MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ALEXANDER POPE, ESQ; faithfully collected from authentic authors, original manuscripts, and the testimonies of many persons of credit and honour: adorned with the heads of divers illustrious persons, treated of in these memoirs, curiously engrav'd by the best hands …

Two volumes, 8vo, engraved frontispiece portrait and pp. xii, 340, [16] index; [iv], 389, [13] index; with 12 other plates; contemporary calf, spines with red morocco labels. First edition of the first full-scale biography of Pope, curiously presented with a leaf containing a royal patent, signed by the Duke of Newcastle as Secretary of State. Straus discusses this work at some length (The Unspeakable Curll, pp. 193-8), and concludes that 'amongst the hundred worst books the Memoirs must be given a high place'. (But he was writing a century ago: he could not have imagined what competition there would be in the later 20th and early 21st centuries.) In his dismissive appraisal, Straus assumes that 'William Ayre' is a fiction, and that the true author was Edmund Curll. The truth lies somewhere in between: William Ayre does seem to have been a real person, because in 1739 his name was affixed to a poem titled Truth, attacking the Essay on Man (Foxon A377). However, contemporary readers assumed, no doubt correctly, that Curll was closely involved with the publication of his book. The text does display Curll's characteristic lack of coherent organisation, but at the same time it is not unsympathetic to Pope; nor does it entirely gloss over Curll's own sometimes less than savoury practices. Baines and Rogers, in their recent biography of Curll, style Straus's opinion 'too hasty a verdict', and allow for some merit: 'As a repository of information, the two volumes easily outdistance anything produced on Pope up to this time, including Jacob's Lives of the Poets and the two instant lives from 1744. Much of the information happens to be accurate, too' (p. 305). Some copies of this work have a duplicate of the portrait of Pope in volume I as a frontispiece in the second volume as well, as called for in the 'directions to the binder for placing the cutts'; the same list, however, omits the portrait of Lord Bolingbroke, which is here bound near the beginning of volume I. Griffith 606. Provenance: Armorial bookplate in each volume of Sir George Shuckburgh (1751-1804), later Shuckburgh Evelyn, baronet. Shuckburgh merits an entry in ODNB for his scientific work, but to book collectors he is much better known as the owner of a magnificent library, including a Gutenberg Bible, and other important early printing.