SOURCE: “A Warfare upon Earth: The Life of a Satirist,” in The Sacred Weapon: An Introduction to Pope's Satire, The Book Guild, 1993, pp. 9-32.

[In the following essay, Blocksidge provides an overview of Pope's life and career, highlighting the personalities whom he targeted—and who targeted him—as the objects of satirical verse.]

Pope has always been a controversial figure, liable to arouse strong feelings in his readers. These strong feelings were as much a part of his life as they have been of his reputation since his death. For a man who, in his life, celebrated friendship and was esteemed highly by a range of eminent and discerning people, his posthumous reputation has been defined largely in terms of his apparent enmities and hatreds. He has had many detractors over the centuries, particularly among those readers who enjoy trying to score moral points over authors.¹

Superficially, it is easy to see why Pope can produce hostility: his satire can be cruel, blunt and unforgiving. It frequently directs itself at individuals who are, as it were, dismembered and left bleeding. Several of Pope's contemporaries have come down to posterity with reputations permanently crippled as a result of Pope's efforts on their behalf. It is difficult not to see the fulminatory nature of some of his writing as excessive and gratuitous, and it is tempting to seek some kind of explanation for his aggression.

A few facts about Pope are well-known and can, by those who choose, be used in easy evidence against him. As a result of a tubercular illness contracted in his boyhood, Pope's growth was severely stunted. He attained a height of little more than four feet. The long-term effects of the illness were severe and inhibiting. They involved curvature of the spine, weakness of the heart and lungs, frequent fevers, and inflammation of the eyes. He was no stranger to pain, exhaustion and the sick room, and was obviously denied many of the pleasures of a ‘normal’ life, not least as far as mobility and sexual relationships were concerned.² Additionally, as the son of two Catholic converts, he was debarred by his religion from the normal processes of education and advancement. Technically Catholicism was illegal and attracted penalties. Although these were often not very systematically enforced, there were perpetual reminders: Catholics were subject to double taxation, and were not allowed to own property. They were associated with political subversion.

Hence, a traditional view goes, Pope had much to be bitter about. He was as twisted psychologically as he was physically. That he wrote satire with such malicious glee was hardly surprising. He was one of nature's outsiders and thus easy prey to rancour and jealousy.

This reading of Pope has always recommended itself to those who take a one plus one attitude to literary biography, and look for easy correspondences between authors' works and their lives. However, to see Pope as the frustrated dwarf venting his spleen on the human race is to ignore the bulk of the known facts about him and to devalue the ease, sociability and sheer busyness of his life. The Pope who emerges from the hands of his biographers is a complex, more rounded and more civilized figure than the caricature who has been appropriated by those who dislike him. Indeed, in examining the facts of Pope's life one is more often struck by its normality and energy than by any kind of pathological bitterness.

It is interesting that many of the least flattering opinions and images of Pope were constructed during his lifetime by his own contemporaries. Where satire was concerned, Pope was much more written about than writing. Think of this, from Edmund Curll in 1728:

A little scurvy, purblind elf;
Scarce like a Toad, much less himself
Deform'd in shape, of Pygmy stature;
A proud, conceited, peevish, creature
The stinking venom flows around
And nauseous slaver hides the ground.(3)

Edmund Curll knew and had reason to dislike Pope: most of those who wrote against him in his own lifetime had never met him. They wrote against him because they were hired for the task. Pope was born into a literary world whose apparent bad manners take some understanding.

He lived from 1688 to 1744. Though Catholic in background, there is little evidence that he himself was particularly devout, but the allegiances of his parents determined much about his early development. In particular, he was denied access to university and received relatively little by way of formal schooling. Like many a literary figure before and since he was blessed with the advantage of a bookish father. Mr Pope senior was a retired linen dealer. The poet had access to Mr Pope's library, and was given every encouragement by him to follow his poetic ambitions. Having left London, the family settled at Binfield in Windsor Forest, where the young Alexander easily took to an isolated, precocious existence. As his older half-sister put it ‘… he did nothing but write and read’. Significantly, in view of the shape his subsequent work was to take, he imitated English poets and translated Latin ones. His father took an interest in his development insisting always on the highest standards of technical accuracy. Pope acquired an assured poetic voice at a very early age.⁴

Like many precocious children before and since Pope found himself more frequently in the company of adults. His first companion was a local landowner and retired diplomat, Sir William Trumbull, with whom he used to ride in Windsor Forest. Trumbull was a man of literary interests too, beguiled by the talented boy. ‘The little creature is my darling more and more’, he was to say, showing the mixture of pride and patronage with which the older generation soon came to view the strangely gifted little figure from the country.

Trumbull had literary acquaintances in the capital, and soon Pope's fame had spread widely amongst the venerable generation of literateurs to whom the old gentleman had been able to introduce him. Pope was never to forget this early encouragement from the senior members of the literary establishment:

                                                                                          Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write;
Well-natur'd Garth inflam'd with early praise,
And Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my Lays;
The Courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield, read,
Ev'n mitred Rochester would nod the head,
And St John's self (great Dryden's friends before)
With open arms receiv'd one Poet more.

(An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot 135-142)

It is not surprising that Pope became enormously confident of his poetic abilities. He had had blessings and status conferred upon him by some eminent men. He had written a set of four Pastorals. They were eventually published in 1709 but had been originally composed when Pope was about sixteen, ‘Granville, the polite’ was subsequently to write of their author that ‘… he is not above Seventeen or Eighteen Years of Age, and promises Miracles: If he goes on as he has begun, in the Pastoral way, as Virgil first try'd his Strength, we may hope to see English Poetry vie with the Roman …’.⁵ The genre of pastoral poetry, with its rather stylized presentation of shepherds and flocks and warbling pipes, may well strike a modern reader as insipid, not to say, derivative. Pope's Pastorals are hardly among his most exciting works. But Granville made an important point when he compared Pope with Virgil. Virgil's earliest surviving poetic efforts were in the pastoral vein. In the hierarchy of importance which traditional classical taste attributed to various poetic kinds, pastoral came relatively low. It was the genre with which a poetic career might start. Virgil subsequently became celebrated for a great epic. Hence much was being said about Pope's promise.

The Pastorals themselves were printed by Jacob Tonson in one of his Miscellanies, which is to say a substantial volume containing work by several poets. Apart from other work by Pope and some by Swift, this edition actually included another set of pastoral poems by Ambrose Philips. There was clearly no reason why the two authors had to become rivals, but rivals they eventually became. Pope's initial response to Philips's work was cordial and appreciative, but when Philips, over the next few years received rather more praise from the literary establishment (he was something of a toady) than Pope himself, it is not surprising that Pope felt hurt. If his pride in his own abilities seems highly developed, we have to admit that Philips's poetic reputation was very soon to sink without trace. Indeed he was to gain, as a result of his writing of pastoral verse, the unflattering nickname of ‘Namby Pamby’ Philips. It is difficult to take him very seriously as an author, but he clearly had influential friends and a rivalry between the two authors was encouraged. Within a very few years Philips was reported as having described Pope in conversation as ‘… the little crooked bastard …’⁶ One notices the irrelevance of the criticism and the way in which the man rather than the work is attacked. It was a pattern which was to continue.

In 1711, at the age of twenty-three, Pope published his Essay on Criticism. It is a remarkable poem for a young man of not much more than undergraduate age, not simply in terms of its technical accomplishment, but for its assured, assertive voice and its rather reactionary defence of classical values. It partly provides a reading of literary history, and partly a guide as to how literature should be read. Its tone is often advisory, and more than a little omniscient:

You then whose Judgment the right Course wou'd
          steer,
Know well each ancient's proper
Character,
His Fables, Subject, Scope, in ev'ry Page,
Religion, Country, Genius of his Age:
Without all these at once before your Eyes,
Cavil you may, but never Criticise.
Be Homer's Works your Study and Delight,
Read them by Day, and meditate by Night

(118-125)

Chiefly, though, Pope seeks to define the manifold qualities which he thinks the proper critic of poetry should possess. He does not mince his words in talking about the shortcomings of certain contemporary critics:

Some ne'er advance a Judgment of their own,
But catch the spreading Notion of the Town;
They reason and conclude by Precedent,
And own stale Nonsense which they ne'er invent.
Some judge of Author's names, not Works, and
          then
Nor praise nor blame the Writings but the Men.

(408-13)

A modern reader is free to be exhilarated by this zestfully opinionated poem but it is not surprising that Pope managed to ruffle a few contemporary feathers, in particular those belonging to a prominent literary critic called John Dennis. Dennis's public manner was both grave and choleric. He was much given in conversation to the use of the exclamation ‘tremendous’. This finds its way into Pope's poem. Dennis appears under the pseudonym ‘Appius’:

Twere well, might Criticks still this Freedom take;
But Appius reddens at each word you speak,
And stares Tremendous! with a threatening Eye
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry.

(584-7)

It says something for the precarious nature of the literary life of this period, that Dennis the guardian of literary propriety was to fall on hard times and die in destitution. But he enjoyed his power while he had it, and was unamused by this young upstart Pope. He reddened indeed, and went straight into print:

‘As there is no Creature in Nature so venomous, there is nothing so stupid and so impotent as a hunch-back'd Toad …’⁷

And so on. Again, it was the shape of things to come. Pope's reference to Dennis in The Essay on Criticism was mischievous and gratuitous. It was teasingly hidden behind a nickname (a character from an unsuccessful tragedy of Dennis's own). Yet it provoked a torrent of immoderate abuse. Part of the pattern of Pope's literary life had been decided. This particular kind of situation was to be replayed numerous times.

‘The life of a Wit’, Pope was to remark with some worldweariness in the Preface to his 1717 collection of poems ‘is a warfare upon earth.’ He was then still in his twenties, and the worst was to come, but it certainly seemed as though the precociously gifted and highly assured young poet possessed just the right qualities to irritate other labourers in the field. Pope was never, as a literary figure, quite able to rest comfortably again. There was always controversy in the air, though Pope's response to it was seldom predictable; sometimes he held his fire, other times he found means of counter-attack.

For example he was unable to let the apparent animosities with Philips and Dennis pass. There is no reason to believe that Pope felt any great personal hatred for these men, but he was never too happy when being sniped at by people whose literary abilities he felt to be less than his own. He disdained the kind of rank abuse that he had himself suffered from Dennis, in favour of something more subtle. His responses were strategic, indirect, and involved making himself as invisible as possible. They centre on two particular documents, both of which shed as great a light on the literary habits of the age as they do on Pope himself.

The first of them returned to the question of pastoral poetry and the person of Ambrose Philips. It was perhaps inevitable that Pope, with a growing number of poetic successes to his credit (the first version of The Rape of the Lock had appeared in 1712) was going to become uneasy about being bracketed with a man of such obviously inferior talent. Indeed when Pope subsequently came to write his Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, a satirical text book of how not to write, Philips was several times quoted.

Matters came to a head in the early months of 1713 when Richard Steele had published in his periodical The Guardian, a series of essays on pastoral poetry. They had, as was customary, appeared anonymously and this made it easy for Pope to submit an additional essay of his own. Whoever had written the preceding essays (probably Thomas Tickell) had shown no great desire to praise Pope. Indeed his own Pastorals were scarcely mentioned, though those of Philips frequently were. Pope consequently felt moved to produce one of his characteristically ambivalent pieces, an essay on Pastoral, written in that indulgent tone which the practised reader of Pope inevitably finds suspicious, apparently praising Philips to the skies, and only at the end involving ‘Mr Pope … whose eclogues … are by no means Pastorals but something better.’ They were mentioned alongside those of the best Greek and Roman practitioners.⁸

The second foray of 1713 was directed at Dennis who had rushed into print with some deprecatory comments about Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato, then enjoying considerable public success because of its perceived relevance to current political issues. Pope responded with a document which apparently criticized someone else, The Narrative of Doctor Robert Norris, Concerning the Strange and Deplorable Frenzy of Mr John Dennis. Norris was an infamous ‘quack’ psychiatrist, and Pope's pamphlet, in dialogue form, presented a mock examination of Dennis by Norris, in which the former becomes obsessed to the point of gibbering lunacy by ‘Cato's’ infringement of literary propriety. It has considerable potential as a theatrical sketch and is very close to the world of modern television satire.⁹

The indirectness of both these pamphlets has been already noted: in the first one the satire rests in the skilful manipulation of an apparently inappropriate tone; in the second, the author disappears from the scene completely, leaving his fiction to do the work. Both these strategies were quintessential characteristics of Jonathan Swift whose friendship with Pope had begun about this time. Swift was twenty-one years older than Pope and his relationship with the younger man could partly be seen as an extension of those relationships with literary father figures which Pope had already enjoyed. This relationship, though, rapidly became one between equals and collaborators. Swift was an Irish clergyman who had spent several years in England during the reign of Queen Anne pursuing patronage and involving himself with Tory politics. Indeed, he had hoped to enlist Pope as a political writer for the same cause. Pope's relish of polemic was considerably less well-developed than Swift's, and it was not a role in which he could easily see himself. Swift liked clubs and was the leading light in the foundation of the Scriblerus Club in 1713, to which Pope also belonged in company with John Arbuthnot, John Gay, William Fortescue and Thomas Parnell.

John Arbuthnot (to be especially commemorated in Pope's Epistle of 1735) was physician to Queen Anne and came from a family loyal to the House of Stuart. This, together with Swift's background in pamphleteering, and Pope's praise of the Queen in his poem Windsor Forest, appeared to give the club a political focus but its purposes quickly changed to the collaborative production of satire. The importance of the club to English literary history is out of all proportion to its actual functioning as a club, lasting as it did only a matter of months, before the death of the Queen in 1714 sent Swift, complainingly, back to Ireland, all hopes of advancement lost, and removed Arbuthnot from his official residence at St James's where the meetings were probably held. Various ‘Scriblerian’ texts, normally the work of diverse hands, have survived, most notably Pope's The Key to the Lock, a mock-hostile criticism of his own Rape of the Lock; Three Hours After Marriage, a farce subsequently performed in 1717; Peri Bathous, which was published in 1728, and The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, whose publication Pope was to oversee in 1741. More importantly, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Pope's Dunciad were both the ultimate result of Scriblerus Club initiatives, and the genesis of the latter poem, along with its Scriblerian indebtedness is discussed in greater length in Chapter 3.¹⁰

That Pope and Swift had a stimulating effect on each other cannot be denied. Pope was to remind Swift of all this in his dedication to The Dunciad. Likewise, a certain common ground can be discerned between this poem and Gulliver's Travels both of which in their own way seek to ridicule ‘the works of the unlearned’. Nevertheless, the association was cut short by events, and seminal though Swift's influence on Pope was to be, Pope was not to return to sustained satirical writing for some time, though one small foray in particular is worthy of note, concerning as it does the publisher and bookseller Edmund Curll who has already been referred to.

Curll, perhaps more than anyone else, embodies all those qualities of the contemporary literary world which Pope came most to dislike, and it is largely through Curll's activities that Pope's relationship with that literary world came to be defined. Curll was the very epitome of all that is meant by the term ‘Grub Street’. First and foremost, of course, this term denotes a specific location in London. Grub Street, hard by Fleet Ditch and other insalubrious parts of the city was the home of the ‘hackney writer’, which is to say the writer who wrote for money at a customer's request. His was not a respectable calling. For a start, the income was precarious and the debtors' gaol never far away. Secondly, it was considered professionally demeaning for an author to earn his living by his writing. A gentleman obviously didn't need to, though for the less fortunate the age of private patronage had largely passed. The lowest echelons of the literary world were fast becoming part of a vigorous economy in which a man of Edmund Curll's entrepreneurial confidence and capacity for self-advertisement could do very well, especially if he wasn't afraid of dishonesty and deceit.¹¹

Curll had an eventful life: imprisoned three times for his unprincipled publishing activities, occasionally having to go to ground to avoid recriminations, and possibly acting as some kind of informer for Prime Minister Walpole. For all this his business prospered hugely. He ‘kept’ a number of hackney writers of his own, including at various times John Oldmixon, Charles Gildon and John Breval, all of whom were to find their way eventually into Pope's Dunciad, and all of whom were available to write whenever they were asked. There were, of course, many other practitioners of exactly the same sort. In an age in which the concept of copyright hardly existed, they obviously had considerable freedom, which a corrupt bookseller like Curll could exploit to the full.¹²

Basically, Curll specialized in forgeries. These might take one of several forms. He might pass off inferior work by one of his own authors under the name of Swift or Pope or Gay; he particularly specialized in the publication of scandalous biographies or wills and testaments of the recently deceased which, as Arbuthnot quipped, added a new terror to death. Additionally there were ‘keys’ purporting to explain recently published works, letters by supposedly famous people, and historical treatises on subjects such as flogging or impotence, in which (quite arbitrarily it would appear) historical and contemporary figures were implicated.

Pope and Curll crossed swords for the first time in 1716, over a relatively trivial issue. Curll had published a collection of Court Poems, probably written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu but passed off by Curll as the work of Pope. Pope's initial response to this was non-literary. He asked his publisher Lintot to effect a meeting with Curll, and then administered an emetic to the unsuspecting guest. Even in an age which greatly relished and often practised practical jokes, this was a somewhat childish act, perhaps, but Pope was to make a great deal of capital out of it subsequently, not only by knowing references to the incident in The Dunciad and An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, but also in a pamphlet, published anonymously of course, called A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr Edmund Curll, in which an exceptionally lurid (and doubtless greatly exaggerated) account of the event was given, rather in the style of The Narrative of Dr Robert Norris.

Curll did not have to do very much thinking to identify the author of this piece, and the consequences were obvious. Attacks on Pope became an ever growing part of his publishing business. In particular, Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad was beginning to appear and Curll had abundant opportunities to torpedo ‘Mr Pope's Popish translation … as best he and his hireling authors could. Pope thus became one of Curll's leading literary butts for the next twenty years. When the first version of The Dunciad was published in 1728, Curll was quick to produce a so-called ‘Key’ to it, which pronounced Pope ‘… a scoundrel and a blockhead, who has, at one time or another betrayed or abused almost everyone he has conversed with. … Yet now he kicks and winces because his arrogance and insolence have been exposed …’ A few years later, Curll was to advertise a Life of Pope which would seek to demonstrate and explain ‘… that Natural Spleen which constitutes Mr Pope's temperament …’¹⁴

Again we see the same situation being replayed and replayed just as it had been during the time of Pope's contretemps with Dennis. A cantankerous and irreverent gesture by Pope, who was prepared usually to be amused before he was offended by the works of Grub Street, would provoke an immoderate and abusive response, always quick to attack the person rather than the writing, and to do so in rather predictable ways. Obviously Pope himself was not above employing Grub Street methods against those whom he disliked, but the difference in kind and degree is always noticeable. Pope's contributions are high-spirited and marked by genuine wit. Their targets are clear and their grounds of criticism at root moderate. They keep their distance from gratuitous insult. In literary terms they are invariably more sophisticated than the attacks which he had to suffer himself.

Even so, they highlight a curious contradiction in Pope who, on the one hand held a most exalted view of literature and the poet's calling, yet on the other was prepared to use literature for the most frivolous of purposes. His next major political undertaking was his translation of Homer, a task which could hardly be entered into lightly. It is unlikely that Pope saw himself as ‘the English Homer’, as his enemies liked to think, but in offering a translation of the classical poet whom he most venerated, Pope was setting himself up as the voice through which Homer might speak to the eighteenth century. He was also, presumably, conscious of the weight of Dryden's translation of Virgil in the previous generation. If the greatest poet of that age could translate Virgil, then, by implication, the greatest poet of the next could translate Homer.

His translation of Homer's Iliad was to occupy him for a further six years, the task being finally completed in 1720. After this, he translated the Odyssey, which he finished in 1725, the year in which he was also to publish an edition of the works of Shakespeare.

These three ventures accounted for a decade of Pope's creative life. He was, at various times, to complain of the drudgery involved, also to claim that he no longer wished to write poetry. Yet the years which were given to these works of translation and editing were the years in which the pattern of Pope's poetic life became set. In 1717 he took the lease of a villa at Twickenham where he lived with his widowed mother until her death in 1733, and his own eleven years later. A thorough-going programme of building and gardening ensued so that the villa came to embody all Pope's tastes in architecture and landscaping, and indeed was to be something of a showpiece, as well as a symbol of his own poetic eminence. He began to live the life of a wealthy country gentleman. This life was to be largely supported by the considerable fortune which Pope's translations of Homer were to make for him. His relationships with Grub Street were certainly made no easier by this huge commercial success. For one whose enmity towards hackney writers was so acute, his own acquisition of wealth as a result of a literary undertaking has its irony. To the hackney writers, endeavouring to catch as many pennies as they could, it was particularly provoking. And Pope was prepared to be open about the matter, for example in his Imitation of the Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace (1736):

But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive,
Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive …

(68-9)

It is not therefore very surprising that Pope's Homer should have proved one of the most controversial undertakings of his career, for by the time he came to work on it, Grub Street was more than ready to make as much trouble over it as was possible. We have already seen some evidence of Curll's early efforts. Others followed, none more significant than the rival translation by Thomas Tickell which was probably embarked upon with Addison's support and encouragement, and which showed the way in which literary production at this time was influenced by the politics of personalities and factions.

Other criticism were voiced, too: in particular that Pope in setting himself up as the English Homer was aiming above his station; and that, not having a university education he was not sufficient of a scholar to do the job properly. Indeed the fact that he employed two young poets, William Broome and Elijah Fenton, as assistants seemed to indicate this very point. By the time Pope was working on The Odyssey, there was no shortage of Grub Street writing to suggest that Pope's Homer was not his own.

His foray into Shakespearean scholarship was a mistake. Pope was ill-equipped for the task from the start. His knowledge of Elizabethan theatre in general was thin, and his understanding of Shakespeare's language and usage was limited.¹⁵ It was not at all difficult for Lewis Theobald in his pamphlet Shakespeare Restored: Or A Specimen of the Many Errors As well Committed as Unamended by Mr Pope in his late Edition of this Poet to point out these shortcomings. Theobald's attack was of a different sort from the ones Pope had been used to receiving. It was a moderate document from a more learned man (who had reputedly read 800 Elizabethan plays) and was less personal in its tone than most attacks from Grub Street had been. Perhaps this was why it irritated Pope so much: its criticisms were sound and would stick. Although it was in the right, more than any of the other attacks hitherto received, it was the one that needed a reply.

The Dunciad appeared in the month of Pope's fortieth birthday, and was perhaps the major literary watershed of his life, for the direction of his writing certainly changed thereafter. By 1728 Pope had a considerable reputation as a poet. This reputation was based on the early Pastorals, An Essay on Criticism, Windsor Forest, the rather grandiosely entitled Works of 1717, which included the final version of The Rape of the Lock, and the Homer translations. With the exception of The Rape … all of these undertakings were entirely serious, and none of them had addressed itself in any way to Pope's critics and opponents. Satire had not been the dominant mode of Pope's poetry, indeed his output had been of a rather more lofty kind. Such isolated ripostes as he had chosen to make Grub Street, had been made in pamphlets and in prose. If Pope was to grow tired of being a butt for less refined and capable authors then he was not in a hurry to show it. We know that he kept many of the pamphlets written against him in bound volumes for his own reference, but to see the author (as many of his contemporaries wished to) as perpetually spitting venom against his enemies is a gross simplification. He waited for his moment, and it was the coming together of a number of different considerations which brought out the first version of The Dunciad in 1728. The poem, comprehensively savage though it is, is no doggerel. It is multiply allusive and exceptionally wide-ranging using a language dense with literary suggestiveness against a mighty cast of rogues and rabble. Pope, the reader feels, has taken on the whole of Grub Street man by man.

For all its literary sophistication the poem hit its victims hard, and consequently provoked even more of the kind of caterwauling from Grub Street that it had been calculated to stop. Pope was being naive when he wrote to Swift that ‘This poem will rid me of those insects.’¹⁶ It didn't. It merely increased hostilities, to the extent that Lord Oxford was to comment to Swift that ‘Pope stands by himself Athanasius contra mundum.’ His half-sister Magdalen reported that Pope never dared to venture out without the company of his Great Dane and with pistols in his pockets.¹⁷

Yet it was in the years following the publication of The Dunciad that Pope began to present himself in his work, not as the literary hostage beseiged by the rabble, but as the man of culture, retired from the fray into an innocent country world reminiscent of the Roman poet Horace's Sabine farm. The picture which it is very easy to construct of Pope in permanent discord with the lesser mortals of the literary world does not quite fit the facts of the next few years, which were certainly Pope's busiest. Much of his writing, it must be said, had a satirical thrust, but the fertility of Pope's mind in the early 1730s meant that he had a great deal of other work on hand too.

The Dunciad was in effect the apotheosis of Pope's Scriblerian satire, which is to say satire directed against the world of writing. He was to return to the poem in 1742 and 1743 in order to extend and adapt it, but with the important exceptions of An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and parts of To Augustus, Pope's work from now on was to concern itself with broader issues and take a much more explicitly moral stance.

Much of the poetry of the first half of the decade takes its colouring from An Essay on Man, which was published in instalments in 1733 and 1734. At a time when Pope's every move was the subject of malicious pamphleteering from Grub Street, the anonymously presented Essay on Man was a huge success and met with little immediate opposition. It clearly answered to a good many contemporary expectations of what a poem should be. To a modern reader it seems easily the most dated part of Pope's oeuvre. A quasi-philosophical exploration of Man in his relationships with himself, society and God, it owes a great deal to the ideas of Pope's venerated friend Henry St John Bolingbroke. Pope saw it as merely the introductory part of a much larger study of humanity which would encompass treatises on government, education and so forth, and which like many of the larger poetic plans of literary history, never came to fruition. It had off-shoots, though, into the four Epistles which were subsequently entitled Moral Essays. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Pope's work in the early 1730s is the way in which his poems take their life from each other. The Epistle to Cobham, (published as the first of the Moral Essays) was written partly to exemplify certain theories of human behaviour explained in the Essay on Man, whilst it is likely that some of Pope's thoughts on education found their way into the New Dunciad, the fourth book which Pope added to that poem in 1742. Likewise, the poems which we know collectively as the Imitations of Horace were written at various times throughout the 1730s, the earliest of them being contemporary with the Moral Essays. The Horatian tone which Pope was seeking was also discernible in parts of An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot.

If the 1730s were Pope's poetically most productive years they were also the most productive years in the pamphlet war against him. 1733 saw at least twelve separate published attacks, all anonymous of course. They were also the years in which the attacks grew more elaborate. Fiction and fantasy tended to replace rank personal abuse. Hence, readers could discover how Pope had supposedly been flogged or tormented or had committed suicide or murdered a woman. There were pictures of him, too, notoriously the engraving which had accompanied the pamphlet Pope Alexander's Supremacy of 1729, and which had pictured Pope's head attached to a monkey's body. Pope was to acknowledge the multifarious strategies of his critics in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot:¹⁸

The distant Threats of Vengeance on his head,
The Blow unfelt, the Tear he never shed;
The Tale reviv'd, the Lye so oft o'erthrown;
Th'imputed Trash, and Dulness not his own;
The Morals blacken'd when the Writings scape;
The libel'd Person, and the pictur'd Shape;
Abuse on all he lov'd, or lov'd him spread,
A friend in Exile, or a Father, dead

(348-55)

Perhaps the most significant charge against Pope, which stuck for a long time, was that in the Timon's Villa section of his Epistle to Burlington, he had been ungraciously criticizing the Duke of Chandos and his estate at Canons in Berkshire. Pope was thus tarnished with charges of malicious ingratitude and lack of respect to an important figure. It showed the way in which a misrepresentation of Pope's writing could rapidly acquire the characteristics of gospel truth. Indeed when, half a century later, Dr Johnson came to write Pope's life, the myth still held as biographical fact.

It was no doubt partly as a result of the anti-Pope industry that Pope was to proclaim insistently in his later poetry his own independence

‘Un-plac'd, un-pension'd, no Man's Heir
or Slave'

(Imitations of Horace, Satire, II i, 116)

Let Lands and Houses have what Lords they will,
Let Us be fix'd, and our own Masters still.

(Imitations of Horace, Satire, II ii, 179-80)

Pope's satire in the 1730s gains greater refinement and applicability. Although Arbuthnot urged Pope to refrain from mentioning actual names in his satirical writing (a point which Pope dramatizes crucially in his Epistle …), Pope's response was that ‘… general satire in times of general vice has no force … it is only by hunting one or two from the herd that any examples can be made.”¹⁹ Pope's satire in the 1730s finds out its own ideology and consequently its own victims with increasing accuracy. Pope becomes more concerned with the lineaments of the ‘general vice’ which he sees around him, a vice rooted not simply in Grub Street, but in the whole political culture of the age.

Two of his Moral Essays, those addressed to Bathurst and Burlington had borne the subtitle Of the Use of Riches and whilst it is true that both of these poems attack individuals, they are also evidence of a response to national issues. Pope is beginning to deal not merely with offensive individuals, but with ‘society’ in general. The economic tone of the age was speculative and expansionist. One of the consequences of this was that whilst huge fortunes were being gained and lost, the Whig nobility were busy constructing huge country houses and gardens for themselves. It was as an offence against order, nature and good taste that Pope saw this environmental profligacy:

You show us Rome was glorious, not profuse
And pompous buildings once were things of Use.
Yet shall (my Lord) your just, your noble rules
Fill half the land with Imitating Fools;
Who random drawings from your sheets shall take,
And of one beauty many blunders make;
Load some vain Church with old Theatric state,
Turn Arcs of triumph to a Garden-gate;
Reverse your Ornaments, and hang them all
On some patch'd dog-hole ek'd with ends of wall

(Epistle to Burlington 22-32)

Burlington, as the passage suggests, was an architectural luminary, and Pope as an ardent disciple in the business of building and landscape gardening was an authoritative source of criticism on these matters of public aesthetics.

The Epistle to Bathurst probes more deeply in its analysis of the age's economic ills. It addresses itself to the Whiggish city gentlemen and financiers who had done so well during the years of Walpole's premiership, yet whose standards of personal morality left much to be desired. Pope sees:

                                                                                          … Riches in effect
No grace of Heav'n or token of th'Elect;
Giv'n to the Fool, the Mad, the Vain, the Evil,
To Ward, to Waters, Chartres, and the Devil.

(Epistle to Bathurst 17-20)

Politically, Pope had never been quick publicly to take sides. By reason of his Catholic background and consequent supposed loyalty to the House of Stuart, he was associated with the backward looking and often rather sentimental Toryism whose influence was extinguished with the death of Queen Anne. His friendship with the Tory Swift, and with figures such as Bolingbroke and Atterbury, both of whom were tarred with the brush of Jacobitism, seemed to place him in a definite political camp. Pope was temperamentally much more of an equivocator than he was a partisan, and fought shy of making public statements of position or loyalty:

In Moderation placing all my Glory,
While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory

(Imitations of Horace, Satire II i 67-8)

Indeed, in the 1720s Pope's relationship with Sir Robert Walpole had been cordial. However, like nearly all contemporary authors, Pope grew increasingly hostile to the corrupt and philistine government that the well-nigh impregnable Walpole sustained on behalf of King George II. Once upon a time the English court had been a nursery of art and artists. George II's indifference to most cultural manifestations was well known, and formed the starting point of Pope's imitation of the First Epistle of Horace's second book, subtitled To Augustus. King George is addressed in the same tones as Horace addressed his patron Augustus (and Augustus, by happy coincidence was George's second name). But where Horace's words were written in sincere appreciation of Augustus, Pope's embody huge ironies:

While You, great Patron of Mankind, sustain
The balanc'd World, and open all the Main;
Your Country, chief, in Arms abroad defend,
At home, with Morals, Arts and Laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a Monarch, steal
An hour, and not defraud the Publick Weal?

(To Augustus, 1-6)

Even though Pope was unprepared to claim himself as a political writer, his Imitations of Horace certainly take up a political standpoint, and Pope can be seen as writing out of a genuine concern for public virtue rather than out of any kind of personal pique.

Although his attitude to being seen as ‘the English Homer’ was ambivalent, Pope suffered no such doubts about becoming the English Horace. The development of the Horatian persona is discussed further in Chapter 5. Pope was open about the fact that he found the figure of Horace answerable to his needs of the 1730s. Horace, the man retired from city life, bore obvious resemblances to Pope at Twickenham. Horace was also valued for his spirit of quiet moderation. He wrote satire without bitterness or rancour, he expressed the moral concerns of the reasonable man. Pope, though not so much as Swift, perhaps, had always liked masks. Whether presenting himself as Esdras Barnivelt in A Key to the Lock, as Dr Norris in the spoof account of John Dennis's apparent lunacy, or as Martinus Scriblerus in The Dunciad notes, he had kept his own identity partly hidden. The Imitations of Horace are very characteristic (some would say vintage) Pope, as even a cursory reading of them will show, though the poet clearly enjoys the obliquity inherent in the idea of imitation.

The tone of Horatian urbanity, however, did not serve Pope to the very end. The satirical writings of the final phase of his life are amongst his most urgent. In particular, the huge allegory of the Chariot of Vice at the end of the first part of Epilogue to the Satires (1738):

Lo! at the Wheels of her Triumphal Car,
Old England's Genius, rough with many a Scar,
Dragged in the Dust! his Arms hang idly round,
His Flag inverted trails along the ground!

(151-4)

These two dialogues, Pope was to state, would be his last works. He had decided to publish no more. The 1730s had found him engaged with the exposure of vice and folly, though he had come to find the activity futile. The power against which the later Imitations were pitched looked impregnable, and had buttressed itself considerably by introducing censorship in 1737 as a means of vetting all publications for libel against the government. It looked as if the position of the satirist was rapidly becoming marginalized in a self-confidently corrupt age. Pope was prepared to admit defeat, but he did so with characteristic pugnacity:

Ask you what provocation I have had?
The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad.
When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
Th'Affront is mine, my Friend, and should be
          yours.

(Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, 197-200)

The final years of Pope's life were, in poetic terms, generally quiet ones. This is partly explained by the deterioration in his health. The diverse symptoms which had often plagued him throughout ‘this long Disease, my Life’ inevitably grew more acute as he grew older, and a prolonged physical decline, horrifying by modern standards, was a source of concern to those close to him. Nevertheless, he continued to visit, as well as to be visited, to enjoy his friendships, and probably to eat and drink too much (a life-long habit). In the company of William Warburton, he worked on revisions of his texts for the collected edition of his works which Warburton was supervising, and which finally appeared in 1751.

But there was one final foray into satire, which was also by way of being a journey into the past. Colley Cibber, an undistinguished comic actor and theatre manager, had contrived, by dint of connections in high places, to be appointed Poet Laureate in 1730. Cibber was in general an unassuming man, presumably being as aware of the incongruity of his appointment as anybody else. Swift had remarked, of the Laureateship, in a letter that the competition for it was ‘… between Concanen or Theobald or some other hero of The Dunciad’.²⁰ He perhaps spoke more than he knew. Cibber had made a fleeting, indirect appearance in the 1728 Dunciad. In the revision of the poem which Pope published in 1743, he had chased Theobald from the Dunces' throne completely, and become the hero of the new poem himself. It has been often enough pointed out that, at root, Cibber was a much more obvious candidate for the Kingship of the Dunces than Theobald anyway. He was a man of very little talent who had been elevated far beyond his deserts. What, presumably, had kept his presence in the 1728 version marginal is that he and Pope had had no very profound reason to cross swords. Their relationship had not been without its difficulties, but like so many of Pope's supposed literary animosities, it is difficult to disentangle fact from fiction in the affair, especially when the most crucial document is a pamphlet from Cibber in the best Grub Street vein. Having been hurt by recent references to him in the New Dunciad, he decided to retaliate in A Letter from Mr Cibber to Mr Pope …²¹ which ostensibly outlines a whole history of conflict between the two men. It leans on the kind of anecdotal evidence that is very reminiscent of the kind of fantasies about Pope which had circulated widely in the 1730s. It was basically an unexpected and unprovoked attack. Certainly any derogatory comments which Pope had made about Cibber were less offensive than the things which Cibber decided to write about Pope. It was a return to the tone and the tactics of an earlier period of Pope's life, though it did provoke the final version of The Dunciad which is the one that has always been most widely read. Cibber kept up occasional sniping against Pope until his death.

The Cibber affair is a neat reminder of the literary world in which Pope was forced to live. Partly as a result of the economics of authorship and of printing, partly as a result of unprecedented political contention, the literary world of the early eighteenth century was not a polite one. Pope was by no means alone in receiving hostile treatment from the gutter press. Certain things about him made him a particularly easy target: his shape and his religion were obvious ones. But there was also his self-conscious assumption of the role of great poet and guardian of traditional literary values. There was his vast wealth, gained from translating Homer, and his retirement to cultured ease at Twickenham. Also there was his espousal of the cause of virtue, moderation and loyalty and his coterie of distinguished friends.

Just as Pope was, literally, the subject of grotesque drawings in his lifetime, so his posthumous reputation has often been reduced to the cartoon-like tiny figure, spattering the world with his malicious couplets. This is, of course, a considerable simplification. Pope's satire (particularly that of his later period) is as much a response to a particular cultural moment as is the recalling of a personal bitterness. Pope was a regular object of satire long before he got into the habit of seeking objects himself. Although he cast many stones, he seldom cast the first, and he was unfortunate to live in an age in which personal abuse was a minor art form in itself. What was unusual about Pope is that his response to such abuse became so important a part of his work. Perhaps the golden boy from Windsor Forest with his prodigious technique and laureate ambitions, could hardly have foreseen the way in which his poetic career was to develop, and that his future fame was to be so closely bound up with his response to ridicule and scorn. It is interesting that the two serious attempts at epic poetry which Pope undertook remained incomplete, whilst The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad exist for all to see.

Notes

1. James Reeves The Reputation and Writings of Alexander Pope (1976) offers a predominantly hostile treatment of Pope's works and his posthumous reputation.

2. See M. Nicholson and G.S. Rousseau: This Long Disease, My Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (1968).

3. See Farmer Pope and his Son. Quoted in J.V. Guerinot: Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope 1711-1744 (1969) p155.

4. For a more detailed treatment of the events of Pope's early life, see George Sherburn: The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934) Chaps 1 and 2. Also, Maynard Mack: Alexander Pope: A Life (1985) Chaps 1 to 8.

5. Quoted by Sherburn p52.

6. Ibid p150.

7. Quoted in Guerinot p3.

8. Reproduced in its entirety in Paul Hammond (Ed) Selected Prose of Alexander Pope (1987) pp40-45.

9. Hammond, pp62-73.

10. For the life of Swift see David Nokes: Jonathan Swift, A Hypocrite Reversed (1985). The history of the Scriblerus Club is discussed at greater length in Charles Kerby-Miller (Ed) The Memoirs … of Martinus Scriblerus (1950).

11. For the phenomenon of Grub Street see Pat Rogers: Grub Street, Studies in a Subculture (1972).

12. See R. Straus: The Unspeakable Curil (1928).

13. The ‘Key’ is discussed by Guerinot, p114. For the ‘Life’ see Straus, p156.

14. An account of Pope's contribution to Shakespearean scholarship can be found in Gary Taylor: Reinventing Shakespeare (1990), pp81-87.

15. Letter to Swift, quoted by Rogers pp181-2.

16. See Mack Life pp489-90.

17. The growth and development of the pamphlet war against Pope is discussed in detail by Guerinot in his introduction to Pamphlet Attacks.

18. See Mack Life p636.

19. To John Gay, quoted by Kenneth Hopkins The Poets Laureate (1954, rev 1973) p73.

20. See Guerinot pp280-294.

13. See Hammond, pp131-135 for the full text of the pamphlet.

A Note on Texts and Sources

All quotations from Pope's poems in the text are taken from the one volume Twickenham edition of 1963, edited by John Butt. This is not only the best, fullest and most authoritative text, it is also an accessible one to students, being available in paperback.

Butt's edition is, however, an abridgement of the original seven volume Twickenham edition (1939-1961) and it is from this edition that all references to editorial material (including Pope's own notes on his poems) are taken.

Pope's correspondence was edited by George Sherburn (five volumes, 1956), but I have, in general, when quoting from the letters, directed readers to the more easily accessible secondary sources where the letters are quoted. A complete bibliography can be found at the end of the book.