The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street

by Pat Rogers

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789144161
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	07/02/2021
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Pat Rogers is distinguished professor emeritus in the liberal arts at the University of South Florida and an acknowledged authority on Pope. A prolific author and editor, his books include Edmund Curll, Bookseller; A Political Biography of Alexander Pope; and the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Pope’s work.

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Introduction 13

1 The Time and The Place 23

2 The Antagonists 44

3 True and False Reports, 1714-15 66

4 Poisonous Relations, 1716 91

5 Horrid Wars, 1716 123

6 The Loss of Eden, 1716 148

7 The Second Aesop, 1717 167

8 An Abominable Catalogue, 1718-19 187

9 Crimes and Punishments, 1720-24 207

10 Prison, 1724-7 232

11 Pillory, 1725-8 255

12 A Confederacy of Dunces, 1728-9 281

13 The Public Ear, 1730-34 310

14 The Letters of Mr Pope: Stage 1, 1735 335

15 The Letters of Mr Pope: Stage 2, 1735-6 354

16 Final Exchanges, 1737-47 385

Closing Arguments 411

Epilogue 426

References 431

Select Bibliography 451

Acknowledgements 457

Photo Acknowledgements 459

Index 461

Editorial Reviews

03/29/2021

Rogers (Edmund Curll, Bookseller), a liberal arts professor at the University of South Florida, dives deep into 18th-century English poet, satirist, and translator Alexander Pope and his fraught relationship with the bookseller and publisher Edmund Curll, in this entertaining history. Pope authored such works as Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728), and his bad blood with Curll began after Curll published of poems falsely attributed to Pope in 1716. The highbrow Pope was concerned that his name would be sullied by being associated with a publisher whose stock in the trade was such topics as naughty nuns. Their feud was also fueled by the fact that Pope was a Catholic at a time when anti-Catholicism was rampant—and Curll’s political leanings were toward the Protestant-friendly Walpole government. Rogers’s account is chock-full of original literary and historical research, and is impressive in its scope: he details many rhetorical battles between the two, culminating in Pope’s inclusion of “shameless Curll” as a venereal disease–ridden dunce in The Dunciad. Curll also purchased and published a set of Pope’s private letters without the author’s permission and proceeded to print more volumes of assorted “Popiana” to which he didn’t own the rights. 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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"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. Cleverly presented as the trial of Pope v. Curll, with scores of documents as 'exhibits' and with posterity as jury, the narrative fully justifies the author’s comment that 'Pope and Curll are both inherently funny.'"

Leo Damrosch

"Rogers’s knowledge of Pope, Curll, and their Grub Street world is, literally, encyclopedic. He wrote the Alexander Pope Encyclopedia and several other important, deeply learned books about Pope and his contemporaries. Rogers maneuvers skillfully through the Grub Street network of authors, fake authors, and printers-fronting-for-booksellers-fronting-for-conspirators-fronting-for-political leaders."

Times Literary Supplement

"In the course of an extraordinarily productive career spanning six decades, Rogers has written cogently, perceptively, and memorably about all kinds of literature, as well as about the character and capacities of literary criticism. His powers of scrutiny and summary are often arresting and always dedicated to resisting imprecision. In his latest book, Rogers imparts a fresh, first-hand excitement to historical events with which he has long been not only familiar but intimate. He knows more than anyone about Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll."

Literary Review

"Antipathy between the artist and the money-men is nothing new. As Pat Rogers details in his fascinating and revelatory book, the satirist and poet Alexander Pope spent a considerable part of his life—from around 1716 until his death in 1744—fighting the bookseller and proto-publisher Edmund Curll over the issue of copyright. . . . Rogers is a scrupulously fair-minded biographer. He structures The Poet and the Publisher as a quasi-courtroom drama, marshaling the often bizarre and inexplicable anecdotes and events with clarity and wit. . . . [A] tightly written tale with great learning worn pleasantly lightly."

Critic

"Everybody who has struggled to establish the facts, let alone the truth, in the fiendishly complicated maneuvers in the feud between Pope and Curll owes Rogers a debt of gratitude. His detective work is exhilarating. Decades of research into this 'improbable relationship' give him an authority beyond all others. Rogers lays out the case for and against as if in a court of law and the reader must decide. Was Curll a villain? Was Pope a double dealer? Were they well-matched ‘kissing cousins?’ Together the pair turned literature into news, using books as weapons in a war of words that has echoed down the ages. Rogers brings clarity, scholarship, and insight to the muddiest of stories and tells it with a verve and wit that even the combatants would surely admire."

Norma Clarke

"Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak of plague. Close scrutiny of the first few decades of the eighteenth century reveals some startling (and oddly reassuring) parallels with our own trying times. In his new book, Rogers, an expert on the writings of Alexander Pope and much else, resurrects what you might think was an obscure battle over copyright between Pope and the Grub Street bookseller and printer Edmund Curll. Their quarrel, though, becomes a prism through which Rogers captures the upheavals, hubbub, and stench, but, above all, the wit of that period, when words could have the explosive impact of hand grenades. . . . His book serves as a monument to them both, a literary delicacy in the spirit of Pope, dashed with more than a little of Curll’s sauce."

Spectator

"Rogers’s lively new history, The Poet and the Publisher, presents Pope and Curll’s clashes as a long-running courtroom drama, or 'Pope v. Curll' . . . [giving] us a modern sense of a figure usually portrayed as ultra-traditional, revealing him instead as a writer whose concerns about self-image and the power of presentation might be thought close to our own."

New York Review of Books - Clare Bucknell

"Pope versus Curll--a thirty-year war of words (and much else) between the cleverest satirist and the sleaziest publisher of the eighteenth century--was among the most vitriolic feuds in literary history. In this definitive, richly documented account, Rogers tells the story with his trademark blend of scholarly heft and analytic flair. Each chapter sheds new light on the ferocious yet oddly symbiotic relationship between the two antagonists, and on the larger implications--cultural,  political, religious, social--of their endlessly surprising duel."

Thomas Keymer

"Lively and extremely informative, this book is written so that nonspecialists can enjoy it as well as profit from it. . . . Recommended."

Choice

"A fascinating account of one of literary London’s most famous feuds. . . . Both the triggers for the conflict and the course the quarrel takes offer deep insights into the world of letters in Hanoverian England. . . . From a legal point of view as well, there is much in the book which is gripping. The narration refers to the laws of copyright, obscenity, seditious libel, blasphemous libel, fraud, etc., with all of which Curll had more than a passing familiarity. . . . The book is a cracking good read, and Reaktion Books deserves credit for publishing it."

Commonwealth Lawyer

"Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak of plague. Close scrutiny of the first few decades of the eighteenth century reveals some startling (and oddly reassuring) parallels with our own trying times. In his new book, Rogers, an expert on the writings of Alexander Pope and much else, resurrects what you might think was an obscure battle over copyright between Pope and the Grub Street bookseller and printer Edmund Curll. Their quarrel, though, becomes a prism through which Rogers captures the upheavals, hubbub, and stench, but, above all, the wit of that period, when words could have the explosive impact of hand grenades. . . . His book serves as a monument to them both, a literary delicacy in the spirit of Pope, dashed with more than a little of Curll’s sauce."

The Spectator

Rogers’s lively new history, The Poet and the Publisher, presents Pope and Curll’s clashes as a long-running courtroom drama, or 'Pope v. Curll'... [giving] us a modern sense of a figure usually portrayed as ultra-traditional, revealing him instead as a writer whose concerns about self-image and the power of presentation might be thought close to our own."

New York Review of Books

2021-04-07
An account of 18th-century literary shenanigans.

Three centuries ago, there were no marketing and sales juggernauts at publishing houses, so authors and booksellers had to find other means to publicize their books. It was not always a virtuous process. Rogers, a noted authority on Alexander Pope, delivers a lively tale about one of the nastiest and most famous protracted feuds in literary history: between the Catholic poet Pope and Edmund Curll, a “rascally publisher” of obscene items who “spent his career dodging…the law.” Telling the story in the form of a trial, Rogers unearths reams of primary source materials or “exhibits” and extensive quotations to show how the clashes between them evolved. After a fulsome assessment of the time—politics, religion, battles of wit, Grub Street—the London they lived in, and sketches of the two antagonists, the trial begins. In 1714, Pope published his five canto The Rape of the Lock; Curll, with no right to it, nonetheless issued his own edition. The feud had officially begun. Beginning in 1716, each assaulted the other via a series of damaging pamphlets. Pope was busy with his edition of Shakespeare’s plays and his translation of the Odyssey while Curll spent some time in jail for lewd publications. The publication of Pope’s The Dunciad, Rogers writes, was “more than a work of literature. Its appearance constituted an event.” Curll was mentioned in it often, and he responded with his Popiad. The feud took its “strangest turn yet” with Pope’s published letters, which Curll pirated, resulting in the now-famous 1741 copyright case, Pope v. Curll, which Pope won. In an enlightening, overlong narrative, Rogers delivers the case, one lying “thickly documented in the archives.” Readers can deliver their own verdict: Who was the most maligned?

A highly detailed, literary tit for tat for fans of publishing and literary history.

Kirkus Reviews