CRITICISM – Empower Pak Welfare organization Abbottabad

(d) POPE IN PRINT AND MANUSCRIPT

’Books and the man’

Pope is the pre-eminent case of a poet who speaks through writing: never to occupy any public position which required oratory, Pope preferred to advise and cajole those of his acquaintance who had money and power through the form of ’Epistles’ which constructed dialogues for public consumption. Self-dramatizing and self-implicating rather than unmediatedly self-revealing, his work is designed (the word is the exact one) to present a controlled textual self. Pope regulated the passage of his work into the public domain as no poet had done before him and as few could aspire to do after him, ceaselessly devising and revising, adjusting format, page layout, typography and fount, capitalisation, italicisation, even the kind of paper and the blackness of the ink. In this sense he was a creature of the age of print. He also had, however, a strong atavistic sense of manuscript culture, his own calligraphic manuscripts sometimes forming the basis for the circulation of poems amongst a select circle, or a resource to return to for later printed editions. In this sense he was antagonistic to the print age and its venal manipulations of private creativity. His relations with the book trade, satirically presented in The Dunciad and the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, have formed a lively subject for exploration amongst critics and theorists over the last half-century

In Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (1972; later abridged as Hacks and Dunces, 1980), Pat Rogers unpicks the mythology, etymology and topology of the phrase ’Grub Street’, loosely used to indicate worthless writing, to establish a kind of geographical and sociological validity to the Scriblerian analysis of Duncehood. By analysing the life stories of several of those writers metaphorically pilloried in The Dunciad [130-

49] and by insisting on the historical content of Grub Street and its environs, Rogers locates in the Scriblerian mythology a core of literal truth. The proximity of the actual Grub Street to Bedlam (a sort of prison for the insane), the location of the journalistic centre of Fleet Street close by the Fleet Ditch, an appalling open sewer that ran into the Thames, and the key position of Newgate prison between both these writerly locales, enables Rogers to flesh out Pope’s mythology of Dulness with some lively details about the Dunces. The ’Cloacina’ episode from Book II of The Dunciad, for example, is not mere mischief but a highlighting of the local connection between journalism and the sewer which was visible to every Londoner. The prevailing metaphors

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and images of The Dunciad – disease, fire, plague, poverty, prostitution, riot, madness, mud, excrement – are shown to derive their power and resonance from actual historical circumstances in a fairly narrow area of London: ’the region was uniquely suited to the symbolic role cast for it by the satirists’ (20-1). This involves, in effect, validating Pope’s point of view and his cultural stance: the Dunces did see themselves as members of a sort of professional association, they were prone to legal sanction (imprisonment for debt or ’seditious libel’, that is, anything regarded as suspect by the government), they were involved in shambolic festivity, they wrote for money and did not succeed in anything like Pope’s way.

In contrast, Rogers (1978) offers a sociological analysis of a somewhat different kind by setting the subscription ventures in which Pope was involved (the two Homer translations [17-18, 35], and Tonson’s Shakespeare [26-8]) alongside similar projects of the period. Contesting earlier judgments in which Pope was thought to have received something like a commission from on high to produce an English Homer, Rogers shows that the project which gave Pope his financial and literary independence was in essence a risky, anxious business, requiring almost as much energy in the business details as in the translation itself. So far from knowing his audience in advance, Pope’s contact with his public had been Vague, fitful and slight’ (14). It was a somewhat vexed opportunity to assess his own career to date: ’to estimate how far he had arrived, to sort out varying reactions in his audience, to get a line on his own ambiguous situation in politics and religion’ (12). Pope had to work hard, and get his friends to work hard, in lobbying the aristocracy, parliament, the universities and the clergy to subscribe; in the end he succeeded well with the former two constituencies, and rather less well with the latter. He scored some notable successes: Newton, Wren and Marlbrough subscribed to the Iliad, and somehow he managed to obtain the patronage of the King and the Prince and Princess of Wales for the Odyssey, as well as obtaining, presumably with Walpole’s approval, a £200 grant from the Civil List to encourage the work. The Shakespeare subscription, which was not for Pope’s benefit, was a relative failure. Rogers concludes that the ’easy ”commission” is a myth: there was only the struggle to find, and to keep, an audience interested enough to subscribe’ (35).

David Foxon approaches Pope’s work from a strictly bibliographic standpoint, and for most general readers his 1991 study of Pope and the book trade will be too specialised; nonetheless it should be mentioned not only as an authoritative guide to the factual details of Pope’s dealings with members of the book trade but also as a sympathetic

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analysis of Pope’s attempts to ’design’ his books for a varying audience. Foxon finds Pope more or less a favoured author from his first publications, with good printers and fine paper put at his disposal by his booksellers; Pope was already aiming for a clear, classic page design, against cumbersome folio formats or close printing. From the start he was contemplating the place individual poems would have in a self-edited Works. Foxon re-evaluates the Homer translations [17-18, 35] from the point of view of page design (amply illustrated), analysing Pope’s careful choice of ornament and illustration, the innovative choice of a spacious but easy-to-handle quarto format, which he went on to use for his Shakespeare and his collected works (63). This aspiration to classic status was also accorded extraordinary financial reward: Foxon recalculates the Homer contracts, estimating that Pope probably made about £5000 from each translation, bearing out Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s assertion that Pope had ’outwitted Lintot in his very trade’ (63).

Foxon goes on to detail Pope’s move towards independent dealings with the book trade; he set up his own printer, and more than one bookseller, in business. This brought its own problems, not least because as an independent author Pope had less ’muscle’ in dealing with copyright infringements than the large players in the trade, and was forced to resort to adversarial lawsuits more than befitted his pose of rural aloofness and moderation. He had a closer knowledge of copyright law than any author of the time; the concept of authorial property (as opposed to bookseller’s property) was enshrined in the ’Act for the encouragement of learning’ which became law in 1710, a year after Pope’s first publication, though the word ’copyright’ itself is later (it is possible that the word is first recorded in Pope’s own usage: 237). For The Dunciad, he felt compelled to arrange for aristocratic ’ownership’ and circulation as a defence against piracy and libel (111). Some accused Pope of turning bookseller on his own account, and practising ’the lowest Craft of the Trade, such as different Editions in various Forms, with perpetual Additions and improvements, so as to render all but the last worth nothing; and, by that Means, fooling many People into buying them several times over’ (144), though Foxon acquits Pope of any charge of avarice, stressing instead his concern for design excellence. It was true, however, that an economic sense of audience did stimulate particular kinds of creativity at particular times, that Pope was aware of the need to fulfil contracts with particular kinds of material, and that he was aware of the different audiences who collected his work in aristocratic quarto or the cheaper octavo formats, and laid out the page, and details of punctuation, capitalisation and italicisation accordingly.

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The quartos have a clearer, more modern appearance, with less typographic emphasis, while the octavos tend to retain an older style in which argument and antitheses are pointed up by typographic means (196). This kind of artistic system can be found in a number of texts: Rideout (1992) analyses Pope’s printing styles in editions of The Essay on Man and finds that Pope’s typographic system of hierarchical orders of emphasis mirrors the philosophical system it presents.

Brean Hammond studies Pope’s estimation of the book trade from the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism. For Hammond, while The Dunciad [130-49] attempts to police the boundary between ’high’ and ’low’ culture, it necessarily feeds on demotic culture in a way which it cannot articulate. Theobald is offensive for openly crossing between Shakespeare and pantomime, the classics and the stage; but Hammond argues that Pope’s pose of artistic independence and his association of dirty materialism with professional authorship conceals the engagement with a bourgeois economy of literature which funded that moral high ground (Hammond 1990). Hammond (1997) replies more fully to the cultural position from which Rogers (1972a) endorses Pope’s analysis of the book trade. Taking a line in which the professionalisation of literature is less mired in disrepute, Hammond discusses the context of literary property disputes and the empirical evidence for changes in the ways authors made a living from their works. Noncanonical authors, especially women authors, get a look in here which is not limited to the role assigned them by Pope and his allies. The Dunciad is a kind of negative canon, a baneful labelling of those writers who appeared to transgress against social strata or mix literary forms, an attempt to scrutinise and police cultural spaces. Again, the selfpresentation of the Scriblerians tends to render opaque a ’massive paradox’ (292) in their mode of operation, in that they were all hugely successful in the professional market their work deplored, and all derived considerable energy (parodic and subversive, but still delightedly engaged) from the lunatic physicality and generic hybridisation they discerned in the Dunces. Pope, whose mastery of book production remains one of the most astonishing feats of literary self-fashioning in history, would be the villain of the piece, as ’the oppressor of other writers, the Canute trying to send back the waves of professional progress, the satirist who attempted to preserve the property of literaryappreciation in the hands of his own and his adopted class-fraction’; yet Hammond in the end discovers in Pope’s covert self-celebrations some genuinely self-deprecating subversiveness, a layer of nuance which happily ’keeps us there, reading’ (302).

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Swift described the piecemeal nature of Pope’s habits of writing in a poem on the composition of The Dunciad: .;,,-•.- ;,

Now Backs of Letters, though design’d P. ..,.;;• ; .;•

: For those who more will need ’em, • . :•*,> ; >«,,:-,; /,..-, •-.-.

Are fill’d with Hints, and interlin’d, ,, , ,r .••••»?• ,••/,.•.:

: Himself can hardly read’em. r-< .• ’ •••:.-• ., .v.- *-\ ,-s

Each Atom by some other struck, r/ -..• ,-• ” ; -•>: ”«;?• . ,;

All Turns and Motion tries; ••< •…:•• •- ., ..••,: •’..,.-« r..t>” .if,-

Till in a Lump together stuck, .-.••, <• , .; ,v*. ;. ,-’.Vv;!

Behold a Poem rise!

•’•• •••’• (’Dr Svc- to Mr P-e, While he was writing the

;•”’ .- Dunciad’; Swift 1967: 321)

In a comic parody of the Dunces’ own travesty of gravitational force, Pope’s hasty, profuse and disparate scraps become a unified whole without any apparent agency, almost in default of Pope’s ’reading’. The reality of ’composition’ is of course more complex than this, and the results more fluid; Sherburn (1945) described how Pope habitually ’worked by paragraphs or passages … his great problem was arranging the paragraphs and tying them together tactfully’ (55). He also moved elements from poem to poem, recycling parts which didn’t fit into wholes into other compositions, and following his own advice to delete ruthlessly in The last and greatest Art, the Art to blot’ (Ep. Z.i, 281). He noted how Denham had spent a lifetime altering, revising, and excising Cooper’s Hill (the poem which Pope drew on in Windsor-Forest] and approved: ’the whole read together is a very strong proof of what Mr. Waller says: Poets lose half the praise they should have got/Could it be known what they discreetly blot’ (Spence 1966: 194). The studied process which Pope admires here is something he celebrated in his own practice.

All students of this aspect of Pope’s work are hugely indebted to Maynard Mack, whose bibliographic research illuminates the complex and meticulous revisal Pope undertook in each published text of his output, his often devious relation to the notion of publication itself (Mack 1982). Mack transcribes Pope’s manuscript notations on other published books; his copies of Chaucer, Montaigne, and Rochester for example, survive with illuminating glosses in his hand. His library indicates a ’marked interest in exact learning’ of the kind which he satirised in Theobald (All such reading as was never read’), in a wellknown strategy of exorcism; it also shows Pope’s commitment to the

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wisdom of the past (Mack 1982: 307-21,394-460). Mack also celebrates the rich resource of manuscript material which remains (Mack 1982:

322-47). Though Bolingbroke, to whom Pope willed his unpublished manuscripts, neglected them, Jonathan Richardson, who had been given many papers in gratitude for his work as Pope’s amanuensis, treasured them. They preserve a wealth of unique details, offering insights into Pope’s revisions, improvements, reversions, and transfers of material: lines originally designed toiEloisa toAbelard, for example, were eventually mutated into a passage in the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, a transposition which cements the link between those two expositions of ’female’ emotion.

In The Last and Greatest Art (1984), Mack presents facsimiles and transcripts of manuscript drafts of Pastorals, Sapho to Phaon, Epistle to Jervas, The Dunciad, Epistle to Burlington, The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Essay on Man and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. Even a look at these facsimiles can be instructive. The manuscript of the Pastorals is an extraordinary calligraphic feat, as close to print as handwriting can get; the papers relating to the Essay on Man, by contrast, are heavily blotted, interlined, deleted and rearranged, suggesting an altogether different level of labour, the careful production of diagrammatic system out of disparate inspirations. The manuscripts bear witness both to Pope’s flow of creativity (or ’invention’ as he would call it) and his painstaking efforts to get everything right. ’There’s a happiness as well as care’, he argues in the Essay on Criticism, suggesting that laborious adherence to rules needs supplementing by lucky inspiration; Mack uses the manuscripts to show that ’happiness is seldom distinguishable from care’ (198).

Mack also contends that Pope’s manuscripts give us ’an exhilarating realism about the nature of art’:

His practice reflects… a poetic in which the poem is assumed to be a process of exploration and discovery, the poet’s individual sensibility acting and reacting with the common language of men and

;’ the common symbolic language of mankind to produce a structure

’”’ that is responsive to all three of these centers of poetic energy, but is at the same time available and gratifying to other readers, and,

.;: though determinate in the sense of having shape, remains capable of change and growth without loss of identity. Poetry, in what

V seems to be Pope’s conception of it, is not history, but a form of action within history that has a history: his completed poem

;1 presents itself not as a species of Scripture or Revelation, but as a configuration of elements arranged in dramatic and dynamic poise

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by an entirely human wit that is ever susceptible to second (and even third) thoughts. ••*•.., •, ..<>,-..;^.-••.v -vv

><v’ ;^ ;-’”.r n/y .;:.-. (Mack 1984: 16)

The ’stately processional of perceived intent coursing in a firm column down one side of the page’ is always offset by ’the dance and play of new perceptions spinning off, developing their own fields of force, some wandering afield to die upon the margins or possibly to be revived in later contexts, others colliding, warring, at last fusing with the original column, altering its direction, sometimes causing it to disintegrate altogether’ (17).

Indeed, there have been several studies of Pope’s compositional practices which have illuminated particular poems in substantial ways. The manuscripts of Windsor-Forest and Essay on Criticism have been published by R.M. Schmitz (1952 and 1962); Wasserman (1960) presents the manuscripts of the Epistle to Bathurst alongside the early printed editions. Robson (1988), commenting on ’To a Young Lady, on leaving the Town after the Coronation’, draws divisions between a ’licentious’ version for intimate private circulation and a pointedly bowdlerised ’public’ version. Phillips (1988) uses the manuscript of Pope’s first Horatian imitation to uncover the hesitations and energies which went into the ’composition’ of that defining voice; Ferraro (1993), considers that a reading of the variants suggests that the poem was more a critique of satire than a satiric manifesto. Vander Meulen (1991) presents a facsimile of the 1728 Dunciad [28-31,130-49], with annotations by Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson recording his collations of two early holograph manuscripts of the poem, to discover something of its decade-long compositional history: ’this contestant in the War of the Dunces hardly sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus’ (61). It is possible to see from the drafts and early printings how Pope toned down some of the more explicit bawdy in the poem into a more calculatedly euphemistic indecorousness; how he vacillated over the explicitness of the political component of the satire; how he changed the names of Dunces in response to altered circumstances, or deliberately left names ambiguous in the printed version when he had made clear decisions about identities in the drafts (59-62). Ferraro (1996) uses the manuscripts and early printings of the Epistle to Burlington to indicate how Pope’s expressed praise of Burlington became more ambivalent in later versions.

’Composition’ means not only the creative act but the created artefact; literally ’placing together’, it also refers to the setting of type in the printer’s shop, a process in which Pope was conspicuously inter-

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ested. Critics such as Leavis have defended Pope by celebrating the ’poetry’ against the bibliographic and contingent husk in which it appears, but recently textual scholarship itself has come to see print and format as not so much ’accidental’ as a constitutive part of a literary work’s meaning. McLaverty (1984) mounts an impressive instance of this argument in relation to The Dunciad [130-49], the text which Leavis had particularly in mind (Leavis 1976). Objecting both to Leavis’s contention that The Dunciad is a poem to which notes are a distraction, and to the bibliographic theory that literary works of art exist as a series of utterances in the author’s mind, of which printed texts are merely inferior copies, McLaverty shows that The Dunciad Variorum makes its impact by manipulating the appearance of the printed book. In theme, the poem charts in ironic epic the degradation of culture through uncontrolled printing into crass materialism. In appearance, it manipulates the status of print itself: it mimics the editorial intrusiveness of editors and critics like Richard Bentley, whose heavily-emended edition of Horace (second edition, 1713), ventured to put the notes on the page, and Lewis Theobald, The Dunciad’s early hero who modelled his edition of Shakespeare on Bentley’s Horace. ’Variorum’ editing was actually associated less with Bentley, whose notorious arrogance did not allow for the tedious labour of collating what everyone else had already said, than with Dutch scholars, but to align Bentley with the ’lumber’ of ’all such reading as was never read’ was a useful short-cut for Pope in his mission to exemplify culture’s ways of reducing literature to material. In addition, however, Pope was celebrating his poem as a true modern epic – ’the pomp of the presentation is genuinely appropriate to the poem’s importance; the ancillary material makes it clear that we have here the work of a major author, an important sociological document, and a witty and learned poem’ – and one which did actually require notes for his wider purpose of mapping the London literary scene (101). As Pope put it, even while mocking the ’Trade’ in ’English classicks with huge Commentaries’, ’What a Glory will it be to the Dunciad, that it was the First Modern Work publish’d in this manner^’ (101). The pleasures of The Dunciad are complex but at least partially visual ones: the joke about the notes only works if you can see them the way Pope intended. That this commitment to a multi-vocal set of textual presences demands ’considerable powers of discrimination’ is itself of course part of the point of a poem which resists the easy commodification of culture: These pressures are, of course, the subject of Pope’s poem and he manipulates the materials of production in order to evade them’ (104-5).

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McLaverty places The Dunciad at a key node in literary history where awareness of ’audience’ marks the division between an oral culture, in which the text is a ’score’ for performance, and print culture, where multiple copies are distributed for private reading, severing the close bond between author and listener (95). Pope is the first author to manipulate the culture of print to say something about that culture and its problems. McLaverty’s article sets itself within a wider aesthetic debate about the status of literary works of art in comparison with ’unique’ physical presences such as the Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. This debate is relevant to Pope in other ways, for his habits of composition and revision were such that the notion of a final ’essence’ to any of his poems is (at the least) problematic. Not only did he revise and correct continually, he reverted to earlier versions, suppressed passages in some editions but not in others, reserved particularly dangerous passages for second or third editions (when they were less noticed) and ’customised’ some editions for particular purposes. The process of revisal was ended only by death – or by Warburton, his collaborating editor, who persuaded Pope to revise his work along particular lines of moral consistency and whose own revisions to the text may or may not have authorial sanction.

– Mack (1984: 16-17) states:

! Throughout his career, the typical Pope poem is a work-in-progress. States of provisional wholeness and balance occur along the way, some more inclusive than others but each conceivable as an end

i. stage; and the one at which the poet finally rests, though in most

I: cases recognisably superior, never declares itself to be definitive in

.’ any absolute sense.

Ferraro (1998) asks similar questions of the ’essence’ of particular poems. Questioning the established editorial principle associated with the scholarly tradition of W W Greg and Fredson Bowers, whereby all states of composition lead to a ’final’ or ’best’ authorial text, usually of an ideal nature, underlying all actual textual manifestations, and subjugating all textual variants to that final state, Ferraro contends that Pope’s ’textual field’ is much wider than the theory of final intention can allow for. Though Pope’s attention to manuscript detail, and the minutiae of print (paper, typography, ink, ornament) gives his page a monumental appearance, his perennial revision and reversion to earlier drafts makes his text rather more fluid. Pope often returned to earlier thoughts from his manuscripts: revision was sometimes return, as well as second thought. He was interested in his own textual variants

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and rejected manuscript versions to the extent of getting Jonathan Richardson to collate them; he published a selection of them as footnotes to his self-edited Works, and chose his moment to supplant ’printed’ lines with ’manuscript’ ones. Thus Pope retains a kind of flexible, private ’manuscript’ control even in the public arena of print; but the question of what then constitutes ’the poem’ remains. The matter of organisation is also sometimes problematic, the title Epistles to Several Persons [93-110] being applied on different occasions to groups of seven, eleven, or four poems (the last being the conventional, Warburtonian position). One’s reading of these poems may be affected by the position in which they are read: putting the four epistles alongside the four of Essay on Man [82-93] emphasises their abstract moral reasoning; looking at them individually in their chronological order, and as they underwent revision, suggests more localised disputations, greater play of ambiguous suggestion.

The ’zigzag’ nature of Pope’s textual process (Vander Meulen 1991:

54) naturally causes problems for modern editors of Pope. The standard scholarly text, the Twickenham Edition (1939-69), quoted throughout this book, ignored manuscript evidence (except in volume VI, Minor Poems) and often followed the punctuation, capitalisation and italicisation of first edition copy-texts, a decision argued by Foxon 1991 to be erroneous in the light of Pope’s peculiar practices. On the other hand, ’last’ authorised editions do not solve the problem, for Pope did not revise all his work into a consistent typography, and those ’deathbed’ editions he did complete have probably been unduly affected by Warburton and the printer. Herbert Davis, in the Oxford Standard Authors edition (Davis 1966), relied on the ’death-bed’ quartos and Warburton’s 1751 edition, purged of Warburton’s interference with the punctuation. While not without its own problems, this edition ’has a consistency of accidentals which is preferable to the Twickenham text’ (Foxon 1991: 233). It also has the great merit of allowing students to see the four-book Dunciad, notes, prose and all, in something close to the form in which Pope finally issued it; the poem can also be found in this form, but with succinct and reliable modern commentary appended, in Rumbold (1999). Davis also includes an early three-book Dunciad and The Rape of the Lock is present in two-canto and five-canto versions. In his Oxford Authors edition Pat Rogers (1993a) abandons the late ordering of the poems established under Warburton’s influence and prints the epistles and imitations of Horace chronologically, in the order they first appeared, though his actual text is based on later revisions. Elsewhere (Rogers 1993b, xiii-xiv) he cautions against the tendency to push the unstable aspects of Pope’s text too far; the variants

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are, for the most part, authorial, to be treated as an unusually rich archive rather than a chaotic undermining of textual authority, and Rogers sees a fairly orderly progression towards ’final’ texts in most cases. A wholly new edition of Pope’s poems is now planned, under the editorship of Julian Ferraro. Presenting in chronological order the complete run of Pope’s poetry, in unmodernised texts from first printed editions but taking account of manuscript versions, with full annotation, this undertaking will offer a new sense of the corpus of Pope’s work.

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