(a) A CATHOLIC CHILDHOOD
Because Pope was not primarily a lyric poet like Donne, or an explorer of private mental experience like Wordsworth, we tend to think of him as essentially a public voice, the satirist of civil follies rather than the analyst of personal emotions. Many of the vices Pope attacked are forms of egotism: avarice, power-seeking, narcissism. The lack of a real or implied partner to address poems to also suggests a reticence about private life which disappoints a voyeuristic age. Nonetheless personal character remained for Pope a fundamental element of poetic voice. Satire has to have a position from which to criticise the world; and since Pope could not acquire the kind of state position which validated the work of his closest model, John Dryden (1631-1700), he developed a position of moral authority derived from his own status as a private, right-thinking citizen, living in principled independence of state patronage, willing to implicate the personal experience on which his voice as a social critic was based. While one could read through the complete poems of Dryden without learning much about his life, Pope insistently manages a particular kind of self-involvement even in his most public, apocalyptic works. Much criticism of him – plenty of it more venomous and scurrilous than anything he produced himself in criticizing others – was based on his own life, character, and body. A competent artist, he controlled the dissemination of portraits and other images of himself, and bestowed extraordinary care on the presentation and publication of his work, mastering book trade processes as no writer had ever done before to produce a meticulous version of his ’corpus’ in print [189-99]. In these ways, he seems a very modern figure. This first section will give an account of the main features of what we know of Pope’s biography, and of how he turned his personal experience into public poetry.
Pope had, and has continued to have, several biographers. During his lifetime he befriended Joseph Spence, a minor poet and critic who compiled a large body of ’anecdotes’ from Pope’s conversation, indicating his views on various critical matters but also recording such facts as Pope could remember, or wished to be remembered, about his own life. ’Mr. Pope was born on the twenty-first of May, 1688’, Spence ascertained (Spence 1966: 3); the time was 6: 45 p.m. and the place is thought to have been no. 2 Plough Court, just off Lombard Street, London, in what was fast becoming the financial centre of England. His father (also Alexander, 1646-1717) ’was an honest merchant and dealt in Hollands wholesale’ (Spence 1966: 7): that is, he dealt in linens, exporting them as far afield as Virginia. The poet’s mother, Edith (nee
ALEXANDER POPE
Turner, d.1733), was just short of forty-five when he was born; the poet was her only child, though there was a surviving half-sister, Magdalen, from his father’s earlier marriage (a half-brother, Alexander again, had died in infancy).
Though Pope’s father was the son of an Anglican vicar, he converted to Catholicism, perhaps during European travels; his mother was from a family which divided along Catholic and Protestant lines. Catholicism caused the family many problems. Though the Civil War itself ended with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the issues which had caused it continued to divide the nation for another century. Rumours of a Catholic plot to assassinate Charles in 1679 (the ’Popish Plot’) had been used to foment some bitter anti-Catholic sentiment during the first half of the 1680s, and the accession of the Catholic James II in 1685 brought the threat of a renewed Civil War much closer. Three weeks after Pope’s birth, James II’s wife gave birth to a son, providing a Catholic heir to the kingdom. Shortly afterwards James was forced to abandon the throne in favour of his daughter Mary and her Protestant husband William of Orange, a ’Glorious Revolution’ as it was known to its supporters, which paved the way for the Protestant succession, though a number of attempts to restore the Catholic line would be made, the last and most serious occurring a year after Pope’s death.
In London especially, heavily punitive measures against Catholics were enforced immediately on the arrival of William and Mary. Pope’s father had amassed about £10,000 from his business, a fortune large enough to enable him to retire from business in the face of this onslaught, thus greatly diminishing the effects of the legislation on Pope’s boyhood: Pope’s family vacated Plough Court for Hammersmith some time around 1692, and the main danger to his early life seems to have come from a wild cow which attacked him while he was, rather picturesquely, ’filling a little cart with stones’ (Spence 1966: 3). He retained great affection for the women of his close and protective household: his nurse, Mary Beach, his aunt Elizabeth Turner, and especially his mother, who lived with him until her death in 1733. A priest who knew him told Spence that Pope ’was a child of a particularly sweet temper and had a great deal of sweetness in his look when he was a boy’ (Spence 1966: 5-6). Johnson reports that ’His voice, when he was young, was so pleasing that he was called in fondness the ”little Nightingale”’ (Johnson 1905: 83).
As a Catholic Pope could not attend mainstream schools and could not attend university. He was taught to read by his aunt, and had developed a very precise calligraphy by imitating the typography of printed books, a talent which he often used in designing his books in
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later life (Spence 1966: 12). At the age of about eight Pope began to learn Latin and Greek from a priest. He subsequently attended clandestine Catholic schools, one in Twyford, from where he was removed after being punished for writing a satire on his master (his earliest satiric venture), and one near Hyde Park Corner, from which he is supposed to have on occasion visited the theatre; he also saw his hero, John Dryden, once (Spence 1966: 25). Pope was dismissive of his formal schooling: ’God knows, it extended a very little way’ (Spence 1966: 8). Indeed, he seems to have valued his independent exploration of literature as a positive escape from the prison-house of grammar-based education, a formal trap which he would later denounce more publicly (Spence 1966: 21-2). At the age of eight he had ’discovered’ Homer through translation (much as Keats was to do more than a century later): John Ogilby’s///W (1660) and Odyssey (1665) were huge volumes ’Adorn’d with Sculptures’ (engravings), and Pope always ’spoke of the pleasure it then gave him, with a sort of rapture only on reflecting on it’ (Spence 1966: 14). With George Sandys’s illustrated Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished (1626), and Statius’s Thebaid, the Homer texts formed a rich repository of Greek and Latin mythology and narrative which stimulated Pope’s imagination through his early career and beyond.
(b) FOREST RETREATS
In 1698 Pope’s father bought a house at Binfield, Berkshire, from his son in law, Charles Rackett, who had married Pope’s half-sister Magdalen. This residence on an estate of some nineteen acres of land, close to Windsor with the forest, castle and river Thames to explore, had a determining influence on Pope, turning enforced removal from the capital into the very model of principled retreat, an idyll never entirely besmirched by later events. Though Pope’s early works such as the Pastorals (1709) and Windsor-Forest (1713) derive much from literary models, they derive something from an acute observation of the heraldic colouring within the castle and the exercise of agriculture and rural sports in the forest.
Here Pope was free to educate himself: his father’s library was wellstocked, and he began to purchase books on his own account, acquiring early editions of Chaucer, Herbert and Milton. His half-sister told Spence that he ’did nothing but write and read’, and his own image of himself spending whole days reading under trees, nicely suggests the twin influences of reading and nature: ’I followed everywhere as my
ALEXANDER POPE
fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the woods and fields just as they fall in his way’ (Spence 1966: 12, 13, 20). Having already developed a taste for English poets such as Waller, Spenser and Dryden, courtly and fantastic by turns, he described his years from the age of thirteen to twenty as ’all poetical’, a voracious if sporadic ’ramble’ through Greek, Latin, Italian and French poetry and criticism (Spence 1966:19-20). At some point around 1703-04 he studied French and Italian in London, against the wishes of his family, concerned for his already insecure health (Spence 1966: 12-13).
The prelapsarian freedom which Pope remembered so fondly began to be eroded by two potent forces: illness, and a growing political sense [163-71]. About the time of the move to Binfield, Pope had the first major attack of the disease which was eventually to cripple him. Thought to be spinal tuberculosis, contracted through infected milk, ’Pott’s disease’ restricted his height to about four foot six, caused progressive curvature of the spine, and left him subject to severe headaches, fits, eye inflammations and respiratory problems. Though he surmounted these difficulties with exercise and fresh air, and experimented with various comic versions of his illness in private letters and in public poems, his sense of himself was deeply affected by his physical appearance. At the same time, the family’s Catholicism (low-key and quietistic as it was) became a second marker of internal exile. His father’s library contained much literature from the religious controversies of the seventeenth century, which Pope read, finding himself ’a Papist and a Protestant by turns, according to the last book I read’ (Letters I: 453). The humanistic tolerance, self-knowledge and irony of Erasmus and Montaigne, both Catholics but men of principled independence of thought, offered an attractive route out of the morass of sectarian
debate.
Pope’s adolescence was also nurtured by a number of much older men with whom Pope became friendly and whom he impressed with his precocious reading and ’maddish way’ (Spence 1966: 13). John Caryll, a local Catholic who was to play an important role in the genesis of The Rape of the Lock [65-77], had a wide circle of literary acquaintance and it was probably he who introduced Pope to the most brilliant actor of the Restoration stage, Thomas Betterton (1635-1710), as well as that stage’s most uncompromising dramatist, William Wycherley (1640-1716). Pope resisted the blandishments of both to write for the stage, but assisted both men in ’correcting’ their verses, a troublesome task but one which testifies to the closeness of the literary friendships and Pope’s rapid rise to esteem. His earliest surviving correspondence is with Wycherley, in whose company he roamed London (he was
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mocked as ’Wycherley’s Crutch’ by unsympathetic observers: Spence
1966: 35). Pope also knew Dr Samuel Garth (1661-1719), patron of Dryden, physician, and wit, whose mock-heroic The Dispensary (1699) is one of the best models for comparison with Pope’s own work in the genre, and Sir William Trumbull, a diplomat who had served with distinction under kings of violently different persuasions and who was now one of the twelve verderers of Windsor Forest. Benign, well-read and generous, Trumbull was an active nurturing force in Pope’s development; they rode in the forest and talked literature ’almost every day’ (Spence 1966: 31). William Walsh (1663-1708), similarly, showed Pope that it was possible to maintain a well-bred moderation in literature and politics, acting as a Whig M.P. under both William III and Anne, and being hailed by the Tory Dryden as the best critic of the age (Spence 1966: 32).
It was this circle of men to whom Pope submitted his early publishable literary efforts, for ’correction’; there is considerable surviving evidence of the close practical and technical attention Walsh in particular exercised over the Pastorals, the Essay on Criticism and Sapho to Phaon. Walsh had told Pope: ’that there was one way left of excelling, for though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct – and he desired me to make that my study and aim’ (Spence 1966: 32). Pope’s one criticism of his master Dryden was that he wrote too quickly (Spence 1966: 24). Not that Pope spurned spontaneity: he claimed ’I began writing verses of my own invention farther back than I can remember’. But he had always been used to revising; his father set him verse exercises and was ’pretty difficult in being pleased and used often to send him back to new turn them’ (Spence 1966: 7, 15). While still at school Pope wrote a play based on speeches from the Iliad for his schoolfellows to act, and completed another based on ’a very moving story in the legend of St Genevieve’, as well as an epic poem, Alcander, in which, he smilingly recalled, he attempted ’to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece’. This four-book epic he later burned, ’not without some regret’; some lines were salvaged for other work (Spence 1966: 15-18).
Pope practised the craft of writing by imitating that which pleased him most in his reading. His earliest surviving poem is a verse paraphrase of a prayer from the Christian mystic Thomas a Kempis, not published in his lifetime and a rare indication of his religious background. Most of his early translations are from pre-Christian writers, notably Ovid, from whose Metamorphoses he produced some tales of monstrous or misdirected sexual activities when he was about fourteen (the most interesting of these, the story of the cyclops Polyphemus’s love for
ALEXANDER POPE
Galatea, remained unpublished in his lifetime). It was also from Ovid that he translated, about 1707, Sapho to Phaon [172, 194], an intriguingly expressive poem in which the Lesbian poetess Sappho, abandoned by the youth Phaon with whom she has fallen in love, laments her confused sexual longings and reviews her languishing life as a poet. His version of Statius’ Thebaid, book I, was written about
1703 (published 1712), and gave him confidence in the use of heroic couplets in ’high’ style; the story itself, which deals with the internecine wars of succession after the resignation of the incestuous parricide Oedipus from the throne of Thebes, is a monstrous and gory exploration of politics, sex and death: there is nothing tame about Pope’s interest in classical mythology. Pope also began translating sections of Homer,
probably about 1707.
He also practised a form of ’imitation’ or stylistic mimicking; around
1701 he was impersonating the polished amatory verses of Waller, the metaphysical conceits of Cowley, and the anti-feminist lyrics of the Earl of Dorset in particular. A short pastiche of Chaucer allowed him to tell a bawdy joke; ’The Alley’, an imitation of Spenser, took the stanza form of The Faerie Queene and applied it mockingly to the filthy pathways of contemporary London. ’On Silence’, a substantial imitation of Rochester’s ’Upon Nothing’, points forward to the sceptical social satire of his mature work. This work was all complete before
1709, but Pope later edited some of it as evidence of his poetic development, or simply as makeweights in anthologies.
(c) LITERARY LONDON
Pope was twenty when his first poems were published, in May 1709, significantly enough adjacent to the first full ’Copyright Act’ which defined authorial property in ways which were to allow Pope to make more money from writing than any poet before him. The Pastorals appeared in Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part, an anthology published by Jacob Tonson the elder, the most eminent publisher of the day: he had acquired the rights to Milton, Shakespeare, and Dryden, and ran a Whig club of authors known as the Kit-Cat Club. Pope contributed three works to the anthology (which also included work by Swift, later to become one of Pope’s closest friends). Two of these emerged from Pope’s self-imposed apprenticeship in translating and imitating: January and May was a rewriting in modern idiom of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, written about 1704 and giving Pope the opportunity to be elegant and witty about sex and marriage; The Episode ofSarpedon
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was a translation from Homer’s Iliad. The Chaucer imitation was to some degree also an imitation of Dryden, whose Fables (1700) had established the utility of ’polishing’ the medieval poet into smoother and more moralistic form (though the story itself remains ribald enough, and Pope was later to add a version of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, also written about 1704, to his oeuvre). In the Episode of Sarpedon, comprising passages from Iliad XII and XVI, Pope explored a high heroic language in speeches of glory and death; again, the imitation is double, for one of the passages had been previously translated by John Denham, another of Pope’s models. The two pieces are therefore both homage to earlier great poets, and the beginnings of a contest with them.
In the Pastorals, Pope announced his intention to challenge for such fame, since pastoral was the genre on which the epic poet cut his teeth (the examples of Virgil, Spenser and Milton were particularly in Pope’s mind). ’First in these Fields I try the Sylvan Strains’, the series opens, asserting originality and naturalism in the midst of imitation and the most ’artificial’ literary genre around. Flaunting his allegiance to wellknown pastorals such as Virgil’s Eclogues and Theocritus’s Idylls, Pope splices the allegorical and mythological song into English settings. Excising the comic rusticity which pervaded earlier English pastoral, Pope claims for England successorship to the enchanted ground of classical literature. Pope’s virtuoso displays indeed are some of the last exercises in the genre, which had been hugely popular in the Renaissance but was beginning to run out of variations. In these painterly landscapes, shepherds pursue nymphs, vie with each other in poetical or musical skill, and invoke the aid of deities, with little or no attention to the actual business of rearing sheep.
Pope had been anticipating publication of Poetical Miscellanies for a few years and in his correspondence with Wycherley struck poses of aristocratic indifference to the squalid world of literary fame and of comic reluctance to appear in print. In London he made the acquaintance of Henry Cromwell, an idle dandy with a poetical turn with whom Pope exchanged some correspondence of flamboyant maleness: Pope felt able to play at being a rake-about-town, perhaps in compensation for his sense of being denied sexual enjoyment by his physical limitations. Never to be Alexander the Great in any heroic sense, he knew he was ’that little Alexander the women laugh at’ (Letters I: 114). In 1707 he had met Martha and Teresa Blount, granddaughters of Anthony Englefield, one of Pope’s Catholic neighbours; from 1711 the intimacy became more conspicuous. A few elegantly bawdy poems survive from this period, suggesting that the poet who had imitated the Cavalier mode of Waller, Denham and Cowley, was still exploring the erotic
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ALEXANDER POPE
potential of verse. More seriously, Pope showed Cromwell, a solid Latinist in spite of his rakish pose, versions of Statius and Ovid for his revision. Pope kept busts of authors such as Dryden, Milton and Shakespeare in his chamber as perpetual reminders of literary greatness (Letters I: 120); he was also working on a poem called The Temple of Fame, based on a somewhat more austere poem of Chaucer’s than those to which Pope had hitherto given attention, The Hous of Fame. Here Pope once again produced homage and challenge to the literature of the past, attempting to envision in what was becoming a favourite form of artistic expression, neoclassical architecture, some secure means of recording greatness for posterity.
Pope had been working on An Essay on Criticism [49-57] since about
1707, and it had passed through his usual revisers. It was published on
15 May 1711, the first of his works to appear independently. Full of quotation, allusion and example, it offers a mediation between extreme critical positions and points towards an accessible community of judgement. Homer is celebrated as the pre-critical fount of Western literature, with Virgil as a sort of post-critical example of how one might recapture ’nature’ by observing the rules formulated by the classical critics. The fragmentary Poetics of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) laid down guidelines for the successful ’imitation’ of nature in poetry and drama. The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC) had turned Aristotelian principles into a more conversational and personal form of advice in the ’Epistle to the Pisos’, commonly known as the Ars Poetica or Art of Poetry’. These works had formed the basis for most critical theorizing of the seventeenth century; in drama especially, the guidelines had become fossilised into ’Rules’ in which truth to nature could only be achieved by very close forms of imitation – limiting the action of plays to one plot, in one location, on one day. There was much debate about the applicability of these rules in an English tradition, and Pope’s master Dryden adopted the ’Rules’ with much misgiving. Some relief from the Rules came in the shape of the treatise known as Peri Hypsous or On the Sublime, ascribed to ’Longinus’ (written probably in the first century AD, and translated into English in 1652 (more influentially, into French by Nicholas Boileau in 1674); this concentrated on ’poetic fire’, flights of the imagination, inspirational visions of boundlessness. Pope had absorbed these critics very thoroughly. He was deeply aware of the tensions between theory and practice, imagination and judgment, and the ongoing European debate about the relative claims of Ancient and Modern learning, which Swift had satirised in The Battle of the Books (1704). He had models for the genteel style of the poetic essay. Horace, notably, but also Boileau’s An Poetique (1674, translated
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partially by Dryden, 1683), the Earl of Roscommon’s£ssay on Translated Verse (1684, following his translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica into blank verse, 1680), and the Duke of Buckinghamshire’s Essay upon Poetry (1682). Nonetheless an essay on criticism done in verse was a new thing and highly significant. Though the poem prefers the collective pronouns ’we’ and ’you’ to T, an ambitious claim to authority is being made: the list of ideally-qualified critics given at the end of the poem leads from Aristotle to Walsh, and the final lines of the poem are, in a characteristic gesture of self-inscription, about Pope’s relation to his critical mentor.
The poem also contains Pope’s first touches of accusatory satire. Amid the examples of bad criticism he cites is one Appius, loud, blustering, and tyrannical. This was a hit at John Dennis, poet and dramatist, who had published two Aristotelian treatises on criticism. Pope shared many of his critical views, but Dennis’s dogmatism, vanity and paranoia was too easy a target. A month after Pope’s Essay was published, Dennis gave Pope his first taste of public controversy by issuing Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody, call’d, an Essay upon Criticism. This was an angry demolition of Pope, characterising his balanced couplets as contradiction, his comprehensiveness as rhapsodic incoherence, his gestures towards authority as upstart arrogance. Moreover, Dennis mounted a vicious attack on Pope’s character and physique, suggesting that his familial Catholicism was active Jacobitism [165-
9] and that his deformity represented his personality [184-5]: As there is no Creature so venomous, there is nothing so stupid and impotent as a hunch-back’d Toad’ (Guerinot 1969: 3). Pope, who had a lifetime of this stuff to face and who always professed his indifference to it, was pained by this attack, though he rightly pointed out that Dennis’s ’passion’ proved how correct the initial criticism of him had been (Spence 1966: 42).
But Pope’s career was not to be derailed by such as Dennis. The Essay brought him to the attention of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Whig politicians and journalists who began their highly influential paper The Spectator two months before Pope’s poem appeared. The Spectator consisted of moderately humorous essays on topics of current concern, literary, philosophical or moral, eschewing (ostensibly at least) party politics for a notion of well-bred tolerance. The Essay was praised by Addison as ’a Masterpiece in its kind’ later that year (no. 253, 20 December 1711), though Pope was mildly censured for (as he put it in thanking Steele for Addison’s praise and his criticism) ’speaking too freely of my Brother-Moderns’. In the next year one whole issue was given over to publication of Pope’s Messiah, a ’sacred Eclogue’ based on Isaiah and Virgil’s Pollio (no. 378, 14 May
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1712), which again showed Pope’s inheritance of the classical mantle, here with irreproachable religious colouring. Addison praised a Miscellany which Pope edited at the behest of Bernard Lintot, a rival publisher of rather less salubrious character than Tonson, which contained ’many excellent Compositions of that ingenious Gentleman’ (no. 523, 30 October 1712).
One of these ’Compositions’ was the two-canto version of The Rape of the Locke, already a dizzying venture in the mock-heroic use of epic language and images to describe small-scale social world of London. John Caryll had asked Pope to write a poem to try to reconcile two Catholic families at war over an incident in which Lord Petre had snipped off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair – a trivial enough incident, perhaps, and regarded by Johnson only as ’a frolick of gallantry, rather too familiar’ (Johnson 1905: 101), but one which had taken on an altogether darker significance. Pope’s poem, which uses the inversions and miniaturisations of the mock-heroic form in a brilliantly evenhanded analysis of both the weight and the triviality of the offence, was handed about in manuscript and Pope took the opportunity of Lintot’s Miscellany to forestall any attempt to bring out an unauthorised edition (Spence 1966:43^). Again, the poem is also partly about poetic fame and the power of verse to produce social effects and personal immortality.
(d) KINGS AND QUEENS
By now there were rather greater, quasi-heroic conflicts to consider. England, with her European allies, had been at war with France for most of Pope’s lifetime, partly because of France’s support for the Jacobite claimants to the English throne and partly because of the general imbalance of political and economic power in Louis XIV’s favour. A partial peace was concluded in 1697, but on the death of William III in 1702, without issue, Anne, James IPs protestant daughter, succeeded to the throne and war was recommenced, with the Whig Duke of Marlbrough as Captain-General winning some decisive victories. But in 1710 the Whig ministry collapsed and the Tories came to ascendancy; pressure to end the war increased. Some of Pope’s mature friendships were formed against this background, one might say partly by it. He grew friendly with John Gay (1685-1732), a poet and dramatist in a congenial mode of mock-heroic. Friendship with William Fortescue, a staunch Whig and lawyer (both terms of abuse in Pope’s later years) shows Pope still maintaining Whig contacts, as with Addison and Steele. But in the crucial state of European affairs, it was hardly possible not
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to take sides, and other new allegiances leaned increasingly towards the Tory camp. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) came from a Jacobite background, was Queen Anne’s physician, and author of a series of prose satires against the war known collectively as The History of John Bull (1712). Perhaps most importantly, Pope met Jonathan Swift (1667-
1745), clergyman and satirist, recently author of some sophisticated partisan papers, pamphlets and verse satires decrying the profiteering of Marlbrough and urging the necessity of the Tory peace. Swift and Arbuthnot formulated the influential view that the ’landed interest’, meaning those aristocrats who farmed large country estates in the traditional way, was being systematically undermined by the ’monied interest’, meaning not so much merchants (like Pope’s father) but bankers, stockbrokers, and anyone who dealt in money as an abstract entity. This view was to operate very powerfully on Pope and on politics generally during the period, though the reality of the situation was considerably more fluid than satire suggested.
The peace, known as the Treaty of Utrecht, was eventually signed on 31 March 1713. Pope had anticipated the actual signing by publishing Windsor-Forest on 7 March [57-64,166,170]. This was a more localised and personal a vision of rural England than the Pastorals, yet once again Pope has several literary models in mind, and the poem depends for some of its effects on a communal literary heritage which would include Virgil’s Georgics (poems celebrating a more practical agricultural life than the Eclogues), English topographic poems such as Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642), and works of national mythology such as Michael Drayton’s Poly-OWion (1622) and William Camden’s antiquarian Britannia (1586). In celebrating the Peace as the dawn of a new age of prosperity and empire Pope characterises Windsor Forest, and Windsor Castle, as zones of true sovereignty, celebrating Anne, the last of the Stuarts, as a talismanic sovereign. The poem is at once the last expression of a Tory kind of mythology of kingship and an elegy for it, written in the rather sombre knowledge that on the death of Anne, whose children all died in infancy, the Act of Succession of 1701 would ensure that Britain would be ruled by the House of Hanover, sympathetic to the Whig interest, antipathetic to Catholics and with a far more secular turn of mind.
(e) SCRIBLERUS
The quality of Pope’s poem was immediately recognised by Swift, who instructed ’Stella’ (his friend Esther Johnson): ’read it’ (Mack 1985:
199). Addison was said to be upset by the poem, and is known to have
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promoted a ’rival’ poem on the peace, On the Prospect of Peace (1712) by Thomas Tickell (1686-1740), which Pope admired. Pope was still close enough to the Spectator group to contribute some seven papers to its successor, Steele’s The Guardian, including a couple of affectionately mocking squibs on ’the club of little men’, the earliest of many attempts to defend his physical appearance through irony. There were signs of a split: Steele and Addison had praised the ’Englishness’ of the pastorals of Ambrose Philips, published in the same Miscellany as Pope’s Pastorals, and puffed them in a series of Guardian papers. Pope contributed an anonymous extra paper, superficially continuing the praise of Philips, but when read more closely, a devastating parodic exposure of his imbecile style against the classical elegance of Pope’s work (a more straightfaced ’Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’ was included in the Works of 1717).
More problematic was the case of Addison’s Cato, a phenomenally successful tragedy which opened in London on 14 April 1713. Dramatizing the resistance of the republican Cato to the tyrant Caesar, and his eventual suicide, it was claimed by both Whig and Tory factions, with the ’tyranny’ it decried being identified equally with the absolutist style of monarchy of the Pretender and with the overweening ambition of Marlbrough. In a rare foray into the theatre, Pope contributed the prologue, a paean to British self-confidence as the inheritors of Roman virtue; it was considered rather Whiggish in cast. When Dennis attacked the play in Remarks upon Cato (1713), Pope responded with a spoof pamphlet, the anonymous Narrative of Dr. Robert Morris, Concerning the Strange and Deplorable frenzy of Mr. John Denn-, in which the quack physician Norris reports his attempts to treat the critic, driven mad by universal praise of the play. It is possible that Pope’s pamphlet troubled Addison with its evidence of Pope’s impulsive scurrility; Addison probably did not know of Pope’s epigram ’On a Lady who P-st at the Tragedy of Cato’, in which the poet exorcised whatever temptation to snigger underlay his genuine admiration of the play.
Through his Whig contacts Pope met Charles Jervas (1675-1739), an eminent portrait painter, from whom he took painting lessons in the years 1713-1714, and with whom he lived when in London. But it was to Swift’s circle that Pope began to incline: though still in contact with Addison’s ’little senate’ at the Whig coffee house Button’s, where he met figures such as the dramatist Nicholas Rowe and the poet Edward Young, by early 1714 he was frequenting meetings of the socalled Scriblerus Club, consisting of Swift, Gay, Parnell, Arbuthnot (in whose rooms in St James’s Palace the club often met), and Robert Harley, the Tory minister. The purpose of the club was to kick about
•liil i^i^-H
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satirical ideas, loosely grouped around the figure of an invented learned fool, Martinus Scriblerus, a figure committed to all pedantic and ludicrous abuses (as the Scriblerians saw them) in science, medicine, law, philosophy, and religion. It was from this vigorous exchange of witty ideas that the three greatest satires of the Augustan age were eventually to emerge: Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Pope’s The Dunciad (1728), and Gay’s the Beggar’s Opera (1728). For much of 1714 the club enjoyed the last summer of Tory power with an exuberance set against the failing health of Anne. On 4 March 1714 Pope published a separate edition of The Rape of the Lock, enlarged to five cantos by the enriching addition of a mock-epic card game and some quasi-celestial ’machinery’, miniaturised ’sylphs’ derived from Rosicrucian lore [65-
76, 153, 155-6, 174-5, 177, 181-2]. It sold 3,000 copies in four days, a wild success. Presciently aware of the kind of obsessive Jacobitehunting about to haunt criticism of literature, Pope also issued a spoof Key to the Lock (1715), zealously exposing the poem as a treasonable political allegory [166-8]. »i
(f) EPIC INTENT
Pope also began work on the decidedly not mock-epic work of translating Homer’s Iliad. The design of this work was based on Dryden, who after completing an impressive version of Virgil’s Aeneid (1697) had translated the first book of The Iliad. On 23 March 1714 Pope signed an epoch-making contract with Bernard Lintot, the bookseller to whom he had defected. Pope, a merchant’s son it should be remembered, realised that he could make better terms with Lintot, anxious to add some class to his list, than with Tonson, who had driven a much harder bargain with Dryden for the Aeneid. Like that translation, Pope’s was to be a subscription venture: that is, a number of purchasers would subscribe in advance of publication and would be listed in the prefatory matter to the book. It was a kind of diffused patronage, replacing a nobleman’s responsibility to fund publication of a book in return for a fawning dedication with a notion of belonging to a more widespread elite. It meant that the publication costs of especially lavish books, such as the Homer was to be, could be defrayed in advance, but equally it meant that subscribers were being asked to buy something on the grounds of reputation alone; it says something about the esteem in which Pope’s relatively modest output to 1714 was held, that he was able to get the venture going at all.
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Getting subscribers proved to be a laborious business, involving much canvassing on the part of Pope’s friends, Whig and Tory, over the period from late 1713 to 6 June 1715, when the first volume, containing books I-IV of The Iliad, was released to subscribers. Though never exactly indigent, Pope’s paternal fortune was always under threat of sequestration, and he needed money on his own account. He handled the administration of the scheme with a rare degree of business skill; his earnings from the Homer project enabled him to put some convincing substance into his pose of a disinterested aristocrat of poetry, with no need to pay court to any influential patron. He told Spence that the translation itself came very fluently: ’I wrote most of the Iliad fast
– a great deal of it on journeys, from the little pocket Homer on that shelf there, and often forty or fifty verses on a morning in bed’ (Spence
1966: 45); his letters of the period, however, indicate that speed notwithstanding the actual labour of translation of such a huge poem caused him a great deal of stress. Given his sporadic education, it is, as Johnson puts it with dry compassion ’not very likely that he overflowed with Greek’ (Johnson 1905: 113), and his enemies were soon to make much of his lack of academic training for the task (he had help from the Scriblerian Thomas Parnell, a classicist with university training, on the commentaries that surrounded the Homeric text).
Addison was outwardly warm towards Pope’s enterprise, and was thanked in the Preface alongside other friends of all parties; but he was secretly promoting, and ’correcting’ a rival translation by Thomas Tickell (1686-1740), the first section of which was deliberately published two days after the first issue of Pope’s. In the pamphlet war which surrounded these rival takes on the foundation of Western literature, Pope’s religion, physique, and avarice were all attacked in turn (Guerinot 1969: 20-3, 35-40). It was however a short contest: Lintot wrote to Pope ’You have Mr Tickles Book to divert one HourIt is allready condemn’d here and the malice & juggling at Buttons is the conversation of those who have spare moments from Politicks.’ (Letters I: 294). Pope was however sufficiently angry at Addison’s involvement in the conspiracy to derail his translation to send him a letter indicating his ability to retaliate in the form of a satiric sketch of Addison’s undoubted strengths and fatal weaknesses, the passage now known as the ’Atticus’ portrait, later incorporated in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. A sort of reconciliation ensued, with compliments for Pope’s translation in Addison’s new journal The Freeholder, but the relationship never regained warmth.
This breach was exacerbated by the new political situation, as some of the attacks on Pope’s Iliad showed. The Scribierus Club was quickly
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
aborted on the death of the Queen on 1 August 1714 and accession of the Elector of Hanover as George I: Arbuthnot lost his job as royal physician, and his rooms in St James’s; Harley was imprisoned in the Tower on suspicion of treason by the new Whig ministry; Swift, defeated and disenchanted, returned to his Irish preferment; so did Parnell. A Jacobite rising in 1715 was swiftly defeated but made life even worse for Catholics like Pope, who were all liable to be thought disaffected if not actually treasonous. Perhaps under the threat of resuscitated anti-Catholic legislation, the Pope family decided to give up Binfield, depriving Pope of the ’few paternal acres’ previously designed for his inheritance and celebrated in his ’Ode on Solitude’. In March 1716 Pope left Binfield, writing several elegiac letters comparing his loss to Adam’s expulsion from Eden and various classical exiles (Mack 1985:284-5). The family moved to Chiswick, to avail themselves of the protection of Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington (1694-1753), an unimpeachably Whig aristocrat, whom Pope had probably met through Jervas. The Earl was a notable patron of all the arts, returning from his grand tour laden with paintings, scultpures, and musical instruments. His house was built to his own eclectically neoclassical design, and his garden also deeply impressed Pope, who was later to dedicate an Epistle on the use of riches in architecture and gardening. Pope was on very easy terms with the Earl, despite the difference in social rank: in a brief, flirtatious note to Martha Blount, he boasted ’we are to walk, ride, ramble, dine, drink, & lye together. His gardens are delightful! his musick ravishing’ (Letters I: 338).
(g) BOOKSELLERS AND LADIES
The loss of Binfield was partially compensated by this new access to aristocratic culture, which Pope for the most part frankly enjoyed. The nearness to London had more serious uses for Pope as he managed the subscription and printing of his Iliad translation. London had other attractions too, and in several light verses of the period he casts himself in mildly libertine character. He also became attracted to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), the most talented woman writer of the period. When three of her manuscript satires on court life were published by the scavenging bookseller Edmund Curll, Pope, perhaps motivated by feelings of chivalry or perhaps by a more immediate sense of injury (Curll also ascribed them to Gay and to Pope himself), took immediate physical revenge. On 28 March 1716, two days after CurlPs publication of Court Poems, Pope somehow managed to slip Curll an
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emetic, and then publicised the results in an imitation Grub-Street pamphlet: A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, On the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller characterises Curll’s bodily sufferings and confessions of literary crime with sadistic comedy of a kind which was to receive defter treatment in The Dunciad. Curll was already well known as a publisher of obscene or scurrilous books; he had a particular knack for tracking down personal papers and documents of famous authors, rushing cheap and scandalous biographies into print as soon as celebrities were dead (Pope’s friend Arbuthnot claimed that Curll had thereby managed to add a new terror to death). He represented a new breed of completely shameless publisher, prizing commercial success above any notion of quality, and became the centrepiece of Pope’s own antagonism to the book trade. Curll responded to the poison episode by publishing some of Pope’s bawdier tavern pieces in an effort to discredit his ’classic’ pose, and by sniping at the alleged Jacobitism of Pope’s Iliad (of which the second instalment was published in March 1716) in the newspapers, alongside pamphlets such as John Oldmixon’s The Catholic Poet (1716), in which Pope’s bookseller is made to declare ’This Papish Dog… has translated HOMER for the Use of the PRETENDER’ (Guerinot 1969: 40). Curll joined with Dennis in publishing A True Character of Mr. Pope (1716), a venomously abusive rant against the ’little monster’: ’the deformity of this Libeller, is Visible, Present, Lasting, Unalterable, and Peculiar to himself. Tis the mark of God and Nature upon him, to give us warning that we should hold no Society with him, as a Creature not of our Original, nor of our Species’ (Guerinot 1969: 44).
Against this public background Pope developed a kind of deliberately extravagant passion for Lady Mary, cultivated through the extreme epistolary gallantry of his correspondence with her while she was in Constantinople accompanying her husband’s diplomatic mission between August 1716 and October 1718. Taking his cue from her situation in the Orient, imagined as a place of sexualised power and luxury, Pope wrote a series of letters of elaborately crafted amorous innuendo to Lady Mary, to which she responded with resolutely informationbased travelogue, treating his overtures as mere raillery. At the same time, Pope was also writing flirtatious letters to the Blount sisters, who were perhaps rendered safe objects of affection not by aristocratic and geographical distance but simply by existing as a pair. From these experiences of the mind or body with women, Pope wrote two substantial poems casting his lot sympathetically with wronged women. His Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady opens with a melodramatic apostrophe to the bleeding ghost of a young female suicide and conti-
LIPE AND CONTEXTS
nues to indict the familial politics which has forbidden a match with her desired lover and driven her to her death in exile. Alongside this we haveEloisa toAbelard [77-82, 153, 177], an original take on the motif of the letter of an abandoned female lover popularised in Ovid’s Heroides. Eloisa, a medieval heroine, laments the loss of her husband and lover Abelard to the castrating vengeance of her uncle. Both these poems conclude with vignettes of the sympathising poet, making a degree of personal investment part of the meaning of the poems.
(h) WORKS AND DAYS
Both these poems were published for the first time in The Works of Alexander Pope, which appeared on 3 June 1717, alongside the third volume of the Iliad translation, and available in the same large sizes, with the same attention to embellishments, paper quality and layout. Though not yet thirty, Pope felt able to align his own work with that .of the greatest of classic poets, whom he was now translating. His main works (Pastorals, Windsor-Forest, Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock and Temple of Fame] offered monumental stature, with translations and miscellanies giving a sample of the juvenilia from which these achievements grew. It was a highly conscious act of self-presentation; the frontispiece depicting Pope was etched from a portrait executed by Jervas in 1714, and shows the poet from the waist up, showing no sign of the distinctive hunched back or diminished size, and giving Pope the air of a gallant young man. The Preface offered, in writing of ’great sprightliness and elegance’ (Johnson 1905: 135) a similarly aristocratic poise: ’The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth’, Pope comments, speaking ruefully to his genteel audience as if they were somehow outside such mundane considerations. The process of careful self-editing, deleting and selection, to which Pope alludes, sought to raise the Works which were now offered with due deference to the public above the .level of the Grub-Street antics of Curll and others. In claiming complete political independence, as an author who ’never made his talents subservient to the mean and unworthy ends of Party or self-interest’ (PW I: 295) Pope began to develop the best role available to him in his politically excluded position.
Pope’s father died suddenly on 23 October 1717, leaving him rather less than might have been expected (Johnson 1905: 85). At this point Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, tried to get Pope to turn protestant on prudential grounds, as Swift had before, resulting in a careful statement of Pope’s position:
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
I am not a Papist, for I renounce the temporal invasions of Papal power, and detest their arrogated authority over Princes, and States. I am a Catholick, in the strictest sense of the word. If I was bom under an absolute Prince, I would be a quiet subject; but I thank God I was not. I have a due sense of the excellence of the British constitution. In a word, the things I have always wished to see are not a Roman Catholick, or a French Catholick, or a Spanish Catholick, but a true Catholick: and not a King of Whigs, or a King of Tories, but a King of England. Which God of his mercy grant his present Majesty may be…
(Letters I: 454)
The statement is perhaps less loyal than it seems – the possibility of not being a quiet subject is implied, and the final sentence lacks the expected obsequiousness; not for the last time, Pope had to generate a political position between subservience and hostility.
The final two volumes of Pope’s translation of The Iliad were released to subscribers on 12 May 1720. It was a massive success, dominating the reception of Homer into the Romantic period and creating a new polite readership for the foundational poet of Western culture. Though it was occasionally disliked for its ornamental or musical character against the supposed strength and simplicity of the original, in the main it was found to be ’the noblest version [translation] of poetry which the world has ever seen; and its publication must therefore be considered as one of the great events in the annals of learning’ (Johnson
1905: 119). The Preface, a full-dress literary essay which deserves to be read alongside Pope’s Essay on Criticism, displays a remarkable enthusiasm for the qualities which some found lacking in the translation, notably the ’Invention’ (imagination) of the poet: ’It is to the Strength of this amazing Invention we are to attribute that unequal’d Fire and Rapture, which is so forcible in Homer, that no Man of a true Poetical Spirit is Master of himself while he reads him’ (PWl: 224). The poem went to the heart of everything: destiny, power, sex, glory, death, the Gods. Everything which ennobles human beings and everything which degrades them was, for Pope’s generation, here. Pope’s response to this universal poetic master was almost visionary, an access of godlike power, a virtual experience of military and amatory excess. This unsettling but stimulating encounter was now very fully mastered, at least for the present. ;}<<•.:••;:••,••.•..•••• .;-i-.”,••…; :•;’• *••*.<:’ ••-••,
(i) TWICKENHAM
With the funds earned from this monumental achievement, Pope set about creating for himself an equally visible monument to inhabit. After considering building himself a house on some of Burlington’s land in London, inadvisable because of anti-Catholic legislation, he had settled down river at Twickenham in early 1719, leasing a five-acre estate from Thomas Vernon. This relatively modest estate in a semirural setting but with good river and road connections to the capital served Pope’s needs well; it was the first house which he was master of, and was to remain his home, and a vital element in his conception of himself, until his death. He remodelled the existing house along newly-fashionable Palladian or neoclassical lines, with a main block on three floors flanked by two-storey wings. Balconies gave good views over the Thames, which ran by at the foot of a sloping lawn. A passage ran under the house, and under the road between London and Hampton Court, to the main garden, which measured about 250 by 100 yards. The whole plot was slightly larger than Pope estimated the gardens of Alcinous to be, in his translation of that section of Homer’s Odyssey (PWl: 147).
Here Pope had an orchard, a small vineyard, an orangery, greenhouses, and a kitchen garden for vegetables; landscaping the rest was a matter of providing serpentine and criss-crossing paths through wooded areas and up mounts to provide viewpoints, seats for reflection, sudden surprises and encounters. Pope was like many of his generation dissatisfied with the rigid symmetrical formalism of seventeenth-century garden design, as practised in extreme form in France. Pope had opposed topiary and artificial gardens in an essay in The Guardian in 1713 and in his own experiments and theories aimed for a subtler control of nature, more green, fluid, curved, locally-sensitive and small-scale. It was, however, conspicuously human: there were seats, obelisks, temples, inscriptions: this was nature methodised, as literature was supposed to be. Pope’s efforts at Twickenham were enthusiastically received by visitors and observers: Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole whom Pope opposed with such virulence, noted: ’It was a singular effort of art and taste to have impressed so much variety and scenery on a spot of five acres’ (Mack 1985: 361).
Pope also gradually expanded and decorated the passage under his house into a Grotto: ’he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage’ (Johnson 1905: 135). In opposition to the neoclassical pieties of the
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house itself, with its symmetry and open vista, the Grotto celebrated obscurity, enclosure, shade, coolness. The Grotto allowed for unusual visual perspectives: you could see into the garden from the Thames, and vice versa; you could, thanks to carefully placed mirrors, see some unusual inversion of scene:
When you shut the Doors of this Grotto, it becomes on the instant, ” ” from a luminous Room, a Camera obscura; on the Walls of which „ ’ all the Objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a
moving Picture in their visible Radiations: And when you have a
mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finish’d
” with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular
1 forms; and in the Cieling [sic] is a Star of the same Material, at
which when a Lamp … is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed
Rays glitter and are reflected over the Place.
(Letters II: 296-7)
Pope never lost a fascination with the darker undercurrents of landscape as represented in caves and fissures in classical epic, though in his literary work caves usually represent some form of pathological interior, a psychic aberration: the Cave of Spleen in The Rape- of the. Lock [65-76], for example.
Pope was able to offer comfortable hospitality to his friends, which in turn enabled him to go visiting each summer. Pope was almost the reverse of a recluse; despite his personal discomforts and the inconveniences of travel, he envisaged his network of friends as a sort of guarantee of proper social values and as a source of potential regeneration against the corruption he increasingly saw at national level. Among the most important of these friends was Allen Bathurst, first baron Bathurst, among those ennobled by Queen Anne in order to ratify the Treaty of Utrecht in the House of Lords, and a mild Stuart sympathiser. Robust, good-humoured and prodigiously given to eating and drinking, Bathurst offered Pope an uncompetitive and energetic friendship fostered by a mutual interest in landscape gardening. He and Pope planted woods and modelled new water features at his estate at Richings, in Buckinghamshire, and more spectacularly at Cirencester Park, Gloucestershire, where Bathurst owned something like 4,000 acres of land. Three quarters of this was eventually covered in woodland, in an attempt to recreate a sort of Windsor Forest, redesigned for perambulation, with vistas, seats, intersecting paths and summer houses. Pope also gave assistance to other noble gardeners, and these practical efforts helped develop his views on nature, the environment, and the socio-
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
political significance of the landscape garden, expressed in major works of the 1730s.
To some extent this garden perspective offered Pope a retreat as well as a position from which to comment. The years immediately following the Iliad project had more than their share of vexations. In 1720 London experienced a bout of stock market speculation and catastrophic collapse known as the South Sea Bubble; Pope, along with a great many others, lost money, though he was not ruined. Nonetheless, given the expenditure on house and garden, Pope probably needed money and his second Homer venture, a translation of The Odyssey (eventually published 1725-26), may have been prompted by financial need. This second excursion into classical territory did not have quite the gloss of the first. The story of Odysseus’s wanderings after the fall of Troy is itself less conspicuously noble, less concentrated, more given to mon-
– strosity and magic, more gruesomely comic, than the Iliad, though the essential skill and wisdom of its protagonist survives all encounters. For the work of translation, however, Pope called on two acquaintances, the minor poets William Broome and Elijah Fenton, to translate half the poem between them in what was originally to have been a secret collaboration. Complex subscription arrangements were made whereby each of the translators took a share of the main subscription and also solicited subscriptions on their account; the publisher (Lintot again) also made arrangements on his own behalf, which signalled the beginning of the end of his association with Pope. Word that the translation was not wholly Pope’s leaked out, giving his enemies grounds to carp at his sharp practice (and his alleged lack of Greek); though Pope undoubtedly masterminded the project, urging his fellow-workers on and meticulously correcting their work, his comments in print about the authorship of the translation always appeared somewhat evasive and his friendship with the two contributors did not survive unscathed. It was as commercially and aesthetically successful as the Iliad, even earning Pope a Civil List grant of £200; and the Postscript (PWll: 51-
66) made as positive a case for the poem as the Preface to the Iliad, even comparing the excellence of the poem to the excellence of the British constitution. But even Pope’s most sympathetic biographer cannot but call the financial aspect ’a shabby business all round’ (Mack
1985: 414).
The Bubble had more far-reaching effects, however. There had been two ineffectual attempts since 1715 to restore the Stuart claimant to the Throne, and the widespread financial problems following the Bubble, in which the Court was implicated, promoted a certain amount of anti-Hanoverian agitation. A new Jacobite plot was hatching in
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1721-22, closely monitored by Government spies. This brought to the fore Sir Robert Walpole, a Whig who had endeared himself to the regime by protecting so far as was possible those members of the court who had unclean fingers in the Bubble; he now sought to use the Jacobite scare to polarise Whig and Tory, penalise Catholics, and make himself the leading politician of the day. In August 1722, he had Pope’s friend Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (1662-1732) and a somewhat unlikely leader of the Jacobite cause in England, imprisoned in the Tower while by a variety of not very scrupulous means he obtained evidence against him. As a Catholic and close friend of the bishop, Pope was implicated; he gave evidence at Atterbury’s show trial (8 May 1723) in the Lords, nervously (and probably truthfully) declaring that he had seen nothing to support the accusation (Spence 1966:102-3). The outcome of the trial, which was wholly political, was never in doubt, despite some words on his behalf by Tories like Bathurst (and even one or two Whigs); Atterbury was actually guilty of the main charge. Nonetheless his banishment, and perhaps more, the manner of the trial, deeply disturbed Pope, not only because of the loss of a close friend, but because of the rise to power of a very formidable politician.
Pope had edited the poems of his dead friend Parnell in 1720-21, adding a nostalgic poem in praise of Robert Harley, the Tory leader imprisoned for his supposed Jacobite sympathies in 1715. He edited the works of John Sheffield, husband of a natural daughter of James II; in January 1723 the impression was impounded for the supposedly treasonable content of the essays; Pope himself may have been arrested. Pope wrote to Lord Carteret a prudent and dignified statement of his own political quietude and independence (Letters II: 160). Just after the Atterbury trial Charles Rackett, husband of Pope’s half-sister Magdalen, was arrested for deer stealing in Windsor Forest, an offence which at this particular point in history carried political overtones. The Black Act, named after gangs of masked poachers, laid down a whole series of capital offences against property and greatly strengthened the hand of the regime under the guise of a defence of property. The outcome of the Rackett case is unknown, but it cannot have helped Pope’s own sense of security.
(j) SHAKESPEARE
Over the years of the Odyssey translation, Pope was also working on an edition of Shakespeare at the behest of the younger Jacob Tonson, who had now assumed command of his uncle’s eminent publishing business. Pope was paid a flat fee of £100 to prepare a new edition of
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
the text in six volumes. He was not an obvious candidate for editor, and indeed Shakespeare is conspicuously absent from his acknowledged early reading, though the influence of close attention to the text is palpable in his later work. The text of Shakespeare had always been a rather embattled thing, since the First Folio prepared posthumously in
1623 had complained about spurious printings of the plays. These ’bad’ quartos, or printings of single plays, co-existed alongside ’good quartos’ which appear to emerge from more authoritative sources. Many plays existed in good, bad, and Folio forms. Not much explicit critical notice was taken of these variants during the seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century, however, a new interest in recovering ’authentic’ Shakespeare began to emerge, at least at textual level. Nicholas Rowe, a friend of Pope’s and man of the theatre, was commissioned to produce a new text for the elder Tonson in 1709, and did much to normalise conventions of presentation (speech prefixes, act and scene numbering, scene locations). He also provided the first biography of Shakespeare, an entertaining account based on some fairly unreliable stories which circulated in theatre circles; it was reprinted with many subsequent editions. But it was Pope who made the first substantial claim to collation (or cross-checking) of the extant early texts. There was very little in the way of public facilities for scholars at this date and Tonson put out advertisements requesting the loan of rare quartos to help Pope’s endeavours (the edition contained a prominent list of those editions consulted). With the aid of these early printings Pope managed to reverse some of the drift towards textual randomness that the folios at their worst represented.
Pope took it upon himself to mark passages of especial beauty with marginal commas (whole scenes of this class were signalised with a star). He also removed from the main text to the foot of the page over fifteen hundred lines which he considered too bad or ’low’ in character to have been written by Shakespeare: anachronisms, bombast and bawdy which a later age would celebrate as part of Shakespeare’s comprehensiveness, seemed to Pope evidence only of the trivialising incursions of ad-libbing populist actors, and he ditched them accordingly. Shakespeare himself appears in god-like manifestation in Pope’s Preface, a vigorous and influential defence of Shakespeare’s genius which forms one of the foundational documents in what would later become ’bardolatry’: ’The Poetry of Shake.spe.ar was Inspiration indeed: he is not so much an Imitator, as an Instrument, of Nature; and ’tis not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks thro’ him’. Shakespeare stands with Homer as above all the poetic of astonishing human insight and emotional force (PWII: 13-26).
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Pope proposed a new model of Shakespeare editing; unfortunately for him, there was at least one other writer who more nearly approached the modern model of professional scholar: Lewis Theobald (1688-1744), a lawyer turned writer, who in March 1726 published Shakespeare Restored: Or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, as well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet. Using his greater familiarity with Elizabethan drama, orthography and grammar, and a somewhat more efficient collation of a rather greater number of early printings of Shakespeare, Theobald was able to show that Pope’s boasted editorial labour was much more erratic and unreliable than it should have been: he had missed obvious errors, emended where no emendation was necessary, failed to understand the sense of his author, and exhibited a complete lack of historical and contextual knowledge. The book (which was issued in the same format as Pope’s edition, as if to be bound up with it), was quite obviously designed to humiliate Pope: with gleeful malice and self-confidence Theobald ’restored’ the sense and text of Shakespeare against Pope’s supposed blunders. It was the first Shakespeare war, and Pope lost.
(k) EPIC OF FLEET STREET i
vKi
Such onslaughts could be set against more moderate criticisms of Pope’s work, such as the Essay on the Odyssey (1726-27) by Joseph Spence, in whom, as Johnson put it, Tope had the first experience of a critick without malevolence’ (Johnson 1905: 143), and with whom he soon became friends. But when Shakespeare Restored was published, Pope was particularly fortunate to have an older friend at hand. Swift was in England for the first time for over a decade, and was in unusually positive spirits: he had become a national hero in Ireland for leading the popular campaign to resist the attempts of Walpole’s administration to impose cheaply-produced copper coinage on the Irish economy for the benefit of the English industrialist who was to manufacture them. Swift sought interviews with Walpole to ascertain what his prospects were for ecclesiastical promotion to an English benefice; but he was also carrying the manuscript of what was to become the most explosive satire of its time: Gulliver’s Travels, eventually delivered to the publisher in an extremely secret and anonymous manner (Pope may literally have had a hand in it). Swift based himself at Pope’s Twickenham villa from April to July 1726, and for that time something of the Scriblerus project revived between Pope, Swift, Gay and Arbuthnot. Pope and Swift reviewed some of their early publications and ideas, eventually issuing
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
a series of Miscellanies. Swift is also said to have rescued from the fire the first sketches of Pope’s Dunciad, and it may have been he who suggested the concept of a literary anti-hero to be crowned King of the Dunces by the goddess Dulness. At any rate, Pope was not one to shy away from antagonistic literary encounters, and his public response to Theobald’s onslaught was to instal him as the chief hack writer in the ironic epic of praise to hack writers which The Dunciad ostensibly is [130-49, 157-9, 166-7, 185-8, 189-98]. Theobald played further into Pope’s hands by publicly ascribing a new play, The Double Falsehood, to Shakespeare, thus indicating what Pope could take to be a talent for forgery unbecoming in an editor. He further compounded his crimes by presiding as a lawyer over his old friend Wycherley’s deathbed marriage settlement, and by editing a posthumous volume of works by the poet which Pope thought had been tampered with. All this confirmed him as a legitimate target.
The moment of The Dunciad, however, was opportune in more ways than that of personal pique. Its origins lie clearly with the ’works of the unlearned’ spoofs of the Scriblerus club; its basic narrative idea is knowingly borrowed from Dryden’sMackFlecknoe (1681). The Dunciad was preceded by an important prose satire, Peri Bathous: or, the art of sinking in poetry, a deadpan parody of the treatise known as Peri Hypsous (’Concerning the Sublime’), ascribed to Longinus, on which Pope drew in the Essay on Criticism. Pope’s spoof selects some of the most ludicrous bombast from Pope’s contemporaries – he does include some of his own early work – as praiseworthy examples of the ’modern’ mode of writing. At the same time, The Dunciad follows hard on the heels of Swift’s scathingly anti-Walpole Gulliver’s Travels, in which the unlovely lineaments of British governmental practice, as viewed by Tories such as Swift and Pope, are clearly visible, and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, an immensely successful parody of foreign opera which with the thinnest possible disguise portrayed the government as a band of highwaymen. George I died on 11 June 1727, and optimists in the opposition hoped that George II, who had been estranged from his father, would dismiss Walpole and regenerate the political system with new blood. It rapidly became obvious that this was a pipe dream.
The Dunciad was originally published as a sort of hoax, anonymously, m a format meant to imitate the lowlife kind of publication the poem itself satirised: the cheap mass printing which Pope posited as one of the signs of the decay of culture. Arguments about the corrupting effects of a press unregulated (except by libel laws) had been going on since the licensing acts, which had limited seventeenth century presses to those managed by the Stationers’ Company, had been allowed to
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ALEXANDER POPE
lapse in 1695: in Tale of a Tub, for example, Swift impersonates a mad scribbler or hack writer to exemplify what was alleged to be a newly rampant and unrestrained press as venal, corrupt, illiterate, treacherous, and overweeningly self-confident. Much the same mythology underlies The Dunciad. Lewis Theobald is installed as the most eminent of the hacks, elected by the goddess Dulness to lead the assorted hacks from their current shabby neighbourhood in the penumbra of the ’City’, already a byword for philistinism and poor taste, towards the seats of the court and parliament in the West End. Many of Pope’s old enemies are named: Curll the bookseller, Lintot, with whom Pope had now completely broken, Dennis the critic, and so on: proliferation and a kind of undifferentiated lack of entity are part of what Pope suggests typifies members of the book trade. Many names were left blank, or only hinted at.
The poem caused uproar, as Pope had intended. As Richard Savage, a friend of Pope’s but rather closer to the scene of Grub Street than he would have cared to admit, describes it (perhaps with assistance from Pope):
On the Day the Book was first vended, a Crowd of Authors besieg’d
:. the Shop; Entreaties, Advices, Threats of Law, and Battery, nay
Cries of Treason were all employ’d, to hinder the coming out of
the Dunciad: On the other Side, the Booksellers and Hawkers made
.,: as great Efforts to procure it.
(TE V xxii)
\H
•• Pope kept pistols in his pocket and his dog at his side whenever he left his house at this time – perhaps a gesture of genuine defiance, or fear, or part of his image as lone crusader. A torrent of publication began: since 1715 Pope had been a ready target for his bodily deformity, his Catholicism, his business acumen (seen as sharp practice) and (probably most of all) his literary skill. The Dunciad could just about be construed as a public dressing-down of those who had attacked him, but Pope must have known that the poem, with its scurrilous depictions of a goodly proportion of contemporary writers in filthy and idiotic situations, would exacerbate the situation enormously. Over the next two years at least three dozen pamphlets traduced Pope in a variety of libellous ways. Some of these attacks are fairly spirited: ’Dauntless Curll’, as Pope aptly characterised him in the poem, took the view that any publicity was good publicity and published not only several ’keys’ identifying characters in The Dunciad, but also The Popiad, The Curliad and probably The Female Dunciad, in which Pope’s sexual misdemean-
30
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
ours, blasphemous tendencies, literary trickery and spiteful nature were all trumpeted forth. Pope’s plagiarism, the deceit over the Odyssey translation, Jacobitism, avarice, mental and physical deformity, ingratitude, treachery, lower class background, taste for smut and filth, were all ceaselessly recycled and inflated in angry fantasies of retribution. Pope was nicknamed Pope Alexander for his self-declared ’supremacy and infallibility’; he was pictured as a monkey, sometimes topped with a papal tiara (Guerinot 1969: 110-98).
For Pope, it was possible to use the furore merely as proof of the original point: he was able to absorb the attacks into a new version of the poem, which must have been part of the project from the beginning. Theobald was a cheap writer, demeaning culture into pantomime; but his scholarship represented a different form of assault on classic literature, one which was not so much illiterate as hyperliterate, a form of Verbal criticism’ which seemed to Pope pedantic and deadening in its concentration on the minutiae of textual history, and self-promoting in the confidence with which texts of classic authors could be emended. In Shakespeare Restored Theobald explicitly aligned his work with that of the great classical scholar Richard Bentley a critic of brilliance and arrogance who had confidently made on the authority of his own genius several thousand alterations to the received texts of mainstream canonical authors such as Horace and Terence, and who had proposed in the
1720s to perform the same office for the Greek New Testament. (In
1732 he ’edited’ Milton’s Paradise Lost.} In 1729, in response to the supposedly ’imperfect’ or piratical state of the first Dunciad, Pope brought out The Dunciad Variorum, in imitation of Bentleian scholarship. It is a mock-edition: the poem text appears (after a pile of preliminary material and before a series of appendices) above a sea of notes by ’Martinus Scriblerus’, the literal-minded and pedantic scholar in whose name the Scriblerus club sought to ridicule any form of learning they deemed incompatible with traditional humanistic and classical concerns. Scriblerus proceeds to propose a series of stupid alterations to the text, quite oblivious to the ludicrous dead-ends his pedantic learning brings him to; Appendix IV gives an ominous list of proposed ’restorations’ to the text of Virgil’s Aeneid. At the same time, however, the notes, indexes, and appendices do actually contain much straightforward information (and some mischievous misinformation) in order to defend Pope’s satiric vision of literary history and contemporary culture: The Dunciad Variorum concludes with A List of All our Author’s Genuine Works’, reminding readers of the classic status of his achievement. Pope was taking control of his role as author: from here he began to use his own printers and booksellers, ensuring his control over layouts, typography, and financial rewards.
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ALEXANDER POPE
(1) SYSTEM AND SATIRE
It is firmly recorded, if somewhat astonishing, that on 12 March 1729 Sir Robert Walpole presented a copy of The Duntiad Variorum to George II, who pronounced its author ’a very honest man’ (TE V: xxviii). Nonetheless, The Dunciad clearly marks the beginning of the end of any possible understanding between Pope and Walpole; the line ’Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first’ (Book 1, line 6) burns Pope’s boats, as Gulliver’s Travels burned Swift’s, and The Beggar’s Of era (with its sequel of 1729, Polly, which Walpole banned) Gay’s. After this affray, a conspicuous setting of boundaries between Pope’s circle and the rest of contemporary literature (a sort of cultural antithesis befitting the master of the couplet), Pope set out to construct a more positive vision of social roles. Pope’s political position became more clearly defined by his increasing friendship with Bolingbroke, who had returned from political exile at exactly the moment Atterbury was going
into it in.
Pope had known Bolingbroke a little during the last years of Queen Anne, though he was more intimate with Harley, Bolingbroke’s rival. Harley died in 1724, soon after Bolingbroke was conditionally pardoned, despite having fled the country on the accession of George I, and having acted as the Pretender’s Secretary of State during the disastrous Jacobite campaign of 1715. Bolingbroke settled at Dawley Manor near Uxbridge, four miles from Pope’s villa. His property was restored, but not his aristocratic title, and he was thus unable to act in any effective political way. Instead he became the central theorist of the opposition to Walpole, drawing to him Tories and disaffected Whigs – and Pope, who told Spence he found Bolingbroke ’something superior to anything I have seen in human nature’ (Spence 1966: 121). Severing all visible ties with the Stuarts, Bolingbroke set about producing a new political ideology (sometimes called ’Country’ ideology, as opposed to ’Court’ thinking), based on traditional English attachment to land ownership and management and attacking the newly-emerged financial institutions (the Bank of England, founded in 1694, the National Debt, the growth of insurance, paper money, the stock market) as so much ’corruption’ (a key term of political opposition). Walpole was characterised as a master of financial manipulation, bribing for votes, managing slush funds and gifting jobs in order to shore up his own power. To Swift’s existing myth of the displacement of (Tory) land by (Whig) money, Bolingbroke added a new and rather saintly version of the solid classical virtues of independence and civic pride. He changed the name of his property to Dawley Farm, indicating the practice of stewardship
32
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
of the land rather than merely ownership of it, and did in fact farm the
400-acre estate. For a decade Bolingbroke studied and wrote on constitutional matters, publishing his views in the opposition periodical The Craftsman and in independent pamphlets.
It was under Bolingbroke’s encouragement that Pope began work on what he later termed his opus magnum or ’great work’: the four-part Essay on Man (1733-34), offering an analytic account of man’s place in the universe, and four ’ethic epistles’ (1731-35), analysing particular aspects of human experience. More was planned, but these represent the surviving essence of the project. The first portion to be published was a verse Epistle to his longstanding friend, Lord Burlington (14 December 1731), originally called ’Of Taste’ but better known as the Epistle to Burlington [105-9]. Here Pope expounded views on architecture and landscape gardening, and the appropriate use of wealth (exemplified in the taste Burlington displays at his villa in Chiswick and elsewhere). Most of Pope’s presentations of positive virtue are offered in contradistinction to some vicious negative example; here, sensibly naturalised landscapes which ’consult the genius of the place in all’, and enhance the features which already exist, are contrasted with the atrocious tastelessness of Timon’s villa, where lavish expense serves only to produce hideously aggrandised buildings and gardens which torture natural forms into dehumanised symmetries. The riotous catalogue of bad taste includes a showcase library of unread books, a chapel with erotic paintings and inappropriate music, and a comically awful dinner.
The praise of Burlington was explicit and passed without comment, but the identification of Timon was a matter of much contemporary curiosity; it was soon rumoured that Pope had based it on a house in Berkshire known as Cannons, belonging to the Whig Duke of Chandos. Pope seems to have been genuinely taken aback by the attacks on his supposed treachery; he issued a firm public disclaimer of ’such Fool Applications’, pointing out obvious differences between Cannons and the estate described in the poem, and he and Chandos exchanged courtly letters assuring each other of mutual esteem and the falseness of the accusation (Mack 1985: 499). The rumour however continued to circulate amongst those anxious to damage Pope’s reputation, and appears to have been partially orchestrated by the Court and the Ministry, perhaps manoeuvring against a nascent enemy.
The second element of Pope’s planned ethical series was the Epistle to Bathurst (1733) [101-5], again on the subject of riches, but this time concentrating on avarice more than expenditure. Propelling the reader through a series of examples of the misuse of riches, Pope takes a
33
J
ALEXANDER POPE
distinctly Bolingbrokian line on ’blest Paper Credit’, ironically celebrated as lending ’Corruption lighter wings to fly’ because of its secrecy. Emphasising the contrary forces unleashed by extreme parsimony or profligacy, and suggesting that divine providence sees a resulting balance in these antithetical extremes, Pope builds the poem towards two final contrasting examples. The Man of Ross, a private man with a small personal fortune, uses money for the sole purpose of benefiting his local community. On the other side, Sir Balaam, a Whiggish dissenting merchant, is shown as being tempted to reject his God not by being made poor, as in the Book of Job, but by being made rich, whereupon he becomes proud, self-sufficient, moves in high society, corrupts his family and eventually ’takes a bribe from France’ – a deeply ironic twist in which the Whig type does what Tories like Bolingbroke were always accused of doing.
Ostensibly didactic as these poems were, however, Pope could not resist teasing the public over publication of the Essay on Man [82-93]. Having published, under his own name and through his normal bookseller, the Epistle to Bathurst in the middle of January 1733 (following this up with the first of his ’Horatian’ imitations in February), he brought out in February, March and May the first three epistles of the Essay on Man anonymously and through an unfamiliar bookseller. The three epistles were tremendously successful, and ascribed to various high-minded clergymen; at least two of Pope’s duncely enemies incautiously heaped tributes on the poem before the knowledge of Pope’s authorship became public. Few outside Pope’s immediate circle associated the doctrinal confidence and theological optimism of the Essay on Man with a politically-suspect Catholic. Ostentatiously plucking the mantle of poet of the universe from Milton, Pope constructs a defence of God for the scientific age. Taking a cue from Newton’s many achievements in physics, Pope contended (as Newton himself did) that the discovery of the ’watchmaker universe’, bounded by irrefragable laws, was not an opening for atheistic rationalism, but the sublimest possible proof of the existence of a creator and the immanence of hierarchy and regularity throughout the known universe. The hypothesis (known from classical times, and especially through a poem that Pope deliberately draws on, the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius) that random collisions of atoms produced everything in the universe, including human nature, was opposed by this poetic analysis of an authored, ordered system.
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
(m) HORACE
Pope’s optimism about the role of providence in this poem was to some extent a necessary counter to the disasters of his personal life, which was marked by several deaths about this period. Atterbury died in March 1732 and was given a somewhat mean funeral in Westminster Abbey. An even worse loss was that of John Gay, carried off swiftly but painfully by some sort of fever at the age of 47 (4 December 1732): Pope told Swift, ’one of the nearest and longest tyes I have ever had, is broken all on a sudden’ (Letters III: 334). Pope was one of the pallbearers at the funeral, again in the Abbey. Pope’s mother died on 7 June 1733, at the age of ninety. Her death had been long expected, but Pope was evidently shaken. He asked his friend the artist Jonathan Richardson to sketch her ’expression of Tranquillity [sic]’ in death, ’as the finest image of a Saint expir’d, that ever Painting drew’ (Letters III: 374).
Literary warfare continued from a different angle. Early in 1733 Pope had begun what was to be a series of ’Imitations’ of the Roman poet Horace, setting out some major satiric conceptions under the guise of updating the earlier poet for the current situation [119-30]. Though Horace was sometimes regarded as the servile flatterer of a tyrannical emperor, his civilised, ironic manner was generally more congenial to Pope’s ethic of moderation than the alternative satirist, Juvenal, whose exiled ranting is more akin to the more extreme aspects of Gulliver’s Travels. ’Imitation’ in this mature context does not indicate servility, but a sort of respectful appropriation and rivalry. Pope adopts the conversational and ’insinuating’ mode of the Roman poet, whose work is placed on the opposite page from Pope’s modern version, to give himself a voice of classic authority from which to comment on social issues. But the adoption of a Horatian position, while it stakes a claim and invites comparison between ancient and modern skill, is also ironic, for Pope is an outsider where Horace was a court favourite, and Pope has no patron whereas Horace was indebted to the emperor and other noblemen. The Horatian model was neither simple nor pacificatory.
In The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (15 February
1733), Pope mildly assaulted Lord Hervey under the name ’Lord Fanny’, alluding to his well-known effeminacy, and took a somewhat more virulent pot-shot at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu under what became her codename in his work, Sappho (the early Lesbian poetess). In suggesting that one might receive ’From furious Sappho scarce a milder Fate,/Pox’d by her Love, or libell’d by her Hate’, Pope neatly encompasses two of the charges to which he had been giving a certain currency
35
ALEXANDER POPE
since about 1728: that Lady Mary was sexually promiscuous, and given to promoting scandalous accounts of himself and his friends. Quite what had turned Pope’s earlier devotion into this sort of rancour is not certainly known: her personal hygiene, jealousy of other male friends, rejection of an inappropriate declaration of love from Pope, her hand in the circulation at court of attacks on him and his friends, her Whig allegiances – all these have been canvassed with greater or lesser cogency (Mack 1985: 553-8).
At any rate, vengeance was hers, in collaboration with Lord Hervey, in Verses Address’d to the Imitator Of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace. By a Lady (9 March 1733), followed in November Hervey’s own rather weaker An Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity. The Verses constituted probably the most skilful attack on Pope ever published, turning satiric shafts from Pope’s own poems against their author, and dismissing his work with aristocratic loftiness as mere vulgar abuse, fit product of a ’wretched little carcase’ (Barnard 1973:
273-7). These two attacks, coming not from the usual Grub-Street hacks but from aristocrats of unassailable social position, wounded Pope deeply enough for him to compose ’A Letter to a Noble Lord’, which remained in manuscript probably because Pope realised that his tone of dignified humility would invite further ridicule (PW II: 442-
56). In the event Pope bided his time and reserved a more efficient and authoritative revenge in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) [110-119].
Pope continued with another ’ethick epistle’, the Epistle to Cobham (16 January 1734) [93-6]. Sir Richard Temple (1675-1749) had been created Viscount Cobham for his exploits in the wars against France and Spain; he was also colonel of the king’s own regiment of cavalry. Though a diehard Whig and supporter of Walpole’s regime, he had become friendly with Pope around 1725; his garden at Stowe became perhaps the most celebrated landscape garden of its time. Moreover, Cobham fell out with the administration in 1733: along with many others he opposed Walpole’s plan for what Pope terms ’a general excise’, an institutionalised internal customs service which would seek to garner duties on all kinds of goods within the country rather than at ports alone. The measure (which Walpole withdrew in the face of huge protest) was seen as a sinister attempt to institute a system of surveillance against the prized ’liberties’ of the British subject. In May 1733, Walpole quashed further government enquiries into the frauds and embezzlements of the directors of the South Sea Company , and Cobham was one of those Lords who signed a written protest at this brazen shielding of corruption. He was summarily dismissed from his regiment in a similarly unabashed display of sheer power. Pope visited
36
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
Stowe soon after these events and drafted the Epistle that autumn. The celebration of Cobham’s independence of mind (he was from now on an Opposition Whig, and his garden became a shrine to Opposition principles) is combined with a psychology of male character, developed from its earlier manifestation in Epistle II of An Essay on Man [82-93], Progress on the Essay had been interrupted by the death of Pope’s mother, whom he paid a public compliment in the fourth Epistle, published in January 1734. The longest of the epistles by some distance, and more miscellaneous in theme and character, it deals with ’happiness’ and its manifestations under a wise and benign providence. The poem as a whole scored a European success and did much to secure Pope’s reputation as England’s most eminent poet.
Pope continued the series of Horatian imitations with the second satire of book II, addressed to a friend in Yorkshire, Hugh Bethel (4 July 1734), and offering a playful but dignified translation of Pope’s internal exile as a form of paradisal moderation.
In that summer Pope ’rambled’ from Twickenham to Bolingbroke’s Dawley farm, then on to Chiswick, London, Rousham, Stowe, Cirencester, and Bevis Mount, where he spent six creative weeks touring, picnicking and writing. In September he went to Bath with Bolingbroke to meet Martha Blount, now established as his main female friend and companion. In December he published, anonymously, a new Horatian imitation: Sober Advice From Horace (or the second satire of Horace’s Book 1), ’imitated in the Manner of Mr Pope’. Using Bentley’s offensively-edited text of the poet for his source (which was displayed, according to his usual practice, on the opposite page to the Version’), Pope selected one of the bawdiest and least ostensibly moral of all Horace’s poems, imitated in fact in Pope’s own best sad-dog manner of comic ruefulness about sexual matters, and tricked out with spoof ’Bentley’ notes designed to mock the great editor’s talent for showy but wrongheaded emendations.
Less comically, Pope was also working on the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, designed as a testimony to a long-standing friendship (it was published on 2 January 1735, eight weeks before Arbuthnot’s death) [110-9,
156]. The Epistle gave Pope the opportunity to cement together various ideas, scenes and sketches, under the general category of a poet’s complaint to a friend about the corruption of the current poetic scene and his victimisation within it. It is perhaps Pope’s most complex selfportrait, as well as his most calculated battle-plan: the ’Sporus’ portrait, stigmatizing Hervey’s effeminacy as an offence against the balances of poetry itself, indicated just how much better Pope was than Hervey at slinging mud. A month later Pope released the Epistle to a Lady [96-
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ALEXANDER POPE
101, 171-182]. The unnamed ’lady’ in question was Martha Blount, who stands in the poem as a model of female character within a poem which displays with humour and occasionally with vehemence the various pitfalls into which female character could be seen by male commentators to fall at this date in history.
(n) LETTERS
In April 1735 Pope published ’Volume II’ of his Works, matching in format the 1717 volume and the Homer translations. Smaller editions for the less well-off followed. The ’magnum opus’ poems (Essay on Man and Epistles to Several Persons] stood alongside the Horatian satires and The Dunciad in giant array, with the addition of line numbers (this was a text to refer to accurately). In the next month, there appeared from Curll’s shop two volumes of Pope’s correspondence with early friends such as Garth, Wycherley, Walsh, Congreve, Steele, Addison and Gay among others. The elegance and wit for which Pope’s poetry was celebrated was very much evident in his prose also, but that was mostly in ironic vein; his letters, of which he was justly proud, exhibit the same talents in the more positive sphere of personal friendship. Though the personal (or ’familiar’) letter had become by this period more or less a recognised genre, connoting spontaneity, warmth, unstudied intimacy, it was still unheard of for anyone to publish their own correspondence. Letters of poets such as Rochester were published, but only after death, feeding and stimulating a public appetite for supposedly private detail. Pope, however, with his by now habitual love of stratagem, elected to kill two birds with one stone. He had the letters printed in great secrecy over a period of years from 1729, and with tortuous and teasing manoeuvres, like an angler reeling in a particular slippery fish, dangled the printed sheets before the nose of Edmund Curll, who had openly advertised his interest in private Popeiana in the newspapers. Curll, who had added to his crimes by becoming a stooge for Walpole, eventually took the bait that was offered by a series of anonymous correspondents, and advertised the volumes. Pope got some aristocratic friends to have the edition impounded on the grounds that it suggested unauthorised publication of letters by members of the House of Lords
– a ruse which failed, in fact, as the House could find nothing of the sort in the sheets they were shown, and freed Curll, who went his dauntless way, selling the volumes with miscellaneous padding thrown in and turning ’Pope’s Head’ into his bookshop sign. Nonetheless, Pope had succeeded in reminding parliament, which was then considering
38
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
renewal of the Copyright Act, of the shameless incursions into authorial property practised by Curll and his kind, and he had established his rights over the large corpus of his own letters. And he had succeeded in getting into the public arena letters which showed less of the embarrassing rakishness of the collection which Curll had got hold of from Henry Cromwell’s mistress and issued in 1726, and more of the wise, tender, warm friend that Pope felt himself to be. As the public satirist of his age, Pope needed the platform of private virtue to legitimate his position; after all the controversies and allegations, the letters showed a more affectionate and sensible character than anything that Dennis or Curll would willingly have admitted.
It was a publishing coup for Curll, but a propaganda success for Pope. The letters ran through 18 editions in 1735 alone, with reprints and piracies swelling the currency for the next few years. ’Pope’s private correspondence thus promulgated filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship’ (Johnson 1905:157). Broome, from whom Pope had become estranged over the Odyssey translation, wrote spontaneously to renew the friendship on reading the letters, and Ralph Allen, an admirer of Pope’s talent who had doubted the goodness of his heart because of the ’asperity of his satirical pieces’ was converted by the letters and soon became a close friend of the author. The letters ’exhibit a perpetual and unclouded effulgence of general benevolence and particular fondness. There is nothing but liberality, gratitude, constancy, and tenderness’, opines Johnson, who however was characteristically sceptical of the theoretical ’naturalness’ of these or any other letters and considered that Pope ’may be said to write always with his reputation in his head’ (Johnson 1905: 160).
In May 1737 Pope brought out a magisterial and luxurious ’authorised’ version of the letters, again in formats matching his literary output, justifying it with a long and very partial complaint against Curll. Most of his works contain very visible dedications to friends; the Essay on Man celebrates Bolingbroke, The Dunciad Swift, the epistles Cobham, Arbuthnot, and so on. Pope endeavoured to make such public statements of virtuous friendship continuous with actual private content in the letters. What no-one in the period except Pope knew was that he had treated the letters, recalled from friends over many years (he had endless trouble getting the most dangerous ones back from Swift), with a certain licence, as if they were indeed poems. He had revised and polished them, edited them, and in some cases spliced separate letters together and readdressed them. Letters supposedly to Addison and Congreve, it was discovered by Pope’s nineteenth-century editors,
39
ALEXANDER POPE
were originally written to Caryll. This was done partly to replace correspondence now lost (Pope could not retrieve letters to Addison, who had died in 1719, or Congreve, who had died in 1729); but the Addison letters were also calculated to prove Pope’s account of their quarrel. The sin of this fabrication now looks somewhat less cardinal than it did when first discovered, and Pope’s actions need to be understood in the context of the virulent biography with which he was lumbered by the Dunces. Pope was at the same period becoming master of his image in art. There are few pictorial images of Pope taken without his consent, and a great many which he evidently authorised: terra cotta busts, oil paintings, medals and engravings, mostly omitting Pope’s deformed stature below the shoulders and concentrating instead on Pope’s expressive features, deployed in serious, contemplative mood, often with an unofficial laureation about the temples or an allusion to earlier poetic models (Wimsatt 1965).
(o) LAUREATE IN OPPOSITION
In 1737, when his authorised Letters were published, Pope resumed his Horace series with Horace his Ode to Venus (9 March), a charmingly self-mocking (and covertly self-celebrating) adieu to sexual pleasures. The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace came out in April, offering a comic catalogue of reasons for not writing alongside a pointed account of Pope’s upbringing; and The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace appeared on 25 May [124-7]. This latter poem, originally addressed to the Emperor Augustus in his role as benign patron, was now, with flagrant irony, addressed to the philistine George II. The Court was beginning to take serious notice of Pope’s poetry of opposition and the Privy Council considered taking him into custody. Tension increased after the death of Queen Caroline, Walpole’s protector, in November
1737, and many of the ensuing Horatian poems offer the Opposition, itself fragmented and disorganised, some cultural platform from which to act; Pope was sometimes celebrated as the alternative laureate in Opposition literature, and was equally abused in the government press for his friendship with Bolingbroke.
On 16 May and 18 July 1738 appeared the two dialogues later known as Epilogue to the Satires but originally published under the Orwellian title One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty-Eight [127-9]. Opposition hopes were high: Walpole was under pressure to abandon his pacific foreign policy and respond to Spanish incursions on British merchant fleets. In Dialogue I, a ’Friend’ urges caution and restraint, pointing
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LIFE AND CONTEXTS
om t tu^t Horace’s ” ’sly, polite, insinuating stile/Could please at Court, aid L j ij^ike Augustu is smile’, whereas Pope had unwisely turned Horace corto a £igure wholLly of opposition and criticism. Pope’s response is to def^.fencj the role of t =he poet as effective social critic, holding ’in disdain’ thj e Co^-rupt ways – of worldly management. The second dialogue, P^’dgblisb-6^ after Wai Ipole appeared to have survived a vote on the Spanish qu^gstj^n, is more \ politically outrageous in its contempt for men of rany^k.cit^g ’tne strrong Antipathy of Good to Bad’ as Pope’s reason for worriting – as if eve srything in the end were a sort of extreme moral coyjuupleC- Bolingbrooke was staying with Pope when the poem was P^ldiblished; it was pi«robably at this juncture that Pope’s windows were brokJccketi, presumably-*/ by government thugs, an event Pope refers to with calciDJlculat;ed nonchalaance (Mack 1985: 714).
Pol Pope ceased to wrrite for a while (it is just possible he was pressurised byV- Wpole into suuppressing a meditated third ’Dialogue’: the fragmtansntiry 1740. A Poe’sm suggests an even more embittered political exile) [16°d<>9| But controversy flared up in another quarter when a Swiss theooaeologian, Jean-Piesrre de Crousaz, accused Pope of heterodoxy in The Esifasayaf? Man, hithe.erto Pope’s most unimpeachable work. Crousaz’s EMmbamn (1737), baseaed on inadequate French-language versions, found Popacfpebth self-contnradictory and fatalistic; others in England took up tht • * clarge and beggan accusing Pope of falling under the sway of Bolinil-linjbroke’ssuppoosed ’Deism’, a sort of minimal, ethical Christianity wkioinict, dispensed wi’ith the need for priests and Divine Revelation in fawov/ou’of a knowleddge of God which one could infer from one’s own rejsoeflsoi. por once pOpeie did not have to enter the lists himself, for William Warharhrton (1689-1 1779), a Lincolnshire clergyman, began a long Vitikfidiiition Of the pcvoem (1738-39), defending its theology as wholly orttorthcfax in essence..- Pope did not know that Warburton had once been analfi alt,Of Theobald 3 and had attacked Pope with the worst of them (MaotAad l 985. 744^ g^^ he adopted this new friend with customary zeal: :lsl; ’know I meannt just what you explain, but I did not explain my owi rt^n Caning so weLUl as you. You understand me as well as I do myself, buX^ytu express me hfbetter than I could express myself (Letters IV: 171-
2).to° % introduced Hhim to the generous Ralph Allen, whose daughter Wji r trton went onxn to marry: his clerical career advanced rapidly. HtJ^-avHiended and pjpuenacious, Warburton was extremely learned in
L-it.iln in . . r °
^lioiloliq,
’ and literary v scholarship, and Pope called him ’the greatest r^[moJC:rit:ic I ever kxnew’ (Spence 1966: 217). In 1741 Pope refused an h° no*^ c*octorate o offered by Oxford, the only overt qualification or
03 , h,’ *le could evwer have received, because the University had WltM*HWn a similar _ Qffer to WarburtorL
41
as.
J
ALEXANDER POPE
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
Pope continued to enjoy summer rambles and winter stays with the Aliens at Bath, feasted his friends, enjoyed company, gardened, revised his own work and work by Swift and Gay for publication, and collected mineralogical specimens for his grotto. Political interests remained: George Lyttleton, a nephew of Cobham, tried hard to engender intimacy between Pope and the tentative Opposition hero Frederick Prince of Wales (1707-51); it was uphill work, though Pope did give the Prince one of his dog Bounce’s puppies (with a beautifully barbed epigram for the collar: TE VI: 372). Two of Pope’s friends, David Mallet and James Thomson, wrote plays which fell foul of Walpole’s censorship measure, the Licensing Act (1737); Pope showed support by turning up for the opening night of Thomson’s Agamemnon, and his appearance, it is said, was greeted with a burst of applause. Later Garrick put on an especially pumped-up version of Richard III for Pope (Mack 1985: 760). His celebrity was indisputable; the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, later a close friend of Johnson, records an occasion in 1742:
Pope came in. Immediately it was mentioned he was there, a lane was made for him to walk through. Everyone in the front rows by ’:l a kind of enthusiastic impulse shook hands with him. Reynolds f! did like the rest and was very happy in having the opportunity.
(Mack 1985: 761)
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i> He praised new work by younger writers such as Samuel Johnson’s Juvenalian imitation, London (1738), published shortly before his own One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty-Eight, and not dissimilar in spirit. For himself, he experimented with versions of the Psalms and with some moral odes, and for a time projected a non-ironic epic on the theme of Brutus, of which only the first eight-line sentence (identifying Pope as ’My Country’s Poet, to record her Fame’) survives. According to the plan of the work, Brutus would have been an English Aeneid, bringing Aeneas’s grandson to British shores to found a commonwealth based on civic virtue. No doubt it would have appealed to the group of young Patriots, of whom Pope was the literary figurehead.
(p) ONE MIGHTY DUNCIAD
The publication of The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries ofMartinus Scriblerus in April 1741 was a last testimony to the collective work of the Scriblerus Club. Evidently Pope’s work in this final form, the ridiculous and wrong-headed adventures of the
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polymath who lacks all common sense takes some very surreal turns, indicating a vein of grotesque fantasy which was about to find more characteristic form. Pope’s final work was to be a darker version of this wayward mental life. On 20 March 1742 he published The New Dunciad, a sometimes obscure and bitter assault on the final death of culture (intellectual, poetic, artistic) under George II. The fall of Walpole, who on 11 February that year at last threw in the towel after twenty years of dominating British politics, and the generalness of the satire, which works on categories rather than individuals, perhaps saved it from the controversies which beset the earlier incarnations of the poem, though there was, as Pope expected, the usual rousing chorus (Guerinot 1969:
286-319). But new problems were engendered by a slighting reference to Colley Gibber, the actor who had been made Poet Laureate in 1730 (thus obligingly fulfilling Pope’s prophetic account of the decay of culture in the Dunciad of 1728-29). As a stage-manager of unrestrainable self-confidence and cheek Gibber was sometimes used as a ’screen’ to talk about Walpole in the Opposition press; in 1740 he published some . charmingly brazen memoirs, An Apology for the Life of Colley Gibber, which included amongst its complacent self-praise the usual litany of Pope’s crimes.
In The New Dunciad, Pope pictured Gibber sleeping on the lap of Dulness, a cameo which reminded Gibber of an incident which he had strangely let lie for over twenty years. According to his A Letter from Mr. Gibber to Mr. Pope (1742), Gibber, Pope and a certain lord were once taking tea in a brothel when one of the prostitutes, primed by the lord, took Pope into an adjoining room; after a while Gibber burst into the room, ’where I found this little hasty Hero, like a terrible Tom Tit, pertly perching upon the Mount of Love! But such was my Surprise that I fairly laid hold of his Heels, and actually drew him down safe and sound from his Danger’ (Guerinot 1969: 293-4). Gibber makes very merry on the occasion, claiming to have saved the ’English Homer’ from death by venereal disease, and a number of unusually explicit illustrations of the story were published (Guerinot 1969: 289; Mack
1985: 781).
Pope claimed privately that such things were his ’diversion’ but his friends commented that he writhed with anguish while reading them (Johnson 1905: 188). Grievous as the insult was, and no doubt much elaborated, if true at all, Pope took his usual revenge, not by denying the story, but by expunging Theobald from his role as King of the Dunces, and installing Gibber instead, in The Dunciad In Four Books, finally revised and published in October 1743 [130-49, 157-9, 166-
7, 182-8, 189-98]. The change is not altogether happy (no-one could
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ALEXANDER POPE
LIFE AND CONTEXTS
accuse Gibber of having read too much, as – to Pope’s mind – Theobald had), but the change is in keeping with the wider sense of apocalypse which haunts the poem. As a Hanoverian stooge, adapter of Shakespeare for the stage, and promoter of cheap theatrical sensations, Gibber exactly catches the mix of meretricious, stagey glamour and complacent cack-handedness which Pope saw as bringing final demise to British civilisation. The completed poem as it stands is a fitting culmination of Pope’s career, incorporating work which had existed in . some form all his writing life.
(q) THE END
Pope spent his last years cultivating his garden and his friendships. A mysterious Arnica’ (female friend) appears to have laid siege to him between 1737 and 1742, to the annoyance of Martha Blount, after falling in love with his work (Mack 1985: 796-801) [171]. His health worsened: he had some form of extreme asthma, his kidneys were failing, his body now had to be encased in a sort of iron frame to enable him to sit up (he made studied but genuine fun of this predicament). He employed students to read to him. And he continued to make extensive visits to friends, on one occasion marring somewhat his friendship with Ralph Allen over an incident in which Martha Blount seems to have been slighted. He continued to adjust the minutiae of his works with Warburton as designated editor. He made his will in December 1743, leaving his books and copyrights to Warburton – a bequest which Johnson estimated to be worth £4000 (Johnson 1905:
170) – and his manuscripts to Bolingbroke, neither of them as it turned out very happy bequests despite their value. Martha Blount was to receive the bulk of his money (Mack 1985: 768). He ordered that his body should be carried to the church at Twickenham as his mother’s had been, by poor men of the parish. In January 1744 he declared, ’I must make a perfect edition of my works, and then I shall have nothing to do but die’ (Spence 1966: 258). The doctors disagreed, to Pope’s no doubt hard-won cheer: ’Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms’ (Spence 1966: 263). In early May he sent advance copies of the socalled ’deathbed’ edition of the four Epistles to Several Persons, with commentary by Warburton, announcing wryly, ’Here am I, like Socrates, distributing my morality among my friends, just as I am dying’ (Spence
1966: 261). His mind began to wander; he had visions, hallucinations, lapses (though he never suffered the terrible dementia of Swift, who survived him by a year). He recovered enough to sit at table with his
friends a few days before his death, to greet friends like Martha Blount, Lyttleton and Mallet, who came to take their leave as Pope had done when Arbuthnot was dying. He was carried into his garden, and he drove into Bushy Park the day before he died. Spence, Bolingbroke, and a few others, attended all the time; Nathaniel Hooke, a fellow Catholic, called a priest so that Pope, who never seems to have bothered much about the outward observances of the religion for which he suffered, could receive the sacrament: ’I do not think it essential, but it will be very right’, he commented (Spence 1966: 268). Pope died on 30 May
1744, in the evening; Spence noted that ’his departure was so easy that it was imperceptible even to the standers-by’ (Spence 1966: 269).
Further Reading
The best early biography is by Samuel Johnson (Johnson 1905), an attentive, appreciative account, written by a poet and critic whose early work overlapped with Pope’s late poems; despite scepticism about Pope’s higher motives, Johnson defended Pope against the gradual erosion of his poetic reputation. Anecdotal material from Pope’s conversation is archived in Spence (1966). Among modern biographies, Sherburn (1934) gives a lively account of the pre-Dunciad years; Rosslyn (1990) offers an accessible and entertaining ’literary life’, from a position of deep sympathy with Pope’s work; and Berry (1988) gives the nuts and bolts of the life in calendar segments, giving us a rawer and less structured account of Pope’s daily life. Ultimately, Mack (1985) stands as the rock of all biographical studies of Pope; though it has been criticised for being partisan and elegiac, it offers a wealth of authenticated detail unlikely ever to be seriously challenged.
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