[In the essay below, Rogers provides a publishing history of the various editions of The Dunciad, stating that they show Pope was "a brilliant poet and acute businessman, sensitive to the follies of the world and highly current with contemporary printing and bookselling practice."]

Alexander Pope has often been portrayed, both during his lifetime and in this century, as a plotting, spiteful little man who used his pen to exact vengeance upon friend and foe alike, often for petty transgressions. Nowhere, according to such critics, is Pope's true nature more evident than in the multiple versions of his Dunciad Variorum. Samuel Johnson asserted that the poem was an elaborate means of revenge, in which Pope "endeavoured to sink into contempt all the writers by whom he had been attacked" [Lives of the English Poets]. I would like to offer an argument challenging these traditional views of Pope and of his motivations for endlessly revising his greatest poem. Much of my argument hinges on bibliographical details or publishing negotiations that have only recently become available, as well as on a comparison with the composition practice of Pope's close friend and memorialist, Joseph Spence.

The charges against Pope stem from his first satire on the dunces, "Peri Bathous," published in the third volume of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies on 8 March 1728, about ten weeks before the Dunciad. Like most satiric works of the day, this parody of Longinus' treatise on the sublime usually referred to its victims only by initials (though Pope often provided identifications for his direct quotations). Responses and speculations regarding the intended victims followed, and were frequently inaccurate. Where I would argue that Pope simply used deliberately vague references to avoid charges of libel, Pope's critics have argued that his use of initials and asterisks was part of a larger plan to elicit attacks on himself in order to justify his creation of the Dunciad. Edna Leake Steeves [in The Art of Sinking in Poetry, 1952] is representative in her accusation against Pope:

[in The Art of Sinking in Poetry, 1952] We may surmise that Pope had it in mind …to use "Peri Bathous " as a sprat to catch a whale, or, more properly, as ground bait to bring the fish to his net. Certainly Pope anticipated the responses which the initials …would incite, and quite possibly he planned beforehand the strategy for the War of the Dunces.

Would that this were so—Pope would indeed be a genius of the highest order, particularly since of the four pamphlet attacks on Pope published between "Peri Bathous" and the Dunciad, not one mentioned Pope's satire m "Peri Bathous." Lewis Theobald did manage to launch a quick retort at the end of March in Mist's Weekly Journal, but a single shot can hardly be characterized as a war (nor was it for this minor provocation alone that Theobald found himself crowned King of the Dunces). Yet scholars persist in inventing such a confrontation, even when it leads to illogical conclusions. Describing the Weekly Journal attack, Theobald's biographer, R. F. Jones, claims that "Pope was evidently satisfied with the rather poor results of the provocative treatise on the "Bathos," for on May 18, 1728, appeared The Dunciad." The causal link presented here is nonsensical: why, if a poet wished to provoke responses, would a single retort contained within a larger work be deemed satisfactory? Surely Pope was capable of penning a truly provocative satire had he so desired, or of stalling the publication of the Dunciad until later responses had been published and could be cited as justification.

Nonetheless, from an initial assumption of a planned series, scholars go on to assert that Pope knew before he published the Dunciad that he would compose the Dunciad Variorum. Their arguments rest on two "facts," one of which is an error, the other, as I see it, an overly strong interpretation. The first "fact" is invoked by R. K. Root and his followers, who claim on the basis of the introductory letter to the 1729 Dunciad Variorum that:

The Dunciad of 1728 was deliberately intended to be an "imperfect" copy; and to further this design there is a glaring misprint in the very first word of the first line, which reads:

BOOK and the man, I sing…

According to Root, this is a setup, since we know from a letter of January 1728 that the line was supposed to read "Books." Root claims that the singular first word enables Pope to fulfil his Publisher's concluding statement: "If it provoke the Author to give us a more perfect edition, I have my end." However, in 1982 David Vander Meulen finally sorted out the order of printing of the 1728 Dunciads, showing that the duodecimo version, which contains the correct reading, "Books," was printed first, before the octavo version which must have lost the "s" in reformatting the pages. Pope may have overlooked the error in the octavo format, given that he had apparently considered a singular reading in his earlier drafts in order to emphasise his satiric focus on a single book, Theobald's Shakespeare Restored. By 1728, however, Pope had chosen to use the plural form, probably in order to restore parallelism with Virgil's original and to acknowledge that his victims were more diverse and prolific than could be captured by a singular noun. Whatever the thinking behind the change, it is clear from the bibliographical evidence that the first edition read "Books" and was therefore not in need of perfecting in subsequent editions.

The second fact upon which Pope scholars rely comes from Swift's letter to Pope of 1 June 1728, in which Swift writes, "The doctor told me your secret about the Dunciad, which does not please me, because it defers my vanity in the most tender point, and perhaps may wholly disappoint it." Since the doctor, Patrick Delany, had left England in mid-May, he must have been entrusted with the secret before the 18th, when the Dunciad was published. Thus, Pope's detractors argue, the poet intended, before he ever published the Dunciad, to revise the poem, presumably in order to incorporate new dunces who had revealed themselves in the meantime, just as was supposed to have happened between the publication of "Peri Bathous" and the appearance of the Dunciad. However, this view rests upon the single ambiguous sentence cited above: Sherbum glosses the word secret to mean "that a larger (variorum) edition was in preparation, and that the inscription of the poem to Swift was deferred to it." I would argue less broadly that the secret simply refers to the omission of the dedicatory lines referring to Swift. Pope recognized that publication of such a dedication would be taken as a sign of his authorship, and preferred for the moment to maintain anonymity. Swift feared complete disappointment, because he was uncertain the lines would ever see print. Not until more than a month after publication, on the 28th of June, did Pope request that Swift contribute annotations, after seeing the first responses to the Dunciad and after being asked for keys to the text by Swift, by a well-informed patron, the Earl of Oxford, and by the King himself. As friends and foes alike misinterpreted his poem, Pope must have realized that he would have to find a way to clarify his satire.

However, clarification entailed legal risks, risks Pope sought to eliminate. By the time the Dunciad Variorum appeared in 1729, Pope had consulted with lawyers to ensure not only that he was safe from prosecution, but also that his printers and booksellers would not be subject to imprisonment. In order to secure protection for them, Pope concocted a scheme involving false warrants of authorship, resulting in a delay in legal registration with the Stationer's Company. This care led to problems in 1743, when Pope wished to republish material from the Dunciad Variorum as part of his Dunciad in Four Books, because of uncertainty regarding the beginning of the 14-year copyright term for the 1729 material. Having originally published the Dunciad Variorum on 10 April 1729. Pope expected copyright to revert to him in mid-April 1743. Pope's bookseller, Gilliver, however, only officially received copyright of the Dunciad Variorum on the 16th of October, 1729 and as a result his term of copyright lasted until late in 1743. It is no accident that the Dunciad in Four Books appeared two weeks after the expiration of Gilliver's copyright (which had subsequently been sold to Lintot). I would argue that Pope was justifiably frustrated by the difficulties involved in reclaiming his copyright, since it had been his careful arrangements in 1729 that had originally determined the late date of copyright transfer. Having looked after their interests in the first instance, Pope no doubt felt he deserved similar cooperation from his booksellers.

As well as legal complications, the desire for clarification led to bibliographical experimentation. Pope had to cloak his need for clarification under some more clever excuse than a mere concession that he had simply misjudged his audience. So, as James McLaverty [in "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum," Studies in Bibliography 37 (1982)] has brilliantly proved, he consulted contemporary models and settled upon the variorum format used in the Oeuvres of Boileau. The variorum format also naturally suggested ridicule of recent scholarly editions in that format, and allowed Pope to indulge his long-standing desire to "correct the taste of the town in wit and criticism" by being satirist and critic simultaneously.

Finally, the variorum format naturally suited Pope's own composition habits, in which he collected and jotted down the inane comments or verses of others, as well as his own verses, on any handy scraps of paper. Swift vividly captures this practice in his short poem, "Dr. Sw—to Mr. P—e, While he was writing the Dunciad:

Swift may perhaps exaggerate, but such a method of composition is evident in surviving Pope manuscripts and the poet confesses in letters to reusing his own lines as examples of dullness. I attribute this constant revisiting of his own scraps and ideas to Pope's broglio method. The Italian word broglio is defined by James McLaverty as probably meaning "that things are moved about, rearranged." The term introduces notes collated by Jonathan Richardson, Jr. in 1728 and 1736 editions of the Dunciad Variorum, where it appears in the title-page explanation that "This Book corrected from the First Broglio MS. as the Ed. 1736 is from the Second." Unfortunately, the Pope manuscripts from which Richardson copied his notes do not survive, but I propose to offer a parallel example that I believe represents what Pope sent to Richardson and helps to explain why Pope was so grateful for Richardson's assistance. If the Spence parallel is apt, Richardson had to transcribe the contents of a sheaf of loose and various sheets, perhaps even in various hands, into a single volume, placing material appropriately and imposing order on a jumble of notes drafted hastily in little or no sequence.

My example comes from a long manuscript poem by Pope's close friend and admirer, Joseph Spence. Spence's work is entitled The Charliad and, like Pope's poem, relies on extensive mock-scholarly annotation to convey its satiric force. The title itself purports to derive from a pseudoscholarly combination of Italian and French, ciarlare babiller, "which signifies to talk w[ithou]t ye drudgery of Thinking." Although it is not possible to determine an absolute date for Spence's initial efforts on The Charliad, datable references all follow the publication of the Dunciad Variorum. Unlike Pope, Spence never published his poem, but his manuscripts survive to display his method of composing a variorum-format satire. I believe that Spence's work provides a suggestive analogy to Pope's own composition practice, a practice which involved collecting scraps and jotting down absurd literary remarks whenever encountered, then compiling all these notes into a single volume; in a word, the broglio method.

Spence's poem survives in two manuscripts. University of Chicago MS 70 includes the earlier of the two versions and reads like a typical fair copy of a poem. It forms part of a longer octavo volume which contains some of Spence's other efforts at poetry and a sheaf of blank pages at the end awaiting the entry of further items. The other manuscript, British Library Additional MS 25,897, is a very different collection, devoted solely to material related to The Charliad. A slim, large quarto, the bound MS consists of a sheaf of originally loose papers of different size, color, and quality. The book opens with an expanded version of the poem, in a relatively clean copy, but this is followed by a medley of undigested potential epigraphs, poetry, and notes, some rejected from the poem, some never incorporated at all, and some perhaps still to be included. This material is recorded on various sorts of paper, in various colors of ink, capturing Spence's efforts at particular moments. Notations and ideas that have been worked into the main text are crossed through and, as in the Broglio MSS, a reader can watch a couplet or theme evolving down the page through successive drafts. One leaf of the MS (f. 51) consists of a title-page from an Italian work, perhaps torn out for scrap paper during one of Spence's three periods as chaperone for the Grand Tour. Several sheets are in another hand and were at one time clearly folded in a letter, just as notes requested by Pope from Swift and other members of the Scriblerian circle, as well as from Thomas Sheridan, and later from Warburton, would have been posted. The authors of Spence's postal contributions are identified only by Roman pseudonyms, but they were clearly well informed of the content of Spence's poem and the general aim of his satire. Spence, less known and less hated than Pope, must have been able to circulate his manuscript without fear of interception, whereas Pope, though equally desirous of support, could only solicit contributions from his friends once printed texts were available to them after 1728, and even then could not identify his contributors for fear of involving them in endless attacks by the dunces. Only in the 1751 edition of the Dunciad are we allowed to distinguish the contributions of Warburton and Pope, though even then many of the 1751 notes are attributed to joint authorship or credited to "Scribl."

Because of Pope's reticence to identify his collaborators (or their reticence to be identified), the Dunciad appears primarily as the work of Martinus Scriblerus, but this fiction of authorship must constantly be regarded as a corporate creation. Any theory of composition that romantically imagines Pope as the spiteful poet alone in his grotto cannot account for the virtually ceaseless revision of the Dunciad. (David Vander Meulen has undertaken the Herculean task of a full bibliography of all the versions of the poem, revealing that the poem exists in at least thirty-three separate editions and about sixty impressions and issues by the time Warburton edits the first posthumous collections of Pope's Works in 1751). On the other hand, a theory of composition envisioning a broglio collection can explain both why lines within the Dunciad refer to events as early as 1719-20 and why ideas included in Richardson's transcriptions of the broglios turn up in other poems, such as the Epistle to Burlington.

With such an understanding of Pope's composition practice in mind, we can see why it was necessary for the poet to announce in his preface to the original Dunciad that "there may arise some obscurity in Chronology from the Names in the Poem, by the inevitable removal of some Authors, and insertion of others, in their Niches." Curll, immediately after the publication of the 1728 poem, presented this practice as another sign of Pope's malicious nature: "The DUNCIAD, it seems, is to mimic a Weather-Glass, and vary every impression as the Author's Malice increases to One, or abates to Another." However, I would stress once again that these changes are not products of Pope's boundless spite, but rather the result of a particular method of composition that collected evidence of folly in all its forms as Pope constantly sought to keep his poem up to date. One could even push this argument to its logical extension and claim that Pope possessed such freedom to substitute names precisely because he held little personal resentment against some of his victims. So long as a victim was readily identifiable as an appropriate embodiment of a particular vice, that person's name was suitable, whether or not Pope had ever been wronged by the individual. No doubt revision was more interesting, though, when the new victim was both a personal enemy and the epitome of a particular fault, particularly if that person's name was the topic of current scandal.

Not content merely to update his internal references to accord with contemporary events, Pope also attempted to coordinate his publication dates with public events of significance for his poem. One of the most important revelations of Vander Meulen's work on the Dunciad has been to show that Pope, having ascertained through a lawsuit against Lintot that copyright of the 1729 Dunciad Variorum reverted to him on the 16th of October, waited a further two weeks, until the 29th of October, to release the 1743 Dunciad in Four Books, in order to align his poem with an historical event already anticipated in his new version—George II's sixtieth birthday—and with a date that had been an important element in the poem ever since 1728—Lord Mayor's Day. Pope may have consoled himself over the bookseller's reluctance to yield copyright with the knowledge that he could at least unite poetry with history, if only for a day, as he once more made an aesthetic and satiric virtue of an externally-imposed necessity·

In addition, he could console himself with his wealth. Despite complaints by Samuel Richardson and others about purchasing multiple editions of Pope's poem, any member of the literary world who wished to stay current really had to check the latest edition for changes. However, I should also emphasize Pope's consideration for his readers—he carefully ensured that each new work or revision came out in formats to match editions of his earlier works, even editions published by his previous booksellers, so that his readers could complete their sets at minimum expense. As Gilliver advertised in the octavo Works II on 24 April 1735:

And whereas Bernard Lintot having the property of the former Volume of Poems, would never be induced to publish them compleat, but only a part of them, to which he tack'd and imposed on the Buyer a whole additional Volume of other Men's Poems. This present Volume will with all convenient Speed be published in Twelves at 5s. that the Buyer may have it at whatever price he prefers, and be enabled to compleat any Sett he already has, even that imperfect one printed by Lintot.

More discerning readers, who had already purchased The Essay on Man or the Satires of Horace in the larger quarto format, "could return them and receive the quarto Works II for 15s," as opposed to the full price of one guinea. For an author whose Works alone came to possess a copyright value which exceeded the combined copyrights of Milton and Shakespeare, such consideration for his readers seems relatively generous.

Cynics would no doubt dismiss this generosity as yet another example of Pope cloaking self-interest in the underserved guise of public good. They would consider his marketing techniques simply good business, and argue that his sales were enhanced by the ability to complete sets at reduced prices. I would agree that Pope's practices were certainly beneficial to himself and usually beneficial to his booksellers, but I would wish to place Pope's motivations within a larger context. As a poet writing in a period of unprecedented uncertainty about the legal rights and professional status of authors, Pope devoted enormous energy to manipulating the networks of production, distribution, and consumption of his texts. Terry Belanger, in a broad survey of the shifting practices of eighteenth-century publishing, has described Pope as a watershed figure, one of the first to adapt the new possibilities to his advantage.

But Belanger emphasized that Pope was also unusual in his success; generally the new structures worked to the advantage of booksellers rather than authors. Alvin Kernan has concisely captured [in Samuel Johnson and The Impact of Print, 1987] the paradox that Pope, as author of the Dunciad, both feared and exploited:

the existence and identity that print gave to the writer with one hand it took away with the other, for if widely circulated printed books made authors real to themselves and others, and made the idea of the author a social fact, then the very number of books published guaranteed, with rare exceptions like Johnson, that the individual writer would exist only momentarily.

Although Scriblerus' claim that his poem resulted from the unfortunate coincidence of living at a time when "Paper …became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors cover'd the land" exaggerated current reality, it did capture the Augustans' nervous awareness that publishing was increasing rapidly and was providing public forums for all sorts of voices. Even worse, in Pope's eyes, the expansion of the market actually encouraged lesser writers to take up quill and paper in order to fill the pages of periodicals, newspapers, and a wide range of booklength publications. A sufficient literary market existed to make possible payment for writing, but the possibility of being a professional writer conflicted with the tradition ideal of writing as a gentlemanly pursuit undertaken in leisure. "Throughout the period, writers labeled each other 'mercenary scribblers' as the most damning epithet possible, perpetuating the low status of the writing profession even as they realized that the age of patronage was passing …[Claudia Newell Thomas, "Alexander Pope and 'The Publick in General,'" 1985] Yet the textual density of Pope's Dunciad Variorum depends upon the abundance of his rivals' printed comments: the 1729 text includes 19 pages of "Testimonies of Authors" as well as copious quotations in the notes, all culled from other printed publications. Pope gathered these items primarily as a means of justifying his response or accusations, but they also helped to swell his own volume and increase its price.

Nor was Pope above such financial calculations and careful accounting of each page in his creative ventures. He understood the value of original work and fulfilled his contracts to the letter of the law, often digging up older works to fill out the required number of sheets for a volume. That was why he submitted "Peri Bathous" to the Miscellany volume in the first place, and also why he probably altered his footnotes to the Variorum to endnotes in the 1735 Works. Warburton seems to have adopted this trick from Pope's model, for he writes to his printer, Knapton, that, having eliminated some notes in order to reduce the printing and sales costs for the small octavo 1753 edition, they consider

That what notes are left be not printed, as in all the other Edns., under each page: but all together at the end of each poem, to which they belong; and the notes of the Dunciad at the end of each Book, as in Mr. Pope's q[uart]o edns. both of his Poems & Homer. My reasons are these, first it will be a variety from the other Edns. but principally I think the small chara[c]ter of the notes in the specimen you have, deforms & hurts the beauty of the Edn. it appears to be much more elegant to have nothing but verses in the page or nothing but prose, besides if the notes be thrown together as I propose they will be in the same letter with the text, which will make the Edn. more beautiful!, & what is of still more consequence will swell it out a little more, which it will want to be.

Pope should have derived great satisfaction from turning his enemies' accusations of mercenary ends into yet more material to swell his Dunciad and enrich himself.

But Pope's printing strategies were not limited to simple (and comparatively inexpensive) adjustments of layout. He was quite willing to tie up (literally) substantial quantities of set type, as he did with the type for his letters to Wycherley from 1728 to 1735, and to store unused sheets from various editions to incorporate wherever possible at a later date. This willingness created innumerable bibliographic difficulties, some of which were evident even during Pope's own lifetime, others of which have only been analyzed by recent scholars. Johnson, once more, was partially responsible for diverting attention from the economic aspects of Pope's constant revision, by stressing the poet's desire to excel: "[Pope] was never content with mediocrity when excellence could be attained…. [T]o make verses was his first labour, and to mend them was his last." But in between, Pope clearly devoted much time and effort to the complexities of imposition and potential uses for unsold sheets.

Nonetheless, Pope did strive for excellence, and not all of his publishing ploys were directed at immediate profit. His choice of the Boileau format, appreciation of Elzevier typefaces, and abandonment of catchwords in the Dunciad Variorum all attested to Pope's desire to associate his text with those of the classics. In addition, Maynard Mack has argued that Pope's addition of annotation to his poems in Works II (1735) was an assertion of status. Pope himself was more explicit about his ambitions in his request to Warburton to become his editor, starting with the 1743 four-book Dunciad: "I have a particular reason to make you Interest your self in Me & My Writings. It will cause both them & me to make the better figure to Posterity." While Warburton's 1751 edition of Pope's Works created as many difficulties as it solved, Warburton was faithful to his author's typographical preferences and continued Pope's practice of issuing his works in varying formats for different audiences. The fifth volume of Warburton's edition, the one containing the Dunciad, appeared in a large octavo format with five new illustrations, but was also published in an unillustrated small octavo from which text was pared by not identifying the authors of notes, and by parting with at least thirty of Warburton's own annotations. The strict economies of publisher limitations impinged on even the greatest of poets and most assertive of editors, because both Warburton and Pope understood the financial value of the poet's every word and recognized the need to please diverse audiences. Only by making it possible for all readers to adorn their bookshelves with complete sets of his works could Pope assure himself a physical as well as spiritual presence among the shelves of the literary canon. In a world where the increasingly shrill demands of new works appealed for space, a substantial presence on the shelf was in itself a symbol of esteem. Thus, although Pope clearly wished to avoid the derogatory accusation of being a mercenary, he also wished to ensure that he achieved the best possible income from his original compositions, and was quite happy to exploit the proliferation of publishing even as he decried it. I would urge that we not only acknowledge but also appreciate Pope's cleverness in adopting the technology and legal rights available to him, rather than scorn him for his financial savvy. Though his contemporaries often berated him for his economic success, their objections hardly prove that Pope was either malicious or wrong, since had he been less crafty in his negotiations we would probably fault him for failing to recognize his own worth or participate in the new literary markets to his advantage.

So far, then, I have sketched a picture of Pope as an author initially trying to extricate himself from the problem of how to ensure that his satire is understood without incurring charges of libel, an author fully aware of his legal rights, ever conscious of the potential for profit, considerate of his consumers, and generally supportive of his booksellers, both current and former. Such an image hardly accords with the malicious toad portrayed by Pope's own enemies, or with the more recent view of Pope as a farsighted provocateur, launching a verbal war against his enemies in order to create ever more cruel and clever satires about them. Instead, I would argue for an image of Pope as a brilliant poet and acute businessman, sensitive to the follies of the world and highly current with contemporary printing and bookselling practice. Using Jerome McGann's terminology, I would maintain that Pope's ceaseless revisions reveal concern with both the linguistic and bibliographic codes, but I would attribute his concern with bibliographic code as much to a desire for money and reputation as to a desire for meaning. I would also argue that the case of Pope's Dunciad provides a rich challenge to editors concerned with the relations between versions and intentions, that it reveals just how much criticism can be misled by literary commentary and instructed by bibliographical detail, and that it undermines traditional views of the Augustan age as stable. What looks in any single version like a massively inert and definitive monument to Dulness proves from a diachronic perspective to be an endlessly mutating conglomeration of disparate, carefully preserved instances of folly and misguided pride. I have no doubt that Pope sought stability, and that one function of the variorum apparatus was to fix meaning and parody the new scholarship, but having recognized that the very instability he feared could yield a solid financial return and enable him to sustain his attack on folly with greater accuracy, Pope made the best of necessity.

In concluding, I should point out that I doubt this is the sort of defense Pope would desire, since a fuller understanding of his compositional methods and financial and legal entanglements undermines his stance as morally superior to his Grub-Street rivals, who were themselves seeking to exploit the system just as Pope had. Viewed as an opportunistic insider taking advantage of and even altering the legal system and printing practices to suit his own ends, rather than as a resentful outsider resorting to the only avenue of protest available to him, Pope becomes an engaged Augustan, part of the vibrant mercantilism and social fragmentation which his masterpiece claims to resent and resist. While Pope was undoubtedly an outsider in many respects and while he would almost certainly prefer us to accept his self-presentation in Epistle to Arbuthnot, he has left enough traces of his behind-the-scenes activities to allow us to sketch an alternative backdrop against which to view his drama of Dulness. Thus the Dunciad Variorum, in all its versions, endures as a testimony to the uniquely ambivalent combination of social, legal, literary, and personal variables that shaped, and reshaped, Pope's verse.