The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XI. The Period of the French Revolution.
§ 23. Curll and Grub Street
If Tonson, Lintot and Dodsley may be accounted among the aristocracy of the publishers of their time, the nadir of the profession is well represented in their contemporary, Edmund Curll, that shameless rascal, in whom even the writer of The Dunciad found his match for scurrility. In the annals of the trade, Curll’s name stands for all that is false, low, dishonest and obscene; indeed, his activity in producing books of an indecent character added a new word—Curlicism—to the language. His many misdeeds brought him varied experiences: from the trick which Pope played upon him at the Swan tavern, and the tossing he received at the hands of the Westminster scholars, up through more than one appearance at the bar of the House of Lords, down to imprisonment, fine and the pillory. But none of these things deterred “the dauntless Curll” from his vicious course. After he had been fined for printing The Nun in her Smock, and had stood in the pillory for publishing The Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland, he continued to advertise these books in his lists, with a note appended to the latter calling attention to the fact that he had suffered fine and corporal punishment on account of it.
At the outset of his career, he put forth as a “second edition, improv’d,” a mere reprint with new title-page—not an unknown deception, it is true; but, with Curll, literary fraud was habitual, and he had no hesitation in suggesting a wellknown writer to be the author of some worthless production by one of his hacks. Elizabeth Montagu, in a letter of 12 November, 1739, writes indignantly:
Curll’s personal appearance, vividly sketched by Amory, was as unprepossessing as his cast of mind. “Edmund Curll,” he says, “was in person very tall and thin, an ungainly, awkward, white-faced man. His eyes were a light-grey, large, projecting, goggle, and pur-blind. He was splay-footed, and baker-kneed.” He adds, however, that “he had a good natural understanding, and was well acquainted with more than the title pages of books.” And, since even a Curll must have his due, it should not be forgotten that he published a number of books of antiquarian, topographical and biographical interest.
The name of Curll is also closely associated with Grub street, a domain which is wont to be a temptation to indulge in the picturesque—and to figure as a literary hades, inhabited by poor, but worthy, geniuses, with stony-hearted booksellers as exacting demons. Not that the existence of Grub street is to be doubted: it was, indeed, a grim actuality, and many a garreteer realised by experience
It was in the first half of the eighteenth century, after the expiry of the licensing laws had removed all restraint from the press, that this underworld of letters most flourished, writers and booksellers striving with avid haste to make the most out of the opportunity of the moment. Unscrupulous members of both professions were little troubled by conscience, their common concern being to produce—the one with the minimum of labour, the other at the minimum of expense—anything that would sell. Booksellers were “out” for business, and paid as little as possible. Some of them were hard taskmasters, no doubt, but they had a sorry team to drive, and one may believe that, in general, these Grub street authors got as much as they were worth.
In his Life of Dr. John North, Roger North speaks of the pickpocket work of demi-booksellers, who “crack their brains to find out selling subjects, and keep hirelings in garrets at hard meat to write and correct by the groat”; and Amory, writing of Curll, says that “his translators in pay lay three in a bed in the Pewter Platter Inn at Holborn, and he and they were for ever at work to deceive the public. John Dunton, a man of many projects, who, in his time, published some six hundred books and himself was the possessor of a ready pen, had considerable experience of hackwriters. As soon as he set up in business, they began to ply him with “specimens”; but he conceived a very poor opinion of the race, and thought their learning very often lay in as little compass as their honesty. Of William Bradshaw, whom he considered to be the best accomplished hackney author he had met, and who wrote for him The Parable of the Magpye, of which many thousands were sold, he says,
One of the multifarious occupations of these literary parasites was the abridgment of successful works. Pirate booksellers, like Samuel Lee of Lombard street, “such a pirate, such a cormorant was never before,” or Henry Hills, in Blackfriars, who regularly printed every good poem or sermon that was published, might, at their risk, reprint whole books; but the safer way was to bring out an abridgment, a method of filching against which there was no legal redress. This was the course pursued by Nathaniel Crouch, who
Several of the best writers of the age—Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith—served some apprenticeship in this lower walk, and the latter, in his Present State of Polite Learning, has feelingly depicted the hardships endured by the “poor pen and ink labourer.” But while many of those who were worthy in due time freed themselves from thraldom, others, like Samuel Boyse, sitting at his writing wrapped in a blanket with arms thrust through two holes in it, found therein a natural habitat.