Calamities And Their Diseases

By Lulu Black on October 16, 2010
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But if any one appears to be concern'd at our Upbraiding him with his Natural Deformity, which did not come by his own Fault, but seems to be the Curse of God upon him; we desire that Person to consider, that this little Monster has upbraided People with their Calamities and their Diseases, and Calamities and Diseases which are either false or past, or which he himself gave them by administering Poison to them. On 30 June Curll brought out Pope's unacknowledged (and smutty) Roman Catholick Version of the First Psalm, to cause more damage to Pope's 'fame'.

Yet punishment, as a public act, has what might be called rhetorical features, and though Curll persisted in his characteristic activities, there is a sense in which the culture at large and retributive justice in particular, adopted Pope's version of the script. Curll was repeatedly subjected to further instances of 'justice', official and otherwise. The title page of Court Poems tied the poems to issues of the highest importance at 'court' by alluding to the 'Last Day of the Lord Winton's [sic] TryaP,Cartier wedding ring, that is, the trial of the Jacobite conspirator the fifth Earl of Wintoun, which ended with a 'guilty' verdict on 19 March 1716 (Wintoun subsequently escaped to France). On 10 April Curll published through Sarah Popping (one of the supposed agents of Pope's Full and True Account) An Account of the Tryal of the Earl of Winton, for which breach of official publication rights Curll and Popping were arrested a few days later; Curll was not released before he had knelt before the bar of the House of Lords to receive a reprimand, nearly a month later. The event, with its ritual humiliation,Cartier Reversible Pendant in Stainless Steel with White Gold Pl, supplies some of the judicial context imagined in Jonson's play that Pope could not envisage, although his pamphlet does have Curll warn Pemberton about an impending prosecution for publishing Rochester's poems. Despite his loyal credentials, Curll's commercial interest in the condemned Jacobite had put him in the position of an abject and guilty criminal, forced to recant in one of the highest public courts only a few weeks after Pope had made him recant in his bedroom.

There is a further twist. Pope was clearly a lot more ready to adopt Grub-Street positions, to exploit the comic violence of the pamphlet, than Jonson: what he takes from Jonson is most obviously the low prank of the vomit, and even then he strips it of its court backing. He was therefore in full approval of the disaster suffered by Curll a few months after the episode. The clergyman Robert South died on 8 July 1716 and very soon, on 26 July, Curll published The Character of the Reverend and Learned Dr. Robert South. Being, the Oration spoken at his Funeral, on Monday July xvi. 1716. This had been spoken by John Barber, head boy of Westminster School. The publication was without authority, and in the sort of Latin that got Westminster scholars birched. Curll was dealt with accordingly.

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