Edmund Curll, Bookseller
Edmund Curll, Bookseller is the first full-length biography of Curll, the notorious London publisher, to appear since Ralph Straus’ The Unspeakable Curll in 1927. Baines’ and Rogers’ biography constitutes the first part of a two-pronged effort, with part two consisting of an up-dated bibliography of the highly various output – pornography, purloined letters, opportunistic biographies of the barely dead, pirated poetry, complete keys, history and antiquities – that was published under Curll’s own name, and the many aliases he adopted, as well as through the more or less deceptive collaborations in which he engaged.
Both parts of the project serve to provide the reader with a thorough view of Curll’s prodigious life and editorial output. While the Straus’ biography still merits our consideration, it is somewhat hard to find. The original edition was limited to 535 copies, with reprints from 1928 and 1970 either difficult to locate or beyond the budget of most scholars, judging from a cursory search of electronic booksellers. The Unspeakable Curll also has its limitations. Baines and Rogers are critical of its arch tone and “understandable reserve on matters of pornography” (p. 2). But if Straus shows reserve on this score, apparently so do Baines and Rogers, who fail to reproduce any of the “fetching frontispieces” (p. 156) of Curll’s racier productions, such as Venus in the Cloister or A Treatise of the Use of Flogging. (And surely OUP could do a better job with many of the reproductions in Edmund Curll, Bookseller than the bad scans that appear.) Straus’ account was also written before much of the work of the great Popeans of the last century. Baines and Rogers have assembled the fruits of that scholarship, along with the results of their own digging into a wide range of archival sources not reflected in Straus, giving us a much more complete picture of the man and his endeavours at the shadier end of the book trade in eighteenth-century London. Where Straus provides the “basic sequence” of Pope’s elaborate plot to induce Curll to print a pirated edition of the poet’s letters and thereby expose the underhandedness of the publisher (p. 246n.), Edmund Curll, Bookseller fills in a wealth of additional material. This adds considerably to our knowledge of a figure who is probably unequalled in book history for being what Baines and Rogers call “hard-nosed, vulgar and mercenary” (p. 47). The emphasis of literary and historical scholarship has also shifted since 1927 when Straus tackled his subject. The history of publishing is now a field in its own right, not merely a sidelight on literature. Relative values in the marketplace of criticism have changed as well, as Melvyn New’s “Swimming Down the Gutter of Time with Sterne and The Scriblerian”, Scriblerian 39:1 (2006), 48-52 has shown. While the dunces have not supplanted Pope, authors from the milieu of Curll have become part of the curriculum: Centlivre, Haywood, Manley, Barker. Whereas Curll can be expected to be the beneficiary of these changes in fortune, Baines and Rogers are even-handed about it. They make no excuses for Curll’s unscrupulous and brazen practices, but place him within the broader context of the London book trade. In their excellent chapter on the publication of Pope’s letters, the authors show how the relationship between the poet and his publishing nemesis was as much symbiotic as antagonistic (in contrast to what they identify as the undue partisanship of Maynard Mack, one of the leading Pope scholars of the last century and author of a notable biography of the poet). Nothing can take away from Curll’s unabashed dishonesty, but the authors give him credit where it is due. An example is his contribution to English history and antiquarianism, in collaboration with Richard Rawlinson (whatever Thomas Hearne – never an objective source of commentary – may have thought about it). “While we can scarcely elevate the bookseller to the rank of a major scholar,” his editing of texts could show both care and some learning (pp. 209-10). The authors also note points of similarity between Curll and another of his many literary opponents, Daniel Defoe. Both were given to “multiple identities and contrary commitments” (p. 112) – so perhaps the publisher was not such an unspeakable anomaly in an age of shifting allegiances and exigencies.
One must descend to the trivial in order to find fault with this book. There is the odd typo. Putting “notes to pages x to y” at the top of the pages of references would save the reader the backtracking required to match up citations and text in a book where the notes are themselves worth reading. There is the odd error, including Curll’s own in referring to the Poet John Sheffield as Duke of Buckinghamshire, not Buckingham. Evidence that Pope v. Curll (an episode entirely overlooked by Straus, it must be said) remains a leading case on copyright in letters could be more recent than works with publication dates of 1903-72, 1925-28, 1935 and 1965. On the plus side the authors do unearth two hitherto unnoticed pieces of litigation arising from Curll’s Scriblerian plagiaries, one initiated by Pope’s executors for breach of Warburton’s rights in the Essay on Man and another by the son and heir of Dr Arbuthnot.
Edmund Curll, Bookseller is an important addition to the literary history of the first half of the eighteenth century. It does not altogether supersede the pioneering work of Ralph Straus, however. As Baines and Rogers “ruefully” admit (p. 5), The Unspeakable Curll is probably more entertaining, if less complete and less reliable. One cannot but agree: read Baines and Rogers for facts; but for fun, seek out Straus.
