Library home | Catalogue   |   Resources   |   Services   |   Help   |   Libraries   |   About us

Staff directory | A-Z index | Site map

2. Lady Montagu

Chosen by:
Dr Patrick Spedding,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts

Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady, 1689-1762.

I came to Monash for the first time in 1993, not to study, or to teach, but to consult the 1747 copy of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Court Poems’, which is held in the Swift Collection. As a direct result of that visit, I have been at Monash, as a student and a teacher, for the last fourteen years.

Montagu’s ‘Court Poems’ were written between mid-1715 and mid-1716. Like John Gay’s Shepherd’s Week (1714), these mock-pastoral satires made up a cycle of six poems, one for each day from Monday to Saturday. The poems circulated in manuscript for about three months before three of them were snapped up and published by Edmund Curll, with the eye-catching by-line ‘Published Faithfully As They Were Found, In A Pocket-Book … In Westminster Hall’. Curll attributed the poems to either ‘a Lady of Quality’ (i.e. Montagu), Alexander Pope or John Gay. Pope was unimpressed. He was a close friend of Gay and Montagu, neither of whom wanted the poems published.

In fact, Pope was so unimpressed with Curll that he decided to take revenge on him for this piracy. He arranged a meeting with him at a tavern, during which he slipped Curll an emetic. Curll went home to vomit, violently; and Pope went home to write A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Edmund Curll, Bookseller, one of his most amusing prose works. Curll’s response to his purging was to print forever afterwards Montagu’s ‘Court Poems’ as a part of the works of Pope, knowing that it would be a constant irritant to him. Pope died in 1744. Curll died in 1747; in the same year, Horace Walpole published the remaining three ‘Court Poems’, for the first time. Walpole had transcribed the poems from Montague’s own manuscript in October 1740, while he was on the Grand Tour. The edition that he published—and which Monash holds—is, then, both the first authoritative and the first complete edition of the poems.

Photo album created with Web Album Generator