Lapham’s Quarterly
We may wonder what got the quarrel started between the poet Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll, a London bookseller churning out mostly ephemeral publications. Hardly anybody outside Britain would have heard of him. Many of his methods—which often included unauthorized piracy of works—were downright illegal, and he did not belong to the respected Company of Stationers, charged with keeping up the good name of the trade. Late in the course of their quarrel, Curll visited Pope’s Thames-side home without permission, and brought out an illustrated description of the house and garden. Pope had reached the pinnacle of literary renown; Curll had merely been elevated to the pillory for offenses including sedition and obscene publications. In Pope’s case, Curll not only pirated the poet’s works, he also frequently provoked the writer’s ire by publishing satirical criticisms of his output and politics.
The publisher had already antagonized some prominent writers. At the head of this list comes Jonathan Swift, an acquaintance of Pope and a figure who had achieved considerable fame as a satirist and political polemicist. Curll had purloined some unpublished manuscripts, which he issued to the world in 1710 together with a key explaining the occasion and meaning of Swift’s great Tale of a Tub, which had first come out in 1704. This was the start of a decades-long campaign to unearth items by Swift (genuine or spurious), and bring them before the public whether or not the writer had given permission. This task would be made easier as time went on by the absence of a proper copyright agreement between London and Dublin, the city where most of Swift’s new works appeared after he was made Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1713. Small wonder that Swift complained in May 1711 to his Dublin friends, “That villain Curl has scraped up some trash, and calls it Dr. Swift’s miscellanies, with the name at large, and I can get no [legal] satisfaction of him.” It would not be the last time the bookseller got away with piracy.
