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Nameless Names:
Pope, Curll, and the Uses of Anonymity

Pat Rogers

THESE DAYS, TO WRITE ANONYMOUS or pseudonymous books is to aim for an effect. In fact, there are hardly any works of literature which fall into the former category: Joe Klein's "novel of politics," Primary Colors (1996), is an obvious exception, and the absence of an authorial attribution may be the most noteworthy feature of the entire text. Similarly when Doris Lessing produced The Diaries of Jane Somers in 1984, it was the suppression of her famous name which lent point to the enterprise—allegedly her aim was to show how differently books of unknown writers were treated. Many authors, of course, use a nom de plume, but in serious literature they generally stick to one or two: only in the realm of popular genres such as Harlequin novels or mystery fiction are multiple identities common. "Literary" writers who break this rule tend to find themselves caught up in scandal, as when "Anthony Burgess" (John Burgess Wilson) reviewed—not too favorably—his own Inside Mr. Enderby (1963), written by "Joseph Kell," for the Yorkshire Post. He was fired when the truth came out. Today authorship and authority have become inextricably linked, and literature without a responsible agent identified is like an artifact that turns up in the saleroom lacking a decent provenance. Both anonymity and pseudonymity have become suspect behavior.

Of course, it was not always so. We have only to think of the major texts written in the long eighteenth century to appreciate this fact. Hardly any of Dryden's original poems (this is to exclude his Fables and translations) bore his name. The situation is similar with Aphra Behn, and other founding documents of the English novel, such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, appeared without any clue of authorship. So it goes on, with Samuel Richardson present only as printer, and covertly as editor, of his novels; then, too, with Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, although the latter does use the increasingly popular formula "by the author of RODERICK RANDOM." Fanny Burney's almost over-determined anonymity is well known. ¹ Likewise Jane Austen is either "a Lady" or "the author of 'Pride and Prejudice', &c." (With Walter Scott, the phrase "the author of Waverley" moves from a disguise to a kind of [End Page 233] banner or trademark.) In other cases writers shift between open and disguised publication: the most interesting case is Alexander Pope, to whom I shall return shortly. It would be possible to categorize these examples by various factors, such as genre, gender, or celebrity of the author. However, the general picture would remain the same: there is nothing suspicious in principle about anonymous publication, whatever the motive for its use.

Some of these motives are self-evident. If Jonathan Swift wanted to deceive the bench of Irish bishops, he could hardly have allowed his own name to accompany, and in practice supersede, Lemuel Gulliver's on the title-page. Robinson Crusoe is putatively "written by himself," and all three parts keep up this fiction: just as Moll Flanders is "written from her own memorandums," and the Journal of the Plague Year "written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London" (here we see the alleged author not just as a persona but depicted as an authority on the title-page). A little more shyly, The Vicar of Wakefield is "supposed to be written by himself," although Goldsmith weakens the effect by signing the advertisement. In the case of Tristram Shandy, the author's supposed anonymity survived until his signature appeared at the end of the dedication incorporated into volume five (1762), three years after the first installment came out. Further cases exist where the basic fictional pretence of a given book requires that the writer should keep out of the action: thus The Castle of Otranto offers itself as "translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto," a sequence which would be fatally disturbed if Horace Walpole were to appear on the title-page.

This does not mean, of course, that no one was aware of the identity of Swift, Defoe, or Sterne before their names were explicitly acknowledged. Quite often the true author was self-evident from the start, and in other cases he or she became known long before the title-page owned up to it. Another motive was to avoid prosecution or other official sanctions, especially where the work contained some hot material of a religious or political kind. In that event it might be many years, perhaps decades, before it was entirely safe to go public. Attribution might have to await the appearance of a collected edition, where some of the impact was often blunted when a work appeared as one item among many, rather than blazing forth as a conspicuous pièce d'occasion. Yet further motives existed: to conceal a special interest, as where a merchant might wish to hide his involvement in a branch of trade on which he was pamphleteering, or to suppress a personal link, as when a writer wanted to gloss over a family connection. ² Exclusive publishing contracts rarely if ever existed, but it seems possible that an author employed by Jacob Tonson on a regular basis would not desire to proclaim too loudly that [End Page 234] he was writing for Edmund Curll (and maybe vice versa). But most of these motives are not strictly literary, in the sense that they would normally make little difference to the way the book is written or read. Anonymity is just a practical convenience, to avoid detection. In other cases, anonymity is in some measure textualized: that is, the author uses the absence of an acknowledged identity to produce meaning within the ongoing discourse.

The situation was rather different in France. Under the stricter controls of the Ancien Régime, French literature of the Enlightenment made heavier use of concealed authorship. Thus, most of the better known works of Voltaire and Diderot appeared under some form of disguise: Candide claimed to have been "translated from the German of Doctor Ralph with the additions which were found in the Doctor's pocket when he died at Minden in the year of our Lord 1759"—a deliberately redundant package of mystificatory nonsense. The title-page of one of Voltaire's most mischievous works "attributed [his] impieties to one of France's most orthodox theologians." ³ Louis-Sébastien Mercier kept secret his authorship of the subversive L'An 2440 from its publication in 1771 until 1791. Even the great Encyclopédie, which soon acquired international prestige, was presented as "par une société de gens de lettres" [by a society of men of letters]: individual entries were attributed only by sometimes misleading initials. It is true that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an exception, most of his books proclaiming
their authorship, but then Rousseau's confessional style made disguise pointless.

The main reason for the difference between the two countries is that "serious" writing overlapped much more in France with clandestine literature than was the case in Britain. In fact, hundreds of the 720 "forbidden books" studied by Robert Darnton, which form the central canon of Enlightenment polemical activity, carried no author's name. ⁴ In Britain there was less need for secrecy and for protective clothing: consequently, the choice to write anonymously was a more positive authorial action. Few major works of English literature in this period underwent suppression or even heavy censorship. Certainly Swift had to call in some of his poems before publication and cancel offending sheets in order to substitute blander content. But it is one thing to introduce bromide into a book, quite another to be constantly expecting inspectors from the official book police to come knocking at the door. [End Page 235]

I

Alexander Pope is a particularly interesting case here, as already suggested. This warrants little surprise, as Pope's positioning as a writer gave his practice an unusually close relation to the issues under review. First, as a number of studies have shown, he devoted much of his career to a process of deliberate self-fashioning as an artist, and increasingly used his poetry as a mode of defining his own intellectual and cultural identity. ⁵ Second, as revealed most tellingly by David Foxon, Pope developed a unique relation with the contemporary book trade, acting as his own publisher on many occasions and generally manipulating the mechanics of publication to serve his literary ends. ⁶ He also took a remarkably close interest in the physical layout of his books, not least in the case of The Dunciad. ⁷ Both these circumstances meant that Pope would be more alert than most to the contents of the title-page, and specifically to the presence or nature of an authorial signature.

Over the range of his career, there is a marked oscillation between works that are acknowledged and those that are not. Early on, the Pastorals were given authorial credit when they appeared at the end of Jacob Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies in 1709: there is a separate half-title, and conceivably the item was available separately, though I do not think such a copy has ever turned up. Thus Pope's Opus One (it is #1 in the standard bibliography) announced his entry into the public sphere of literature. On the other hand, An Essay on Criticism (1711), with its Olympian pretence of standing loftily above the action, came out anonymously. Such alternations recur: Pope naturally withheld his name from the scandalous and risqué items which crept into print, with or without his connivance, but he also allowed more serious items to appear without a parent, including "Messiah" when it came out in the Spectator in 1712. Often these items were quickly laid at Pope's door, and joined pieces like The Rape of the Lock and Windsor-Forest among the well-known attributions. In 1717 came the full-dress collection of Pope's assembled Works, including almost everything of moment he had so far produced, with the exception of the Homer translations. ⁸ Yet even in this same year he chose to engage in a separate enterprise when he edited a slender miscellany for Bernard Lintot. This, as Maynard Mack remarked, "allowed him to preserve in print a handful of small poems and juvenilia that apparently he wished neither to own nor to suppress." ⁹ Already we see the poet cagily managing his career, letting out just as much as he cares to do about the work he has published. It is canon formation carried out on the run, by the author himself.

After this things got more complicated, and Pope was not always able to maintain the control he desired over his public identity. First came [End Page 236] the unfortunate imbroglio when it was revealed that he had used two hidden collaborators on his translation of the Odyssey, in the shape of William Broome and Elijah Fenton. A feeble attempt at damage limitation among subscribers was mounted, with Broome admitting to three of the eight books for which he had actually been responsible, and Fenton to just two out of four. Newspapers were quick to point out that this was to engage in the seamiest of Grub Street tactics: "To have one or more Authors obtruded upon us, without our Knowledge or Consent, under the Name and Character of another to whom we have subscribed, is Quackerery and C—licism in the greatest perfection." ¹⁰ Actually Curll would have handled the cover-up operation more skillfully. Next came the Scriblerian Miscellanies of 1727-8, containing amongst other things The Art of Sinking in Poetry. There was also a lot of muddle in these collaborative volumes, and responsibility for some items has not been sorted out even today. Moreover, it looks as if the Art of Sinking only took its place in the third volume because The Dunciad—originally destined for this slot—was not yet ready.

At length the first version of Pope's mock-epic appeared in May 1728. It was of course anonymous in the technical sense, but festooned with bluffs and slices of misinformation. The title-page claimed that it was a London reprint of an earlier Dublin edition: this was quite fictitious, and gave the deliberate impression that the work had been published in a clandestine way, rather than being issued in exactly the way its creator designed. The only name on the title-page is also deceptive: Anne Dodd was a "mercury" who acted as a distribution agent and hardly ever owned the copyright of titles she sold. ¹¹ Self-evidently, members of the book trade acquire a greater relative prominence when authors figure less prominently; and notoriously eighteenth-century imprints are liable to be unreliable in the information they purport to convey. Still, there is something particularly tricksy about this title-page, and about The Dunciad in general—I shall return to this matter. We might think it would take no great acumen to identify the concealed author, since even in this earliest edition (lacking the notes and apparatus which later accompanied the text) there are enough clues regarding Pope's established enmities, quite apart from any consideration of the internal signs of his poetic hand. But when the poem came out, even a well-connected observer could write to the second Earl of Oxford, an insider within the Pope group, "Who is the Author of the Dunciad?" though he did then hazard the guess, "Is it not Pope?" This provides a useful historical reminder: in the heat of the fray, not even the most certain-looking attributions can be wholly relied on. In all likelihood, Pope believed that most people would suppose him to be the author, but initially they could not be altogether sure. The Dunciad Variorum, when it came out in the [End Page 237] following year, effectively blew the author's cover, but as it did so it introduced further mystifications—the copyright was assigned to three unimpeachable peers of the realm. A "compleat and correct Edition" could now appear, with the imprint now also bearing the name of Lawton Gilliver—the real name of a real bookseller, but one who sounds like yet another false front, baring in mind that Gulliver's Travels had made its own unexpected appearance just three years earlier.

In the 1730s Pope fought a long-lasting war to manage his own literary property (as a commercial undertaking) but also to preserve his authorial identity as a high-toned gentleman writer, above the fray of partisan journalism and the rude fisticuffs of Grub Street. He had more success with the first aim than with the second. The attempt to keep up his dignity required him to allow his name to appear in print on a regular basis: he could not afford the elegant amateurish stance of a true aristocrat. On the other hand too much publicity might damage his affectation of standing above the squalid events of day to day life.

However, he carried the day in some instances, most obviously when he carefully engineered the appearance of the Essay on Man in 1733. First he issued a conspicuous folio entitled Of the Use of Riches, an Epistle to the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst. By Mr. Pope, a work which joined the Epistle to Burlington (1731) in what was by now becoming a series of moral essays, and thus easily identified by the public. This work too carried Gilliver's imprint. Shortly after he sent out the first of what was to be a long line of Horatian imitations, with his own identity dovetailed into the subtitle: The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated in a Dialogue between Alexander Pope of Twickenham in Com. Midd. Esq. on the one part, and his Learned Council on the Other. Pope actually gives his name and address in form, as though he were making a full public disclosure in the course of a legal process. Only then did he spring the trap. In the weeks that followed, he caused the first three epistles of the Essay on Man to slip out in driblets before readers. All three came out anonymously, and the publisher is listed as John Wilford, an associate of Gilliver who had never had anything to do with previous work by Pope. As Mack explains: "The ruse succeeded admirably. An acquaintance of Pope's not in the secret reported to a friend . . . that the Town was currently reading, along with the poem to Bathurst, 'An Essay on Man by a New Author' . . . At about the same time . . . some readers were attributing the new work to one or other well-known clergyman, 'Dr. Croxall, Dr. Secker, and some others' solemnly denying it. What must have gratified Pope most of all was that several of the dunces went on record at this time with tributes they could not afterward decently retract" (AL 522). This then was one phase in the ongoing battle with Pope's detractors. Pope was able to fool most of the public much of the [End Page 238] time, just because he slipped in and out of anonymity when it served his turn. Such a swerve would have been impossible for Defoe, nearly all of whose works had come out in an anonymous form.

The next important episode concerned Pope's maneuvers to get his collected letters in print. As is well known, he tricked Edmund Curll into doing the job for him, thereby escaping the censure which such an egoistic act as self-publication would have incurred. Curll had been threatening to bring out a life of the poet, complete with personal details of the sort Boswell later smuggled into the practice of biography. Everything, Curll declared, was in place for such a work on Pope, except for "his (universally desired) Death." The plot was laid, and soon "by a series of intrigues and intermediaries, including at one point a London actor dressed to look like a clergyman [Pope] had duped Curll into buying the unbound sheets and thus becoming their apparent publisher and unmistakably their first distributor" (AL 653). But the scheme did not altogether achieve its object: Curll was brought to the bar of the House of Lords, but escaped without serious punishment. Pope had been trying to outwit another expert in subterfuge, and to this end initiated his own clandestine publication—seeking, as it were, to pirate his own work. It was another example of manipulation behind the scenes, luckily for Pope's reputation undiscovered for more than a century to come. Yet this reveals some of the paradoxes here: only a writer with a big name would have been able to sell copies of his personal correspondence, and only the private letters of a public figure would have been worth Curll's attention. It needed such a thing as literary celebrity to exist before anyone would go to these lengths to hide his or her tracks. Pope could use anonymity as a strategic career move, just because there was so much known about him—so little anonymity about his life as a whole.

The point could be generalized. No one could arrange a temporary death of the author, for tactical purposes like those of Pope, until the Author had been born. It would have made little sense for most medieval writers to seek anonymity because that was the condition imposed on them most of the time. We might debate when the change in standing took place. Plainly a key document is the title-page of the First Folio in 1623, brandishing the name of William Shakespeare in large-point type which overshadows lesser information such as "COMEDIES, / HISTORIES, & / TRAGEDIES," and devoting a large proportion of its space to the engraving of the dramatist by Droeshout. However, this was an exception in its age: only Ben Jonson among contemporaries enjoyed such full-dress publishing treatment, and Shakespeare's earlier appearances in the Quarto texts had made little or nothing of his agency in the play concerned. [End Page 239]

As time went on, authorship grew more conspicuous, as the career of individuals such as Dryden makes clear. Yet there are further developments in Pope's lifetime, including the growth of interest in literary reminiscences and ana, which would culminate in works like Isaac D'Israeli's Quarrels of Authors and the Literary Anecdotes of John Nichols (over both of which the shadow of Pope lies heavily), not to mention the collections of Pope's own Boswell, Joseph Spence. The poet himself did something to further the process, when he published his private letters, for example, or when he took the bookseller to court in 1741 to establish the writer's legal property in his correspondence. ¹² But Curll may bear a still greater responsibility. Year in and year out, he issued his instant lives of any halfway famous writer: Pope would have known his biographies of Prior, Delariviere Manley, Congreve, Gay, the printer John Barber and many more, and after the poet's own death "William Ayre" (probably a pseudonym for Curll) would quickly produce his unauthorized Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope (1745). Beyond this, Curll was constantly riffling through the garbage cans of the great, to find stray droppings that had somehow escaped notice and could be published as the writer's "Remains." Routinely he sent out copies of wills to the world, even though these dry testamentary dispositions seldom carried anything scurrilous. Day by day he used newspaper stories and advertisements to keep up public interest in marketable names. Of course Pope played the same game when he wrote pamphlets describing Curll's louche behavior toward his luckless hacks, as in A 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, "publish'd by an Eye Witness" (1716)—but Curll had done it first.

Cumulatively, all this activity of Curll made authorship into news, and literature into a locus of scandal, a temple of infamy, a whispering gallery of rumor. Where modern gossip magazines "celebrate" individuals, by creating people famous for being famous, Curll's practice turned writers into people who were written about. As more and more idols crowded the literary market place, it got both easier and harder to remain anonymous.

II

The work which expresses this duality, needless to say, is The Dunciad. Across the years the poem, which hinges on mutation, mutated from a relatively simple text to a massive production, beset by multiple authors and editors, subjected to a metacritical self-examination like that of Pale Fire, and constituted by a rich heteroglossia of competing discourses. Yet [End Page 240] it becomes all the more obviously Pope's handiwork as it goes on. The original readers of the 1728 version, as we saw, could express genuine uncertainty about the true author. In 1743, even someone who had contrived to miss fifteen years of debate and rejoinder would have needed to be brain-dead not to recognize the signs of Pope's responsibility.

As the poem grows more elaborate, the duality we have been noting increases in significance. The shadowy writers first set in motion within the narrative were for the most part genuine nobodies in 1728. In the intervening years, they ceased to hold this protective layer of obscurity. Minor figures in the literary world are given a major role in the action. (Even Theobald, the original king of the dunces, must have seemed relatively minor to most readers: his was not a household "name.") Bigwigs like Bentley are brought down to the level of the sorriest hacks. On top of this (or below it, on the page), the notes add detailed biographical and bibliographical information of damaging particularity. The responses of the dunces are set out at length in the preliminaries. An index recycles the insinuations of the main text: "BOND, BEZALEEL, BREVAL, not living Writers, but Phantoms." By this means, the dunces have achieved their quarter of a millennium of fame.

From the start, an essential trick of The Dunciad had been to make obscurity conspicuous. This occasioned its author a degree of uncertainty, arising from his fear that he would somehow be swallowed up in the morass he was seeking to expose. Dennis Todd has written very well of this anxiety, "caused by the very lowness and impotence of those he wanted to attack" (IM 220). For Todd, this is related to a sense of lost identity on the part of Pope. Yet we might extend this reading in a somewhat tangential way, with the recognition that the poem both destroys and creates anonymity. By giving so much detailed scrutiny to "ev'ry nameless name," The Dunciad forges a collective identity as it reinforces the forgettable quality of each individual. ¹³ Bond, Breval and Bezaleel come to seem interchangeable: we do not immediately perceive that two surnames are grouped with a given name. While few works of literature name names as insistently, few works contain as many references to persons without a "name."

One of the running jokes is that the dunces had themselves written much of their work anonymously. ¹⁴ This is particularly true of the journalists who engage in their muck-raking games in the second book. They plunge into the depths of the Fleet Ditch, and are soon "number'd with the puppies in the mud": "Ask ye their names? I could as soon disclose / The names of these blind puppies as of those" (B 2.309-10). Most newspaper articles carried no by-line, and the work would be identified with the masthead of the journal—Daily Gazetteer, or whatever. Such a form of labeling hardly amounted to the creation of an eidolon or [End Page 241] literary persona. It simply indicated a place where writings of a certain stamp could be found. The newspaper represented the acme of ephemerality: the note by Martin Scriblerus at B 2.314 observes that the Gazetteers have lived only a moment, and challenges the learned world "to produce one such paper at this day." Aptly, the leading competitors in this division of the contest are totally unknown today: William Arnall and "Mother Osborne" (James Pitt).

But other dunces had spent much of their time producing anonymous pamphlets, often directed against Pope. A subsidiary aim of the poem and its apparatus is to attribute some of these works to their true author—thus of John Oldmixon, "We find in the Flying-Post of Apr. 13. 1728. Some very flat verses against [Pope] and Dr. Sw. and Mr. Curl tells us in the Curliad, that he wrote the Ballad called The Catholic Poet against the Version of Homer, before it appear'd to the public" (note to A 2.199). In fact, Pope had originally suggested that two other dunces, Charles Gildon and Susannah Centlivre, had collaborated on this ballad. Officiously, Curll had corrected this statement, and with a show of scholarly pedantry Pope duly accepts the correction in his note. It didn't matter, of course, who was responsible for the ballad. To establish the canon in this fussy way is to remind us just how indistinguishable most of the dunces were. This goes with their effort to deceive the public by adopting pseudonyms which might allow their identity to be confused with that of real writers: "Cook shall be Prior, and Concanen, Swift: / So shall each hostile name become our own" (B 2.138-39). Imaged as phantoms and shadows, the dunces appear in the poem much as they had been manifest in the real world, as ciphers, noms de plume, literary ghosts.

Curll at least stood out. And Pope considerately allows him to win the palm in his contest by peeing over a greater span of the neighborhood: "Still happy Impudence obtains the prize" (B 2.186). This reflects the fact that booksellers did indeed achieve greater prominence than most professional writers, since it was their name which stood on the title-page. Pope and Swift could get away with suppressing their identity, so that only Benjamin Motte figures at the head of the Miscellanies, just as he had appeared conspicuously in Gulliver a year earlier. But for lesser writers such anonymity was not an elective affinity—rather, it was just the rule on the lower reaches of Parnassus they inhabited, where week after week items flowed off the press: "A Proper Memorial for the 29th of May, &c. Printed for A. Bettesworth, and E. Curll." Who was behind such a production? We shall probably never know. Then, in the same week: "Homerides; or, Homer's First Book modernized. By Sir Iliad Doggrel. Sold by R. Burleigh. 6d." This time we can make a plausible guess at the identity of Sir Iliad, because scholarship has unearthed the fact that [End Page 242] Thomas Burnet and George Duckett were the authors. The facts have gone on record because the pamphlet happens to concern Pope, and the co-writers duly earned a niche in The Dunciad:

Behold yon Pair, in strict embraces join'd,
How like their manners, and how like their mind!
Fam'd for good nature, B** and for truth;
D** for pious passion to the youth.

(A 3.173-76)

For a moment the pair half-emerge from the cave of obscurity, only to find themselves reduced to mere initials, with the stars in "B**" permitting a reading like "Bugg'ry." It was really safer most of the time to go on skulking in the shadows.

III

The foregoing discussion has not attempted to conceptualize the issues surrounding anonymity in any extended way. It should, however, have historicized the notion to this degree: we can see how writing anonymously has a different valency in different periods. As suggested, medieval writers could seldom gain a useful spin on a condition which was the normal way of doing things. Likewise today, with the opposite circumstances, it is hard for a writer to make a point by withholding her or his name: the gesture is too large, and the effect too bizarre and uncontrollable. However, there was an intermediate stage in literary history when anonymity was neither routine nor eccentric. The freedom this enabled is indicated in a suggestive passage by Roger Chartier concerning developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this period, he claims, "by twisting the rule of individual attribution of literary works the various games played with the author's name (dissimulation, disguise, usurpation) in reality confirmed the rule of the individual attribution of literary works." ¹⁵

Pope, surely, was the ultimate master of such games. Sometimes he overreached himself: he devised such a complicated system for identifying Swift's contributions to the Miscellanies that we are still trying to sort out whose was whose. ¹⁶ Moreover, he did not always manage to best Curll. Although the bookseller kindly published items which Pope secretly wanted to see in print (this may be the case, for example, with "The Court Ballad" in 1717), he also ushered before the world items Pope would rather have kept under wraps, such as "A Roman Catholick Version of the First Psalm" (1716). Again, another item called "The [End Page 243] Worms" slipped out of the poet's control, and "this poem, published repeatedly in Curll's collections, was to haunt Pope for life" (AL 297). Still further pieces had appeared surreptitiously in print, like "Two or Three: or, A Receipt to make a Cuckold" (1713), but it was Curll who made the first ascription to Pope, and teased out the full obscene potential of the verses. At such moments the relation of author and bookseller seems a little less than perfect symbiosis.

Nevertheless, Pope's career as a whole shows an unparalleled ability to seize the opportunities afforded by the situation to which Chartier alludes. Local strategies dictated the suppression of his name in the case of the Essay on Man, but the choice permitted him to achieve a lofty impersonality which belied his reputation at this time as a vicious and nitpicking satirist. Above all, in The Dunciad he was able to exploit his technical anonymity: no separate edition of the poem issued before his death carried his name, though by that time nobody was asking about the identity of the author. The work cashes in on the poet's notoriety, without ever quite speaking openly in the poet's voice. It dramatizes the surreptitious operations of the dunces, and forces them to act out their literary lives in a specially constructed underground network with a base in the city of London: "One Cell there is, conceal'd from vulgar eye, / The Cave of Poverty and Poetry" (B 1.33-34). Even Curll might have envied the nerve it took to make heroes of the smallest fry, and to assail these nonentities on their home ground, among the dark byways of anonymity.

 

University of South Florida

Pat Rogers, DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida, has written and edited numerous books on eighteenth-century literature, history and art, and is now completing a study entitled Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts. A joint project with Paul Baines is concerned with the biography and bibliography of the publisher Edmund Curll.

Notes

1. The description applies mainly to Evelina, where Burney took elaborate pains to conceal her identity, including the use of her brother in disguise to deliver the manuscript to the publisher. After this novel, she generally figured as "the author of Evelina" (distinct from her public identity as "Madame d'Arblay").

2. Another reason might be to conceal the author's gender, but this was not as common a motive as in the nineteenth century. The androgynous pseudonym (as with Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell) had seemingly not yet been developed.

3. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995), p. 4.

4. See Darnton, The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789 (New York, 1995). Elsewhere Darnton has described the spread of ideas conducted through illegal presses and (usually) anonymous authorship, employing an English form of the French expression "sous le manteau"; see "Philosophy under the Cloak," in Revolution in Print: the Press in France 1775-1800, ed. Robert Darnton and D. Roche (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 27-49.

5. See for example Frederick M. Keener, An Essay on Pope (New York, 1971); John Paul Russo, Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton, 1978); and Fredric V. Bogel, Acts of Knowledge: Pope's Later Poems (Lewisburg, Pa., 1981). The most sustained discussion of Pope's own anxieties concerning the possible dissolution of identity is now Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1995); hereafter cited in text as IM. The best account of Pope's "self-exposure" in satire is that of Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

6. See David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford, 1991).

7. There are some illuminating comments on this topic in James McLaverty, "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: the Case of the Dunciad Variorum," in Pope, ed. B. Hammond (London, 1996), pp. 220-32.

8. On this volume see Vincent Carretta, "'Images Reflect from Art to Art': Alexander Pope's Collected Works of 1717," in Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. N. Fraistat (Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 195-233.

9. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, 1985), p. 334; hereafter cited in text as AL.

10. London Journal, 17 July 1725, cited by Mack, A Life, p. 414.

11. On Dodd (c. 1685-1739), see Michael Treadwell, "Anne Dodd," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 154, The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820, ed. J. T. Bracken and J. Silver (Detroit, 1995), pp. 103-5.

12. For this case as exemplifying a "shift in focus from the bookseller to the author," see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp.
58-66.

13. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, ed. J. Sutherland (London, 1963), B text, book 3, line 157; hereafter cited by the text of the four-book version used (A or B), the book number, and the line.

14. An associated joke lies in the fact that Anne Dodd was often an associate of Curll and had been listed as the publisher of some sharp assaults on Pope, for example [Edmund Curll?], A Compleat Key to The Dunciad (1728).

15. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, tr. L.G. Cochrane (Stanford, 1994), p. 58.

16. It is notoriously difficult to attribute Scriblerian items, which are often of composite authorship. Thus, the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus were belatedly published in the Works of Mr. Alexander Pope in 1741, but they were stated to have been written by Dr. Arbuthnot and Pope: most scholars believe that Swift, Gay, and Thomas Parnell played some part in the undertaking at an early stage. On the other hand, A Key to the Lock (1715), a reply to The Rape of the Lock by "Esdras Barnivelt, apoth.," is probably Pope's unaided work.