'Books and the Man I Sing': New Work on the Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace

Both of these major studies of the eighteenth-century book trade aim to complicate current understandings of the distinction between respectable and unrespectable literary production and consumption, in a century that saw little technological advance in book production but a great deal of activity in the promotion of books through newspapers and journals, and through the development of circulating libraries and debating societies.¹ Jan Fergus challenges the view that women were the primary consumers of fiction in the eighteenth century, presenting evidence that men borrowed and bought as many novels as women did. Paul Baines and Pat Rogers are concerned with a single bookseller whose list at various points prompted legal actions on grounds of lewdness, sedition, and copyright infringement, but which also included a series of studies of the antiquities of the cathedrals of England, and a volume of Shakespeare’s poems that was adopted into the Rowe edition published by Jacob Tonson. Both studies explore the relationship between the kind of books one wants to be caught reading and the kind one doesn’t. Both volumes digest and order a large and unwieldy archival record, bringing some fairly mysterious practices into sharper focus, and offering some very plausible arguments about the nature of literary production and consumption. If one were to search for a criticism to make of these studies, it would be that they also, very occasionally, demonstrate the interpretative limits of studies of the book trade.

Baines and Rogers have produced what might be an unsurpassably complete account of the life and career of Edmund Curll. They acknowledge their debt to Ralph Straus’s The Unspeakable Curll before going on to list the documents and sources that have become known or available since that book was published in 1927 (p. 3). Their aim is to provide a sober account of Curll with the aid of modern bibliographic tools and in the context of renewed scholarly interest in the book trade. Baines and Rogers cover the best known episodes in Curll’s life with great care: his being tossed in a blanket by a group of Westminsters for publishing scraps of a Latin funeral oration by their school-mate John Barber; Pope’s administering an emetic to him after the publication of Court Poems in 1716; his appearance in The Dunciad in 1728 in the various booksellers’ contests; the intricate exchange of deceptions with Pope over the publication of Pope’s letters, including the copyright infringement on the 1741 Works of Alexander Pope in Prose, volume 2; and Lord Hardwicke’s judgment on the property of private correspondence. But other, less appreciated, facts about Curll are given an airing. He ran a series throughout the 1710s on local antiquities that began with the publication of Thomas Browne’s remarks on Norwich cathedral. This series was to earn him the praise of John Nichols in the Gentleman’s Magazine, as one who ‘deserves commendation for his industry in preserving our National Remains. . . . he did not publish a single volume but what . . . contained some precious ore, some valuable reliques, which future collectors could no where else have found’ (quoted in Baines and Rogers, p. 312). It is one measure of the depth and breadth of Baines and Rogers’s scholarship that they identify and reproduce these passages, as well as Curll’s more lubricious appearances in public. Some of these are candid: his advertisement of a possible future publication on ‘the Hanging Lechers’ alludes to the death of the writer Peter Anthony Motteux in an episode of erotic asphyxiation (p. 116).

The constant pleasure of reading this book is the level of its detail, salacious or otherwise, but its generalisations too are serious. The authors ponder on the relationship of dependency between Pope and Curll:

Like all satirists, he needed enemies, and Curll’s attacks gave him an excellent...