A mighty contest from trivial things — the quarrel between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll

Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak of plague. Close scrutiny of the first few decades of the 18th century reveals some startling (and oddly reassuring) parallels with our own trying times. In his new book, Pat Rogers, an expert on the writings of Alexander Pope and much else, resurrects what you might think was an obscure battle over copyright between Pope and the Grub Street bookseller and printer Edmund Curll. Their quarrel, though, becomes a prism through which Rogers captures the upheavals, hubbub and stench but, above all, the wit of that period, when words could have the explosive impact of hand grenades.

Pope was the most financially successful author of his time, largely through his translations of Homer, but also because of his brilliant poetic satires such as The Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728). But he was a Catholic at a time when all Catholics were under suspicion (and legislated against for their religion) after repeated Jacobite attempts to reinstate the Stuart monarchy. He was friends with Jonathan Swift and John Gay; portrayed by the society painters Godfrey Kneller and Michael Dahl; infamously irritable, and an easy target for caricature because illness in childhood had left him with a hunched back and disabilities that worsened with age.

Curll was brash, extrovert, salacious and quarrelsome. A keen supporter of the Whig (and Protestant) government of Robert Walpole, he was described as ‘a nuisance to mankind’ by Swift and ‘an ugly, squinting old fellow’ by Laetitia Pilkington. (Rogers ensures that women make frequent, and often surprising, appearances as writers and printers.) As a bookseller and publisher, Curll was renowned for his ‘Bawdy Books’ (often veering on pornography), his unabashed willingness to ascribe works to authors who had never written a word of them and his readiness to go to any lengths to make a book sell.