and the dominance of Robert Walpole, still the nation’s longest-serving prime minister.

Particularly important for the quarrel was the deposition of the Catholic monarch James II, which brought in the aggressively Protestant reign of William and Mary. The supporters of James Stuart (the ‘Old Pretender’) continued to plot against the new regime throughout the 1690s. Even when Queen Anne came to the throne in 1702 and the Hanoverian line was confirmed as her successors, they did not give up. In one abortive attempt halfway through her reign, a fleet bearing the Old Pretender was dispatched from Dunkirk up the North Sea with the intention of landing in the Firth of Forth. The plan had never been one of the best laid, and when the small convoy overshot its target, bad weather forced the Pretender to abandon Plan B, a landing near Inverness. He had to scuttle back with his retinue, licking his wounds.

But the cause refused to go away. The Jacobites were back in 1715, then again briefly in 1719, and they plotted an invasion again in 1722. Their last hurrah came with the invasion led by the Young Pretender, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, in 1745 – but by that time Pope had gone to his grave, Curll was on his last legs, and the great feud had run its course.

A second issue festered under the surface of national life, largely although not wholly independent of the question of who should succeed Anne. This concerned the Union of the English and Scottish parliaments in 1707. The measure was supported by most, but not all, of the ruling class in Scotland. They tended to be based in Edinburgh and the Lowlands, and to be Presbyterians, Whigs – and, of course, prosperous. Many had links with commercial operations that stood to gain by greater access to markets at home and abroad. By contrast, opposition to the Union was strongest among the Highland clans, Episcopalians and elements of the common people who valued national independence above most things.

A deeper fissure that penetrated nearly all public life was that separating Whigs from Tories. Under Anne the former had attained a growing ascendancy, based in large measure on their support for the War of the Spanish Succession, a costly struggle marked by the military triumphs of the Duke of Marlborough. In 1710 their dominance would evaporate after a number of missteps, notably the decision to prosecute the High Anglican preacher Dr Henry Sacheverell – an event that prompted a huge groundswell of commentary, in which Edmund Curll cut some of his publishing teeth. A Tory government took over, led by Robert Harley, later Earl of Oxford, and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, both of whom would play a significant role in Pope’s career. It was during the period of this administration that the poet acquired some lifetime alliances among the literary fraternity, especially with Jonathan Swift, Harley’s chef de la propagande. Much of Pope’s later work was written in support, direct or indirect, of these three men, and some of his onslaughts against Curll bear on this matter.

In 1714 the partnership between Oxford and Bolingbroke, always fragile, burst apart. The need, as Tories such as Swift saw it, to ‘bring this long and expensive war to an honourable and happy conclusion’ caused further ruptures.¹ Although most people yearned for peace, the Whigs argued that Britain’s allies such as the Dutch had been sold out in the Treaty of Utrecht, an accord Pope had lauded in his poem Windsor Forest (1713). As the United States found out after Vietnam, ending an unpopular war does not heal all the wounds in civil society. Oxford was forced from office, and the whole Tory edifice collapsed just as the queen died.

This prompted the arrival of the first monarch in a new line, the former Elector of Hanover, George I. Rapidly a new regime set about supplanting the previous order. The Whigs won an election by a landslide in early 1715. They impeached leaders of the outgoing administration, and Oxford was dispatched to the Tower to await trial for treason. Bolingbroke fled to France to join the Pretender. Very soon afterwards came the first great Jacobite Rising, which was launched by the Earl of Mar in the autumn of the year with high hopes for a multi-pronged invasion. Its collapse within months signalled the beginning of a decades-long supremacy for the Whigs. Beyond that, it brought show trials of Jacobite leaders, as well as the introduction of severe measures by the government against Catholics, held to be the instigators of the Rising. As we shall see, this fraught juncture starting in 1714 and reaching a climax in 1716 provided the backdrop for the first exchanges in the quarrel between Pope and Curll. Mainly for political and religious reasons, the poet was at his most vulnerable as he endeavoured to get off the ground his massive new undertaking, a translation into English verse of Homer’s Iliad. By contrast, Curll was entering one of his most cocky phases, having prudently taken the winning side in the recent tumults.

Historians have identified the growth of party conflict in England between 1694 and 1716 as marking ‘the divided society’.² The clashes on the national stage had their echoes in the pamphleteering sideshows and journalistic brawls of the day. This is where our principal actors make their entrance.

Crucially for the quarrel, this short span of time marked the precise moment when a vibrant press emerged, with newspapers and journals an unprecedented force. This was partly because the old system of official censorship had lapsed in 1695, and had not been replaced. It is true that governments found alternative ways to cow and control the press, but these did not always succeed.³ In addition, the ancient stranglehold on the London book trade held by the Stationers’ Company had begun to weaken. At the same time avenues began to open up for a new generation of entrepreneurs with the passage of the first Copyright Act in 1710, a measure that in practice helped publishers more than authors. (Pope was among the few writers to see ways of exploiting the new commercial possibilities.) There was a huge surge in print culture more generally, and a spike in controversial pamphlets on every topic. This was the moment when what is commonly recognized as ‘the rise of the novel’ occurred, with the arrival of work by Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood, and the indeterminate status of this new genre between high and low culture symbolized a current aspect of the literary scene acted out in the quarrels of Pope and Curll.

THE KILLING FIELDS

The scene of virtually all the crimes we shall trace, committed or alleged, is London. It was the largest city in Europe, as its population went past the more stagnant figures for Paris, and the biggest in England by a factor of at least fifteen, contributing around 600,000 people to a national total of about 5,500,000. Only Norwich and Bristol had reached 30,000, and the former had slowed in its growth.

We must imagine ourselves in a very different city. The first impression that a time traveller would get might be a kind of sensory overload, affecting not just phenomena perceived through the eyes but also those taken in by the ears and the nose. One of the best evocations of the odours that would assail a visitor comes in a book by the French historian Alain Corbin in 1982, translated into English as The Foul and the Fragrant (1986). It describes the impact of various urban pollutants, such as slaughterhouses, rotting human corpses, primitive sewers, stagnant pools – all found in London as well as Paris. Corbin writes of ‘the phantasm of the excremental swamp, the horror aroused by the mishaps that befell cesspool cleaners or individual stories of lost travellers swallowed up at Montfaucon. The stench and corruption from the accumulation of excrement challenged the city’s very existence.’⁴ Small wonder that writers surrounded by this miasma had a lot to say about it. The Dunciad is just a more extensive and more sophisticated treatment of the theme that lesser writers attempted in fifty other places. In a letter, moreover, Pope once referred to Curll as a ‘Tom Turdman’, that is, someone employed to empty cesspools.⁵ As Sophie Gee has shown in her book Making Waste (2010), Pope forges a Miltonic idiom for his epic, which is filled with ‘the literal filth of London’s streets and the intellectual and cultural dross of its literary world’.⁶

It was not only smells that would batter the senses. Emily Cockayne demonstrates in Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (2007) that one of the main public nuisances in the era derived from the clatter that enveloped people’s lives. Whether it was clanking machinery, the rattle of coaches and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the jingle of harnesses, the ringing of almost endless church bells, the cries of street vendors, the piteous moans of animals brought in for slaughter, the savage barking of dogs, the drunken brawls in or outside taverns, or the surprising range of travelling musicians who scraped their fiddles or blasted their trumpets – these and much more contributed to a ceaseless pandemonium against which anything that resembled polite living had to compete for attention.⁷ Hogarth depicted this in his print The Enraged Musician (1741), and its contents have been vividly detailed by Jenny Uglow. ‘Music was everywhere,’ she observes, picking out the wandering oboe player and the woman holding her baby as she croons a sad ballad:

But how could these compete with the bashing of the pavior in his Irish cap, the clattering of the dustman heaving his basket to his head, the tinny beating of the pewterer at his shop in the background, the knifegrinder sharpening his screeching blades, the pealing bells ringing from the steeple . . . Small boys join in, beating a drum and trapping squawking birds. The little girl holds a rattle, and even the city wildlife adds its chorus, from the screeching parrot to the rooftop cats howling at the emerging chimney-sweep.⁸

Uglow suggests that the scene may be St Martin’s Lane or Drury Lane. She doesn’t even need to mention the snarling dog, the sowgelder blowing his horn or the milkmaid in the centre of the picture crying her wares. In the face of all this, the distracted performer who has put his hands over his ears as he tries to rehearse in his upstairs room has no chance ‘of making sweet music’.⁹

Of course, there was a world of grace and civility, too – but it had little immunity from these ever-present clamours. The cacophony percolated almost everywhere, just as the smells from the backstairs crept into the drawing room. Let no one assume that it was only the Industrial Revolution that produced deafening noise. In the London of Pope and Curll, there was no soundproofing.

What of the scale of the place? In terms of its extent, the city was one that modern residents or visitors would struggle to find worthy of the name. In every direction fields surrounded areas that are now regarded as the inmost suburbs, and a green belt ran out as far as outlying villages such as Chelsea and Islington. Eastwards the bounds stretched no further than Stepney. To the south, there was nothing beyond Southwark. The western perimeter was marked by Hyde Park Corner and the road to Tyburn (now Park Lane). In the northern quadrant, many of the streets and squares in Marylebone and Bloomsbury had only just been developed, thanks partly to the efforts of landowners such as Lord Oxford and the Duke of Chandos, as well as architects such as James Gibbs – all friends of Pope. From there it was a short stroll into Lamb’s Conduit Field, and in the absence of really tall buildings (except for church spires), Londoners could sometimes get glimpses of Hampstead and Highgate from quite close to the centre of town. You would spend most of your life within the limits defined on today’s public transport as Fare Zone 1.

Yet this is misleading. London had long since become a teeming social mix, showing signs of what we might regard as modern urbanism. It enjoyed many advantages from an economic point of view. We may forget that it possessed a large manufacturing capacity; the largest share of domestic and overseas shipping; the youngest, most diverse and most mobile labour force; virtually all the major financial establishments; the main legal and political institutions; a greater presence than now of quasi-democratic bodies allowing middle-class citizens in particular more say in how society was regulated; and an unparalleled abundance of well-heeled consumers. On the negative side, it had more disease, more organized crime and more civic disturbance, the last of which feeds into much of the satire written in this age. Relevant to the quarrel is the fact that London dominated the production of books and journals, far surpassing its nearest competitors at Edinburgh and Dublin in the scale of its enterprise and the number of its print workers. By 1700 there were perhaps eighty printing presses in the capital, and a comparable but slightly smaller number of booksellers. We ought to add ancillary trades such as paper-makers and type-founders.

The venue of the lengthy battle of the books between Curll and Pope vacillated between the literal and virtual space of Grub Street, in printed works and newspaper ads, migrating to the law court, ...