One table was surrounded by a boisterous group in the centre of which was a fat man in a frowsy wig.

He had a malicious glint in his squinting eyes and was evidently of some importance.

When he spoke the others listened with respect.
This pompous personage was Edmund Curll, bookseller, whose coarse and infamous publications once brought him within the law.

Curll, we are told, possessed himself of a command over all authors whatever; he caused them to write what he pleased; they could not call their very names their own.

Curll was the deadly enemy of Pope and his friends, and his unlimited scurrility drew from the poet of Twickenham a retaliation every whit as coarse and as biting as anything the bookseller's warped mind ever conceived.
Had Lavinia been told this was the notorious Curll, the name would have conveyed nothing.