Review: Edmund Curll - Bookseller by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers

Back in 2015, I read The Unspeakable Curll by Darin Strauss, the life of a much maligned eighteenth century bookseller. Ten years later (and where does the time go?) I read Edmund Curll: Bookseller by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers. The books themselves were written over seventy years apart, and a lot has been found out about Grub Street since then.

Strauss’s was a joyful book to read, declaring itself not a proper biography and admitting that he didn’t know where Curll came from or where he was buried. He adopted a scampy, playful attitude to his telling and often characterised his subject based on his own feelings about Curll than any definite facts. Baines and Rogers are far more factual. The digitisation of libraries and scholarship has meant they can track down Curll’s work in far more detail, provide painstaking evidence for their conjectures and treat the bookseller far more as a historical fact than the bogeyman of legend or the almost Del Boy figure portrayed in Strauss. They admit that Strauss’s is the more entertaining book but their more serious, sober, reportage probably brings the reader closer to the truth.

They pin down Curll’s birthday (14th of July, 1683) but can’t find a certain location. Whats more, Curll was never officially apprenticed into the book trade, nor ever served in the Stationer’s guild. There are suggestions of him working in stalls around Covent Garden, which inveigled him into bookshops that merely sold works before beginning to produce his own.

In some ways, Curll was not a joiner. Aside from never joining the guild, he very rarely published as one of the congers, the large groups of booksellers used to fund prestige projects. Despite that, he did often collaborate with other people, though these seemed to be looser, more ad-hoc affairs. He’d work with other booksellers for the occasional work, often to hide his own involvement. He also had writers he worked with. He often fell in and out with them, but there were those he worked with for years and years.

He became infamous for quick cash-grab books. He was very good at digging up old texts, giving them new title pages and tying them in with some old scandal or newsworthy topic. He had certain ‘go-to’ texts that he’d rename, retitle, repackage or bundle up with other works multiple times over decades. His real skill was marketing, and he was a master in shining up something a little old or past its sell-by-date. If he had something by a reputable name, a casual work passed between friends that ended up with him, or a letter he’d been passed, he could reuse it in a hundred ways.

His instant biographies became famous. He’d throw out a hastily written account of a life, bundle it with any other material he had found or had lying around (when it often only has the faintest relation to the subject) and finish it off with the person’s will, which could be had on public record. As the authors note, “Curll could do more with an et-cetera than anybody”. He’d advertise for the public to send things to him about the forthcoming subject, an almost user-generated content model.

The name that sold best was Alexander Pope’s. Pope was incensed that this tradesman would publish things under his name, especially when Curll got hold of some indiscreet satires meant to be passed about in private. Curll’s response was to point out that if writers didn’t want their satires printed by him, they shouldn’t write them. The war between them benefitted them both, with Pope even managing to manipulate Curll into giving him an excuse to publish his own very polished versions of his letters. Curll, on the other hand would slap Pope’s name on all sorts.. one collection included a poem by Pope, a few essays and the love letters of Henry VIII - it wasn’t the content he sold, it was the cover page.

As well as this, Curll had a pseudo-pornographic range, with some naughty translated stories and some works described as medical textbooks. One work on masturbation included the story of Peter Anthony Motheux, a scholar who INXS-d himself. Yet he had a solid line of religious books, essays, sermons and devotionals.

Baines and Rogers also pursue a line of antiquarian books, which do seem to have been an interest of Curll’s. As he was selling all the other stuff, he never quite gave up on publishing lavish accounts of cathedrals and their plaques.

This is a book laden with detail. There are hundreds of Curll publications named, traced and described. How Curll repackaged his works is minutely detailed, as are all the other works he had a hand in. It does make this a dense book. An interesting one, because it shows exactly how Curll, operated which makes it easy to see exactly why a certain kind of writer hated him but also to see what a modern attitude he had to material. A modern Curll would be flogging AI generated cookbooks through Amazon Marketplace - not a noble work, but one which understands what the market wants and the easiest way to give it to them. The Curll in this is not someone who is standing up for the guileless writer, he’s a chancer.

The book ends by sketching out his strange impact on culture. Many of the practices he developed died out as bookselling became more respectable and regulated (and are whizzing their way back into the online wild west). His mythic figure is such that any image of a Grub Street writer has a Curll somewhere in the background (literally in the case of Hogarth’s ‘The Distressed Poet) and this book does a good job in creating his as a realistic person. 

Near the end, the book quotes a big chunk of The Life of John Buncle, where Curll appears as an ugly but skilful businessman. Of course the book ends with his Will, it’s what Curll would have done.

Playing With History: 2 (The Plot)

 In writing something intended to be a respectful piece of historical fiction, there are some really strange limits and freedoms. Last week I talked about how the tussle between history and narrative worked in producing characters, this week I want to talk a little about the plot.

According to Natty doesn’t follow any strict ‘heroes journey’ or anything like that. None of my books have really, it seems a very restrictive way of understanding a story. Partly, the book is modelled on Beryl Bainbridge’s According to Queeney, in its use of year-defined chapters adding events and layers to the central characters through a series of mostly self-contained scenes and vignettes, but my recent re-re-read has also shown me how I’m a different writer from her and do want a little more narrative force. I’m most inspired by Margaret Atwood’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where the novel is a handy receptacle for useful, interesting and nourishing things and, as they roll about with each other, they rub up and recontextualise each other.

This means I have to make a criteria of what things will be useful, interesting and nourishing for the book I am trying to write. The central conflict in the book is between the inner self and the outer world - it’s a theme I find myself constantly going back to, most of the books I have written have an underlying warning about getting lost in the internal realm and losing connection with others. In this book Nat has his desires, for connection with those around him and connection to the physically beautiful. His desires are impeded and thwarted by his relationship with his brother Samuel, his relationship with his family, with his town and with wider society in general. His wish to be connected pulls him to succumb and acquiesce to their wishes but his desire for the beautiful encourages him to pull away. 

In the very first chapter of the book, the four-year-old Nat is put into a very beautiful frock. He admires it and loves it but is worried, this is Samuel’s London frock, it has particular significance to him and Nat knows Samuel will not appreciate him wearing it. He goes downstairs, tries to get the attention of his father who is busy (as he often is), goes to the kitchen and tries to get attention from his mother, who half-listens as she fusses. He’s eating his breakfast (of oats) as Samuel appears at the top of the stairs and goes down into the kitchen. 

As expected, Samuel is furious about Nat wearing his frock. It doesn’t matter that he’s now of an age when he’s not expected to wear one and that it’s functionally useless to him, the frock is the special outfit bought for him when he went to London to meet Queen Anne and be touched for scrofula. It doesn’t matter that his memories are fuzzy, he feels that Nat is appropriating his own disabilities and memories, he demands Nat change. Here is the first pull between Nat’s desire to have a good relationship with his brother and his desire for beauty. It’s only a small thing, but Nat is a small boy, and those conflicts will grow bigger as he does. Nat gives in and goes up to change, his desire for connection wins this time.

This simple, domestic chapter uses all sorts of historical influences. One of the first is the geography of the house. The boys are located in separate rooms up top, their father in the bookshop on the ground floor and their mother in the kitchen in the basement. Of course, they will penetrate each other’s spaces, especially as they grow older, but the geography of the house help differentiate their characters and spheres of influence. 

The London Frock, an important part of this first chapter, was an item brought back from London a few years before. As Sarah says to Nat, it was not a trip that she and Samuel made, but one all three of them did. Sarah was pregnant with Nat at the time and did not tell Michael in case he forbid the journey due to it. So, Nat has the notion that he was part of this expedition, even if Sam sees him as an intruder who came later.

Sam pursues his argument about the frock in a pseudo-legal way. He’s only a young boy, but precocious, and he uses slips of latin to bolster his argument. The older Samuel Johnson was certainly argumentative, he ghostwrote an entire series of law lectures and was always interested in the law. All parts of the older Sam showing through in his chapter.

As well as this, there’s the fact that they eat oat porridge for breakfast, something they did, which puts Johnson’s later definition of oats into a different perspective. Sam himself has coffee with his breakfast, which no one else has, this suggests a favouritism towards him but is also one of the things he remembers being most affectionate to his mother for.

So, the history sparks with the characters to create a scene which probably never happened but could have. It encapsulates Nat’s twin desires and the tension between them. It sets up the characters and their relationships with each other. I said at the beginning that I was going to talk plot, but find myself talking character, because in this sort of book plot is character. I hope for all its smallness, it’s not a dull start. If it is, the next chapter is more dramatic. The reason Nat’s been put into the special frock in the first place is because it’s Easter day and the Easter service of 1716 was interrupted by some masonry falling down, causing chaos. 

 

Playing with History: 1 (The Characters)

Although I have written books set in a past time or inspired by old works, According to Natty is my first straightforwardly historical novel. While I needed a realism of setting, there wasn’t much realism of story in my 1911 set novel about huge, breaking, mind-control machines and the eighteenth century setting of Odes to the Big City was a fantasia created out of the literature than a real place.

But the Lichfield in According to Natty is a real place and the four residents of Breadmarket Street were real people. I loved my research stage. Aside from the continuous joy I take in anything that could be seen as procrastination, it meant I could read about the things I’m already so interested in. Yet, it was an odd research, because I had to remember that it was all in aid of creating a plausible fiction.

It’s a completely different mindset than when I write fiction, with different constraints and freedoms and different needs pulling in different directions. First, you have to let the research lead you somewhere but then you have to use imagination to flesh it out but still keep it within the borders created by the research and then you have to make it work as a proper narrative with functional fictional characters. 

My take on the young Samuel Johnson could prove a little controversial (if it gets a readership, I haven’t even finished the first draft yet). Johnsonians are very attached to Samuel, as am I, but it seems pretty clear that young Sam was not the nicest of people. Even the old, established, settled Samuel Johnson was hard work but even he admitted that he used to be harder work, not even trying to be sociable until he was 30 (and the book ends when he’s 27). What’s more, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines of descriptions of his early life to see something of a tyrant in him. When he has his friends carry him to school, or pull him across the ice, they are presented as spontaneous acts of respect to his youthful intellect but they could as easily be acts he forces on his friends. Samuel seems to treat many of his childhood friends poorly, or transactionally - using Edmund Hector to transcribe the book he was commissioned to translate.

Whats more, there are good character reasons to depict a pricklier Samuel Johnson. He’s a genius but constrained by his body, with increasingly deteriorating mental health and strained against narrow expectations of his community and his family. It makes character-sense for him to have a chip on his shoulder. Even more compellingly, from a narrative point of view, the book is told from the viewpoint of his little brother, Nathaniel.

We know Samuel’s own guilt in later life towards his brother, but there’s also this sense in how Nathaniel was left out or stands at the sidelines of anecdotes that Samuel simply didn’t notice him very much. Whats more, Samuel seems to be the most obvious and likely antagonist to Nathaniel, they are both rivals for the affection in their house and the esteem from their town. 

Whereas the problem of Samuel is that he’s so written about that a fictional representation of him needs to thread some tight needles, Nathaniel is almost a complete unknown. Samuel represents him pretty consistently as decent enough bloke but seems to imply he’s pretty unremarkable. To be honest, I reckon this was pretty accurate. It makes sense that someone growing up in a house full of nagging and the melancholic states of father, Michael and Samuel himself, that Nathaniel would grow up into something of a people-pleaser, a conciliatory figure with an easy sociability and laid back attitude - a decent bloke. Even in our one remaining text by Nathaniel, a letter when he was in his deepest despair, prepared to run away to America, blaming his family for not supporting him, Nathaniel ends with a cheery note of love and thanks for supporting him. So I think the easygoing nature was not an act, but a response to his environment.

Yet, as the protagonist of a novel, he needs a little more desire and agency. Yes, he has the desire to have a closer relationship with his family, especially Samuel, but he needs something outside of that to want. This is where I have gone completely off-piste. I have decided that Nathaniel is captivated by visual beauty. I have him keenly aware of colour and texture from an early age. His first struggle in the book is between wearing something beautiful (that Samuel had outgrown) or giving in to Samuel’s wish that he not wear it. What’s more, I’ve made this fictional desire for beauty into the reason he gets into (possibly legal) trouble. We don’t actually know what Nathaniel did wrong, but in my version he stole/finagled his way into materials to create a beautiful book. 

It makes a sort of sense to me. The Johnsons are a family surrounded by books, he has near him access (or at least awareness) of the stunning St Chad’s Gospel - if I give Nathaniel a want, the it’d be to make a stunning book. I also like the notion that Nathaniel is the only Johnson to really appreciate books, as a physical object at least. Sarah resents books with their clutter and unsaleabilty, Micheal sees them as advancement, Samuel guts them for knowledge but only Nathaniel has a pure love of the thing in itself. And it’s what dooms him eventually. 

The other real difficulty I’ve had writing my research is to stop calling Samuel, Johnson. There’s a bunch of Johnsons in this thing.

An Author to be Lett by Richard Savage

It’s time to go deep into Grub Street, into the late 1720s. Pope has released his first version of The Dunciad anonymously and is collecting the praises and attacks in his next version. He’s hired a Grub Street hack with dubious, noble parentage who has recently been pardoned off a death sentence for murder,  to dig up the dirt on his victims, that man is Richard Savage. 

In 1729, Pope published the official Dunciad, with many of the notes influenced by Savage’s muckraking and Savage himself released his own work against the dunces, An Author to be Lett in which he played the part of Iscariot Hackney, the epitome of all base practices and pride of Grub Street. 

Born among ill omens, Iscariot quickly grew up to be the tattletale of the class, setting boys against each other and masters against boys. He also developed a love of pulling wings off flies, legs of insects and harming stray dogs. This, he says, set him up to be a wit, as “to be a great wit is to take a Pleasure in giving everybody great pain.”  He also developed a skill for pilfering, which would help him become a great plagiarist later on. 

Set with a “propensity to sneer at all Mankind”, he is set on his way to be a writer. Of course his first publisher is Edmund Curll. He manages to cheat Curll of some money but is easily counter-cheated and put into servitude in translating things from the French “they never wrote” and other literary chores. 

He was once pleased that some of works were passed off by a Lord as his own in private, a joy that was stolen when the Lord then published them. He has a reputations as, “a great Joker, and deal in Clenches, Puns, quibbles, jibes, conundrums and carry a good whichits.” He also attacks authors who publish under their own names but writes under other authors pen-names to aid his sales. He also writes technical works he knows nothing about by misusing indexes and dictionaries and creates pretend dialogues from Henley’s Oratory. 

He’s developed a skill at all kinds of ephemeral poetry, especially those praising flash-in-the-pan successes. He dedicates works to people who would never appreciate them and is a ghost writer for a member of parliament, a man so low even Iscariot treats with contempt. When parliament is in session he makes a living writing for either party, when it’s not, he makes do by writing prophecies and tales of ‘wonders’. He often hears these stories being praised and hates the public for taking to them.

He’s tried his hand at theatre but not hit the big times and offered himself as a government spy but was rebuffed. As he says, he’s tried “all Means (but wha Fools call Honest ones) to make a Livelihood. His latest wheeze is as a tutor to boys on the grand tour. He can crib any academic knowledge he needs from the same Grub Street anthologies he writes and knows the really important things to know t be successful in the task is where the comfortable beds and good food are. If he’s really good, he’ll know where the free young women are as well and set them up with his charge. By doing this, he boasts, he’ll have saved up enough money to retire to Switzerland or Wales.

He ends by imagining how famous he should be considering he is “a Perfect town Author.” He hates anyone who hates him and looks down on anyone who helps him, as helping him shows how pathetic they must be. He’s sold hundreds of copies of his works, mainly because he retitles them and releases them as new, something he’s learned from Curll.

Finally, he says where he can be found for hiring. A number of gin-shops, nightly rent rooms and other low-down places. There, from Hockley-in-the-Hole (a well known Highwayman hangout) he’ll be happy to make any deal with any possible client.

In this work, Savage succinctly and colourfully lays out every attack on Grub Street. The venality of it, the lack of morals or gratitude, the bare attempts at wit and learning, the bile. It’s a Dunciad stripped of its poetry, it’s heroic trappings and its creative flourish. It’s plain dealing, no-holds-barred invective.

It’s also something of an accurate self-portrait. Savage was turned down as a spy, he did deal in invective and muckraking, he did betray or belittle everyone who ever tried to patronise him. He even tried to retire to Wales but got bored and died in a debtor’s jail in Bristol. Yet, Savage was greatly appealing to the young(ish) Samuel Johnson who befriended him soon after and turned the story of his life into the prototypical tale of the artist too elevated for this harsh world.

Were there writers like Iscariot Hackney in Grub Street. Probably. But there were many other stories, tales of people accomplishing great things or simply being able to live based on their writing. These Grub Street writers created modern newspapers, dictionaries, close-reading, literary criticism, advertising, agony-aunt, lifestyle pieces, cookbooks - and so many other things. It’s hard to remember when reading works by Pope and his group, but they were the losing side of the early eighteenth century culture war. Their ideal of gentleman writers using time-established classical forms and modes was on it’s way out. The hacks won, Iscariot Hackney was triumphant - and the new age of social media is busily sweeping away the world they built. Who knows what the next will be?