‘guiltless of his country’s blood’—for all that is now known of him is that he used to go hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a full-bottomed wig tied up at the ends—had been given by that gentleman to a lady with whom he had relations, who being, as will sometimes happen, a little pressed for money, sold them for ten guineas to Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a bookseller and publisher, upon whose head every kind of abuse has been heaped, not only by the authors whom he actually pillaged, but by succeeding generations of penmen who never took his wages, but none the less revile his name. He was a wily ruffian. In the year 1727 he was condemned by His Majesty’s judges to stand in the pillory at Charing Cross for publishing a libel, and thither doubtless, at the appointed hour, many poor authors flocked, with their pockets full of the bad eggs that should have made their breakfasts, eager to wreak vengeance upon their employer; but a printer in the pillory has advantages over others traders, and Curll had caused handbills to be struck off and distributed amongst the crowd, stating, with his usual effrontery, that he was put in the pillory for vindicating the blessed memory of her late Majesty Queen Anne. This either touched or tickled the mob—it does not
matter which—who protected Curll whilst he stood on high from further outrage, and when his penance was over bore him on their shoulders to an adjacent tavern, where (it is alleged) he got right royally drunk. [65] Ten years earlier those pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got hold of him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. This was the man who bought Pope’s letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. Pope, oddly enough, though very angry, does not seem on this occasion to have moved the Court of Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending of the volume. Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when he obtained an injunction against Curll, restraining the sale of a volume containing some of his letters to Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid its publication had never been established, and the view that a letter was a gift to the receiver had received some countenance. But Pope had so much of the true temper of a litigant, and so loved a nice point, that he might have been expected to raise the question on the first opportunity. He, however, did not do so, and the volume had a considerable sale—a fact not
likely to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought occurred, ‘Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.’ His communications with his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would, and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer’s feelings. The only way to avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friendship was for all the letters to be returned to the writer, who had arranged for them to be received by a great nobleman, against whose strong boxes Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope’s friends did not at first quite catch his drift. ‘You need give yourself no trouble,’ wrote Swift, though at a later date than the transaction I am now describing; ‘every one of your letters shall be burnt.’ But that was not what Pope wanted. The first letters he recovered were chiefly those he had written to Mr. Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of character. Mr. Caryll parted with his letters with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was at the extraordinary pains of causing them all to be transcribed; in a word, he kept copies
and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set about as paltry a job as ever engaged the attention of a man of genius. He proceeded to manufacture a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified to his heart’s content. He took a bit of one letter and tagged it on to a bit of another letter, and out of these two foreign parts made up an imaginary letter, never really written to anybody, which he addressed to Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he chose. He did this without much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with much solemnity, the nobleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr. Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good. The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt,
he opened a sham correspondence under the initials ‘P.T.’ ‘P.T.’ was made to state that he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope’s, who had done him some disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what ‘P.T.’ was offering him. Pope replied by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying the existence of any such letters. ‘P.T.,’ however, still kept it up, and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a clergyman’s wig and lawyer’s bands. Curll at last advertised as forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope’s letters to, and, as the advertisement certainly ran, from divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for threatening to publish peers’ letters without their leave. Curll, however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of their Lordship’s House that this was a mistake, and that no noblemen’s letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted, gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but the judicious even then opined
that he protested somewhat too much. He promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll’s edition—a proceeding on his part which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope’s publisher, but what came of the litigation I cannot say.
The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it actually existed, after long remaining in manuscript, has been published, and we have now the real letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote to Caryll as follows:—
‘I have been just taking a walk in St. James’s Park, full of the reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above and gaze on the world at a vast distance, as now we do on those.’
Poor stuff enough, one would have thought. On re-reading this letter Pope was so pleased with his moonshine that he transferred the whole passage to an imaginary letter, to which
he gave the, of course fictitious, date of February 10th, 1715, and addressed to Mr. Blount; so that, as the correspondence now stands, you first get the Caryll letter of 1713, ‘I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine,’ and so on about the starry walks; and then you get the Blount letter of 1715, ‘I have been just taking a solitary walk by moonshine;’ and go on to find Pope refilled with his reflections as before. Mr. Elwin does not, you may be sure, fail to note how unlucky Pope was in his second date, February 10th, 1715; that being a famous year, when the Thames was frozen over, and as the thaw set in on the 9th, and the streets were impassable even for strong men, a tender morsel like Pope was hardly likely to be out after dark. But, of course, when Pope concocted the Blount letter in 1735, and gave it any date he chose, he could not be expected to carry in his head what sort of night it was on any particular day in February twenty-two years before. It is ever dangerous to tamper with written documents which have been out of your sole and exclusive possession even for a few minutes.