The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1 / Poetry - Volume 1

by Alexander Pope

P. T. and Smythe put forth a counter-advertisement on the 23rd of May, in which they declared that they would retaliate by committing to the press the letters of Curll.[75] The ostensible motive of the mock clergyman and his employer was to cover the bookseller with infamy. The effect, they said, will be, "to open a scene of baseness and foul-dealing that will sufficiently show to mankind his character and conduct." The correspondence does not bear out this description. The documents show that the lying and trickery rested with P. T., while the bookseller was veracious in his assertions and straight-forward in his proceedings. "That Curll," says Johnson, "gave a true account of the transaction it is reasonable to believe, because no falsehood was ever detected."[76] It was his boast that falsehood had been his abhorrence throughout the discussion, and he drew vaunting comparisons between Pope's addiction to the vice, and his own detestation of it.[77] His very failings in one direction had helped to sustain his virtue in another. He had too much effrontery to care to descend to duplicity, and it is impossible to read his many controversial manifestoes without perceiving that he was in general as truthful as he was impudent. In the instance of Pope's letters, there is the original blot, that he saw no discredit in publishing papers which he supposed to be purloined; but he had already avowed the fact before the House of Lords, and the crime was more than shared by P. T. In everything else the acts and language of the bookseller contrast favourably with the meanness and falsehoods of his correspondent, who would not have assisted to disseminate the record of his own misdeeds. But it was different with the poet. He must have seen that the inevitable tendency of the "Initial Correspondence" would be to convict him of the offences he had tried to fasten upon Curll. His single chance of diminishing its disastrous effect was to promulgate it as evidence upon his own side, and not to allow it to come forth solely as the hostile statement of an opponent. The proceeding in P. T. would have been to aid in propagating the proofs of P. T.'s "baseness and foul-dealing." In Pope it was an effort to throw upon the initials the stigma which would otherwise have fallen upon Pope himself.

The resolution of P. T. to proclaim his own disgrace was less extraordinary than his manner of doing it. It was announced on the 24th of May, that "the clergyman concerned with P. T. and Edmund Curll to publish Mr. Pope's letters hath discovered the whole transaction, and a narrative of the same will be speedily printed."[78] Hence it appears that Smythe had made a full confession to the author of the "Narrative," and P. T. must be presumed to have been a party to it, since he transmitted the originals of the communications he had addressed to Curll, together with Curll's replies. This "Narrative" was the work of Pope. He alone could have furnished several of the particulars, together with the letter which Curll wrote to him in March, 1735; and the statements, the misrepresentations,[79] the reflections, and sometimes the words, are the same which he employed in the preface to the quarto of 1737. Hitherto, P. T. had been so fearful of detection by the poet, that in the language of Smythe, he suspected his own shadow. He now unmasked himself without a motive, and without reserve, to the man he had injured. He had nothing to tell of Curll but what Curll had insisted upon relating before the House of Lords, and the only novel information he could give was the details of his own thefts and frauds. This, indeed, was what Pope would chiefly have cared to learn. He would have been eager to ascertain who the person could be that had got access to his letters, and the means by which they were copied and printed; and he certainly would not have called anything "a discovery of the whole transaction," which contained no revelation upon the only points of the least importance. But it is extremely improbable that the wary P. T. should have wantonly turned self-accuser. To the last this fabulous personage continued to act in the manner which was most convenient to Pope, and the true explanation of the pretended confession is, that it was a fiction of the poet to account for his possession of the correspondence with Curll.

More inexplicable than all was the forbearance of Pope to produce the facts in his "Narrative." He might feel bound to suppress the names of culprits who had volunteered a confession of their crime; but he might have told the manner of the theft, and specified the printer employed by P. T. He refrained, on the contrary, from revealing the particulars which would have absolved him from an odious imputation. He kept back every tittle of evidence which would have acquitted him if he was innocent, and have implicated him if he was guilty. His story has none of the circumstantiality of an actual occurrence; his statements are as indefinite as the agents were shadowy. He disclosed the dealings of P. T. with Curll, which Curll had noised abroad, and was about to publish, but he does not bestow a thought upon the far more essential question of the mode in which the correspondence was purloined, and seems to be satisfied himself, and wishes that the world should be satisfied likewise, with learning that a person, whose only designation was a couple of initials, sent the letters ready printed to the bookseller. Obliged to abandon his original story of the means by which they found their way to the press, Pope had now some powerful reason for diverting attention from the subject, and leaving the mystery unexplained.

He speedily manifested his desire to consign P. T. to oblivion, and reverted to his former scheme of imputing the publication to Curll. In the very "Narrative" which showed that the bookseller had no share in gathering together the correspondence, Pope inculcated the idea that he had been active in the task. He charged him with having put forth an advertisement of the letters to Cromwell, in which "he promised encouragement to all persons who should send him more," and adds, a little lower down, "By these honest means Mr. Curll went on increasing his collection."[80] The accused challenged him to produce the advertisement, and the accuser was silent. He persevered nevertheless in misrepresenting to his acquaintances Curll's part in the business. Writing to Fortescue, on March 26, 1736, of the volume of 1735, he calls it "the book of letters which Curll printed and spared not," though the poet's own witnesses, P. T. and Smythe, had demonstrated, even in their anger against Curll, that he had nothing to do with procuring or printing the letters, and was merely the vendor of the copies he had bought. In Pope's complaints to his other friends, Curll is the single culprit to whom he ascribed the injury he had suffered, and on no one occasion did he go through the form of keeping up his P. T. fiction. His misrepresentations to the world at large were more covertly expressed. He spoke in his authorised edition of the "publisher's own accounts in his prefaces," and, as his first example, quotes P. T.'s address "to the reader," which he knew from the letters of Smythe had never been seen by the publisher till it was shown him at the bar of the House of Lords. To help out the mis-statement in the text his reference in a note is made to Curll's reprint of the collection of 1735, instead of to the volume in which the address "to the reader" was originally produced.[81] Nor was it, perhaps, without design that in the catalogue of surreptitious editions, prefixed to an octavo impression of his letters which appeared in 1737, he put first in the list, as if it had been the parent of the rest, an edition of Curll, which was taken from the volume of P. T., and allotted the second place to the primitive text. He never revived the clumsy fabrication he had been compelled to promulgate in his "Narrative." In private he transferred the crimes of P. T. to Curll; in public he insinuated what he dared not assert for fear of retaliation; but neither in public nor private was anything heard of the phantom who had purloined, printed, and sold the correspondence. Had his existence been real, or the invention been credited, Pope would not have persisted in calumniating the bookseller for want of a culprit upon whom to lay the offence.

Faulkner, the Dublin printer, told Dr. Birch, in 1749, that James Worsdale was the person who went to Curll, by Pope's direction, in the habit of a clergyman.[82] Before the entry in Birch's diary was published, Dr. Johnson had given the same account in his "Lives of the Poets."[83] Worsdale was a painter, dramatist, and actor, and, as if his triple calling was insufficient for his versatile disposition, he followed a fourth, and was hired, Johnson says, to conduct clandestine negotiations. When an attempt was made to extort money from the second son of Sir Robert Walpole, he was engaged to mix with the conspirators, to win their confidence, and to betray it. They were convicted of the fraud, and Worsdale, in giving his evidence, "acted with so much life and spirit the several parts he had performed during the time of sifting out the mystery as gave no small diversion to the court."[84] According to Horace Walpole, the poet had employed this personator and detector of rogues in his more reputable capacity, to make several copies of a portrait of Atterbury.[85] He seemed formed to carry on the traffic with Curll, and since it was his profession to aid in plots, he might be expected to be a secret as well as a willing assistant. Johnson, who attached some weight to his evidence, says he was of doubtful veracity,—an objection which would have applied to the disclosures of any representative of Smythe; for no upright man would have played a part in a scheme of deception. His assertion would have been worthless, if it had stood alone; but it at least falls in with the numerous circumstances which all conjoin to criminate Pope.

If his impatience to print the Wycherley correspondence renders it probable that he would be anxious to print the more important collection which he had sedulously prepared for the press; if the deception he practised in 1729, to avoid being taxed with the proceeding, and to throw it upon somebody else, favours the belief that he repeated the deception in 1735 with the same intention; and if the various facts connected with the publication unite to prove with accumulative force that he was the sole contriver of it, there is the further argument that no other person had the slightest interest in perpetrating the act. "The numbers," says Dr. Johnson, "offered to sale by the private messengers, showed that the hope of gain could not have been the motive to the impression." Money was so little the object that a parcel of the books was sent to Lintot, "for which no price was ever demanded, as he had made known his resolution not to pay a porter, and consequently not to deal with a nameless agent."[86] Any person in the employment of Lord Oxford, who had access to the papers, and was competent to transcribe them, would not have undergone the toil, and risked detection, disgrace, and ruin for the sake of a few pounds which he must have shared with his accomplice Smythe. The vaunted revenge of P. T. could not have been the motive; for beyond the empty profession, it was belied alike by his words and deeds. The poet in truth loved himself too well to be able to counterfeit speciously the part of a hater. P. T. published the letters which Pope meant to be published; he lauded Pope in Pope's own strain; he took the measures which were most to Pope's advantage; he reflected Pope's vanities, weaknesses, and falsehoods, and behaved throughout in a manner as identical with Pope's position as it was remote from his own. Lucre and revenge were propensities to which P. T. was a stranger, though he aspired to a reputation for the latter, and the only passion apparent in his conduct is his mania to gratify by dishonesty and deceit the literary ambition of Pope.

"The engineer was hoist with his own petard," and Curll, the intended victim, had the satisfaction of being the executioner. The poet plainly considered him to be a scoundrel whom he had a right to damage by any means, foul or fair. Walter Scott believed that his inveterate persecutor administered the emetic to him, and extraordinary as it may seem that a celebrated man of letters should adopt this method of punishing an obnoxious bookseller, the language of Pope obliges us to accept the conclusion[87]. The trick was puerile and degrading, but it inflicted no injury. The prosecution in the House of Lords, and the subsequent effort to fasten his own misdeeds upon his enemy was an outrage of a different description. To lure him into purchasing a book, and then to employ the influence conferred by genius in founding charges upon the act which were absolutely groundless, and in branding him with the disgrace which belonged to his accuser, was a baseness of which the lowest Grub-street scribbler satirised in the Dunciad would probably not have been capable. A spirit of unfairness, which, bad as it might be, was less injurious, pervaded his commercial dealings with Curll. The bookseller paid ten pounds in money, and twenty pounds in promissory notes, for three hundred copies of the work. Two hundred and forty only were delivered, and of these one hundred and ninety wanted the letters to Jervas, Digby, Blount, and others[88]. P. T. and Smythe stated in their advertisement of May 23 that Curll's notes "had proved not negotiable," which they seem to have designed as an excuse for not completing the imperfect books[89]. Curll maintained that the defence added slander to treachery; for the notes were not due till the 12th of June, and he indignantly declared that they would be honoured if the terms of the bargain were fulfilled[90]. But these terms were never intended to be performed. Smythe had contracted to reserve the whole impression for Curll, and assured him on May 10 that no one else should sell a single copy.[91] The pledge was violated as soon as made by sending a parcel of the books to Lintot, and one of the artifices which marked every part of the transaction was employed in public to counteract the promises which had been given in private. As Curll was to provide his own title-page and preface, and the copies seized by the order of the House of Lords had a title-page and preface by P. T., Smythe wrote to Curll on the 13th of May to explain this departure from the arrangement. A "wonderful caution" had suddenly seized P. T., who, apprehending that an injunction might be obtained in Chancery against Curll, had furnished a preface which "threw the publication entirely off him," and a title-page, in which, substituting the entire trade for an individual, it was said that the volume was "printed and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster."[92] This was pronounced by Smythe to be "as lucky as could be," and it was certainly a curious piece of fortune which caused P. T. to transmit the fifty early copies without title or preface, and inspired him immediately afterwards to attach both to the copies which were instantly to be pounced upon by a messenger from the Lords. To deceive Curll by promises was the first end to be attained, and he was led to believe that he would have a monopoly of the work. To deprive him of the advantages he imagined he had secured was a second, though a subordinate object of the conspiracy. The whole corporation of booksellers were to be invited to encroach upon his rights, and the preface and title-page affixed to the copies produced at the bar of the House of Lords had been drawn up with the secret purpose of contradicting any claim which might be set up by Curll. When Smythe wrote his deceptive explanation of the motives of P. T., these confederates were endeavouring to coax their dupe into owning that he was the collector of the letters, and it was necessary that he should still be humoured and beguiled. When the mask was thrown off, P. T. and Smythe joined in the declaration that they had neither of them "given or could pretend to give any title whatever to Mr. Pope's letters to Curll," and they promised "that every bookseller should be indemnified every way from any possible prosecution or molestation of the said Curll."[93] This invitation to all the world to republish the correspondence of Pope was advertised in the newspapers, and the poet shortly afterwards reprinted it in his "Narrative" without a word of direct remonstrance against the pretension to dispose of his property. P. T. had always hitherto adopted the course which furthered the projects of Pope, and Pope, in return, appeared to smile upon the enormous prerogative to make a general grant of his correspondence which had been assumed by P. T. Commercial honesty was not to be expected in a plan which was based upon falsehood and calumny; but if an ordinary tradesman had conducted his dealings in the same manner as Pope, his custom and character would have been destroyed. The events which followed the publication lead to the same conclusion with the incidents which preceded and attended it. Pope stated in his "Narrative" that there were so many omissions and interpolations in the surreptitious volume, that it was impossible for him to own the contents in their present condition.[94] In two distinct advertisements which he put forth in May and July, 1735, he went further, and declared that some of the letters were not his at all.[95] Nevertheless the bookseller, Cooper, with whom he was now in alliance, reprinted the entire collection, and brought it out on the 12th of June. He at the same time announced that his edition had been entered at Stationers' Hall, according to the Act of Queen Anne, and that "Edmund Curll or any other pirater of the book should be prosecuted." Curll then served upon him a process, the purport of which does not appear, and Pope wrote to his friend and counsel Fortescue, who a few months later was raised to the bench, and informed him that he had bid Cooper send him the document for his legal opinion, begged to be acquainted with the steps which were necessary to be taken, and acknowledged that he had connived at Cooper's publication. In a subsequent note he asks for further directions in the conduct of the case. The poet and the bookseller were therefore working in conjunction, or to speak more correctly, the bookseller was the agent of the poet. It must have been by Pope's authority that he appropriated the copyright of the letters, and threatened proceedings against any one who invaded it. When Curll took up the gauntlet Pope adopted the cause, engaged Fortescue in the defence, and carried on with him the correspondence respecting it. His sanction of the publication is confirmed by the catalogue of surreptitious editions, since this impression of Cooper is omitted from the list, notwithstanding the insertion of a later impression by the same bookseller, containing some slight additions that had not been ordered by Pope. Thus while the poet pretended that he could not own the P. T. collection, with its mutilated, interpolated, and forged letters, he had secretly authorised a reprint which was identical with the collection he denounced. His actions evince the insincerity of his words. He had the power to erase the forgeries and interpolations with a stroke of his pen, and unless he had approved of the book in its primitive state he would not have entered into a league with Cooper to produce it unaltered. He afterwards seemed to disclaim the republication he had espoused. In the preface to his avowed edition in 1737, he spoke of the "piratical printers" of the surreptitious editions, without making any exception, and said that there was "not one of them to whom he had ever given the least title, or any other encouragement than that of not prosecuting them." This was either a direct untruth or, what was more in accordance with his peculiar morality, a deceptive quibble. Though he knew that his readers must infer that the epithet "piratical" was applied to all the printers who had put forth an edition of the volume of 1735, he may yet have justified to himself the assertion that he had never given the least title to any of them, by the reflection that as he had given a title to Cooper he was not a piratical printer.

While the inquiry was going on before the House of Lords in May, Smythe impressed upon Curll that P. T. had his whole heart set upon the publication of the letters, not so much on account of the volume which had been seized, as because it was the precursor of a much more important correspondence with Swift, the late Lord Oxford, the Bishop of Rochester, and Lord Bolingbroke.[96] When P. T. disappeared from the scene, Pope is found to have inherited his ideas and to be animated by the desire to complete the schemes his enemy left unfulfilled. "Since I saw you," he wrote to Lord Oxford, June 17, 1735, "I have learnt of an excellent machine of Curll's, or rather his director's, to engraft a lie upon, to make me seem more concerned than I was in the affair of the letters. It is so artful an one that I longed to tell it you—not that I will enter into any controversy with such a dog. But I believe it will occasion a thing you will not be sorry for relating to the Bishop of Rochester's letters and papers." There are no further particulars to explain in what degree Pope had acknowledged to Lord Oxford that he was "concerned in the affair of the letters,"[97] nor does any record remain of the artful device of Curll, or of the new director who had succeeded to P. T. and Smythe. The want of all foundation for the allegations against the bookseller is probably the cause of the vagueness of the allusions. The single palpable circumstance is that, in spite of his lamentations at the publication of his letters, Pope was already designing to send a fresh instalment of them to the press. Whatever may have been the "excellent machine" to which he darkly referred, Curll had furnished him with the pretence he sought. The bookseller put forth a new edition of the printed copies he purchased from P. T., and called it the first volume of "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence." Partly, perhaps, to vex Pope, and partly to attract purchasers, he affixed the same title to future volumes, which were principally a medley of trash that had no relation to the poet. Among the promised contents of the second volume were "Atterbury's Letters to Mr. Pope." Pope cited the announcement as a reason for publishing his correspondence with the bishop, which P. T. had enumerated among "the much more important correspondence" that was intended to follow, and which, the poet, in precise agreement with him, declared was "of a nature less insignificant" than the printed collection.[98] The coincidence of opinion between these bitter antagonists is especially remarkable, because others have not been struck with the superiority of the letters of Atterbury. Mr. Croker thought them, with one or two exceptions, dull, pedantic, and common-place, and Warton complains that they are, many of them, crowded to affectation with trite quotations from Horace and Virgil. The excuse for making them public was weak in the extreme. On the 12th of June Cooper replied to Curll's advertisement of his second volume by a counter-advertisement, and offered him ten pounds for any letter of Atterbury to Pope, or of Pope to Atterbury, of which he could produce the original or a voucher. P. T.'s copy, if it existed, must have been demanded when he made his confession, and it is among the circumstances which show this confession to have been a fiction, that the poet in his Narrative omitted to mention the surrender of the important transcript, and never subsequently alluded to its existence. Without copies or originals Curll could not violate the secrecy for which Pope affected to be anxious. The poet, in fact, did not put forth his pretence for printing the correspondence till he had received practical evidence of the poverty of the bookseller's resources. Curll's volume was published on the 14th of July,[99] and Pope's advertisement did not come out till the following day. It was drawn up on the 13th,[100] when he had probably seen an early copy of the book, or he would have waited till the next morning, when he could have read in conjunction with the rest of the public the letters which Atterbury was alleged to have written to him. They were three in number. The longest was a statement printed by the bishop, and addressed to the entire world, refuting a charge of having corrupted the manuscript of Clarendon's History. The remaining two were pronounced by Pope to be forgeries, and of these one had already appeared in a Biographical Dictionary,[101] and the other consisted chiefly of poetical quotations. Not a line had oozed out from his private papers, and the argument for divulging them was gone. A man who was eager to drag them into day might use the incident as a pretext, but anybody who did not court publicity would have left them in their obscurity upon the discovery that they continued safe from prying eyes and transcribing fingers. Pope's practice and professions were as usual at variance. He raised a cry of distress at the publication of his letters by P. T., and laid hold of the first hollow excuse for completing the obnoxious design, and spreading before the world that portion of his correspondence which P. T. had been unable to smuggle into print, in consequence of Curll's unexpected revelation of the plot.

Pope stated in his advertisement, that along with his correspondence with the Bishop of Rochester he should publish such of the letters as were genuine from the surreptitious volume, and added, that the work would be printed "with all convenient speed."[102] But speed was not convenient. The project slept till March 26, 1736, when he writes to Fortescue, "Your too partial mention of the book of letters, with all its faults and follies, which Curll printed and spared not (nor yet will spare, for he has published a fourth sham volume yesterday), makes me think it may not be amiss to send you—what I know you will be much more pleased with than I can be—a proposal for a correct edition of them, which at last I find must be offered, since people have misunderstood an advertisement I printed some time ago, merely to put some stop to that rascal's books, as a promise that I would publish such a book." His excuse for the delay in redeeming his pledge of supplying an authentic edition, is a curious instance of the absurdity to which a man of genius may be reduced, when, unable to divulge his true reasons, he has recourse to invention. "People" could not have "misunderstood" the advertisement as "a promise that he would publish such a book," for the promise was distinct, and there was no room left for misunderstanding in the matter. But if we allow that an advertisement in the newspapers, asserting that he was under a necessity of putting out a genuine edition, which would be printed with all convenient speed, was only designed to be read as a threat for the purpose of stopping Curll's trade, it is plain that Curll must have become acquainted with an interpretation which was apparent to the rest of the world, and would have paid no attention to a menace that was not intended to be executed. Unless Pope desired that the public should believe he was serious, the whole proceeding was objectless. He was long in learning the misconstruction which had been put upon his words. While the announcement was fresh, and likely to have been a topic of conversation, he remained completely passive, and it was not till after an interval of more than eight months that he discovered he was supposed to have given a pledge, and must immediately redeem it. He had forgotten that he had betrayed to Fortescue that he was in earnest at the time the advertisement appeared. On August 2, 1735, a fortnight after it was issued, Pope wrote to him, and asked to have back his letters; "for," said he, "I find my collection, such as it is, must be hastened, or will not be so effectual." It had not yet occurred to him to maintain that his promised publication was a feint. The true cause of his procrastination has been suggested by the critic in the Athenæum. He had distributed portions of his extensive correspondence with Caryll among other groups, and addressed several of the letters to men of higher position or greater fame. He must have rejected the fictitious compound from his genuine edition, or waited till Caryll, who was sinking with age and illness, was in his grave. The latter was the course which Pope preferred. His friend was no doubt dying at the close of March, 1736, and on the 6th of April he expired. With him disappeared the sole difficulty which stood in the way of the new edition, and the poet from that moment was active in its prosecution.

It is amusing to observe the indifference and distaste which Pope feigned for an undertaking that was entirely within his own discretion. He began by announcing that the work would be printed with speed. He then protested he did not mean what he said, and only yielded because others had erroneously inferred, that by advertising in the papers that he would immediately print a book he intended to signify that a book would be printed. He next resolved to publish by subscription, which was a mode of levying forced contributions through the canvass of the author and his friends. He hoped nevertheless that the subscription would fail, in order that he might be excused from an act to which he had been over-persuaded.[103] His hope that support would be withheld had grown to a belief when he wrote to Allen, on the 30th of April, and Allen, who had sought his acquaintance from admiration of the benevolence and goodness of heart which pervaded his letters, offered to bear the cost of the impression. The public by their backwardness afforded Pope the opportunity he professed to desire of dropping the work, but the patronage of an individual was sufficient encouragement. He at once replied that he would "not serve his private fame entirely at another's expense," but that he would "accept the assistance in any moderate degree," which meant that he would allow Allen to defray the outlay which was in excess of the amount subscribed.[104] Time wore on, the letters were three-quarters printed, and the subscribers were few.[105] In his first receipts the poet had stated that if he did not proceed with the book the money should be returned on demand after midsummer.[106] The unwilling public pleaded the uncertainty as a reason for not putting down their names. He admitted that the doubt they expressed was a pretence, and informed Allen that to deprive them of the pretext he had substituted receipts in which he promised to deliver the volume by Lady Day.[107] His object, he said, was to save Allen's purse. The reluctance had ceased to be with the poet. He began by consenting to print a book he would rather not have printed, that he might oblige the world, and ended by compelling the world to subscribe to a book they would rather not have purchased, that they might oblige Pope.