Pat Rogers, _The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street_ (1 of 2)

IS ALEXANDER POPE one of the great English poets? Eighteenth century readers were willing to see him as such, by and large, and. it's hard to think of anyone else between Milton and Blake who might qualify, apart from Dryden. But I rarely come across readers who like Pope's work as much as I do. People nowadays rarely agree with Matthew Arnold about anything, but he sums up a widely-shared view on Pope: "Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose."

I can see what's not to like about him. The philosophizing of Essay on Man wobbles between the inane and the vicious, and he devoted astonishing amounts of of his gifts to attacking his enemies; it's hard to read either version of The Dunciad without being on the one hand amazed by his wit, erudition, and verbal command, and on the other dumbfounded by his willingness to expend his powers on such unworthy targets.

It's his elegance that wins me over, I guess. He's a tightrope walker, doing something that does not seem to have much intrinsic importance, that does not produce much or take us anywhere,  but doing it so gracefully, so seemingly effortlessly, so dazzlingly that I can only gawp at the display of skill.

I not only like to read Pope, I like to read about Pope, but I must confess I never made it through Maynard Mack's magisterial but airless biography. Rogers's book, though, I gulped down. Rogers is looking at one very specific dimension of Pope's biography, a long-running feud with the opportunistic, somewhat shady publisher Edmund Curll. At 450 pages including notes, The Poet and the Publisher may seem unduly exhaustive, but it's crisply written, entertaining, and illuminating.

A "bookseller" in 18th century terms normally had a shop where books were sold, as we might guess, but was also what we would call a "publisher," producing their own line of books. This was in some ways a more wide-open business than it is now. Bookseller-publishers had to deal with state censorship (vigilant about religion, politics, and sexual morality), but copyright was a good deal looser then (the first Act of Parliament trying to define copyright was passed in 1710). When Pope was just beginning to make his name, Curll obtained, somehow, some manuscript poems by Pope and printed them without permission or payment--and the feud was off and running. Pope retaliated by having an emetic slipped into Curll's cup of sack and writing an account of the explosive results. Curll then got a hold of some of Pope's private correspondence and published it. Pope fired back in The Dunciad. Curll fired back in attacks of his own of Pope's various vulnerabilities (Pope was short, hunchbacked, Catholic, and had friends who were suspected of wanting to put the Stuarts back on the throne). 

The masterstroke was that Pope and some confederates set Curll up to publish a large batch of Pope's correspondence. Getting these letters sounds like a windfall and a major coup for Curll, but his jumping at the opportunity to publish them enabled Pope to publish the correspondence himself, in a corrected version. Publishing your own letters would have been considered bad form at the time--but in the circumstances Pope could present himself as simply putting things right after Curll's unseemly appropriation. 

(to be continued)