SOURCE: “The ‘Truest Copies’ of a ‘Mean Original,’” in Resemblance & Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 11-39.

[In the following excerpt, Deutsch describes Pope's poetic corpus within the context of the emerging book trade and role of professional writer, relating how the ubiquitous image of the poet marks his poetry as uniquely his own.]

Few proficients have a greater genius for Monsters than myself.

“To a Lady from her Brother,” 10 February 1714/15?, Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 277

In this chapter I determine how Alexander Pope's body remains outside, yet inexorably connected to, the orderly mirroring of his couplets. My book thus begins by shifting its focus from the poet's polished lines to the author's distorted body. This body beyond the poetry's frame becomes the central figure for both this poet's life-work, and for the cultural imagination of authorship at a transitional moment when the profession of letters in England, not yet fully formed, under constant and embattled negotiation, is a matter of “monstrous contingency.”¹ Pope's body lends its shape to an era during which:

it was no simple matter to delineate the person of the expressive author in contrast to that of the artisanal book producer, to differentiate the economic interests of writers from those of publishers, or to determine the relation between a writer's legal personality (as a copyright holder or as responsible for obscene libel) and his or her ethical or aesthetic personality (as creator or moral authority).²

In the context of such contestation, Pope's indelibly marked body functions not as his work's coherent metaphor, nor as its effect or cause, nor as its repressed opposite, but rather as its distinguishing mark; a mark which Pope's recent critics have learned to disavow but with which his contemporaries were fascinated. The metaphor of portraiture points to the way in which the image of the author in Pope's time takes the place of both the concept of authorship, and the chaotic social milieu which gives it life. Such an image, whether in print or in paint, is constructed in relation to the codes that give the social body meaning, that attempt to keep it whole. Portraiture, like literature, was a booming business in eighteenth-century England, and like literature drew an unprecedentedly large and various audience by benefit of mass reproduction. Just as the author's individuality stands in marked disjunction from the texts he imitates, from the system that markets him, and from the confused orders of those who read him, so the idea of the particular likeness, of “portraiture as a concept thus stands in a contradictory relationship to the mythic unified body which is rationalized and re-presented in portrait depictions.”³ The original portrait, in other words, like the original author, is for the eighteenth-century public something of a paradox.

Alexander Pope, the most frequently portrayed individual of his generation, particularly embodies this paradox.⁴ Eighteenth-century codes of bodily representation privileged the head, and more specifically the face, as the site of character, reading the image of the face “in symbolic relation to the subject, not in representation of it.”⁵ As Deidre Lynch argues, “the legible face indexed character: a social norm, a determinate place on the ethical map where every person had a proper place and where distinction was contained within limits. Recognizing a face, or putting a name to a face, was thus an allegory for … discriminating and weighing samenesses and differences.”⁶ Pope's unique body, by its deviation from the norm and by the improper attention it calls to itself, disrupts these somatic and symbolic economies by refusing to be read.

Reconsidering the authorial body that has been constructed as monstrous, and which in its obviousness has remained paradoxically invisible to later readers, enables us to see both how meaning is figured at a particular cultural moment, and where meaning has its limits. To read Pope's deformity is to delineate the limits of form itself for his cultural field; it is to see the reflection of his poetry's finished surface, the roots of his hard-won Augustan “originality,” the marks of his monumental cultural entrepreneurship and self-possession, in illicit ambiguity.⁷ At the intersection of the general and the particular, public gaze and personal display, social metaphor and individual metonymy, when this authorial body is made visible, it is uniquely deformed.

Pope's body is above all a body of contradictions, and Pope a figure of personal and historical liminality. Called both the last Renaissance poet and the first modern author, he shrewdly negotiated the historical transition from patronage to mass publication by his active solicitation of subscriptions in translating the Iliad. The first professional author to also be de facto his own publisher was both the product and a shaping presence of an era in which, as Mark Rose writes, the “work was now above all the objectification of a personality.” While “readers increasingly approached literary texts as theologians had long approached the book of nature, seeking to find the marks of the divine author's personality in his works,” the mortal author became a text at the mercy of his readers, a text readers tried to control by depicting.⁸ Reauthorizing a celebrity both courted and compulsory, Pope does not transform his body through his work, nor does he try to write himself out of his body, rather he silences his audience by making his body visible. Throughout his career, Pope struggled for control over this authorial image.

The first, and earliest, of such images was composed by a well-known contemporary of Pope's, the critic John Dennis, in response to a perceived libel in the form of an unidentified “Imitation of Horace.” Entitled “A True Character of Mr. Pope, and His Writings,”⁹ Dennis's tirade, one of his few exercises in the genre descended from Horace and Samuel Butler, centers on the ambiguity of “character”—iterable printed mark, (in)decipherable letter, or ineffable moral substance—and gives that ambiguity the shape of a monster. Signalling uneasiness about originality, claiming to have written a private letter rather than an essay, Dennis begins with an anonymous “character within a character” that allows him to ventriloquize the harshest of his attacks:

That he is one, whom God and Nature have mark'd for want of Common Honesty, and his own Contemptible Rhimes for want of Common Sense, that those Rhimes have found great Success with the Rabble, which is a Word almost as comprehensive as Mankind; but that the Town, which supports him, will do by him, as the Dolphin did by the Ship-wrack'd Monkey, drop him as soon as it finds him out to be a Beast, whom it fondly now mistakes for a Human Creature. 'Tis, says he, a very little but very comprehensive Creature, in whom all Contradictions meet, and all Contrarieties are reconcil'd; when at one and the same time, like the Ancient Centaurs, he is a Beast and a Man, a Whig and a Tory, a virulent Papist and yet forsooth, a Pillar of the Church of England, a Writer at one and the same time, of guardians and of examiners, an assertor of Liberty and of the Dispensing Power of Kings; a Rhimester without Judgment or Reason, and a Critick without Common Sense; a Jesuitical Professor of Truth, a base and a foul Pretender to Candour; a Barbarous Wretch, who is perpetually boasting of Humanity and Good Nature, a lurking way-laying Coward, and a Stabber in the Dark; who is always pretending to Magnanimity, and to sum up all Villains in one, a Traytor-Friend, one who has betrayed all Mankind.¹⁰

Pope's literary villainy, his betrayal of “all Mankind,” takes on his body's unnatural shape, a shape initially described as that of a beast, but ultimately fixed as undefinable (“like the Ancient Centaurs, he is a Beast and a Man”). The unclassifiability which Pope himself will later point to repeatedly as the sign of his political integrity—“Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory”¹¹—here signals physical and moral abjection. Dennis writes Pope “himself” in the perverse image of his future poetry; this portrait of a “very comprehensive Creature, in whom all Contradictions meet, and all Contrarieties are reconcil'd,” for whom the ultimate opposition (as it is in the Epilogue to the Satires and the fourth book of the Dunciad) is between himself and all mankind (an opposition which Dennis, like Pope, marks as originating from a literary model), resembles nothing more than Pope's couplet art. Dennis takes the analogy one step further by identifying Pope's monstrous origins with the embodiment of the genre that Pope will ultimately transform into his own image (a genre whose etymological origins were, fittingly enough, considered dubious): “The grosser part of his gentle Readers believe the Beast to be more than Man; as Ancient Rusticks took his Ancestors for those Demy-Gods they call Fauns and Satyrs.”¹²

Dennis's pun here seems prescient, since in 1716 Pope was still a respectful imitator of classical fathers, rather than an embattled satiric hero whose greatest opponents were the originals who gave him form. And it is Pope's expertise at imitation which occasions some of Dennis's most extreme virulence:

As he is in Shape a Monkey, is so in his every Action; in his senseless Chattering, and his merry Grimaces, in his doing hourly Mischief and hiding himself, in the variety of his Ridiculous Postures, and his continual Shiftings, from Place to Place, from Persons to Persons, from Thing to Thing. But whenever he Scribbles, he is emphatically a Monkey, in his awkward servile Imitations. …

Thus for fifteen years together this Ludicrous Animal has been a constant Imitator. Yet he has rather mimick'd these great Genius's, than he has Imitated them. He has given a False and a Ridiculous Turn to all their good and their great Qualities, and has, as far as in him lies, Burlesqu'd them without knowing it.¹³

Dennis's portrayal once again slides imperceptibly from the bestial form of the author to his literary style, a style which is itself “awkward,” “servile,” and ultimately unrecognizable even by Pope himself: “He has … Burlesqu'd them without knowing it.” Imitation is so much in Pope's nature, that in Dennis's terms he is a mere mimicry.

Yet what makes Pope an “original” in Dennis's portrait is identical to that which marks him as a cheap imitation. Defending himself against possible charges against “our upbraiding him with his Natural Deformity, which did not come upon him as his own Fault, but seems to be the Curse of God upon him,” Dennis circuitously argues that his attack on Pope's person “is intended to lead … to an Exact Knowledge of the Truth by a very little enlarging upon it.”¹⁴

We desire that Person to consider, that this little Monster has upbraided People with their Calamities and their Diseases, and Calamities and Diseases, which are either false or past, or which he himself gave them by administring Poison to them; we desire that Person to consider, that Calamities and Diseases, if they are neither false nor past, are common to all Men; that a Man can no more help his Calamities and his Diseases, than a Monster can his Deformity; that there is no Misfortune, but what the Generality of Mankind are liable too, and that there is no one Disease, but what all the rest of Mankind are Subject too; whereas 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. … Thus, Sir, I return you Truth for Slander, and a just Satire for an Extravagant Libel, which is therefore ridiculously call'd an Imitation of Horace.¹⁵

From building a sympathetic analogy between the helpless Pope and the victims of his unjust satire, Dennis abruptly shifts to an opposition that objectifies the satirist and places him in an abjectly visible contrast to an invisible generality. The ultimate difference is between the uniformity of “the rest of Mankind” and the “Visible, Present, Lasting, Unalterable, and Peculiar” mark of Pope's deformity, a mark which distinguishes him from and deprives him of “Society,” and which enables Dennis to distinguish “Truth” from “Slander,” “Satire” from “Libel.” Should readers still object to such a construction of the author, Dennis argues, he need only point to Pope's text (the original of which has yet to be found) for further proof:

When they behold [Horace] thus miserably mangled, and reflect at once with Contempt and Horrour, upon this Barbarous Usage of him, [they] will not be able to refrain from exclaiming in the most vehement Manner.

Qualis adest, Quantum mutatus ab illo, &c(16)

In a dizzying regress of allusion in which form mimics content, Dennis quotes Satan's opening speech in Paradise Lost, which begins the narrative of Milton's epic with a moment at which recognition and misrecognition unite in an acknowledgment of degradation. Satan speaks to his second in command, Beelzebub:

If thou beest hee; but O how fall'n! how changed
From him, who in the happy Realms of Light
Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst outshine
Myriads though bright:

(I, 84-87)

but the reader hears at once an allusion to Isaiah XIV.12: “How art thou fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer,” and an echo of a pagan lament for lost heroism in Virgil's Aeneid II, 275-276: “ei mihi, qualis erat! quantum mutatatus ab illo/Hectore.”¹⁷ These two super-imposed narratives of the loss of an ideal, themselves forming a third narrative of historical loss, frame Satan's recognition of another's sad change as a misrecognition of himself. Performing a similar shift from subject to object, James Ralph (among others) brings Dennis's description of Pope's Horace to bear on Pope himself; juxtaposing the phrase as the epigraph to his poem Sawney (1728) with Pope's own words from the Essay on the Dunciad “Now Farce and Epic get a jumbled Race.” (Pope himself used the phrase to describe the end of Villiers in the third of the Moral Essays.)¹⁸ This line enables the lampooners to imagine both Pope and his text in corporeal form and literary context. Pointing to the authorial body as visibly marked by its fall from an original wholeness, these words nevertheless, burdened by their hyper-referentiality, themselves exemplify the failure of such transparent visibility inherent in attempts at literary originality. In Dennis's case, the question of agency takes on particular importance. What Dennis perceives as Pope's violence to his Horatian original exculpates his own violence to the imitator. What distinguishes Dennis's aggression from Pope's is the extent to which that violence is made visible (and therefore self-evident) and the author to whom such violence is attributed (Pope himself or “God and Nature”). For Dennis, Pope's mistake is, like Lucifer, to have presumed to be his own author.

Dennis's portrait sets the tone and the terms for a plethora of exercises in the same genre, the greatest number inspired by the provocation of Pope's Dunciad. One factor remains consistent: the origin of such portraits of the author is always, as the borrowing from Milton indicates, a matter of vexed indebtedness.¹⁹ The image of Pope on a pedestal bearing the insignia “His Holiness and his Prime Minister” (an ass respectfully attends the author, who is rapt in thought as he pens “The Dunciad with Notes Variorum”) is in many ways the visual equivalent of Dennis' verbal picture. Pope wears a papal miter, his Catholicism, as the Dennis lampoon also shows, a sign of his marginality and moral indeterminacy, rendering him both supreme and abject.²⁰ Pope's face is a realistic representation copied from a portrait by Kneller authorized by the poet; his body a fantastic hybrid of ape and rat, complete with humped hairy shoulders and hairless tail. Both visually and verbally, then, the image is a pastiche of past “originals.” The pamphlet version of this engraving, identical but for the miter and the words on the pedestal, goes to greater lengths to emphasize the Babel-like dimensions of this portrait's textual reflections. Following the frontispiece … are the texts of four “inscriptions graven on the four sides of the Pedestal, whereon is erected the Busto of Martinus Scriblerus, from which Original the Effigies pre-fixed to this Work was taken.”²¹ The author explains, “as all Criminals who fly from Justice are executed in Effigie, his Figure is exposed, and four Inscriptions under it, on the several Sides of the Pedestal, in Greek, Latin, Spanish, and English. … This curious image communicated to me [by a Dunce] I thought it proper to take a cut from it.”²² Whether by “curious image,” the writer refers to Pope, the pedestal, or the inscriptions themselves (the texts of which are neither translated nor commented upon in the body of the pamphlet) is unclear. What remains is the ambiguity of the image itself (human head on animal body) and the juxtaposition of image with text.

Beneath the frontispiece is a brief blank verse poem, explicating either the image or its title, “The phiz and character of the Hyper-critick and Commentator” (“phiz” here ambiguously distinguished from the “character” it is meant to represent):

Nature herself shrunk back when thou wert born,
And cry'd the Works not mine—
The Midwife stood agast; and when she saw
Thy Mountain back and thy distorted legs,
Thy face half minted with the Stamp of Man,
And half ore'come with Beast stood doubting long,
Whose right in thee were more.

Pope's monstrosity in this portrait is that he is author-less; his character, quite literally the visual imprint of his identity, leaves him a coin of indeterminate value that no one, least of all maternal Nature, will own.

PORTRAYAL AND SELF-POSSESSION

As these examples show, the portrait poses problems of truth and “truth of life,” of identity conceived as visual stasis rather than narrative movement, of original subjects and faithful representations, that consume both Pope and his reading public. Satan's words in the mouths of Pope's lampooners portray Pope's descent from a semi-divine originality and his fall into narrative as a moment of stasis made visible by his deformity. Pope's satire abounds in portraits—one thinks of Timon in Epistle to Burlington, Sporus in To Arbuthnot, or the poetic portrait gallery of Epistle to a Lady (suggestively subtitled “Of the Characters of Women”), among many others—which confound the visual with the verbal.

Such confabulation, as Dennis's remarks on Pope's “Imitation of Horace” also indicate, is crucially related to Pope's career-long endeavor to base poetic originality on literary imitation of classical models. The genre of the satiric portrait or character, in which literature takes painting as its model, conflates the visual with the textual through its reliance on the frame. As Roland Barthes states in his discussion of the portrait of the aging castrato in S/Z: “Every literary description is a view. It could be said that the speaker, before describing, stands at the window, not so much to see, but to establish what he sees by its very frame.”²³ The frame which creates the possibility of such a vision excludes as much as it includes; as it establishes what is both visible and “natural,” it ultimately creates “a supplementary meaning (accessory and atopical): that of the human body: the figure is not the sum, the frame, or the support of the meanings; it is an additional meaning, a kind of diacritical paradigm.”²⁴

Barthes accounts for the effect of the “natural” in literary portraiture as the product of the artificial and incomplete coincidence, the “disparity,” of different codes of representation. In the process of reading the portrait, that which is initially figured as the object of the frame, the body, becomes itself the subject, “the semantic space,” that establishes meaning. For Barthes, the body's meaning is supplementary, excessive, ornamental, and finally, diacritical. By that final adjective, Barthes indicates that the meaning of the portrayed body resides both inside and outside the text of which the portrait is a part: the diacritical is that which separates, or indicates distinction; as a grammatical mark it is that which, according to the O.E.D., is “applied to signs or marks used to distinguish different sounds or values of the same letter.” The verbally portrayed body, therefore, inflects and informs our reading of the space which it adorns and which gives it shape; it comes to mean as we come to see it, at once (and neither) visual space and (nor) verbal text. It is with the unnatural origins of such a “diacritical paradigm” that the figure of Pope's body confronts us.

In a cultural confounding of the visual with the textual, the market for Pope's poetry was inseparable from a thriving market for images of the poet. Portraying Pope was something of a national pastime. When Voltaire came to England, he was convinced of the esteem with which the British held the arts by observing that “the picture of the prime minister hangs over the chimney of his own closet, but I have seen that of Mr. Pope in twenty noblemen's houses.”²⁵ As with his literary work, Pope made it his task to authorize these images, thereby compelling readers to claim them for themselves. Here, for example, in 1742, two years before Pope's death, the young Joshua Reynolds, later to become a great portraitist of authors, first sees this most self-conscious of subjects. The setting, aptly enough, is a marketplace: Lord Oxford's auction of paintings, including three portraits of Pope, at Covent Garden:

The room was much crowded. Pope came in. Immediately it was mentioned he was there, a lane was made for him to walk through. [He soon heard the name of Mr. Pope, Mr. Pope, whispered from every mouth … Immediately every person drew back to make a free passage for the distinguished poet, and all those on each side held out their hands for him to touch as he passed.] Everyone in the front rows by a kind of enthusiastic impulse shook hands with him. Reynolds did likewise with the rest and was very happy in having that opportunity. Pope was seldom seen in public, so it was a great sight to see him. [He was, according to Sir Joshua's account, about four feet six high; very humpbacked and deformed; he wore a black coat; and according to the fashion of that time, had on a little sword. Sir Joshua adds that he had a large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which always are found in the mouths of crooked persons; and the muscles which run across the cheek were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords. Roubilliac, the statuary, who made a bust of him from life, observed that his countenance was that of a person who had been much afflicted with headache, and he should have known the fact from the contracted appearance of the skin between his eyebrows, though he had not been otherwise apprised of it. This bust of Roubilliac is now (1791) in possession of Mr. Bindley, Commissioner of Stamps.] Sir Joshua said he had an extraordinary face, not an everyday countenance—a pallid, studious look; not merely a sharp, keen countenance, but something grand, like Cicero's. It was like what Petronius Arbiter says [grandiaque indomiti verba Ciceronis]. He said there was an appearance about his mouth which is found only in the deformed, and from which he could have known him to be deformed.²⁶

This portrait is initially remarkable for its layers of self-referentiality: it is a portrait not so much of Pope but of a portraitist seeing Pope through superimposed mirrors of reputation and relation. The now famous painter recollects for the biographer of a celebrated mutual friend his youthful encounter with an already canonical poet. He has told the story before, but his memory of Pope's celebrity and the ineffable marks of Pope's deformity (not the body itself but the legible marks of bodily distortion on the poet's face) unite the two accounts. Within Reynolds' narrative, the living image of Pope's person, by virtue of his efforts to keep himself out of circulation, becomes a tautology of value, an alluring commodity: “Pope was seldom seen in public, so it was a great sight to see him.”

But Pope's image is also excessively familiar. Overly exposed in print and in portraits, the poet's face is an open book to a classically educated and dutifully inquisitive audience. What he provides in person is supplemental, art's proof, its diacritical mark.

Pope's face is exceptional, one might say “legible,” to Sir Joshua because of its “pallid, studious look”; like his body (as other portraits of Pope will show), his face is marked by, and therefore a mark of, his zeal for literary labor. Sir Joshua has learned to decipher this face through reading both visual and verbal texts. The sculptor Roubiliac, “who made a bust of him from life” (see Figure 2), provides Reynolds with the authority to support his reading of Pope's pained countenance, and reinforces our awareness of that countenance as collectable commodity, a sculpted imprimatur in the possession of the Minister of Stamps. The account collapses the distinction between the bust and the living head. Similarly, when Reynolds searches for a metaphor for Pope's distinctive face, he comes up with one from the realm of literature. Perhaps it is the classical content of Pope's painstaking and pain-inducing literary labors that reminds the younger artist of Cicero, another self-made literary man. But even more interestingly, Reynolds is reminded not of Cicero “himself,” nor his oratory, but of a textual construction of Cicero, Petronius's verbal portrait not of the orator/author but of his language: “the sublime words of indomitable Cicero.” This curiously verbal vision portrays a contaminating collusion of literature and life: Pope's voracious reading distorts his face; his face resembles heroic oratory described in writing. The English poet himself becomes a walking classical imitation, formed after and read by virtue of Latin models of self-creation, a text whose most immediately decipherable feature is the mark of deformity.

Such marks remind us that the struggle for definition of the modern author is a struggle for ownership of meaning. If, as Mark Rose argues, “the distinguishing characteristic of the modern author … is that he is a proprietor, that he is conceived as the originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the ‘work,’”²⁷ the case of Pope demonstrates particularly clearly how the author is formed, and deformed, in that work's image. Francis Hargrave's Argument in Defense of Literary Property could serve as the explicatory text for Reynolds' portrait: “a literary work really original, like the human face, will always have some singularities, some lines, some features, to characterize it, and to fix and establish its identity.”²⁸ The creation of such an identity paradoxically excludes the agency of the author himself.

Pope's figure is a text both ineffably original—that which, like the mark of deformity, stands only for itself, rarely seen and therefore a sight to see—and recognizably derivative; the poet whose literary career was one long exercise in imitation of the classics himself embodies translation. When a less sympathetic although equally proficient reader of both Pope and the classics, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, responds to Pope's pointed attacks on herself as Sappho in the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, her distaste for classical imitation couples with a disgusted exposure of the imitator's monstrosity. In her Verses address'd to the Imitator of … Horace by a Lady of London, she describes Pope's “motly Page” as a kind of monstrous hybrid of “Roman Wit” and “English Rage,” “modern Scandal” and “ancient Sense” which distorts Horace beyond recognition. As Pope's text is to Horace's on the space of the page, so the poet's body is to the divine original:

Thine is just such an Image of his
[Horace's] Pen,
As thou thy Self art of the Sons of Men:
Where our own Species in Burlesque we trace,
A Sign-Post Likeness of the Noble Race;
That is at once Resemblance and Disgrace.(29)

(11-15)

If Pope's text is a monstrous distortion, then Pope himself is a monster. Dennis's attack on the young Pope haunts this lampoon: a singular burlesque of the original species, the poet physically embodies the genre of imitation; he is a distorted sign of the natural. Just as the poetry's conjunction of what Dr. Johnson labelled “irreconcilable dissimilitude,” its yoking of “Roman images” with “English manners,” produces something “uncouth and party-colored, neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern,” so the threat of the poet's deformity is its indeterminacy, its weakening of natural distinction.³⁰ But imitation's ambiguous form also provides Pope with the means to bind his unnatural figure to the most correct art. Thus Lady Mary, like scores of other attackers after her, staves off such unnatural confusion by marking Pope's body out:

When God created Thee, one would believe,
He said the same as to the Snake of Eve;
To human Race Antipathy declare,
Twixt them and Thee be everlasting War …

(54-57)

And with the Emblem of thy Crooked Mind,
Mark'd on thy Back, like Cain,
by God's own Hand;
Wander like him, accursed through the Land.

(110-112)

Pope's attacker here reacts against the monstrous ambiguity of both Pope and his text by asserting a fixed binary opposition between the deformed poet and the human race, and a transparent analogy, one with the guarantee of a divine Author, between the crooked back and the crooked mind. A walking emblem, Pope's body explicates the evil within. Lady Mary turns her libeller into a morally decipherable divine text as she turns the divine text against her libeller: Pope becomes a thing both written and written upon.³¹

In Pope's literary self-fashioning, this lampoon shows, deformity and poetic form create the ultimate couplet, guaranteeing the author, if not possession of his text, at least a kind of patent on it. Literary imitation's complex balance of readerly fidelity and authorial originality repels Lady Mary and causes her to identify Pope with his unnatural text. Yet such a balance, and an ability to anticipate and manipulate such responses, inform Pope's career-long strategies of self-authorization through literary imitation.

THE DISEASE OF TRANSLATION

Even the most libertine of imitators must suffer from what Dryden called “the disease of translation” that both frees him from and binds him to his own authority.³² The disease of translation from which Pope suffers can be read as a dramatization of the paradox of his own physical affliction. King Mezentius in Virgil's Aeneid invented a torture whereby living victims were bound to corpses and left to die. Pope, who spoke of his own body as “the wretched carcase I am annexed to,” turns the torture of his physical existence into an image of his art.³³ The poet translates the battleground of the active mind within the wasted frame which his deformity makes of him into his particular brand of literary imitation; like Mezentius' torture, Pope's work binds art inexorably to the physical reality we expect it to transcend. In all of its correctness, Pope's art has something of the monstrous and the illicit in it.

Edward Young, in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), a seminal work in the creation of the modern author, explicitly excludes his model and predecessor Pope from the ranks of the original: “An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.”³⁴ The poet who speaks of himself in his imitation of Horace's Epistle II, ii as “that unweary'd Mill / That turn'd ten thousand Verses” (78-79), faces the potential threat of becoming a poetry machine; incapable of the gentlemanly “True Ease in Writing” which conceals its art, the poet of more mechanical than natural genius risks being both unoriginal and inhuman.³⁵

So comprehensive is Pope's “Ars Poetica” that it eliminates any trace of its natural origins. Virtually all critical searches for the true Pope begin and end in literary self-consciousness. “Even as a child,” David Morris writes, Pope was “never wholly outside the world of literature.”³⁶ Whether he is claiming in the Epistle to Arbuthnot that he “lisped in Numbers, for the Numbers came” (128), breaking his health by doing “nothing but writ[ing] and read[ing],” performing for his father by producing “good rhymes,” giving the gardener a starring part in his first dramatic effort, writing a lampoon on his schoolmaster, making a pilgrimage to Will's Coffee House at age twelve to get a good look at John Dryden, or writing at that age an “Horatian poem without an original”—his “Ode on Solitude”—where, as Morris puts it, Pope “seemed to pass directly from infancy to middle age or its literary equivalent,” the young Pope is represented as already in debt to the author he was to become.³⁷

Such all-encompassing art defines all literary endeavors as inherently imitative. By imitation I refer to contemporary definitions of the freest of translations, what Dryden dubbed one step beyond the golden mean of “paraphrase,” and marked as the opposite extreme of literalist “metaphrase,” namely “this libertine way of rendering authors … where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from words and sense, but to foresake them both as he sees occasion.”³⁸ Samuel Johnson opines in his Life of Dryden that a translator “is to exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them had his language been English: rugged magnificence is not to be softened; hyperbolical ostentation is not to be repressed, nor sententious affectation to have its points blunted. A translator is to be like his author: it is not his business to excel him.”³⁹ Johnson's translator is not so much a creator as a linguistic transvestite; his work is judged by “its effect as an English poem,” but the body clothed is that of the original author.⁴⁰ Thus the translator paradoxically frees himself from responsibility for a deviant original by fidelity to its deviations. In just this way, as David Morris points out, Horace's Latin originals provide Pope with a “ready-made structure” which is itself inchoate, affording the English poet an escape from his audience's expectation of more coherent forms.⁴¹

Both Johnson and Dryden leave the question of what is behind the dress, what of substance makes the work unique, largely unanswered. Sliding out of a verbal trap into a visual metaphor, Dryden's translator becomes in a later essay a portraitist, capable of creating “a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. 'Tis one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable, and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole.”⁴² Dryden's model translator is ultimately a life-bestowing god, while a failed copyist is termed a narcissist who studies “himself more than those who sat to him,” and thereby commits a kind of murder: “A good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body.”⁴³ By an act of complete self-effacement the ideal translator here asserts his own originality by bringing the dead to life. But for a translator to display himself through imitation is a kind of profane exhibitionism: “to state it fairly, imitation of an author is the most advantageous way for a translator to show himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead.”⁴⁴

Pope's friend and patron Lord Bolingbroke inverts the paradox when he recommends, after Boileau, that rather than translating an ancient author “servilely” and literally, “a good writer will jouster contre l'original, rather imitate than translate, and rather emulate than imitate: he will transfuse the sense and spirit of the original into his own work, and will endeavor to write as the ancient author would have wrote, had he writ in the same language.”⁴⁵ For Bolingbroke, rebellious self-assertion is the highest brand of fidelity. The translator's own work is paramount; the original is not a passive subject but rather an active adversary against whom the imitator must compete in a mock-heroic battle. The imitator becomes an actor playing a role, and finally, an author creating a character who is and is not himself.

The questions of authority which this brief discussion of literary imitation raises, the complex negotiations between servility and freedom, fidelity and originality, natural genius and mechanical servility, sincere fidelity to the original and self-interested theatricality, which comprise the genre, are keys to any investigation of Pope's self-fashioning. Pope is perhaps his own most original act of literary imitation. The originals against whom he plays the part of Pope are not only classical models but also earlier or conflicting versions of himself. (The voice of “F.” [friend] in the Epilogue to the Satires, for example, is a conventionally Horatian Pope speaking.) In translating his own person into Horace's persona, in displaying his living self dressed in dead letters, Pope becomes neither dead nor alive, neither entirely authentic nor completely artificial, but possessed of a trademark in the form of his particular body.⁴⁶

Pope himself comments on the immoral aspects of imitation when he publishes his anonymous imitation of Horace's notoriously bawdy Satire 1.2 on sexual mores, calling it Sober Advice from Horace Imitated from his Second Sermon in the Manner of Mr. pope (1734). Warmly dedicating the work to himself, the poet proceeds to take liberties with Horace, himself, his friends (whose sexual exploits along with those of his enemies are ridiculed in the text) and the renowned Richard Bentley, whose Latin text and emendations he reprints verbatim, and whose morally outraged and pruriently precise attempts to get Horace's original obscenities right are parodied in “Notae Bentleanae,” the first of which is on the word “Imitated”: “Why Imitated? Why not translated? … A Metaphrast had not turned Tigellius, and Fufidius, Malchinus and Gargonius (for I say Malchinus, not Malthinus, and Gargonius, not Gorgonius) into so many ladies. Benignus, hic, hunc, &c all of the Masculine Gender: Every Schoolboy knows more than our Imitator.”⁴⁷ Pope equates Bentley's obsessive concern with the proper spelling of proper names with a zeal for keeping the proper bodies in the proper places. In this parody, imitation makes Bentley uneasy because it takes liberties with gender in both its physical and grammatical senses. Indeed Bentley's fidelity to the letter has made gender a strictly grammatical construct; to turn a man into a lady is simply a matter of word endings, a diacritical proceeding indeed. The real infidelity is neither human adultery nor graphic poetry about it, but rather the imitator's adulteration of the original.

Literary imitation is Pope's generic portrait. Perhaps the paradox which makes Pope so mysterious can be put as simply as this: he wants imitation and artifice to embody the truth about himself.⁴⁸ How are we to take Pope's attempts to (as he claims in Satire II, i) “pour out all myself,” to convince us, as Leopold Damrosch remarks, that “he has nothing to hide, so that art can freely coincide with life”?⁴⁹ Damrosch gets to the heart of Pope's duplicity when he writes that Pope “seeks to represent a self that is grounded upon lived experience, while the poems in turn serve to establish, if not actually to create, the self and the experience”⁵⁰ and, I would add, to make that experience marketable. Pope's life's work was to produce the definitive version of himself. “I must make a perfect edition of my works;” Spence records him as saying, “and then I shall have nothing to do but to die.”⁵¹ That self's excluded reflection, its remainder, is Pope's deformity.

Yet deformity enables Pope's particular brand of imitation to go originality one better: his poetry marks itself not as original but as impossible to duplicate. What matters for Pope is not the poet who comes before but those who cannot replace him, no matter how hard they might try. Just as this chapter attempts to read Pope's figure for the form, so Pope's brand of imitation reads its original, one might say reconstructs the concept of originality, in order “to purify the original of meaning,” and in Pope's unique case, in order to appropriate the form for himself.⁵² Just as Pope's brand of literary imitation evolves over the course of his career from respectful transparency to embattled obstruction, so his texts are increasingly marked by his own inimitable, indecipherable form. Pope's body figures that curious interrelation of original and translation, of transparency and opacity, of nature and artifice, that teasing elusiveness of understanding, which Walter Benjamin refers to as “the essential kernel … definable as that in translation, which, in its turn is untranslatable.”⁵³

CORRESPONDING IN PERSON

Off the page such deformity gives the poet a constant audience, a fixed image against which he must rebel. Almost continually ill and almost never clean, Pope refers to his person in his personal letters as that which “may properly at this time be called a human structure.”⁵⁴ Small wonder that such personal correspondence was written with an audience in view, and that Pope schemed to have it published first through the agency of his enemy the pirate publisher Curll and subsequently in a definitive edition under his own watchful supervision.⁵⁵ Pope writes impersonally, always performing before a potentially threatening audience, because his person is not his own. Esteeming himself “the Least Thing Like a Man in England,” Pope is dead to himself.⁵⁶ His body is his burden, a blight upon and distortion of the real life within, possessing him and putting him on permanent show. It is also the vehicle through which Pope takes possession of his art by exposing what that art has successfully transmuted. Pope's malformed body offsets his feats of poetic form. In the same way that an original frees a translator from authorial responsibility, Pope's body saves him from the constrictions of sincerity.⁵⁷

Nowhere in Pope's oeuvre is sincerity more of an issue, and more connected to issues of physical presence, than in his correspondence. In a famous early letter to Lady Mary, we can see how Pope turns physical vulnerability to his own poetic advantage.⁵⁸ This initial sally into amorous combat, the publication of which twenty years later reinscribes private self-exposure in print, begins with this proviso:

I can say little to recommend the Letters I am beginning to write to you, but that they will be the most impartial Representations of a free heart, and the truest Copies you ever saw, tho' of a very mean Original. Not a feature will be soften'd, or any advantageous Light employd to make the Ugly thing a little less hideous, but you shall find it in all respects most Horribly Like. You will do me an injustice if you look upon any thing I shall say from this instant as a Compliment either to you or to myself: whatever I write will be the real Thought of that hour, and I know you'll no more expect it of me to persevere till Death in every Sentiment or notion I now sett down, than you would imagine a man's Face should never change after his picture was once drawn.⁵⁹

Pope's words make it impossible to determine which is the “mean Original”: his body or his heart. The reader is forced to visualize the “crazy Carcase” and reinterpret it as a metaphor for an inner reality. Lady Mary must simultaneously look and read. Pope dares Lady Mary to turn away knowing that no polite reader could allow herself to expose the author of this passage as a cripple, since to do so would reveal the deformity of her own imprisoned heart. His correspondent's potential derisive disgust has been foreclosed upon by Pope himself. Ugliness guarantees verisimilitude and virtuous transparency. But at this moment of visual stasis, Pope calls attention to the vehicle of the letter, that which Richardson would later term “writing to the moment,” which absolves him of any original constancy and which posits the flow of text as the closest thing to truth. The portrait metaphor is reinstated, but is now termed unreliable in its fixity.

While we might term the previous passage moral exhibitionism, what follows can be described as sentimental voyeurism. Though many readers are familiar with the opening of the following passage, few know the conclusion:

If Momus his project had taken of having Windows in our breasts, I should be for carrying it further and making those windows Casements: that while a Man showd his Heart to all the world, he might do something more for his friends, e'en take it out, and trust it to their handling. … But since Jupiter will not have it so, I must be content to show my taste in Life as I do my taste in Painting, by loving to have as little Drapery as possible. Not that I think every body naked, altogether so fine a sight as yourself and a few more would be: but because 'tis good to use people to what they must be acquainted with; and there will certainly come some Day of Judgment to uncover every Soul of us. We shall then see how the Prudes of this world owed all their fine Figure only to their being a little straiter-lac'd.⁶⁰

From the metaphor of the “window in the breast,” to the more blatantly physical image of the heart actually handled, Pope shifts to the image of the self as artist's nude, devoid of drapery. From there the move to imagining Lady Mary herself naked is an easy one, all under the most decent cover of the sentimental language of sincerity, and finally of divine revelation. So effective is this strategy's duplicity that to take offense—to cover herself up—would make Lady Mary guilty not just of prudery but of dishonesty and moral culpability; to be a prude in this situation is to have something ugly within to hide. It thus becomes impossible to tell whether a response of over-delicacy or hypocrisy would be the greater sin. Regardless, the potential exposer finds herself exposed.

By baring all, Pope achieves a perverse transparency by giving to art his body's peculiar shape. He thus reinterprets deformity as do the people in “those parts of India” he tells Lady Mary of in a later letter, “where they tell us the Women best like the Ugliest fellows, as the most admirable productions of nature, and look upon Deformities as the Signatures of divine Favour.”⁶¹ The signature here, however, is Pope's own.

Although Pope's baring of the soul did not produce the desired effect in Lady Mary, many critics have since compliantly submitted to his naked truth. Dustin Griffin, for example, applauds the sincerity of this epistolary “language of the heart” created long before Pope's Horatian poems took up the cause of authorial transparency. So invested is Griffin in Pope's loaded language of self-exposure that he refers to Pope as appearing in the letters in undress. But in support of what he construes to be Pope's goal—the creation of a self free of the body's contaminating mark—this critic refuses to uncover what the metaphors themselves expose. When Griffin quotes the opening of this letter to lady Mary, he stops before Pope mentions the “mean Original.”⁶² Pope's professions of transparency make him the ideal reader's ideal and every mention of imperfection—on both the physical and moral register—is suppressed. But the ideal reader's delicacy blinds him to the fact that it is exactly that imperfection, the “Spots,” which prove the “Medium must be clear” and which prove Pope himself authentic.⁶³

Pope's bodily metaphors curiously figure a real body which is never touched; through feats of words Pope can demand that his person be, if not desired, at least looked upon without aversion. Just as Pope can undress his female correspondents for the duration of an honest letter, so they must be forced to imagine him as a physical presence for the space of a few sentences. The game can take place because of its limits. When Pope's friend Caryll, after the publication of the Epistle to a Lady which was dedicated to Martha Blount, asked if the poem's conclusion hinted at marriage, Pope replied: “[Apollo] gave me long ago to Belinda, as he did Homer to Achilles, and 'tis a mercy he has not given me to more ladies, but that I am almost as little inclined to celebrate that way, as the other.”⁶⁴ Art and life, like Martha and Belinda, are rendered equally fictional by mutual distortion and mutual disembodiment.

“You have all that I am worth,” the young Pope wrote to Lady Mary, “that is, my Workes.”⁶⁵ As Pope's body gives shape to his art, so his books give shape to his body. The letters record a vacillation between the monumental poet and his unremarkable person. “Methinks I do very ill,” he writes to Martha and Teresa Blount from Oxford, “to return to the world again, to leave the only place where I make a [good] figure, and from seeing myself seated with dignity on the most conspicuous Shelves of a Library, go to contemplate this wretched person in the abject condition of lying at a Lady's feet in Bolton street.”⁶⁶ When Pope edited this letter for inclusion in the official collection, he changed the phrase “contemplate this wretched person” to “put myself in the abject posture.” The process by which body becomes book is exemplified by the way in which Pope edits the phrase person out of the soon-to-be-published proceedings, even if it means including the phrase myself. In the original version Pope is aloof from the action, watching his body go through abject motions; in the edited version, the poet puts himself through his paces. In both cases, the self is at its most conspicuous and most dignified when isolated between the confines of a book cover; the “person in an abject condition” is excluded from print.

While the Blounts stayed connected with Pope until his death, Lady Mary responded civilly but coolly to Pope's heated epistolary passion. The ending of their friendship is commemorated forever in Pope's vicious characterization of her as Sappho in the first of his Horatian poems, Satire II, i (1733), and others such as the Epistle to a Lady thereafter. The accounts of the connection's termination vary, but the explanation which has been elevated to the status of legend reads that Pope finally declared himself to Lady Mary in person, upon which she dissolved into a fit of laughter. Without words as his shield, the poor poet becomes a laughing stock, an emblem of the disjunction between the puny body and the printed page, known to the nineteenth century simply as “The Rejected Poet.”⁶⁷

In his amorous letters to women, Pope aligns the soul with the body in order to enable personal and reciprocal self-exposure. This analogy casts the crooked mind his lampooners assume his crooked body signals in a sentimental light. In his letters to men (friends and patrons), the poet recasts the soul-body analogy as heroic opposition.⁶⁸ This correspondence translates the physical into what is at one level of intensity the polite, at another the outrage of moral fervor. In translating his physical self, Pope rewrites literature into morality, correctness in its double sense. In 1730 he writes to Lord Bathurst,

Let me tell you my life in thought and imagination is as much superior to my life in action and reality as the best soul is to the vilest body. I find the latter grows so much worse and more declining that I believe I shall soon scruple to carry it about to others; it will become almost a carcase, and as unpleasing as those which they say the spirits now and then use for vehicles to frighten folks. My health is so temporary that if I pass two days abroad it is odds but one of them I must be a trouble to any goodnatured friend and to his family; and the other, remain dispirited enough to make them no sort of amends by my languid conversation. I begin to resolve upon the whole rather to turn myself back again into myself, and apply to study as the only way I have left to entertain others, though at some expense both of my own health, and time. I really owe you and some few others some little entertainment, if I could give it them; for having received so much from them, in conscience and gratitude I ought not to go to my grave without trying at least to give them an hour or two's pleasure, which may be as much as half the pains of my remaining life can accomplish.⁶⁹

From the familiar generality of the soul-body analogy, Pope shifts imperceptibly to the particulars of a physical wretchedness which makes him virtually dead to the world; both dead and in debt, since his infirmity puts him at the mercy of the kindness of friends who must forgive his languid conversation.⁷⁰ In this rendition, literature replaces the social, allows the writer to entertain in the way a host entertains a guest, and permanently fills in for the evanescent companionship which the poet cannot afford. But Pope pays for this higher entertainment (we are reminded here of the vicious circle of study and deformity) with both health and time. Poetry tastefully substitutes for his physical presence, while apologizing for the trouble and distaste that presence causes. Literature permits the writer to perform gracefully while suffering in private.

By resolving to “turn myself back again into myself,” Pope attempts to establish an original self outside of society, a true identity imagined in opposition to the contagious translations of the social:

Hurry, noise, and the observances of the world, take away the power of just thinking or natural acting. A man that lives so much in the world does but translate other men; he is nothing of his own. Our customs, our tempers, our enjoyments, our distastes are not so properly effects of our natural constitution, as distempers catched by contagion. Many would live happily without any ill ones, if they lived by themselves.⁷¹

Retirement offers a return to the natural and the just, an escape from both physical deformity and social distemper into self-possession.⁷² Pope's fantasy of a wholeness that is at once moral and physical is reminiscent of Horace's response to the desertion of the fickle goddess of fortune in Ode 3.29—“virtute mea me involvo” [I wrap myself up in my virtue]—a line Pope was fond of and used in other contexts. Horace's phrase is remarkable, I think, for the strangeness with which it literalizes an abstraction, and even more significantly, makes of an abstraction a cover for the self which by dint of the operating metaphor is envisioned as the body. (One is reminded here of Johnson's teasingly empty metaphor of the dress of literary imitation, signalling a wholeness beneath that can't be seen.) Under the cover of virtue, Pope goes beyond good manners and becomes finally heroic; so this account of his literary endeavors, written to his friend Caryll, reveals. His studies, Pope writes,

are directed to a good end, the advancement of moral and religious vertue, and the discouragement of vicious and corrupt hearts. As to the former, I treat it with the uttmost seriousness and respect; as to the latter, I think any means are fair and any method equal, whether preaching or laughing … I shall make living examples, which inforce best, and consequently put you once more upon the defence of your friend against the roar and calumny, which I expect, and am ready to suffer in so good a cause.⁷³

This Pope is not merely a Grub Street producer, nor is he simply a poet: he is a warrior in the fight for the good. He is neither salesman nor dissimulator, but a servant of the Truth. This prototypical moral image emerged partly in defense of Pope's attack on particular individuals in the Moral Essays and poetically in Satire II, i. In this passage, and even more dramatically in his Epilogue to the Satires (1738), Pope translates social infection into solitary moral purity. The poet on show amidst a circle of onlookers becomes the sole defender of virtue, braving roar and calumny. In the Horatian poems Pope's concern with living examples, his insistence upon using particular vicious and corrupt hearts in his defense of general moral and religious virtue plays out on another level the conflict between the disembodied satirist-hero and his corruptly particular flesh.

MARKING OUT THE AUTHOR

Samuel Johnson, in an unflinchingly detailed description in his Life of Pope, demonstrates how readers of Pope struggle to control this economy of physical infirmity and authorial power:

The person of Pope is well known not to have been formed by the nicest model. … He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy; but he was of a constitution originally feeble and weak, and as bodies of a tender frame are easily distorted his deformity was probably in part the effect of his application. His stature was so low that, to bring him to a level with common tables, it was necessary to raise his seat. But his face was not displeasing, and his eyes were animated and vivid. …

Most of what can be told concerning his petty peculiarities was communicated by a female domestic of the Earl of Oxford, who knew him perhaps after the middle of life. He was then so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female attendance; extremely sensible of cold, so that he wore a kind of fur doublet under a shirt of very coarse warm linen with fine sleeves. When he rose he was invested in boddice made of stiff canvass, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.⁷⁴

In Johnson's portrait, Pope's body disempowers him, puts him eternally in a highchair, “in perpetual need of female attendance.” Johnson must fix Pope's unnatural origins—the narrative of authorial self-engendering evidenced by the reader's vision of his disability—in the realm of the body now branded explicitly as feminine and feminizing.⁷⁵ He brands the poet's person a botched work of art, a poor imitation. The faultiness of the model is explained as “in part the effect of his application”; in other words, according to Johnson, Pope distorted his own body through his excessive literary efforts. Johnson here echoes a host of other writers who similarly explain Pope's deformity. Most relevant here is Spence, who cites the bifold authority of the poet's own words and his mother's nostalgic vision of a visible fall from grace preserved in a portrait of Pope as a boy “in which his face is round, plump, pretty, and of a fresh complexion. I have often heard Mrs. Pope say that he was then exactly like that picture, as I have been told by himself that it was the perpetual application he fell into, about two years afterwards, that changed his form and ruined his constitution.”⁷⁶ Johnson goes on to state that the indulgence which Pope demanded in his weakness “had taught him all the unpleasing and unsocial qualities of a valetudinary man,” and takes the marginalization implied by his comparison one step further: “He expected that everything should give way to his ease or humour; as a child whose parents will not hear her cry has an unresisted dominion in the nursery.”⁷⁷ From infantilized invalid to female infant, Pope's authorial power takes shape in Johnson's text as bodily powerlessness. By attributing Pope's deformity to his authorial labor, Johnson paradoxically deprives Pope of any authorial power over the products of that labor, in much the same way that a translator is deprived of any authority over his original.

The cruellest kind of ad hominem reading can result; Pope's deformity—itself supposedly the result of his literary exertions—severs him from his own poetic forms. William Empson, commenting on the lines which close the Epistle to Burlington with a vision of the Golden Age, exposes Pope with cruel concision: “the relief with which the cripple for a moment identifies himself with something so strong and generous gives these two couplets an extraordinary scale.”⁷⁸ The powerful voice which inspires Empson's sense of the strong and generous is here translated into and embodied in the cripple. By pointing to the stunted body behind the lofty lines, Empson excludes the poet from his prophecy of order and makes of him a spectacle. Pope is marked out, even from the vision his own words construct.

Pope's most sympathetic readers are equally unable to avoid crediting his physical imperfection for his literary genius. “Sensitive and perceptive beyond the ordinary as Pope was,” Norman Ault writes, “it is only too likely that his desire for perfection sprang up and drew its miraculous growth from his bitter realization, during the formative years of adolescence, of how much he was doomed to be deprived of a man's rightful heritage, not only of health and strength and physical endurance, but also—and more tragically—of ordinary human stature and shape.”⁷⁹ Whether compassionate or disgusted, critics are compelled to read Pope's body as a text in conclusive interpretation of his literary excellence. The poet's deformity becomes the center of a vicious circle of cause and effect from which Pope in his capacity as author, objectified as an infantilized and feminized cripple, is excluded. Whether readers praise the artist's use of illusion in overcoming his deformity, or exclude him as spectacle from that illusion, they must mark physical aberration as the point of origin, the boundary between art and life. Pope himself, to the letter of his deformity, becomes an ineffable original.

THE MIRROR AS SPECTACLE

Although Pope could silence potential attackers by verbal self-exposure, visual display of his body posed the possibility of loss of authorial control. Of the hundreds of portraits which Pope authorized of himself, it is not surprising that none were full-length profiles. Most portraits were Romanized busts, complete with laurel wreaths or bareheaded in the manner of Milton, nobly bodiless profiles on the faces of coins (perhaps an attempt to fix in Roman style a character fragmented by the lampoons), or splendid oil half-lengths of the poet in various reflective poses.⁸⁰

Most full-length profiles of Pope were cruelly satiric products of the kind of morbid fascination with Pope's monstrous ambiguity evidenced in Lady Mary's attack. But not all unauthorized portraits were the work of attackers. The motivation in these rare cases—two informal sketches made in private company—seems to have been less the desire to inflict pain than an urge, like that of the critic who points beyond the page, to fix the poet's “true character.”

The key to these drawings is precisely that they are self-consciously “unauthorized.” One, a pen and ink sketch by Lady Burlington, shows Pope concentrating upon a game of cards.⁸¹ A doodle resembling a parasol branching out of Pope's head places the image in a mini-narrative: a member of the party, perhaps odd woman out of the game, sketches idly and comes to focus upon one of the players. He could, like the characters in The Rape of the Lock, be playing ombre; but here he is too intent upon the game to be aware that someone else is composing his figure. The drawing could have been subtitled “Belinda's Revenge.” It was not made public, nor identified as a portrait of Pope, until 1945.

Much more frequently reproduced, and now almost legendary, is a red chalk drawing by William Hoare, a painter of fashionable visitors to Bath who had officially painted Pope in oil. The sketch was initially published by Joseph Warton as the frontispiece to the first volume of his 1797 edition of Pope's Works. Warton chose to juxtapose this surreptitious full-length sketch with a Roman-type profile engraving after an oil portrait by one of Pope's most prominent portraitists and friends, Jonathan Richardson. The original Richardson portrait was owned by a Dr. Richard Mead, “one of the most eminent virtuosi of his day,” who had converted “his large and spacious house in Great Ormond Street … into a Temple of Nature, and a Repository of Time,” placing Pope's portrait “near the Busts of [his] great Masters, the antient Greeks and Romans.” Dr. Mead here shows himself a proper reader (and collector) of Pope's image.⁸²

Turning the page in Warton's edition, however, the reader is confronted with a most improper two-page spread: on the one side the poet, unaware of the viewer and engaged in conversation, his hump plainly visible, on the other an inscription (taken from the back side of the drawing) which is both an explanation and a justification:

This is the only Portrait that was ever drawn of Mr. Pope at full Length. It was done without his knowledge, as he was deeply engaged in conversation with Mr. Allen in the Gallery at Prior Park, by Mr. Hoare, who sat at the other end of the Gallery.—Pope would never have forgiven the Painter had he known it—He was too sensible of the Deformity of his Person to allow the whole of it to be represented.—This Drawing is therefore exceeding valuable, as it is an Unique of this celebrated Poet.⁸³

Warton's unprecedented choice of frontispieces puts on show the causal connection between Pope's canonization of himself as author and the subsequent desire on the part of his reader for “an Unique of this celebrated Poet.” Pope, for better or for worse, by making himself a celebrity has made his person public property. That voyeuristic public is eager to have “the whole of it be represented.”

William Hoare's unauthorized sketch thus becomes emblematic of all of Pope's efforts at self-representation. What makes the drawing worth looking at is not Pope's curved back—the lampooners provided that with a vengeance—so much as the fact that it was done in his presence but “without his knowledge.” The controversy which arose about the publication of the image (one critic, for example, complained of Warton's tactless advertising of the “Bard's … pictured person and his libel'd shape”), the frequency of its reproduction as “a favorite subject for copying by amateur draughtsmen”⁸⁴ and its popularity in the nineteenth century, all stem from its unauthorized display of an author whose province is self-exposure. This passage from the Reverend Robert Aris Willmott's Summer Time in the Country, first published in 1849, elaborates on the image's appeal:

I always find it pleasanter to let [an] author … tell [his] own history. … We catch the form and face in a looking-glass, of which the person is unconscious. He has no opportunity of making up his countenance, but is sketched, like Pope while in conversation with a friend in the gallery of Prior Park, and transferred to the canvas before he knows that an eye is on him—hump and all.⁸⁵

By translating the poet's verbal professions of transparency into the visual realm of the looking glass, Wilmott puts the integrity of authorial self-representation, be it visual or verbal, into the balance. The author tells his own history but is unconscious of the result, which is characterized not as a text but a form and face in a looking-glass to which the image's source is strangely blind. Such unconsciousness is equated with artless sincerity because it belies authorial control; the hump surreptitiously portrayed guarantees a portrayal's truth. In his self-portrait in Satire II, i, Pope set the terms for this equation:

I love to pour out all myself, as plain
As downright Shippen, or as old Montagne.
In them, as certain to be lov'd as seen,
The Soul stood forth, nor kept a Thought within;
In me what Spots (for Spots I have) appear,
Will prove at least the Medium must be clear.
In this impartial glass, my Muse intends
Fair to expose myself, my Foes, my Friends.

(51-58)

Contrasting the lovable transparency of Shippen and Montaigne with the offputting occlusion of his own self-exposure, Pope forfeits sympathy for proof: the crooked back offsets the couplet's elegance, moral flaws make confessions more convincing, spots of ink constitute the proof of print.⁸⁶ Whether reader or author gain possession of this impartial glass, Pope's deformity imprints its vision.

As the next chapter will show, when Pope gazes at Belinda, in love with her own reflection in an extremely partial glass of his own construction, deformity strikes up an affectionately ironic affinity with femininity: an affinity based on a common love of beauty, and a common desire to author oneself. Deformity allows the poet to distinguish himself from his celebration of feminine perfection by his awareness of the contingencies of the market and of mortality, contingencies that reduce all things, however beautiful, to objects.

Notes

1. David Saunders and Ian Hunter, “Lessons from the ‘Literatory’: How to Historicize Authorship,” Critical Inquiry, 17 (Spring 1991): 485.

2. Ibid., p. 757.

3. Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 6.

4. “Pope was probably the most frequently portrayed English person of his generation, perhaps of the whole eighteenth century.” William K. Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. xv. Pointon calculates 66 primary types of portraits of Pope (reproduced in various forms, including engravings, lithographs, mezzotints, medals, and miniatures) in circulation in eighteenth-century England. See Hanging the Head, p. 2.

5. Pointon, Hanging the Head, pp. 62-63.

6. Deidre Lynch, “Overloaded Portraits: The Excesses of Character and Countenance,” in Veronica Kelly and Dorothea E. Van Mücke, eds., Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 116-117. Lynch's account of the evolution of the depiction of character in eighteenth-century portraiture points to the “overloaded face as a deterrent example: a warning signal … marking the point at which the seemliness of the body, the propriety of meaning, and the artistic hierarchy came into jeopardy,” a point which Pope's deformed body signals more flagrantly.

7. “The analysis focused on the ‘ideological meaning’ of monsters overlooks the fact that previous to signifying something, previous even to serving as an empty vessel of meaning, monsters embody enjoyment qua the limit of interpretation, that is to say, nonmeaning as such.” Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 134. See also Fredric Jameson, on the “polysemous function” of the shark in Jaws, in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 26-27; cited in Žižek, p. 134.

8. Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations, 23 (Summer 1988): 75. See also Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the Author,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 17, 4 (Summer 1984): 425-448; Ian Watt, “Publishers and Sinners: The Augustan View,” Papers of the Bibliographic Society of the University of Virginia, 12 (1959): 3-20; Harry Ransom, “The Rewards of Authorship in the Eighteenth Century,” University of Texas Studies in English, 18 (1938): 47-66. For Pope's particular part in the proceedings see Pat Rogers, “Pope and His Subscribers,” Publishing History, 3 (1978): 7-36, and James A. Winn, “On Pope, Printers and Publishers,” Eighteenth Century Life, 6 (1981): 93-102. The definitive work on Pope and the literary market is D. F. Foxon, Pope and the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

9. Herman Lewis Asarnow, “Pope's Early Public Character, 1709-1729: His Creation and Promotion of a Public Image in the Early Career,” abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International 42, 11 (1982): p. 4829A. Asarnow argues that the phrase “true character” was first used in this sense in English in Dennis' text.

10. John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939-1943), vol. 2, p. 103.

11. See the First Satire of the Second Book (1733), line 68; Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I (1738), lines 7-8: “'Tis all from Horace: Horace long before ye / Said, ‘Tories call'd him Whig, and Whigs a Tory.’” In typical Popean fashion, the initial (and imitative) claim to unique originality is later self-consciously and critically cited (in the words of an imagined adversary) as derivative of a classical original.

12. Dennis, Critical Works, vol. 2, pp. 103-104. See John Dryden, “Essay on Satire” in John Dryden: Selected Criticism, eds. James Kinsley and George Parfitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 229-267, for a discussion of satire's possible etymologies, which include “satura” or mixture, and “satyr.” Edward Tyson's collapsing of the great chain of being in Orang-Outang sive Homo Sylvestris or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. To which is added, A Philological Essay concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein it will appear that they are all either Apes or Monkeys, and not Men, as formerly Pretended (London, 1699), could serve as a kind of catalog from which abusive names for Pope were chosen. In its collapsing of distinctions between monkeys and men (despite its title's attempt to assure the reader otherwise), Tyson's speculation gives a cultural context for the anxieties that Pope's figure inspires in his attackers. The ape, man's distorted mirror image, is known and feared for its skill at mimicry, and in Tyson's hands conflates art with nature. Tyson claims to be looking for the “Real Foundation for [Ancient] Mythology,” and to have found the orang-outang to be synonymous with what the ancients called “wild men,” “little men,” “Pygmaean men,” “black men,” “wild Beasts,” “satyrs,” “fauni,” “Pan,” “Sylvanus,” “Silenus,” and even “Nymphae.” Orang-Outang, p. 1.

13. Dennis, Critical Works, vol. 2, p. 104.

14. Ibid., p. 105.

15. Ibid., p. 105. Dennis refers here to Pope's prisoning of the pirate bookseller Curll, as published earlier in 1716 by Pope as “A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, On the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller; With a faithful Copy of his Last Will and Testament.” The “True Character” is written to a large extent in response to Pope's bodily/textual attack on Curll, and Dennis' editor assures us that he was patiently silent in the face of other assaults for five years. In this highly scatological narrative, Curll repents of his many misdeeds against authors while first “perpetually interrupted by vomitings,” and then “from his close-stool.” His most important sin is appropriating authorial agency: “Gentlemen, in the first Place, I do sincerely pray Forgiveness for those indirect Methods I have pursued in inventing new Titles to old Books, putting Authors Names to Things they never saw, publishing private Quarrels for publick Entertainment; all which, I hope will be pardoned, as being done to get an honest livelihood.” In Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 262. While Pope too publishes private quarrels, he does so with the most direct of methods; he reduces Curll to the gripings of his own body. It is also worth noting that Pope recollected and reappropriated this particular passage of Dennis' attack in the notes to the Dunciad Variorum, II, 134; TE, vol. 5, p. 119.

16. Dennis, Critical Works, vol. 2, p. 106. For the mournful affect of such textual self-consciousness, see chapter 4, on Pope, Horace and prosopopeia, the trope by which, as Paul de Man puts it, “one's name … is made as intelligible and memorable as a face,” a face which always eludes our memory of its original. “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 76.

17. John Milton, Paradise Lost I, 84-85, with references from The Poems of John Milton, eds. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, 1968). This is the first speech in the poem, termed “rhetorically the ianua narrandi or the opening of narrative proper.”

18. James Ralph, Sawney. An Essay on the Dunciad an Heroick Poem (London: Whitehall Evening Post, June 27, 1728); Pope, To Bathurst, line 305.

19. For more on Pope's exploitation of the ambiguities of agency inherent in both contemporary ideas of satire and of authorship, see chapter 5. For this image, see William K. Winsatt, Portraits, no. 7. 11, pp. 70-72.

20. For a historical analysis of the various ideological valences of Catholicism as a cultural sign in Stuart England, see Peter Lake, “Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice,” in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 72-106.

21. Pope Alexander's Supremacy and Infallibility Examined (London: Monthly Chronicle, 1729), p. v.

22. Ibid., p. 1.

23. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), trans. Richard Miller, p. 54.

24. Ibid., p. 61.

25. Voltaire, Letter XXIII of Letters Concerning the English Nation. By Mr. De Voltaire, 2d. ed. (London: C. Davis, 1741), p. 178; quoted in Wimsatt, Portraits, p. xvii. Written c. 1728-1731, these letters were first published in English at London in 1732.

26. From James Boswell's notes for a biography of Sir Joshua Reynolds in Frederick W. Hilles, ed., Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952), pp. 24-25. For the bracketed material, see James Prior, Life of Edmund Malone (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1860), p. 429.

27. Rose, “Author as Proprietor,” p. 54.

28. Francis Hargrave, An Argument in Defense of Literary Property, 2d. ed. (London, 1774), pp. 6-7; quoted in Rose, “Author as Proprietor,” p. 72.

29. Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace. By a Lady (London: A. Dodd, March 9, 1733), p. 2. This text was jointly and anonymously authored by Lord Hervey. In Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 266.

30. Samuel Johnson, Life of Pope, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. 3, p. 247.

31. The same weapons are used, ironically enough, by those who come to the moralist's defense, such as the “Gentlewoman” authoress of “Advice to Sappho occasioned by her Verses on the imitator of the First Satire of the Second book of Horace.” This fair anonymous supporter, who declares that the “Nymph” who conquers Pope's “mighty Soul” is due more “Honour … than if she reigned o'er all the fopling Crew,” also resorts to a reading of the poet's body:

    Nature, surpris'd to see a Mind so great,
    Forgot to form the supple Limbs with Care,
    'Twas immaterial to a Soul so fair.

    So that if Pope's crooked mind marks his body in Lady Mary's account, the immaterial greatness of his soul for this devoted mythographer makes his body's weakness “immaterial.” In either case, the poet himself, and not his book, is to be read. Advice to Sappho occasioned by her Verses on the imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace. By a Gentlewoman (London, 1733).

32. “For this last half year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation; the cold prose fits of it (which are always the most tedious with me) were spent in the History of the League; the hot (which succeeded them) in this volume of Verse Miscellanies.” John Dryden, “Preface to Sylvae, or The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies” (1685), in Selected Criticism, p. 194.

33. Pope to Swift, 19 December 1734, Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 444.

34. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Marley (London: Longmans, 1918), p. 7.

35. These lines first appear in An Essay on Criticism 362-363, and are ironically cited and rejected (quoted in the epigraph, revised in the body) in Pope's imitation of Horace's Epistle 2, 2 (1737). See chapter 5.

36. David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 3.

37. Spence, Anecdotes, vol. 1, pp. 7, 9-10, 13, 15; Johnson, Life of Pope, vol. 3, pp. 474, 475; Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 249. For an account of Pope's glimpse of Dryden, see Spence, Anecdotes, vol. 2, p. 611. Pope said of Dryden, in words reminiscent of Reynolds' attempt to read Pope's own face, “I remember his face, for I looked upon him with the greatest veneration even then, and observed him very particularly.” Spence, Anecdotes, vol. 1, p. 25. Johnson notes that Pope is keeping poetic models in mind in his inability to remember “the time when he began to make verses. In the style of fiction it might have been said of him as of Pindar, that when he lay in his cradle, ‘the bees swarmed about his mouth.’” Life of Pope, vol. 3, p. 474. For Pope's account of learning by imitation, see Spence, vol. 1, pp. 17-21.

38. John Dryden, “Preface to Ovid's Epistles” (1680) in Selected Criticism, pp. 186, 184. For an excellent introduction to eighteenth-century poetic imitation, see Arthur Sherbo's introduction to his edition of Christopher Smart's Verse Translation of Horace's Odes, English Literary Studies Monograph Series (University of Victoria Press, 1979), pp. 5-42. Sherbo usefully distinguishes between Pope's “formal” Horatian Imitations, which remain more or less connected to a specific text of Horace, and Pope's poems in the “spirit and tone” of Horace, such as the Ode to Solitude and Epistle to Arbuthnot. Reuben A. Brower terms Pope's life and literary career an imitatio Horati, and asserts that “nearly everything” Pope wrote after his translation of the Iliad “shows more or less distinctly the influence of Horatian poetic modes and themes.” Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 165.

39. Johnson, Life of Dryden, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. 1, p. 423; quoted by Sherbo, p. 31.

40. Johnson as quoted in James Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. 3, p. 256. For Johnson's implementation of similar metaphors intent on distinguishing surface ornament from substantial essence with regard to Pope's Essay on Man, see my introduction.

41. Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 260.

42. Dryden, “Preface to Sylvae,” in Selected Criticism, p. 195.

43. Ibid., pp. 195, 196.

44. Dryden, “Preface to Ovid's Epistles,” in Selected Criticism, p. 186.

45. Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (London: A. Millar, 1752), vol. 1, p. 62.

46. Pope prefaces his first Horatian Imitation, The First Satire of the Second Book, by explaining, “The Occasion of publishing these Imitations was the Clamour raised on some of my Epistles. An Answer from Horace was both more full, and of more Dignity, than any I cou'd have made in my own person.” TE, vol. 4, p. 3.

47. TE, vol. 4, p. 74. See Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 78. For Pope's ambivalent relationship to antiquarianism, and in particular to the modern philological classical scholarship that Bentley represented, as exemplified in his Iliad translation, see Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 6.

48. For a rich essay on Pope's ambivalence toward self-representation, see S. L. Goldberg, “Integrity and Life in Pope's Poetry,” in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976).

49. Leopold Damrosch, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 29.

50. Ibid., p. 28.

51. Spence, Anecdotes, vol. 1, p. 258, Spence's emphasis. Dustin Griffin writes that Pope “was in effect composing the features of the self-image he planned to leave for posterity. Indeed, his remark suggests that his life's goal was nothing more or less than to leave a ‘perfect edition.’” Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 35.

52. Carol Jacobs, “The Monstrosity of Translation,” Modern Language Notes, 90 (1975): 758.

53. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” quoted in Jacobs, p. 757. See also pp. 758-759 for an illuminating description of the independence of the genre of translation which “is always on the verge of eluding understanding,” much as the visual sign of Pope's deformity eludes coherent categories.

54. Pope to Martha Blount, 30 October [1719?], Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 17.

55. Deformity, through both Pope's and his attackers' efforts, made him exemplary. Pope led Curll on in part by feeding the publisher the story of his having been whipped as a boy for writing a lampoon on his teacher. Curll's response was to advertise the anecdote in the Daily Journal as “a Proof of that Natural Spleen which constitutes Mr. Pope's Temperament, (as my Lord Bacon observes of Deformed Persons) and from which he has never yet deviated.” See James A. Winn, A Window in the Bosom: The Letters of Alexander Pope (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977), p. 31.

56. Pope to Cromwell, 24 June 1710, Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 89.

57. Pope's body thereby blocks the portraitist's access to his “true character.” If portraiture is, as Pointon puts it, a “mechanism to bridge the chasm between material existence and the interiority of the individual,” then to portray Pope's body is to portray instead the chasm itself. Hanging the Head, pp. 62-63.

58. For a related discussion, see Cynthia Wall, “Editing Desire: Pope's Correspondence with (and without) Lady Mary,” Philological Quarterly, 71, 2 (Spring 1992): 221-237.

59. Pope to Lady Mary, 18 August [1716], Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 352-353.

60. Ibid., p. 353.

61. Ibid., [October 1716], vol. 1, p. 364.

62. Griffin, Alexander Pope, pp. 5, 32.

63. Pope, Satire II, i, 55-56.

64. Pope, 18 February 1734/5, Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 451. See also Pope's earlier letter to Jervas, 16 August 1714: “to follow Poetry as one ought, one must forget father and mother, and cleave to it alone.” Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 243.

65. Ibid., [June 1717], vol. 1, p. 407.

66. Ibid., [September 1717], vol. 1, p. 430.

67. The title of a painting by W. P. Frith, c. 1854, depicting a laughing Lady Mary and an enraged Pope, described in Wimsatt, Portraits, as perhaps the finest of the nineteenth-century visual fictions about Pope, p. 362.

68. For a parallel account of Pope's transformation of the soul-body relationship over the course of his correspondence, see Wall, “Editing Desire.”

69. Pope, 18 December [1730?], Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 156.

70. Johnson recounts how Pope “once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry.” Johnson, Life of Pope, p. 198. Pope remarked on his inability to speak well in public, and Pope's sister Mrs. Rackett observes of her brother that “I never saw him laugh heartily in all my life.” Spence, Anecdotes, vol. 1, pp. 6, 102.

71. Pope to Broome, 29 June [1725], Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 302.

72. See, for example (and there are many others) this fantasy of retirement from poetry itself in Epistle II, ii:

    To Rules of Poetry no more confin'd,
    I learn to smooth and harmonize my Mind,
    Teach ev'ry Thought within its bounds to roll,
    And keep the equal Measure of the Soul.
              Soon as I enter at my Country door,
    My mind resumes the thread it dropt before;
    Thoughts, which at Hyde-Park-Corner I forgot,
    Meet and rejoin me, in the pensive Grott.

    (202-209)

73. Pope, 27 September 1732, Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 316.

74. Johnson, Life of Pope, vol. 3, pp. 196-197.

75. On Pope's cultural feminization, see Kristina Straub, “Men from Boys: Cibber, Pope, and the Schoolboy,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 32, 3 (Autumn 1991): 219-239. Pope exploits this image of himself as child in his Guardian 91, on “The Club of Little Men” (1713): “At our first Resort hither an old Woman brought her Son to the Club Room, desiring he might be Educated in this School, because she saw here were finer Boys than ordinary.” Prose Works, vol. 1, pp. 121-122. In the sequel to this essay, Guardian 92, Pope ironically situates himself in a tradition of diminutive authors that includes Horace, Voiture, Scarron, and Aesop. On the debate alluded to here over Aesop's deformity interpreted as a figure for the contested forum of print, see Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The English Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 3.

76. Spence, Anecdotes, vol. 1, p. 6.

77. Johnson, Life of Pope, p. 198.

78. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 128.

79. Norman Ault, New Light on Pope (London: Methuen, 1949), p. 6.

80. For eighteenth-century portraiture's ordering of the body's parts in accordance with social hierarchies rather than mimetic accuracy, for its codes of representation that put “the head—and above all the face—with its cognitive and physiognomical particularities … in metonymic relation to the body as a whole,” see Pointon, Hanging the Head, p. 56. Pointon also points out that eighteenth-century portraits of Homer differed according to whether the author of the Iliad or the Odyssey was portrayed; the ideal of Homer, and not Homer himself, was what mattered. Hanging the Head, p. 63.

81. Wimsatt, Portraits, No. 65, p. 311.

82. Ibid., No. 52.1, pp. 205-207. Figure 3 is Warton's frontispiece, No. 52.2, p. 210. In this regard Mead is not unlike Pope himself, whose library was adorned with busts of Homer, Newton, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. The multiple attributions listed beneath this frontispiece, concluding with the designation of its rightful possessor, also demonstrate how ownership legitimates the ambiguous originality of images of the poet.

83. Ibid., No. 64.1, pp. 298-299.

84. Ibid., pp. 300, 304.

85. Ibid., p. 304.

86. An early example of Pope's equation with the materiality of a writing reimagined as print with the possibility of transparency is his essay “On the Origin of Letters”: “By this means we materialize our Ideas, and make them as lasting as the Ink and Paper, their Vehicles. … The Philosopher who wish'd he had a Window to his Breast, to lay open his Heart to all the World, might as easily have reveal'd the Secrets of it this way, and as easily left them to the World, as wish'd it.” The Guardian 172, 28 September 1713, in Prose Works, vol. 1, pp. 142-143.

Abbreviations

Correspondence: The Correspondence of Alexander Pope. Ed. George Sherburn. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.

Prose Works: The Prose Works of Alexander Pope. Ed. Norman Ault. Oxford: Basil Blackwell (for Shakespeare Head Press), 1936.

Spence, Anecdotes: Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (1820). Ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

TE: The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt et al. 11 vols. London: Methuen, 1939-1969.