When one publisher, Edmund Curll, greedily published and erroneously ascribed a certain collection of poems to Pope, poems that could have compromised him legally above all other considerations, he responded well beyond what George might have done: he poisoned him and then wrote about it in the “Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison,” as “publish’d by an Eye Witness.”[1]
That he called it an “Account” can be read in a variety of ways here: its meaning as “narration” or “relation” of an incident, as it would mean most obviously in this context, arrives last to the English language; “Account” as a “reckoning of money received and paid” has a longer presence in the language and cannot be neglected; and of course it describes Curll “answering for conduct,” in the sense that an “account” is one’s judgment and punishment.[2] In this word we can see the relation between the story within the work, the story of the money made off that work, and the story of who is right and who is wrong.
The work begins with what is, in once sense, a celebration of Pope’s subversion of the power of publishers, and, in another, a self-abasing lamentation of the “horrid and barbarous revenge” upon the person of this publisher: “History furnishes us with Examples of many Satyrical Authors who have fallen Sacrifices to Revenge, but not of any Booksellers that I know of, except the unfortunate Subject of the following Papers." A tone of mock-chastisement, with Curll as “the unfortunate Subject,” exists concurrently with a laudatory presentation of Pope committing a justified revenge. The meaning of “account” as judgment is complicated considering that Pope receives no punishment and it is more an “account”—or narration—of the “account”—or punishment—of Curll for a crime that precedes the revenge. The ironic condemnation of Pope by himself makes it a mock-“account,” a feigned reprimand of someone instituting a very real reprimand.
The reason for revenge against Curll is that he ascribed the Court Poems to either “a Lady of Quality, Mr. Pope, or Mr. Gay." This act may surely be considered one worthy of retaliation as Curll describes, while under the influence of the poison, how, “if [he] survives this, [he] will be revenged on” the man who ascribed the printing of the poems to him by “reprint[ing] these very Poems in his Name.” Ascribing acts to those who did not commit them is malicious; while at the same time committing a malicious act and ascribing it to oneself—“Mr. Pope”—seems more acceptable in a print world concerned with literature instead of money.
The complexity of Pope’s work goes beyond the division between his attacking self and the one that describes him–the “Eye Witness”—in the third person as a “Person of bright Parts … carry’d away by the Instigations of the Devil”: it lies in the ambiguity between which of these Popes asserts the presence of his true meaning. He could have poisoned Curll as the simple act of revenge it is purported to be, and then written about it to further articulate and publicize the humiliation. However, what is more likely, Pope always intended to write about it and thus he published the incident twice, however untraditional the first satiric attack might have been. Indeed he goes to a bookseller with an idea and its physical representation, though it is poison as opposed to a draft; the greedy bookseller accepts anything given to him, though it is a “Glass of sack” opposed to the envelop of a manuscript; this then multiplies greatly in the possession of the bookseller as he reproduces it for the public, though it is vomit and not books that he bestows upon the world. Pope, however, would argue this final difference to be “delusive” as well considering much of what Curll published. As a bookseller he did not merely discard Pope’s creation into he the toilet; instead he distributed it in his “strange Fancy to run a Vomiting all over the House.”
Pope understood that a disagreement with a bookseller needs to take place extratextually for him to be able to subvert the control of this “powerful intermediary” who is in charge of the presentation of his work to the public, or, in the case of the “Court Poems,” what is not his work. It was this very understanding that led him to conceive the Dunciad in the way he did: that it would be a poison to the economically logocentric, disguised by what they love to consume: books filled with the controversy the public loves to consume so much. the Dunciad is the poison in Curll and the a in différance, and, it incites him to throw up his “Compleat Key to the Dunciad,” in the year of its publication and the Curliad, following the Variorum edition. It defers Pope's intention and forces us to search through vomit it to find it. Yet Curll seems wholly unaware that the poison of Pope’s design lingers within him and forces him to spew self-damning nonsense.
[1] Pope, Alexander. “Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison On the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller; With a faithful copy of his Last Will and Testament,” and “A Further Account.” The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, Vol. I. Norman Ault, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936. 257-266, 275-285.
[2] “Account.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
"he poisoned him" you should clarify who poisoned who (even though it becomes clear if one keeps reading)
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