A Preface to Pope

Ian Robert Fraser Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315505237
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This second edition of Ian Gordon's A Preface to Pope places the poet within the social, cultural and intellectual context of his time. It throws new light on the theoretical and imaginative structures of Pope's poetry focusing on the linguistic complexity at its centre. It offers a critical survey of his work and also contains introductory essays. The book concludes with a reference section which includes indispensible information on places and people in Pope's poetry, together with a glossary of technical terms and a guide to further reading.

Part One
The Poet in his Setting

Chronological table

	MAIN EVENTS OF POPE'S LIFE	RELATED HISTORICAL AND LITERARY EVENTS
1688	(May 21) Pope born, Lombard St., London.	'The Glorious Revolution' William of Orange becomes King of England. James II flees to France.
c. 1696	At school in a Catholic seminary, at Twyford, Hants.
c. 1700	Pope's family moves to Binfield in Windsor Forest.	Death of Dryden.
1702		Death of William III. Accession of Queen Anne. Declaration of war on France.
c. 1705	Becomes acquainted with Wycherley, Walsh, and other literary persons.
1709	Pastorals	Peace negotiations.
1710	Beginning of friendship with Caryll.	Fall of Whigs. Tory Ministry formed under Robert Harley, later Lord Oxford.
1711	An Essay on Criticism.Friendly with Addison and Steele.	Swift's Conduct of the Allies.
1712	The Rape of the Lock (2 Canto version). First meets Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Parnell and Oxford. Beginning of Scriblerus Club.
1713	Windsor-Forest. Proposals issued for translation of the Iliad. Painting lessons from Jervas.	Peace of Utrecht. Harley and Bolingbroke struggle for power within Tory party.
1714	Enlarged (5 Canto) version of The Rape of the Lock.Scriblerus Club breaks up on death of Queen Anne.	Death of Queen Anne. Accesion of George I. Tories fall from power. Swift sent to Ireland.
1715	The Temple of Fame. Iliad,Vol. I (Books I–IV). Friendship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu begins.	Impeachment of Oxford and Bolingbroke. Oxford put in Tower, Bolingbroke flees to France. Jacobite rebellion.
1716	Iliad, Vol. II (Books V– VIII). Family move to Chiswick.	Septennial Act.
1717	Iliad, Vol. III (Books IX– XII). Pope's Works including Eloisa to Abelard and The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. (October) Death of Pope's father.
1718	Iliad, Vol. IV (Books XIII– XVI).	Death of Parnell.
1719	Pope and his mother move to Twickenham	Death of Addison. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
1720	Iliad, Vols. V and VI (Books XVII–XXIV).	South Sea Bubble.
1721	Pope's edition of Parnell's Poems with 'Epistle to Oxford' as preface. Begins work on edition of Shakespeare.	Robert Walpole becomes Lord Treasurer.
1722	Begins work on translation of the Odyssey with Fenton and Broome.	Atterbury charged with complicity in a plot to reinstate the Pretender.
1723	Pope's edition of Buckingham's Works, seized by Government on suspicion of Jacobite passages. Pope appears before House of Lords as witness at Atterbury's trial.	Atterbury found guilty of Jacobitism and exiled. Bolingbroke pardoned and returns for brief stay.
1725	Pope's edition of Shakespeare in 6 volumes. Odyssey Vols I—111 (with Fenton and Broome).	Bolingbroke returns from exile and settles near Pope at Dawlay Farm.
1726	Odyssey IV–V. Swift visits Pope. Friendship with Spence begins.	Bolingbroke begins The Craftsman. Theobald's Shakespeare Restored. Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
1727	Pope–Swift Miscellanies, I–II. Swift's second visit to Pope.	Death of George I. Accession of George II.
1728	Pope–Swift Miscellanies, III, including Peri Bathous. The Dunciad, in 3 Books, with Theobald as hero.	Gay's Beggar's Opera. The War with the Dunces reaches a peak.
1729	The Dunciad Variorum.	Swift's Modest Proposal.
1731	Epistle to Burlington.
1732	Pope–Swift Miscellanies, IV.	Death of Gay. Hogarth's prints of The Harlot's Progress.
1733	Epistle to Bathurst. Imitation of Horace, Satire II, i. An Essay on Man, Epistles I–III. (June) Death of Pope's mother. Pope becomes more committed to the Patriot opposition.	Walpole's Excise Scheme defeated. Bolingbroke's 'Dissertation upon Parties' appears in The Craftsman.
1734	Epistle to Cobham. An Essay on Man, Epistle IV. Imitation of Horace, Satire II, ii.
1735	An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. Epistle to a Lady. Pope's Works, Vol. II. Curll's edition of Pope's letters. Prince of Wales visits Pope at Twickenham.	Death of Arbuthnot and Lord Peterborough. Bolingbroke returns to France. Hogarth's prints of The Rake's Progress.
1737	Imitation of Horace, Epistle II, ii. Authorized edition of Pope's letters. Imitation of Horace, Epistle II, i.	Death of Queen Caroline. Prince of Wales heads Patriot opposition. Grousaz attacks An Essay on Man.
1738	Imitation of Horace, Epistle I, vi. Imitation of Horace, Epistle I, i. Epilogue to the Satires.	Bolingbroke returns from France and stays with Pope at Twickenham. Dr Johnson's London.
1739	Spends winter with Ralph Allen at Prior Park near Bath.	Warburton's Vindication of the Essay on Man defends Pope against Crousaz.
1740	First meets Warburton. Refurbishes his grotto.	Cibber's Apology for his Life.
1741	Publishes Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. Works closely with Warburton on revised edition of his poems.
1742	The New Dunciad (i.e. Book IV).	Walpole resigns. Handel's Messiah receives its first performance, in Dublin. Cibber's A letter from Mr Cibber to Mr Pope.
1743	The Dunciad, in Four Books,with Cibber replacing Theobald as hero. Pope's health deteriorates.
1744	(May 30) Pope dies at Twickenham.

1 Alexander Pope, the man and his life

Lord Bolingbroke's usual health after dinner is 'Amicitiae et Libertati'. I should like to have it for a motto to my door, with an 's' added after it.

(Pope to Spence, April 1742)¹

I believe,, if any one, early in his life should contemplate the dangerous fate of authors, he would scarce be of their number on any consideration. The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth; and the present spirit of the learned world is such, that to attempt to serve it (any way) one must have the constancy of a martyr, and a resolution to suffer for its sake.

When Pope wrote these words in the Preface to the first edition of his collected Works in 1717 he was not overdramatizing the vulnerability of the poet's position, nor was he exaggerating the degree of forbearance necessary to serve the learned world. 'The life of a Wit', in post-Restoration England, truly was 'a warfare upon earth'. Dryden had received similar, if not as savage, treatment a generation earlier, and both Swift and Gay had to come to terms with it during Pope's own time. Each of these writers found themselves attacked for reasons that only too often had little or nothing to do with their published work. The Augustan man of letters' private life became a public concern, much as a politician's does in our own day. Any scandal that could be dredged up, whether fictional or factual hardly mattered, was useful ammunition in the continual warfare that attended the Augustan literary scene. As a result contemporary accounts of early eighteenth-century writers' lives were frequently deliberately distorted or confused. Swift, we are told, was mad, whereas Pope was seen as having a warped mind in a warped body. Such impressions, however partisan they may originally have been, tend, like mud, to stick, and we can find Pope described as recently as 1925 and by Lytton Strachey as a 'fiendish monkey' ladling out 'spoonfuls of boiling oil' at an upstairs window 'upon such of the passers-by whom the wretch had a grudge against'.²

Furthermore the beginning of the eighteenth century was a period in which political parties were establishing themselves in England, and literature found itself closely connected with such a development. Writers were in heavy demand as purveyors of propaganda and, even if an author managed to avoid becoming a paid party hack, the author's duty to the public was sufficiently strongly felt that he was more or less forced to commit himself to either a Whig or Tory position.³ Either way the author was bound to make enemies as well as friends, and although Pope strove hard for a number of years to maintain a posture of Party independence his essential Tory sympathies were bound to create enemies for him. Such persons leapt at the slightest chance to vilify him (see chapter 2), and though his conduct was by no means spotless (he was certainly capable of giving at least as good, and generally better, than he got) it was far more attractive and praiseworthy than common literary lore has, until comparatively recent times, held it to be. It seems to be worthwhile, therefore, beginning this introduction to his work with a brief account of the major events of his life.⁴

Early life and education, 1688–1708

Alexander Pope was born, of Catholic parents, in Plough Court, off Lombard Street in the City of London on 21 May 1688. He was the only child of his parents' marriage and was born when his mother was already forty-six and his father forty-two. His lifelong devotion to his elderly parents, whom he cared for till the time of their respective deaths, is one of the most moving and significant aspects of his life. This admiration and love is poignantly expressed in the final forty lines of An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, composed just before his mother's death in 1733, where he celebrates his parents' 'unspotted names' and in particular their virtue, gentleness, honesty and independence.

The Pope family lived in Lombard Street until Alexander was five years old. By all accounts he was a very healthy and happy child of a particularly sweet temper who showed no signs of the illness that later disfigured him. Spence tells us that a portrait of him painted when he was about ten years old shows his face as 'round, plump, pretty, and of a fresh complexion. I have often heard Mrs Pope say that he was then exactly like that picture . . . and that it was the perpetual application he fell into about two years afterwards that changed his form and ruined his constitution.' (9).

His father had been a successful linen merchant for almost twenty years prior to his son's birth, but had been forced to retire early in life owing to the anti-Catholic laws passed after the arrival of William III. In the same year as Alexander was born an Act of Parliament came into being which prohibited Catholics from living within ten miles of the City of London. This Act, which received renewed prominence from royal proclamations issued in 1696, 1715 and 1744, became a major factor in determining the course of Pope's life. We do not know for certain where the Pope family lived from the time they left Lombard Street in 1693 to the time they moved to Binfield in Berkshire about 1700. There is some indication they lived at Hammersmith, which although not far enough out of the city of London legally to satisfy the anti-Catholic laws, would probably have been far enough out to indicate the right intention.

Pope received his first education when he was about eight years old from a priest named Edward Taverner who instructed him in Latin and Greek, He then went to Twyford School, near Winchester, which was one of the best schools available for Catholic boys at the end of the seventeenth century. He only stayed there for one year, however, being expelled at the end of that time for writing a satire on one of the masters – an omen, perhaps, of things to come. When Pope was twelve his father complied with the anti-Catholic legislation and moved his family from London. He purchased Whitehill House, together with nineteen acres of land in Windsor Forest, at Binfield in Berkshire.

The move to Binfield brought Pope's formal education to a close and henceforth he largely educated himself. In June 1739 he told Spence that:

When I had done with my priests I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry. In a few years I had dipped into a great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek poets. This I did without any design but that of pleasing myself, and got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several poets I read, rather than read the books to get the languages. I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
• Dedication
• PART ONE: THE POET IN HIS SETTING
• PART TWO: CRITICAL SURVEY
• PART THREE: REFERENCE SECTION
• Bibliography
• GENERAL INDEX
• INDEX TO POPE'S WORKS