Alexander pope the major works

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
ALEXANDER POPE
ALEXANDER POPE was born in London in 1688. His elderly
parents moved to Binfield in Windsor Forest around 1700 because
of anti-Catholic laws. From early boyhood Pope suffered from a
tubercular disease which retarded his growth and left him a lifelong
invalid. A precocious poet, his first published work was the set of
four pastorals published in 1709. A succession of brilliant poems
followed, including An Essay on Criticism (1711), Windsor Forest
(1713), and the five-canto version of The Rape of the Lock. Pope
then embarked on a translation of the Iliad (1715-20), which
together with the Odyssey (1725-6) left him financially secure. His
position as the major living English poet was confirmed by the
appearance of his Works in 1717. There followed a break in creative
activity, during which Pope edited Shakespeare (1725). However,
the appearance of the first Dunciad (1728) marked the beginning of
a brilliant new phase, including the imitations of Horace, the Essay
on Man, and the epistles to various friends. In 1742 Pope added a
new fourth book to The Dunciad, and the complete work was
published in 1743. Pope spent the last twenty-five years of his life
at his villa in Twickenham, devoting much of his time to his
celebrated garden and grotto. He died in 1744.
PAT ROGERS, DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the
University of South Florida, has written many books on Augustan
satire including Grub Street (1972), Literature and Popular Culture
in Eighteenth-Century England (1985), The Alexander Pope
Encyclopedia (2004), and Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts (2005).


OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS

For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics have brought
readers closer to the world's great literature. Now with over 700
titles—-from the 4,ooo-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the
twentieth century's greatest novels—the series makes available
lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained
introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene,
and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.
Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and
reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry,
religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive
commentary and essential background information to meet the
changing needs of readers.


OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS

ALEXANDER POPE

The Major Works
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
PAT ROGERS

OXFORD
U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS


OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Introduction and editorial matter © Pat Rogers 1993
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published with revisions as an
Oxford World's Classics paperback 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
Typeset in Ehrhardt
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc
ISBN 0-19-920361-X 978-0-19-920361-1
1 3 5 7 9 1 08 6 4 2


CONTENTS
Introduction

ix

Acknowledgements

xxiii

Chronology

xxiv

Note on the Text

xxvii

Pastorals
An Essay on Criticism
Sappho to Phaon

Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture
Windsor Forest
The Guardian, no. 173
The Wife of Bath from Chaucer
The Rape of the Lock
To Belinda on the Rape of the Lock
Letter to Martha Blount, November 1714
The Temple of Fame
A Farewell to London in the Year 1715
Epistle to Mr Jervas
Epistle to Miss Blount, on her Leaving the Town after the
Coronation
A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge
A Further Account of the Condition of Edmund Curll
Letter to Lord Burlington, November 1716
Eloisa to Abelard
Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady
Letter to Teresa and Martha Blount, September 1717
Letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1718
The Iliad, Book XVIII
To Mr Gay
To Mr Addison
Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford

I

17
40
46
49

62
66
77
100
101
103
118
120
122
124
128
134
137
147
150
151
155
173
174
176


vi

CONTENTS

Letter to Swift, August 1723
Letter to Martha Blount, 22 June 1724
Preface to the Works of Shakespeare
Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry

Letter to Swift, 28 November 1729
Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton
An Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington
An Epistle to Allen Lord Bathurst
The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated
An Essay on Man
Letter to Swift, 20 April 1733
The Fourth Satire of Dr John Donne Versified
An Epistle to Sir Richard Temple, Lord Cobham
The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated
The Second Satire of the First Book of Horace Imitated
in the Manner of Mr Pope
Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot
An Epistle to a Lady
The Second Satire of Dr John Donne Versified
Letter to Swift, 25 March 1736
The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated
The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated
The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated
The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated
Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue I
Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue II
Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog
Epitaph for One who would not be Buried in
Westminster Abbey
Letter to Hugh Bethel, 19 March 1744
The Dunciad
Epitaph on Bounce
Conversations with Joseph Spence

177
179
183
195
239
242
242
250
265
270
309
311
319
327

409
409
411
572
573

Notes

575

332
336
350
358
361

363
372
385
389
394
400
408


CONTENTS

vii

Further Reading

710

Biographical Index

714

Index of Titles

734

Index of First Line

s736

Index of Correspondents

738


This page intentionally left blank


INTRODUCTION
THE aim of this volume is to give a representative selection of Pope's
most important work. His chief lifelong vocation was that of the poet,
and this is reflected by the inclusion of all his major poems, omitting
only the translations of Homer. In addition, a characteristic sample of
his prose is provided, including satires, pamphlets, and periodical writing. His criticism is represented by the influential preface to his edition
of Shakespeare. Finally, the personal side of his work is illustrated by
short passages from his conversations with Joseph Spence, and by
examples of his wide-ranging correspondence. In all categories there
are inevitably omissions, caused by the demands of space. Pope is a
highly allusive poet, and even with a number of self-denying ordinances
I have been obliged to annotate the text quite fully in order to enable
a reader to follow its sense.
Among the poems there are several casualties which are particularly
to be regretted. It has not been possible to find room for some of the
early translations (although Sappho to Phaon is included); for Messiah
and the Ode on St Cecilia's Day; for the original version of The Rape of
the Lock and The Dunciad; and for many shorter items which demonstrate Pope's skill in occasional verse, especially in ballads, epigrams,
and epitaphs. The largest gap, as already indicated, surrounds the
translations of Homer, but a single book of the Iliad is included to give
some sense of Pope's attempt to bring 'primitive' epic within Augustan
norms. The drama, which is nearly all collaborative, has had to be
excluded. However, Peri Bathous is present in full to illustrate the

Scriblerian carping against solemn folly, as well as the prose squibs
which emerged from Pope's prolonged struggle with the rascally bookseller Curll. As for the correspondence, ten typical letters are given in
full, and whilst they cannot speak adequately for the entire body of
over two thousand letters they do show some of his best effects in the
familiar epistle. The items are printed in chronological order, regardless of their literary category (except for the extracts from Spence), to
enable a reader to follow the shape of Pope's career. Brief rationale
behind these editorial decisions will be found in the Note on the Text,
p. xxvii below.
Pope has often been termed the first truly professional poet in English. This is a fair judgement, even though (as Pope realized sooner
than anyone) his poetic father John Dryden had led the way. In the


X

INTRODUCTION

review of Pope's life and writings which follows, I shall try to give a
more detailed justification for this description; at this point it is enough
to observe that Pope had a peculiarly acute awareness of the traditions
he inherited, as well as a clear-sighted vision of where he stood in
literary history. His dealings with the book trade mark a significant
moment in the development of the literary profession. This can be seen
in the care with which Pope prepared his texts and supervised their
appearance in print; his choice of outlets and occasions for publication;
and his battles with the redoubtable Curll in print and in the lawcourts.
Curll was a key figure in the evolution of print culture, a never-failing
irritant to Pope but also an essential combatant in the battle of the books
which helped to produce the literary market-place of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Apart from the ruse by which Pope tricked Curll
into producing the first collection of a writer's private letters in 1735,

we might consider the ideas at stake in the pamphlets against Curll
printed below, pp. 124-34.
The great Popian scholar Maynard Mack has used an epigraph from
Thomas Mann: 'Who is the poet? He whose life is symbolic.' The
application can be made in several ways: Mack probably had in mind
the way in which Pope inhabited both the garden and the city, actively
engaged in the political fisticuffs of his turbulent times and yet holding
part of himself in reserve. The emblem of this divided life is the grotto
he created at Twickenham. This was a shrine to family life and to
retirement, garnished with a dense array of historical and mythological
references, but it was also a repository of geological discoveries. It was
set in a secluded garden, but this Eden was itself planted in an almost
suburban location, only a matter of miles upstream from London.
Pope's villa offers itself as a miniature of the grand country house
owned by his aristocratic friends like Burlington and Bathurst. But his
'estate' ran not to thousands of acres of protected parkland, but to 'five
rented acres' on a busy road, directly abutting on to the Thames. In
the same way, Pope's situation as a Catholic meant that he was not
quite a full citizen of the realm, someone almost in the situation of a
naturalized alien. His invalid condition ensured that he could participate in the business of life only through writing. It is no accident that
this successful careerist, with his grand acquaintance and his pampered
visits to the stateliest homes of England, should have been personally
dispossessed, disinherited, and deprived; hence, among other things,
the ability of his poetry to enter into the feelings of women, whose
social and physical position his own mimicked. Hence, too, the symbolic
marginality of his role as a poet: famous, widely respected, and even


INTRODUCTION

xi

feared, Pope still had at his command only the illusory weapons of the
imagination.
'The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth', he wrote in the preface
to his first collection in 1717. He duly took part in the contest of
ancients and moderns, originality and imitation, Tory and Whig, city
and court, which eddied around him as Stuart gave way to Hanoverian.
No great work in English literature, with the possible exception of
Shakespearian comedy, is so explicitly a battle of the sexes as The Rape
of the Lock. No work enacts more directly the political takeover of a
nation than does the Dunciad, with its coup d'etat by the all-conquering
forces of dulness. But these are mythical battles. Pope imagined them
the more keenly because he had so little power to affect the real course
of events, whether the great issues of state or the domestic dramas of
sexual politics—where he was forced to remain on the sidelines as a
maimed non-combatant. Pope thus prefigures the willed selfpositioning of the Romantic and modern poet, asserting the spiritual
primacy of the fictive in the face of the primacy of raw life in the
everyday world. For Pope this was not a pose, but a genuine existential
destiny.
Moreover, Pope is a professional poet in a more obvious and direct
sense than the discussion so far reveals. It is noteworthy that the early
masters of English fiction—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne,
Smollett—had all been otherwise employed before they found the
novel, or the novel found them. Pope is the great exception to this rule.
Where the age often cultivated a pose of genteel amateurism, he stood
out as a serious player in the literary market-place. From an early age
he was dedicated, purposeful, single-minded; he brought the intensity
of a specialist to his vocation. He dabbled in drama, dipped his toe a
tentative inch into scholarship, and threw off the occasional essay in

criticism or satiric squib in prose. (He also wrote some remarkable
letters but they were—or affected to be—at the informal end of the
writer's craft.) All his deepest energies were monopolized by poetry.
The two translations of Homer are considerable works, but in so far
as they are Pope, rather than as true renderings of the original. We
need not root about to find and assemble from disjecta membra 'the
essential Pope'. In his works we find his very self and voice.
His life is in many ways an interesting one; and his literary career is
splendid and historic. But from childhood on, his biography is only a
background to the art. Alexander Pope was born on 21 May 1688 in
the heart of the City of London, at his parents' home on the south
side of Lombard Street. It was a prosperous area, still associated with


xii

INTRODUCTION

money-lenders, but with bustling markets around to give it a less bleak
and institutional air than it has today. Across the street were two
churches destroyed in the Great Fire, just a generation back, and Sir
Christopher Wren was then restoring them. Pope's father and mother
were both well into their forties: indeed, his father was on the point of
retiring from business. He had done well enough out of the linen trade
to amass a respectable stock of capital, perhaps £10,000, comparable
to thirty times as much today.
This sounds like a stable enough family; but there were cracks in
the placid bourgeois front. Alexander Pope senior, born an Anglican,
had become a Roman Catholic; his second wife Editha (the poet's
mother) belonged to the same faith. Apart, possibly, from 1558, when

Queen Elizabeth succeeded Mary, the year 1688 was the least propitious moment in English history for a Catholic to enter the world.
James II was forced from the throne within months of Pope's birth,
and his religion was to be from now on an officially proscribed unEnglish activity. As Pope grew up under William and Mary, he found
himself a member of a beleaguered and unpopular minority. One
reason for his father's early retirement, in fact, was the need to comply
with anti-Catholic legislation which sought to drive papists from the
capital. The Pope family moved first to Hammersmith, at this time an
outer suburb, and then to the country in Berkshire, where the second
Mrs Pope had connections. When young Alexander was about 10 he
came with his parents to Binfield, deep in the forest between Windsor
and Reading. It was the first settled home he had known, and his
rural surroundings were to furnish a classic ground from which his
imagination would develop. He immersed himself in the pastoral, as
perhaps only a sensitive boy would do when plucked from the noise of
the town and the effigies of prejudice. Robert Hooke's primly doric
Monument stood
pointing at the skies,
Like a tall bully
(Epistle to Bathurst)

just two hundred yards from Pope's birthplace, with its true-blue Protestant message reinscribed in the 1690s.
In Windsor Forest Pope was to some extent protected from the
discriminations suffered by the Catholic community. If the active life
was hemmed in by restrictions on public participation, at least a contemplative existence was possible. But there was no defence against the


xiii
second great handicap which fell to Pope's lot. At the age of about 12,
he contracted a form of tuberculosis of the bone, probably as a result
of drinking infected milk. This produced severe curvature of the spine,

and progressively affected his mobility. The first onset of the illness
(which was soon to be identified by Dr Percival Pott, hence its later
name 'Pott's disease') lasted until Pope was around 16. After that he
seems to have found a way of living with his disorder, and it was only
in middle age that he submitted to the state of an outright invalid. But
he remained dwarfish in build (perhaps four feet six inches tall), and
underwent a variety of humiliations throughout life. He needed help
to perform ordinary functions like dressing and undressing; he suffered
excruciating torments every time he travelled along the bumpy roads
of eighteenth-century England; and a normal sex life was debarred
him. In his later years he had asthma, recurrent migraine, heart trouble,
and an eye condition, as well as a urethral stricture which involved a
painful operation in 1740. Most people know that Pope was a hunchback and some awareness of the fact hovers behind our reading of his
poems. But we generally make too little allowance for it. We are conscious of his physique as it makes for oddity (and hence, perhaps, his
prickly nature and satiric leanings); we too rarely comprehend the sheer
pain, inconvenience, and embarrassment to which his 'crazy carcass'
put him. A medical case-history cannot explain away Pope's flaws, as
a man or a writer; nor, for that matter, can his 'long Disease' be
identified with his creativity. But it is critically prudent, as well as
humane, to remind ourselves of the obstacles he had to face. There is
a hint of compensatory over-achievement in Pope's career, but we
ought to be clear just what was involved—not a freakish father or a
bad prep school, but the condition (doubly so) of a total outsider.
Excluded by his physical condition from normal education, Pope had
to rely on his own resources. His bookish tastes led him to the great
literature of Greece and Rome, and in his youth it seems to have been
the epic and pastoral writers who meant more than moral or satiric
poets. In English his masters were, as they remained, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden (who died just as Pope approached his
twelfth birthday). But his interests were eclectic enough to prompt
imitations of such different models as Chaucer and the influential

seventeenth-century lyricists Cowley and Waller. Nobody at this date
fully understood Chaucer's metric, and 'imitating' his poetry involved
greater liberties than we readily countenance today. The lines 'Women
ben full of Ragerie', written c.1702, have a callow mocking air, which
combines pseudo-medieval inflexions like stoppen and callen with pure
INTRODUCTION


xiv

INTRODUCTION

Augustan attitudes ('Miss star'd'). But even a century later Wordsworth
thought it worth retaining in his versions of Chaucer 'sprinklings of
antiquity' to supply a historical local colour. At all events, Pope's long
tutelage did him no harm in the end. He acquired a patron in Berkshire
—Sir William Trumbull, a lawyer, ambassador, and government minister who had retired to a life of dignified idleness a few miles from
Binfield. At the age of about 17, Pope was strong enough to face the
hurly-burly of the capital, and there he gained the notice of litterateurs
in the coffee-houses, notably the playwright Wycherley and the
physician-poet Garth, author of The Dispensary. The youthful Pope
had a talent for charming old people, which suggests that a certain consciously winsome quality may have formed part of his make-up.
These men, along with other established literary figures, helped to
usher him into print in 1709. The leading publisher Jacob Tonson
included various items, including the four Pastorals, in a volume of
miscellanies which took its place in a highly regarded series. The virtuosity of the Pastorals would have been apparent in any mode of publication, but here they were set off to the maximum advantage. Within
a year or two Pope had reached the fringe of the Spectator circle, then
at the pinnacle of all literary affairs. He soon afterwards made the
acquaintance of Jonathan Swift and John Gay: one consequence was
the formation of the Scriblerus Club, to which Thomas Parnell and

Dr John Arbuthnot were also admitted. The club perfected a kind of
high-spirited spoofing, involving parody, intellectual practical jokes,
and an onslaught upon all things pedantic. The roots of The Dunciad,
as indeed of Gulliver's Travels, may well lie in this convivial association.
At the same time Pope was coming to know some of the greatest figures
in the land, including the two Tory statesmen, Oxford and Bolingbroke,
who dominated political life. Every year brought a fresh triumph for
Pope: in 1711,An Essay on Criticism, both elegant and incisive; in 1712,
the original Rape of the Locke in its two-canto form; in 1713, Windsor
Forest, celebrating the end of the long-drawn Marlborough wars and
also evoking the scenes of Pope's boyhood; then in 1714 the revised
Rape of the Lock, wonderfully enriched by its expansion to five cantos.
All these poems, together with Eloisa to Abelard, appeared in a handsome folio collection in 1717, which provided a conspectus of his career
to date.
This pattern of unbroken success might well have been disturbed by
the events of 1714, when Queen Anne died and the Tory ministry fell.
Certainly the Hanoverian regime promised a different set of values,
and it was one seen by many creative people as hostile to their purposes.


INTRODUCTION

XV

Swift was exiled to Dublin, landlocked in a safely remote deanery when
he had envisaged himself as Bishop of Bath and Wells (later, no doubt,
of London or Winchester). Gay, too, went through many years of
neglect and self-pity. Even the robust Dr Arbuthnot had to endure the
loss of his court post and his lodgings in St James's Palace. But Pope
had no official encumbrances. He was already plotting his own road to

independence: a verse translation of the Iliad, begun during the Tory
ascendancy. The first instalment appeared in June 1715, and thereafter
the poem came out in segments until its completion in 1720. The Iliad
confirmed Pope's now unchallengeable standing as the leading poet of
his day. It also laid the foundations of a secure and even comfortable
way of life.
Up to this time Pope had not made very much money. For most of
his work he had been paid between £15 and £30, and the original
copyright of The Rape of the Locke earned him no more than £7. But
the Iliad was published by private subscription, and Pope organized a
massive campaign to attract names for his list. He also obtained particularly good terms from his bookseller, Lintot, which meant that he took
a higher proportion of the profits than was customary (Lintot hoped to
get his own returns from a separate trade edition, and in the end he
did so). The Iliad carries a list of 575 subscribers, who ordered just
over 650 sets at 6 guineas per head. Dr Johnson in the Lives of the Poets
estimated Pope's receipts at £5,3 20; this may be a little on the high side,
as Pope had to pay Lintot for distribution expenses of later volumes.
However, he certainly cleared a very considerable sum and had gone
far to set himself up for life. He started painting in a genteel way and
then became an expert on landscape gardening. The family had moved
from Berkshire to Chiswick in 1716; after the death of Pope's father
he took up residence with his mother in Twickenham. From 1718 this
would be his home for the rest of his life.
The South Sea Bubble in 1720 was to mark a turning-point in
national affairs, preparing the way for the long dominance of Robert
Walpole. Pope and the Prime Minister have been described as 'mighty
opposites', and it is true that the rise of Walpole coincided with a dip
in Pope's fortunes. After completing the Iliad in 1720, he embarked
on a similar project for translating the Odyssey. Although the subscription list was even larger (over 600 names, taking 850 copies) and he
made something like £4,500, his energies seem to have flagged. He

was responsible for only half of the text, twelve books of Homer having
been allotted to discreet assistants in William Broome and Elijah
Fenton. The facts eventually trickled out, as they always will, and Pope


xvi

INTRODUCTION

lost something in reputation as a consequence. At the same period he
was engaged in an edition of Shakespeare, mounted for the benefit of
the publisher Tonson. It was not particularly successful commercially,
and it suffered critically at the hands of Lewis Theobald, whose Shakespeare Restored (1726) exposed the poet's limitations as a historical
scholar. There are good things in the edition, notably an impressive
defence of Shakespeare in the preface; but Pope's handling of textual
matters was perfunctory even by the far from rigorous standards of the
age. Theobald's own edition (1733) was to mark an improvement in this
respect, and later in the century Malone was to continue the process.
Another of Pope's undertakings was an edition of the works of an
aristocratic poetaster, the Duke of Buckingham (1723), which the ministry seized in the belief that it might contain some coded Jacobite
message. A few months later he was summoned to appear before the
House of Lords as a character witness for his friend Francis Atterbury,
Bishop of Rochester, who was accused of plotting on behalf of the
Pretender. As a matter of fact Pope had survived the first Jacobite rising
in 1715, and subsequent minor attempts in favour of this cause, without
a great deal of trouble; whether he would have found it possible to
come to terms with a restored Stuart monarchy, had one of these coups
succeeded, is a matter of guesswork. But it was again uncomfortable
to be a Catholic in 1723, and when Pope's own brother-in-law and
nephew were pursued by the authorities that year (ostensibly for deerstealing in Windsor Forest, though there were political overtones) he

was understandably disturbed—indeed, he came closer to the writer's
notorious 'block' than he ever did again.
As he approached the age of 40, he made an astounding recovery
from his creative lethargy. He was, for one thing, rid of Homer and
Shakespeare for the first time for over a decade. He also experienced
the invigorating company of Swift once more, during two visits the
Dean paid to England in 1726 and 1727. Curiously there may even
have been some stimulus in the death of George I, in the first of those
years, and the accession of George II. The Dunciad made it pretty clear
what Pope felt about that event:
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first!

But somehow this confirmation of Hanoverian rule, with Walpole
against all the odds entrenched even more firmly in power, provided
Pope with a fresh burst of imaginative energy. The first version of The
Dunciad appeared in May 1728, twenty months after Gulliver and four


xvii
months after The Beggar's Opera. There were as yet no notes, and most
of the names were not spelt out in full. But there was already enough
damaging particularity to arouse the whole of Grub Street against Pope.
The poem deals with the transference of sovereignty from one King
Dunce (in the fiction Elkanah Settle, a deceased compiler of funeral
tributes and stage-manager of official pageantry) to another (Lewis
Theobald, here styled 'Tibbald', a hack dramatist and critic who had
irked Pope with Shakespeare Restored). The pretended occasion for this
handover of power is the Lord Mayor's Day procession, held each year
in November when the new civic dignitaries took up office. In reality
Pope is making covert allusion to the royal succession; Queen Dulness

has a marked tincture of Queen Caroline about her, whilst the ceremonial of enthronement and anointing (e.g. i. 231-46) directly recalls
the coronation of George and Caroline in October 1727. Pope was, of
course, very well advanced in composing his poem by that date; but he
was too skilful a reviser and adaptor not to make use of this gift from
fortune.
Three volumes of miscellanies by the Scriblerian wits appeared in
1727 and 1728. The most important single item was Peri Bathous, or
The Art of Sinking in Poetry, an ironic course of instruction in achieving
literary depths. Pope was mainly responsible, and his assiduous collection of inflated or anti-climactic writing served his purposes well. In
1729 he published The Dunciad Variorum, still in three books, but with
many gaps filled in and extensive preliminaries attached. The general
effect was to emphasize the burlesque of pedantry; but the broader
political and cultural message ran no risk of occlusion in the process.
Much of the action concerns the scribblers of Grub Street, and Pope
takes the opportunity to pay off some personal scores. (He had a spy
among the garrets in the shape of Richard Savage, best known to history
as the hero of Samuel Johnson's remarkable biography.) However,
patrons and sponsors are equally in the line of fire: the malign organism
of Dulness has corrupted the fashionable West End in addition to the
seamier quarters of town. The metaphoric life of the poetry asserts a
connection between the miasmic squalor of Grub Street and the sordid
lucre of the court. And the mock-heroic framework—a parody of the
removal of Troy to Latium in the Aeneid—supplies a constant reminder
of alien dignity and vanished significance.
The 1730s represent the decade of Pope's most diverse achievement.
He embarked on a massive new project, first mentioned in November
1729, which was to treat a vast range of social and ethical concerns.
This philosophical opus magnum was never to attain a finished state,
INTRODUCTION

xviii

INTRODUCTION

and indeed recent research has shown that its scope and content veered
about in Pope's mind for the remaining fifteen years of his life. However, most of his important poetry in the 1730s bears a definite relation
to the scheme; and many individual poems were composed at this time
with a particular slot in the scheme marked out for them.
Among the eight finished epistles intended as component parts
of the scheme, the first to appear was the verse letter to the Earl of Burlington, published in 1731. Later this became the fourth and last of
the Epistles to Several Persons, which Pope's literary executor Warburton
rechristened 'Moral Essays' when editing the works in 1751. It was
followed by the Epistle to Bathurst (1733), the Epistle to Cobham (1734),
and the Epistle to a Lady (1735). Each of these poems is addressed to
an individual well known to Pope, though the degree of intimacy varies.
The lady in question, Martha Blount, was Pope's closest woman friend
for more than thirty years. Each epistle has a theme, broadly social in
nature, and the method of the poem allows for direct apostrophe
together with discursive argument, character sketches, parables, and
satiric asides. Meanwhile Pope was busy about another portion of the
planned 'ethic epistles', namely the four instalments of a poem now
known as the Essay on Man, published at intervals in 1733 and 1734.
Their concerns interlock closely with those of the Epistles to Several
Persons, but the tone is generally more elevated and the scale of imaginative operation more cosmic. Pope himself wrote to Swift of a choice
which lay before him, of proceeding 'in the same grave march like
Lucretius' or of descending 'to the gaieties of Horace'. Modern critics
on the whole have found it more congenial to detect the affinities with
Horace, but Pope would probably have laid the emphasis rather on its
Lucretian (and anti-Lucretian) vein of metaphysical enquiry, enacted

in the exclamatory, interrogatory, and hortatory gestures of its language.
But it is impossible ever to banish Horace from the Augustan poetic
scene. At the very same juncture Pope was engaged in a series of
Imitations of Horace, the first of which dates from 1733. It has been
suggested by Miriam Leranbaum that Pope began the imitations 'as a
kind of jeu d'esprit to provide relaxation from the greater moral seriousness demanded by the opus magnum project', but that in time they came
to possess their own 'moral earnestness and intensity'. This may well
be true, and it is a relevant consideration that the Horatian poems
cluster in time around the period of maximum absorption in the opus
magnum. For an eighteenth-century audience, an 'imitation' meant an
adaptation of some earlier text, modernizing references and inserting
topical material, but not departing too widely from the original. An


xix
imitator twined his parasitic poem closely around the host; if the new
growth totally obliterated the old, then he had failed in his task. Pope's
most substantial attempt in this direction is his version of the first
epistle of the second book. Horace had inscribed his poem to the
Emperor Augustus: Pope retains this formula, though it is understood
by everyone that he means the King, George Augustus. The imitation,
published in 1737, brilliantly reverses Horace's drift to convert a
Roman celebration into an English lament. When these Horatian
poems were collected by Warburton in 1751 the famous Epistle to Dr
Arbuthnot was set at their head, and a subtitle 'Prologue to the Satires'
appended. We cannot be sure that this would have had Pope's blessing,
but all in all it makes reasonable sense. On the other hand, the two
Epilogues published in 1738 were certainly intended as a tailpiece to
the series of imitations—and a splendidly trenchant conclusion they
form, too.

The last period of a writer's life is often the best documented: recipients are more likely to keep letters, and anecdotalists to report conversations. So it is with Pope. We know a good deal about both his doings
and his opinions towards the end. A young protege called Joseph
Spence began to collect his obiter dicta, whilst a large body of correspondence survives to record his activity as a writer (and by this time,
effectively, publisher of his own works). We also learn much of his
beloved 'rambles' around the country, which enabled him to keep in
touch with a wide circle of friends and to put into practice some of his
theories on landscape design. At home in Twickenham he was obsessively occupied with his garden and especially its centre-piece, the
famous grotto. As Maynard Mack has shown, the grotto became an
emblem of retirement and the poetic imagination. As for his far-flung
friends, they included the Bath entrepreneur Ralph Allen, the ageing
politician Bolingbroke (once disgraced for his Jacobite activity, but
permitted a limited reinstatement during the 1730s), the mercurial
ex-soldier Peterborough, and the rather withdrawn architect-earl, Burlington. Although his health was declining, Pope seems to have attained
a wide measure of fulfilment as he reached his fiftieth birthday.
But politics were never far off. He had been enlisted as a fringe
member of the so-called 'Patriot' Opposition to Walpole, a highminded and ideologically intense campaign to oust the Prime Minister
which was led by men of distinction including William Pulteney, the
Earl of Chesterfield, and William Pitt, later to be celebrated as the
Great Commoner and then as the Earl of Chatham. It is a matter of
contention how much active support Pope gave to this movement, which
INTRODUCTION


xx
INTRODUCTION
had many writers (James Thomson, Henry Fielding for a time, the
young Samuel Johnson) on its side. We know at least that he was willing
to attend the first night of nakedly partisan plays mounted by the
Opposition, even if there is a possibility that interest in drama had
something to do with his presence. But it is undeniable that his Horatian poems contain many thrusts at the ministry. He was planning an

epic called Brutus (never completed) which would have celebrated liberty in terms close to those of Opposition polemic. And at the very end
of his life, a new fourth book for The Dunciad (1742) implicated in its
satire not just Walpole, men finally poised for the fall, but also the
King—who would outlast Pope and half the Opposition. A revised
version of the full Dunciad in four books (1743) recast the main role,
with Theobald's place as King Dunce now taken by the Poet Laureate
Colley Cibber, an eccentric and seemingly easy-going man who had
acquired a large measure of influence in the world of the arts. Cibber's
fitness for the part derived both from his court appointment and from
his history as an actor-manager. At the same time Pope widened the
scope of his poem to include a whole range of current issues, from
deism to education, and from opera to antiquarianism. The resonant
last paragraph of Book III was transferred to the new last book, where
it still forms a conclusion of startling pungency.
Pope died on 30 May 1744, just after his fifty-sixth birthday. His
health had been deteriorating steadily, with his asthma little alleviated
by a quack who treated him for dropsy. Most of his old literary allies
were dead: Swift alone survived, bereft of almost all his faculties, for
another year. There began a process of reassessment such as eminent
authors are bound to undergo. Biographies, pamphlets, and critical
essays followed one another. Warburton's edition of the works in 1751
provoked fresh controversy; new poems and new biographical facts
continued to emerge. In this extensive debate the two most important
figures were the poet and literary historian Joseph Warton and the
redoubtable Samuel Johnson. Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings
of Pope (1756-82) contains a searching review of the poetry: with a few
exceptions, he finds Pope deficient in originality and in imaginative
power. Johnson's study in The Lives of the Poets (1781) constituted in
some respects an answer to the first volume of Warton's Essay. It is
more sympathetic to what might be termed the central Augustan virtues

in Pope (harmony, chastity of language, architectural skill), but it
acknowledges faults in both the man and the poet. Johnson's Life
remains the single most distinguished item in the long critical debate
that has raged around Pope.


xxi
In the nineteenth century, Pope was especially fortunate in his
admirers. Byron was a resolute defender of Pope's reputation, adducing
his example in opposition to what he saw as the provincialism and
self-indulgence of much Romantic poetry. On a famous occasion
Charles Lamb singled out Pope's compliments, by which he must have
meant the tributes to eminent contemporaries which are so skilfully
worked into the fabric of the satire. Hazlitt reports Lamb as saying,
'Each of them is worth an estate for life—nay, is an immortality.' A
generation later, Ruskin was to see Pope as a case-study in the effects
of the 'classical spirit'; though this 'spoiled half his work, he broke
through it continually into true enthusiasm and tender thought'. Elsewhere Ruskin linked Pope with Virgil as 'two great masters of the
absolute art of language'. Better known is Matthew Arnold's critique
in 'The Study of Poetry' (1880), where he concludes that 'Dryden and
Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose'. This
attitude remained dominant in the English-speaking world until the
1930s, when poets like W. H. Auden and Edith Sitwell offered a higher
estimate of Pope's imaginative powers, and academic studies made a
significant advance. The edition of the Works (1871-89) by Elwin and
Courthope has gradually been supplanted. The poems, including the
Homer translations, were splendidly edited by a team of distinguished
scholars headed by John Butt and Maynard Mack. A second volume
of the prose works has been prepared by Rosemary Cowler to supplant
the earlier edition by Norman Ault. The correspondence has been

edited by George Sherburn. Stimulating monographs have illuminated
various areas of Pope's work, for example R. A. Brower's consideration
of his habits of allusion, Ian Jack's exploration of the mock-heroic
device, Geoffrey Tillotson's analysis of stylistic features, and Howard
Weinbrot's review of the relation to formal verse satire from earlier
periods. Maynard Mack has produced the deepest study of Pope's life
and a host of important essays on the poet's imagery, his physical being,
and his relations with Walpole. A further generation of critics including
Emrys Jones and Howard Erskine-Hill have drawn attention to a vein
of fantasy, surrealism, and the comic 'absurd' in Pope. Most recently,
feminist scholarship has opened up new vistas on all of Pope's writing,
as exemplified by the contributions of Carole Fabricant, Ellen Pollak,
and Valerie Rumbold.
Pope is primarily a comic writer. By this I mean not simply that he
is often very funny, as in the pose of self-pity at the start of his Epistle
to Dr Arbuthnot. I refer equally to the domain of his best work: its visible
dramatis personae are those of a living, breathing society, its settings are
INTRODUCTION


INTRODUCTION
xxii
beguilingly familiar, and its emotional range reflects our own daily
moods. It is important to add 'visible', for Pope's imagination may at
any time take off to stranger and more grotesque countries of the mind.
The Rape of the Lock is in the first place a poem concerning beaux and
belles, prompted by a scandalous story of a peer who snipped off some
curls from the head of a giddy young socialite. Its milieu seems to be
domestic (dressing-tables, coffee-tables, card-tables). Yet the plot gets
mixed up with Rosicrucian mysteries, and we visit a nightmare world of

psycho-sexual disorders in the Cave of Spleen. Similarly, The Dunciad is
formally constructed around the doings of a squalid array of recognizable hack writers. But the imagery, the allusions, and the dense poetic
texture all encourage us to see these louche and farcical doings within
the wider sweep of history.
Pope was lucky in that the seventeenth-century 'reform of our
numbers' no longer needed to be argued about as in Dryden's day:
Late, very late, correctness grew our care,
When the tired nation breathed from civil war.
(Epistle to Augustus)

The ingredients that made for correctness (pure diction, clean syntax,
smooth versification) could be largely taken for granted, and Pope could
harness these to express thought, feeling, and observation. In civic
terms, in bodily constitution, he was a pariah, an outsider. But he
understood his age—both the larger workings of society and the psychology of individuals—as fully as anyone then alive. His dedication to
the art of poetry enables us to share that insight, dispensed to us in the
richest possible way through pleasures of the imagination.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE major debt accrued by an editor is to former generations of
scholars who have built up our knowledge of the life and works of
Pope. My deepest gratitude goes to those who have produced the two
great editions of the poet: the unduly maligned Elwin and Courthope
in the nineteenth century, and the group headed by John Butt who
were responsible for the Twickenham edition in the twentieth century.
As a modern spelling edition, my own has different textual priorities,
and the series policy calls for a different style of explanatory gloss.
Nevertheless, the work of these predecessors has left a solid groundwork on which we continue to rely. Among one-volume editions, I have
found some useful material in the selection of poetry and prose edited

by Aubrey Williams (Riverside Editions, 1969).
The text of Pope's letters is based on The Correspondence of Alexander
Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford University Press, 1956). The
excerpts from Pope's conversations with Spence are taken from Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men by Joseph Spence,
ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford University Press, 1966). Permission to
use this material is gratefully acknowledged.
A wider indebtedness is to the biographical, critical, and bibliographical work of Maynard Mack, which it would be impossible to
conceal even if I desired to hide the fact. Such acknowledgement may
perhaps stand in the place of a formal dedication.


CHRONOLOGY
1688
1688-9

21 May, P born in London.
Protestant Revolution: James II forced to abdicate in favour
of William and Mary.
c. 1700
P's family moves from London to Binfield, in Windsor
Forest.
1702
Queen Anne succeeds to throne.
1704
Swift, A Tale of a Tub.
1709
P's first published works, including his Pastorals, appear in
a London miscellany.
1710
Formation of Tory Government led by Harley and St John

(Bolingbroke), later close friend of P.
1711 P's Essay on Criticism brings him fame; Addison and Steele
launch the Spectator (P and Swift occasional contributions).
1712
20 May, first appearance of Rape of the Lock (two-canto
version).
1713
7 March, Windsor Forest published; P writes essays for
Steele's journal the Guardian. Scriblerus Club becomes
active, with P, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Parnell, and Harley
(now Lord Oxford) members.
1714
4 March, five-canto version of Rape of the Lock published,
I August, death of Queen Anne and accession of first
Hanoverian king, George I. Tories out of office for the
remainder of P's life. Swift settled in Dublin as Dean
of St Patrick's.
1715 February, The Temple of Fame; 6 June, first instalment of
P's Iliad translation. Jacobite rising in Scotland in support
of the Old Pretender, put down with relative ease. AntiCatholic legislation limits P's personal liberties.
1716
P's family moves to Chiswick on outskirts of London. P
attacks the bookseller Curll in prose pamphlets.
1716-20 Remaining volumes of Iliad translation published.
1717
P, Gay, and Arbuthnot collaborate in farce Three Hours afte
Marriage. P's father dies. 3 June, P's first major collection