cover image The Poet and the Publisher

The Poet and the Publisher

Pat Rogers. Reaktion, $35 trade paper (448p) ISBN 978-1-78914-416-1

Rogers (Edmund Curll, Bookseller), a liberal arts professor at the University of South Florida, dives deep into 18th-century English poet, satirist, and translator Alexander Pope and his fraught relationship with the bookseller and publisher Edmund Curll, in this entertaining history. Pope authored such works as Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728), and his bad blood with Curll began after Curll published of poems falsely attributed to Pope in 1716. The highbrow Pope was concerned that his name would be sullied by being associated with a publisher whose stock in the trade was such topics as naughty nuns. Their feud was also fueled by the fact that Pope was a Catholic at a time when anti-Catholicism was rampant—and Curll’s political leanings were toward the Protestant-friendly Walpole government. Rogers’s account is chock-full of original literary and historical research, and is impressive in its scope: he details many rhetorical battles between the two, culminating in Pope’s inclusion of “shameless Curll” as a venereal disease–ridden dunce in The Dunciad. Curll also purchased and published a set of Pope’s private letters without the author’s permission and proceeded to print more volumes of assorted “Popiana” to which he didn’t own the rights. What sets Rogers’s history apart is his ability to combine fastidious research with lucid, unpretentious prose. History buffs and literary-minded readers alike are in for a punchy, drama-filled treat. (June)