Edmund Curll, Bookseller, by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers. NY: Oxford University Press, 2007.

I will rely on the publisher to provide a nice summary of this new book.

“Edmund Curll was a notorious figure among the publishers of the early eighteenth century: for his boldness, his lack of scruple, his publication of work without author's consent, and his taste for erotic and scandalous publications. He was in legal trouble on several occasions for piracy and copyright infringement, unauthorized publication of the works of peers, and for seditious, blasphemous, and obscene publications. He stood in the pillory in 1728 for seditious libel. Above all, he was the constant target of the greatest poet and satirist of his age, Alexander Pope, whose work he pirated whenever he could and who responded with direct physical revenge (an emetic slipped into a drink) and persistent malign caricature. The war between Pope and Curll typifies some of the main cultural battles being waged between creativity and business. The story has normally been told from the poet's point of view, though more recently Curll has been celebrated as a kind of literary freedom-fighter; this book, the first full biography of Curll since Ralph Straus's The Unspeakable Curll (1927), seeks to give a balanced and thoroughly-researched account of Curll's career in publishing between 1706 and 1747, untangling the mistakes and misrepresentations that have accrued over the years and restoring a clear sense of perspective to Curll's dealings in the literary marketplace. It examines the full range of Curll's output, including his notable antiquarian series, and uses extensive archive material to detail Curll's legal and other troubles. For the first time, what is known about this strange, interesting, and awkward figure is authoritatively told.”

The story is compelling, the scholarship is superb, the reviews are glowing. All that remains to do is mine some Curll nuggets.

CONTEMPORARY COMMENTS ON CURLL

-“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 authors inform us, “The last point is the earliest reference to Curll’s squint, and the character that might be inferred from it.”

-“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.’”

-“…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…”

-“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.”

-“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.”

Both the above from no less of a figure than Jonathan Swift.

And Daniel Defoe weighs in as well in the following passages.

-“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.”

-“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.”

And the following threat is from a powerful Bishop, in regard to his youthful translations of Pliny’s Epistles.

-“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 CATALOG TITLES

-The Case of Sodomy, in the Tryal of Mervin Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven

-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

-Venus in the Cloister: or, The Nun in her Smock

-A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs

-The Art of Knowing Women: or, The Female Sex Dissected

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

In this case, the fictitious author’s dubious cures in the form of ready-filled syringes could be requested by code-word at the only location where they were sold, which was Curll’s book store. A ridiculous running argument ensued between two other quack cure practitioners (one of whom was probably the actual author of the above work), carried out in fliers and publications of the day. At one point Curll accused the opposing protagonist of not being able to translate Greek and Latin. “…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.” Supposedly, Spinke went to Curll’s book shop on April 9, 1709, two days after the Post Boy challenge, and faithfully translated everything handed to him. Curll did not pay, and Spinke won a suit against him for the five guineas plus court costs.

CURLLIAN METHODS

-“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. OZELL, and Sold by Mr. CURLL’ (p. xiv); a reference to Thomas Betterton’s monument in Westminster Abbey prompts mention of the ‘lately published Life’ available from Curll. Curll’s title pages, if not quite ‘marvels of optimistic inaccuracy’ (Strauss), 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. 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.”

-“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.”

-“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.’”

-“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.”

-“Only in 1718 did he begin his most sustained concentration on sexual matters, sometime disguising the books as ‘medical’ treatises: on eunuchs, hermaphrodites, the crying sin of ‘onanism’, and other sexual deviations.”

-“Arguing that the study of modern sexual behavior 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).”

-“Salisbury was the last of the grand local volumes. Richard Rawlinson left for the Continent in 1719, depriving Curll of his main editor. 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.”

-“Curll could do more with an et cetera than anybody else in recorded history.”

When a rival publisher put out a different version of Bishop Samuel Parker’s History of his Own Time, a Curll advertisement included the following vicious review.

-“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....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.”

-“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. A nineteenth-century editor of Colley Cibber’s Apology cited it as an instance of ‘injudicious celerity’ in producing biographies. ‘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.’”

-“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.”

-“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.”

-“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.”

-“He covered a wide range: big translation ventures, an antiquarian series, political controversy, 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 success 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.”

WAR WITH POPE

-“Three days on, and another advertisement in the Flying Post for a work entitled Homer Defended, 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.”

-“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’.”

-“In the best discussion of these matters, Maynard Mack has pointed out how Pope had long endured the assault 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’.”

-“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 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.”

-“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.”

-“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.”

-“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).”

-“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.”

-“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).”

CURLL COMEUPPANCE

-“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: but then Curll dealt in some heavy punishment, and people considered it no more than rough justice.”

-“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 of William Staunton, five of which Curll had published in 1723 and 1724, and now advertised as showing that there was no precept for ‘worshipping 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. 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.”

-“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.”

-“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.”

-“Circumstantial as 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.”

-“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 a man of less impudence than his own, would have been very uneasy.’”

AFTERWORD

“...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 substituted a broken-backed 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 Stationer’s 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. Once he was gone, on 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.”

So, what to make of this work? The things that strike me the most are the amount of research necessary to produce this much rich detail about everyday events of three hundred years ago (not so much in evidence in these seminal and spicy excerpts as in most of the text, and the busy footnotes are omitted here too); how the writers kept it all straight; and the enabling miracle of that much ephemeral and anecdotal evidence surviving to begin with. Then there is the rich irony of this “lifer” getting a modern life of his own—one which pays homage to much of what came before but clearly intends to set the larger record straight, which with Curll is an additional irony. Although the prose is engaging, evocative, and full of wry humor, the Latin translations are shockingly incoherent (just kidding—entering this world has really Curlled me—there are probably twenty great English words in here I never heard before); and while every student of early bookselling and Pope collector and research library should own a copy, it isn’t exactly light reading. While I don’t mean to echo the advice of Mrs. Pendarves not to buy the life, only hire it, this would be for the opposite reason, as there is nothing indifferent about its scholarship. At the end of the day, there will never be a more superior book about the life of Edmund Curll, but if Tim Burton ever made a movie about this churlish knave and/or early defender of free speech, he would probably have to rely more on the reading level of Straus’s 1927 The Unspeakable Curll to convince the producers and money men than on this scholarly treatment. I suggest it here, using both accounts, with Johnny Depp in the lead role when he hits his 50s (he owes us one for mishandling so many antiquarian books in The Ninth Gate). Add to this one more conceit. If I had the power to bestow time travel awards on the deserving, I would drop the properly disguised authors off in front of prime E. Curll’s establishment, and greatly enjoy their meeting.

Shawn Purcell operates Balopticon Books & Ephemera and can be contacted at http://www.balopticon.com.