WRITING STORIES - The Lawless Early Days of Print

I doubt you could have missed the pair, seated in the Swan tavern on Fleet Street in London, that 28 March,  1716.  Last to arrive was the infamous publisher, pornographer and plagiarist Edmund Curll, a scarecrow of a man, very tall and thin, splayfooted, and with gray goggle eyes that threatened to burst from his pale face like a cartoon character.

 Waiting for him like a spider on his web was one the greatest poets in history, the oft quoted and revered deformed genius Alexander Pope (above), with a Roman nose and a spine so twisted he stood barely four feet six inches tall from his stylish shoes to the top of the hump on his back. 

Curll thought he had been invited to settle their disagreements. Pope intended upon doing just that, by poisoning his guest's beer.  Later Pope joyfully wrote a mocking obituary of his victim, “A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, bookseller...To be published weekly”. Curll was not killed, but he did projectile vomit until he wished his was dead. It was like a scene from Animal House. Ah, good times among the 18^th century London literati.

Publishing was in its youth, as young as the internet is today, and just as chaotic, dishonest, unregulated, and unencumbered with a functional business model. In 1688 there were only 68 printing presses in London, all controlled by members of the Stationer's Company or guild.  But in 1695 Parliament refused to renew the company's monopoly, setting off a decade of pure anarchy. Daniel Defoe of "Robinson Crusoe" fame, noted, “One man studies seven year(s), to bring a finished piece into the world, and a pirate printer....sells it for a quarter of the price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament".  So in 1710 Parliament obliged with The Statue of Anne - she was queen at the time - which created a 14 year copyright for authors. Still, six years later one author felt required to strike at a pirate printer – by making him vomit for 24 straight hours, and then attacking him again in print with his obituary in rhyme .

“Next o'er his books his eyes begin to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole;
How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug.”

Alexander Pope (above)  The Dunciad (1728)

Pope's justification for the poisoning of  Edmund Curl was as revenge for embarrassing the smart and lovely Lady Mary Montagu. The morally pompous poet, so famous for his version of Shakespeare and translations of Homer that he was nicknamed “the Bard”, was smitten with the lady. They even maintained a correspondence.  Pope privately published one of her poems. Copies were discretely passed about the English court. But soon, Curll was selling copies on the streets. Cultured nobility were not supposed to engage in publication – it smacked of stooping to actually earning a living. So Pope saw himself as a knight protecting Lady Montagu's honor when he poisoned  Curll and attacked him (among others) in his poem, “Dunciad”.  Curll responded by pirating the poem about his own attempted murder, even publishing an annotated version, also called a “key”. Mocked Curll, “How easily two wits agree, one writes the poem, one writes the key”.

Edmund Curll was not quite the “shameless Curll” Pope portrayed – not quite. He was infamous for keeping a revolving stable of struggling quill drivers “three in a bed” in the “low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses” jammed into Grub Street (above). Originally “grub” referred to the roots and insect larval uncovered when the street was originally scrapped out. Eventually it was adopted as a badge of honor by the poverty stricken occupants, like the eventual great biographer Samuel Johnson, or Ned Ward, who considered his profession as “scandalous...as whoring....”.

These grubs were hack writers, named after the ubiquitous horse drawn Hackney cabs that plied London's streets, going where ever their paying passengers demanded. 

Which usually meant, obscenity, which as today, always sold well, as did insults and attacks on the pompous and well to do - like Pope (above). The occasional advance paid to a hungry writer was a “grub stake”, and the pitiful meals they could afford were “grub”. Jonathan Swift, eventual creator of “Gulliver's Travels”, grandiosely referred to this literary sub-culture as "the Republica Grubstreet-aria. But like Johnson, Swift was clever enough and lucky enough to eventually escape the life as a mere grub.

In fact, Curll employed no more Grub Street warriors than any other Fleet Street baron. But he was particularly adept at supplying what the public wanted - licentious sex, and manufactured controversy. Curll paid grubs to engage in a “pamphlet war” - much like the Fox News war on Christmas - over the 1712 trial of Jane Wehham for witchcraft. (She was convicted).

Curll also printed cheap pirated books that sold for a mere shilling, thus undercutting the actual author's authorized editions. His growing empire made Edmund Curll one of the most successful barons on Fleet Street. Acknowledged one critic, “He had no scruples either in business or private life, but he published and sold many good books.”  All paid for by the dirty and stolen books he published illegally.

With Pope's urging, Curll was convicted of obscenity in 1716, and twice more in 1725. In 1726, Curll struck back by befriending the mistress of a Pope confident. She passed him several letters in which the arrogantly moral Pope admitting to lusting after the Blount Sisters, Terresa and Martha. “How gladly would I give all that I am worth,” Pope wrote in one purloined missive, “for one of their maidenheads.” Embarrassed, Pope helped engineer yet another Curll conviction in February of 1727. 

This time a frustrated and exasperated court fined Curll and ordered him pilloried for an hour. At the mercy of the mob, Curll was spared the usual assault of rotted food and manure when a pamphlet was read to the well armed crowd, claiming Curll was being punished for defending the departed Queen Anne. Thus misinformed, the mob carried him home on their shoulders. Pope was infuriated and determined to even the score.

One of Edmund Curll's most profitable ventures was what came to be called “Curlicisms”. When a well known figure died, Curll would advertise a forthcoming biography, and ask the public for any anecdotes about or letters from the deceased. Then, without validating the submissions Curll would hire a Grub street hack to string them together into an instant and usually inaccurate biography, creating what one potential subject described as “one of the new terrors of death.”

Curll had done this when the Duke of Buckingham died in 1721. But Buckingham was a peer, a member of the House of Lords, and that body summoned Curll for interrogation. Curll was unrepentant, since it was not a crime to publish writings of a peer without their permission. So the Lords made it illegal, and in this Pope saw a new opportunity to injure Curll.

In 1731 Curll announced a upcoming “Curlicism” of Alexander Pope, himself; “Nothing shall be wanting,” Curll assured his potential readers, “but his (universally desired) death.” Again Curll called for submissions and a mysterious figured identified only as “P.T.” offered letters written by Pope to the Lord of Oxford.  In 1734 Curll published the letters in a vicious biography of Pope. The next year Pope published his own “Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years”, including the same letters to Oxford.  But the details in Pope's version did not match those published by Curll, as Pope pointed out when he alleged Curll had violated the privilege of a member of the House of Lords and worse, slandered the Lord while doing it. The trap was sprung.

The only problem was, Curll again refused to repent. Called again before the Lords, Curll quipped, "Pope has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him.” And in fact as well. The Duke of Oxford still had the original letters in his files. So, asked Curll, where had P.T.'s inaccurate versions come from? Curll produced P.T.'s letters so the Lords could judge for themselves who was implicated by the handwriting. 

For a few days, the city of London, or that section that cared about such things, held its breath. And then an ad appeared in a small newspaper offering 20 guineas if P.T. would come forward to admit he had “acted by the direction of any other person.”  P.T., of course did not appear. And the ploy fooled no one – Pope had written the originals and the fakes and even the ad, and everybody knew it. The House found a political solution; since the published letters were fakes, the law had not been broken. Case closed, except Pope now had even more egg on his face.

Wrote Curll, “Crying came our bard into the world, but lying, it is to be feared, he will go out of it.”.

And so he did.  Pope died on 30 May, 1744, and Edmund Curll followed him in December of 1747.

Thus, Curll earned the last word. He described his relationship with Pope this way, “A fitter couple was never hatched, Some married are, indeed, but we are matched”.

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WRITING STORIES

I doubt you could have missed the pair, seated in the Swan tavern on Fleet Street in London, that 28 March,  1716.  Last to arrive was the infamous publisher, pornographer and plagiarist Edmund Curll, a scarecrow of a man, very tall and thin, splayfooted, and with gray goggle eyes that threatened to burst from his pale face like a cartoon character.

 Waiting for him like a spider on his web was one the greatest poets in history, the oft quoted and revered deformed genius Alexander Pope (above), with a Roman nose and a spine so twisted he stood barely four feet six inches tall from his stylish shoes to the top of the hump on his back. 

Curll thought he had been invited to settle their disagreements. Pope intended upon doing just that, by poisoning his guest's beer.  Later Pope joyfully wrote a mocking obituary of his victim, “A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, bookseller...To be published weekly”. Curll was not killed, but he did projectile vomit until he wished his was dead. It was like a scene from Animal House. Ah, good times among the 18^th century London literati.

Publishing was in its youth, as young as the internet is today, and just as chaotic, dishonest, unregulated, and unencumbered with a functional business model. In 1688 there were only 68 printing presses in London, all controlled by members of the Stationer's Company or guild.  But in 1695 Parliament refused to renew the company's monopoly, setting off a decade of pure anarchy. Daniel Defoe of "Robinson Crusoe" fame, noted, “One man studies seven year(s), to bring a finished piece into the world, and a pirate printer....sells it for a quarter of the price ... these things call for an Act of Parliament".  So in 1710 Parliament obliged with The Statue of Anne - she was queen at the time - which created a 14 year copyright for authors. Still, six years later one author felt required to strike at a pirate printer – by making him vomit for 24 straight hours, and then attacking him again in print with his obituary in ryme .

“Next o'er his books his eyes begin to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole;
How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er like an industrious bug.”

Alexander Pope (above)  The Dunciad (1728)

Pope's justification for the poisoning of  Edmund Curl was as revenge for embarrassing the smart and lovely Lady Mary Montagu. The morally pompous poet, so famous for his version of Shakespeare and translations of Homer that he was nicknamed “the Bard”, was smitten with the lady. They even maintained a correspondence.  Pope privately published one of her poems. Copies were discretely passed about the English court. But soon, of course.  Curll was selling copies on the streets. Cultured nobility were not supposed to engage in publication – it smacked of stooping to actually earning a living. So Pope saw himself as a knight protecting Lady Montagu's honor when he poisoned   Curll and attacked him (among others) in his poem, “Dunciad”.  Curll responded by pirating the poem about his own attempted murder, even publishing an annotated version, also called a “key”. Mocked Curll, “How easily two wits agree, one writes the poem, one writes the key”.

Edmund Curll was not quite the “shameless Curll” Pope portrayed – not quite. He was infamous for keeping a revolving stable of struggling quill drivers “three in a bed” in the “low-rent flophouses, brothels, and coffeehouses” jammed into Grub Street (above). Originally “grub” referred to the roots and insect larval uncovered when the street was originally scrapped out. Eventually it was adopted as a badge of honor by the poverty stricken occupants, like the eventual great biographer Samuel Johnson, or Ned Ward, who considered his profession as “scandalous...as whoring....”.

These grubs were hack writers, named after the ubiquitous horse drawn Hackney cabs that plied London's streets, going where ever their paying passengers demanded. 

Which usually meant, obscenity, which as today, always sold well, as did insults and attacks on the pompous and well to do - like Pope (above). The occasional advance paid to a hungry writer was a “grub stake”, and the pitiful meals they could afford were “grub”. Jonathan Swift, eventual creator of “Gulliver's Travels”, grandiosely referred to this literary sub-culture as "the Republica Grubstreet-aria. But like Johnson, Swift was clever enough and lucky enough to eventually escape the life as a mere grub.

In fact, Curll employed no more Grub Street warriors than any other Fleet Street baron. But he was particularly adept at supplying what the public wanted - licentious sex, and manufactured controversy. Curll paid grubs to engage in a “pamphlet war” - much like the Fox News war on Christmas - over the 1712 trial of Jane Wehham for witchcraft. (She was convicted).

Curll also printed cheap pirated books that sold for a mere shilling, thus undercutting the actual author's authorized editions. His growing empire made Edmund Curll one of the most successful barons on Fleet Street. Acknowledged one critic, “He had no scruples either in business or private life, but he published and sold many good books.”  All paid for by the dirty and stolen books he published.

With Pope's urging, Curll was convicted of obscenity in 1716, and twice more in 1725. In 1726, Curll struck back by befriending the mistress of a Pope confident. She passed him several letters in which the arrogantly moral Pope admitting to lusting after the Blount Sisters, Terresa and Martha. “How gladly would I give all that I am worth,” Pope wrote in one purloined missive, “for one of their maidenheads.” Embarrassed, Pope helped engineer yet another Curll conviction in February of 1727. 

This time a frustrated and exasperated court fined Curll and ordered him pilloried for an hour. At the mercy of the mob, Curll was spared the usual assault of rotted food and manure when a pamphlet was read to the well armed crowd, claiming Curll was being punished for defending the departed Queen Anne. Thus misinformed, the mob carried him home on their shoulders. Pope was infuriated and determined to even the score.

One of Edmund Curll's most profitable ventures was what came to be called “Curlicisms”. When a well known figure died, Curll would advertise a forthcoming biography, and ask the public for any anecdotes about or letters from the deceased. Then, without validating the submissions Curll would hire a Grub street hack to string them together into an instant and usually inaccurate biography, creating what one potential subject described as “one of the new terrors of death.”

Curll had done this when the Duke of Buckingham died in 1721. But Buckingham was a peer, a member of the House of Lords, and that body summoned Curll for interrogation. Curll was unrepentant, since it was not a crime to publish writings of a peer without their permission. So the Lords made it illegal, and in this Pope saw a new opportunity to injure Curll.

In 1731 Curll announced a upcoming “Curlicism” of Alexander Pope, himself; “Nothing shall be wanting,” Curll assured his potential readers, “but his (universally desired) death.” Again Curll called for submissions and a mysterious figured identified only as “P.T.” offered letters written by Pope to the Lord of Oxford.  In 1734 Curll published the letters in a vicious biography of Pope. The next year Pope published his own “Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years”, including the same letters to Oxford.  But the details in Pope's version did not match those published by Curll, as Pope pointed out when he alleged Curll had violated the privilege of a member of the House of Lords and worse, slandered the Lord while doing it. The trap was sprung.

The only problem was, Curll again refused to repent. Called again before the Lords, Curll quipped, "Pope has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him.” And in fact as well. The Duke of Oxford still had the original letters in his files. So, asked Curll, where had P.T.'s inaccurate versions come from? Curll produced P.T.'s letters so the Lords could judge for themselves who was implicated by the handwriting. 

For a few days, the city of London, or that section that cared about such things, held its breath. And then an ad appeared in a small newspaper offering 20 guineas if P.T. would come forward to admit he had “acted by the direction of any other person.”  P.T., of course did not appear. And the ploy fooled no one – Pope had written the originals and the fakes and even the ad, and everybody knew it. The House found a political solution; since the published letters were fakes, the law had not been broken. Case closed, except Pope now had even more egg on his face.

Wrote Curll, “Crying came our bard into the world, but lying, it is to be feared, he will go out of it.”.

And so he did.  Pope died on 30 May, 1744, and Edmund Curll followed him in December of 1747.

Thus, Curll earned the last word. He described his relationship with Pope this way, “A fitter couple was never hatched, Some married are, indeed, but we are matched”.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Thirty-Four

The bullet hit the old man in the right shoulder, but the impact was so slight it left him in the saddle, instinctively still controlling his horse. His staff agreed it was a spent round - meaning that like most wounded on battlefields, General Joe Johnston  (above) was not the intended target. The sheer volume of metal and wood and rocks traveling at supersonic and near supersonic speeds on a battlefield are intended not so much to kill as to strip away the veneer of a rational God and replace him with the harsh deity of chaos. This weary bullet was not strong enough to do that. That would come next.

In the fading light of a frustrating Saturday, 31 May, 1862, General Joseph Eggleston Johnston paused on a low hill just west of the Fair Oaks Station on the Richmond and York Railroad, to get a final look at the carnage before nightfall. With their backs against the rebel capital of Richmond, Johnston's 60,000 man army had turned on the ponderous 100,000 man Army of the Potomac. 

But in attempting to crush the Yankee flank along Nine Mile Road and drive the invaders into the rain swollen Chickahominy River, the rebels had bungled the assault. Johnston was seeking to assess what needed to be done tomorrow to finish the job. He never got the chance.

A staff colonel warned that blue clad skirmishers seemed to be edging closer. The prim Johnston dismissed the potential for death saying, “There's no use in dodging. When you hear them, they have passed.” As soon as those words left his lips the random lead plowed into the General's shoulder. When his staff rushed to support him they unintentionally held him up upright just as a shell exploded to his front, sending spinning shards slamming into his chest and thigh. The same shell killed Private George Pritchard of Captain Robert Stribling's battery - the probable intended target - just unlimbering a few yards south of the General's position.

Johnston was knocked from his horse, the fall breaking his arm, his right shoulder blade and two ribs. He was carried from the field blood soaked and unconscious. He awoke briefly to the bitter reality of Jefferson Davis' false compassion and the schadenfreude sympathy from the President's military adviser, General Robert Edward Lee. 

Then darkness again embraced him. By the time Johnston awoke from surgery in a Richmond Hospital, Davis had appointed Lee the new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and Johnston was an extra general.

Conscious of losing his spot in the minuet of musical chairs for command, the 56 year old Johnston (above) reported as fit and ready for duty just 4 months later.  He was far from fully recovered - he would never fully recover from these wounds -  but Davis found just the spot for his least favorite general. 

He exiled Johnston to the newly created Department of the West, headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On paper Johnston was to coordinate the operations of 46 year old Braxton Bragg's 35,000 man Army of Tennessee, at Murfreesboro (above), just south of Nashville, and 54 year old Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton's 40,000 man Army of Mississippi.

Once in Chattanooga, Johnston found the two commands were 600 miles apart, with no direct rail or even telegraph connection between them, which meant they could not support each other. But when Johnston suggested a restructuring, Secretary of War Brigadier General George Randolph, said no. 

Shortly there after, Johnston realized that he was really dealing with his old enemy Jeff Davis (above), and the President was undermining him. In the normal chain of command, Bragg and Pemberton reported to and received orders from Johnston and Johnston reported to and receive orders from the War Department in Richmond. But both Bragg and Pemberton were communicating directly with President Davis, who often issued them orders without informing Johnston. When Johnston complained he was supported by Randolph. And when Davis refused to stop interfering, Randolph resigned. But all that accomplished was that Davis got a new “malleable” Secretary of War – James Seddon, and the confusion got worse.

Next, Johnston suggested he be given authority over 58 year old General Theophilus Holmes's Trans-Mississippi Department, including Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. In response, Davis (above) mocked him - first Johnston complained his department was too big, and now he wanted to make it even bigger? The answer was no. Johnston then requested that Holmes transfer 20,000 men to Pemberton in Vicksburg. But Holmes was an old friend of the President's, and the answer again was no.

In late December of 1862, the 40,000 man Federal Army of the Cumberland under Major General William Rosecrans, marched 40 miles from Nashville to Murfessboro, and slammed into Bragg's Army of Tennessee. After four bloody days, which killed or wounded one third of the soldiers on both sides, Bragg felt forced to retreat 35 miles south to the railroad town of Tullahoma, Tennessee. 

Braxton Bragg's subordinates went into rebellion, calling the brooding Bragg (above) a fool and a coward and demanding his removal. In February Davis ordered Johnston to Tullahoma to remedy the situation.

It seemed clear Davis wanted Johnston to take over Bragg's army. But the infections in Johnston's wounds had flared up again, and he did not feel inclined to extend himself. He reported back that Bragg should be left in charge. Davis was infuriated, but without going to Tennessee himself, there was nothing he could do. So Johnston (above) returned to Chattanooga.

One of Johnston's few accomplishments was procuring the February transfer of the impulsive profligate “terror of ugly husbands", the handsome if diminutive southern coxsman, General Earl Van Dorn (above) from Pemberton's command to Bragg's. The reason for the change was not the potential for genius by the volatile and dapper Lothario, but because the equally volatile Nathan Bedford Forrest had announced he would “...be in my coffin before I will fight again under...” Bragg's cavalry commander, General Joe Wheeler. Wheeler was promoted out of the way, and Van Dorn assumed command at the Cheairs, mansion at Spring Hill, Tennessee, about 30 miles south southwest of Nashville. 

On Friday, 10 April, 1863, Van Dorn tested his new command, sending his 2 brigades of horsemen north to poke at the federal outpost protecting Nashville, the new Fort Granger, at Franklin, Tennessee. Van Dorn was not impressed with the results. He lost 137 men to the Yankee's 100, and withdrew to Spring Hall to lick his wounded ego and...

...seek comfort in the arms of the lovely and lonely Mrs. Jessie McKissack Peters, third wife of Dr. George Peters, a retired physician and a member of the state legislature.  Luckily she lived less than a mile away, just across the a valley

Later that month Johnston's infection flared up again and he was bedridden when he received a rare telegram from Pemberton on Saturday, 1 May. “A furious battle has been going on since daylight, just below Port Gibson,” Pemberton wrote. “General Bowen says he is outnumbered trebly....”. Johnston forwarded Pemberton's request for help to Richmond, telling Secretary Seddon that any new troops, “...cannot be sent from here without giving up Tennessee.” Seddon did not respond at least to Johnston, and for four days the telegraph lines from Vicksburg dissolved into incoherent static and confusing coded messages. Johnston's pride did not allow him to ask Jefferson Davis if he had heard anything. Finally, on Tuesday, 5 May, Johnston's sent a telegram to Vicksburg, asking for information, and telling Pemberton that his army was more valuable to the Confederacy than the city. But there was still no reply.

Then, on Thursday morning, 7 May 1863, Dr. Peters rode up to the Cheairs mansion (above).  The representative often visited Van Dorn's headquarters, to obtain a safe conduct pass when visiting his constituents near the Yankee lines.  He was immediately admitted into the General's presence, and a few minutes later reappeared, mounted his horse and cantered off.  

A few moments later General Van Dorn, married father of two “legitimate” children and several “illegitimate children”, life long unrepentant womanizer and reprobate and one of the most talented cavalry commanders remaining to serve the Confederate cause, was found slumped over his desk, with a small caliber bullet hole in the back of his skull. He died five hours later, without regaining consciousness.

Doctor Peters rediscovered his affection for the Federal Union when he received asylum behind Union lines in Nashville.  He was never charged with the murder of Van Dorn, and later freely moved to other property he owned in Arkansas, where he was eventually joined by his repentant Jessie. Eight months after the murder, Jessie had given birth to a girl.  And Doctor Peters raised her as his own.  The "affair" provides a glimpse beneath the Victorian mask of southern womanhood and noble Confederate Cavaliers. 

Beyond that,  Earl Van Dorn's isolated "honor murder" at the age of 42, was as much a waste of life as the other half million southerners who died fighting to keep humans in bondage. The best that might be said of the man was that at least Van Dorn died seeking pleasure in life, not merely the death, dismemberment and enslavement of others.  When one southern woman urged the notorious seducer to “let the women alone until the after the war is over”, Van Dorn defended himself, saying “I cannot do that, for it is all I am fighting for."

- 30 -