Edmund Curll renews his controversy with Matthew Prior, by threatening to publish the poet's works without permission.
In his last years Curll published a series of "Merryland" books which constitute a major contribution to the somewhat peculiar genre of English seventeenth and eighteenth century erotic fiction in which the female body (and sometimes the male) was described in terms of topographical metaphor.
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He published and advertised John Oldmixon's The Catholick Poet and John Dennis's The True Character of Mr Pope and his Writings. He reprinted these in 1716, when the atmosphere of England was highly charged after the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715.
In the context of The Dunciad, Moore stands not just for the generally degraded fop, nor for the imprudent heir of a fortune, but for the avarice and stupidity of book sellers (exemplified by Edmund Curll) who would publish anything at all, regardless of value, if it looked like it would sell.
From 1710 also, Morphew, who was connected to the Tory administration, began working with Edmund Curll and producing political pamphlets.
The initial states of the print kept the quotation but replaced the genuine bill with a representation (which appears to have been entirely invented by Hogarth rather than copied from a real bill) of Pope clashing with Edmund Curll over the unauthorised publication of the poet's correspondence.
Edmund Burke | Edmund Spenser | Edmund Hillary | Edmund Wilson | Edmund Husserl | Edmund Muskie | Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby | Edmund Barton | Edmund the Martyr | Edmund Rubbra | Edmund Kirby Smith | Edmund Gosse | SS Edmund Fitzgerald | George Edmund Street | Edmund Kean | Edmund Francis Law | Edmund Campion | St Edmund Hall, Oxford | Edmund Sharpe | Edmund Blunden | Edmund | The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald | SS ''Edmund Fitzgerald'' | Edmund White | Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York | Edmund Ignatius Rice | Edmund Curll | Clifford Edmund Bosworth | Sir Edmund Beckett, 4th Baronet | Edmund Reitter |
Publisher Edmund Curll is convicted under English law for the publication of an English translation of Venus in the Cloister (in 1724) under the common law offence of disturbing the peace, setting a legal precedent for prosecutions for obscenity.
Even after his death under suspicious circumstances, he was not widely mourned, and Alexander Pope, in particular, memorialized him viciously in The Dunciad a full seventeen years after his death, where he has the publisher Edmund Curll given a gift of a tapestry by Dulness showing the fates of dunces, where the whipping of Tutchin through the west country is a featured panel.