[In the following essay, Brown plumbs the depth of Pope's instinct for self-fashioning in his letter writing, explaining the role of the poet's concept of fiction in his approach to publishing his assorted collections of letters during his lifetime.]

As early as 1706 in letters exchanged with William Wycherley and in 1712 with Caryll, we find Pope speculating and encouraging speculation about the possibility of his ‘epistolary fame’. Pope first explores the notion tentatively and with classical models in mind, but the impulse is a telling one and shows us a young man compulsively fascinated with the public presentation of himself. Pope's posturing in his early letters causes Wycherley to wonder at times whether he is ‘more Complimented than abused’ by Pope, and even to observe that he finds Pope ‘a man of too much fiction’ in their correspondence with one another. Wycherley's is an interesting phrase, and his insight into Pope's peculiar need to fictionalise his correspondence as early as 1706 gives us real indication of how pervasive the instinct for self-fashioning was in Pope's letter writing. And it is crucial that we understand Pope's highly idiosyncratic concept of ‘a fiction’ if we are to grasp the significance of his approach to the publication of his letters in their various collected forms between 1728 and 1742.

‘Fiction’ is a word that Pope uses on only a few occasions in his published work and for which in each instance he has a specific and technical meaning in mind. In all (including forms such as ‘fictitious’) Pope employs the word eight times in his poetry and four times in his prose. His Odyssey translations account for half the occurrences; the Epistle to Arbuthnot and the Rape of the lock supply the other prominent examples. In all cases, however, Pope situates his meaning for ‘a fiction’ delicately on the isthmus between the reality of lived experiences and the negation of that reality by lies. A fiction for Pope is a thing in every instance and is, in that sense, materially real, its reification tied directly to and wholly dependent upon its textuality; that is, fictions are real for Pope because they are artefacts of publication. Bibliography confirms their material existence. It is as lies (as the Epistle to Arbuthnot illustrates) that murder fictions. The distinction that Pope makes in Arbuthnot and in the preface to the Rape between fictions and lies is, in the first instance, a distinction between text and tongue, or print and rumours; and in the second, it is more importantly a distinction between legitimate, quality printing and piracies or cheap editions. In one sense (as the preface to the Rape suggests), Pope thinks of all print publications no matter what their content as necessarily fictions. Thus the names and repeated words of actual individuals once committed to the printed page take on an independent material existence that clearly separates them from sources outside their text. Pope accordingly reassures Arabella Fermour that the characters of Belinda and the Baron are as ‘fictitious’ as the machinery of the Sylphs; print is its own material reality.

Pope's distinction between fiction and lies as a matter of booksellers' credentials and printers' production values also colours his idiosyncratic use of the word ‘fib’. To Pope ‘fibs’ are truly airy nothings because they are always oral expressions and thus attempts in every instance to use oral culture to undermine legitimate print values. Again ‘fibs’ like ‘lies’ are at odds with the power and authority of the print culture. In Pope's usage, a fiction is distinguished from a lie or a fib because unlike them it is a product with physically measurable and quantifiable values. Pope's ‘fictions’ are thus defined by their condition of being manufactured objects, products of technical sophistication. The best example of this meaning of ‘fiction’ in Pope's own usage is the appearance of the word in his translation of Penelope's description of her device of weaving to fool the suitors. Fiction, in Penelope's case, is both the action and the product of weaving; that is, the thing is as much a fiction as the purpose to which it is put. Pope's translation on this point differs completely from those of both Chapman and Hobbes. Even the modern translation by Fitzgerald refers to Penelope's ‘trick’.

Pope's etymology for the word ‘fiction’ is historically and classically justifiable, but his insistence upon divorcing the meaning of ‘fiction’ from deception and thereby freeing his usage from any moral implications is at odds with most common English usage and especially Johnson's definition of the word. Johnson's Dictionary stresses the moral ambiguity of all fictions, emphasising fiction's distance from the real and its contradiction of the true. Johnson is utterly Platonic in his attitude towards fictions.

I suggest that for Pope ‘a fiction’ is primarily a well-made object or thing; or, in more literary terms, a printed text whose legitimacy as fiction has more to do with the quality of its mode of production than with its professed literary or moral purpose. If it is fiction's imitative obsession with and dependence upon the material world that primarily troubles a Johnson or a Plato, Pope's definition of his letters as fictions is wholly predicated upon the essential importance of their materiality to their value as art. Pope's concept of fiction as constructed artefact is particularly evident in the contrasting formats of the 1735 and the 1737 editions of his Letters.

The relative pastoralism of Pope's identity in the 1728 Wycherley volume of correspondence is replaced in the mid 1730s not by one but by two fictions of the self: Edmund Curll's vulgar lie and Pope's own socially correct response. The letters in each volume, the 1735 Curll and Pope's 1737 folio and quarto, are in almost all aspects of content the same. Where they differ is in the important point of physical presentation. Curll's is cheap, plentiful, and intended for a wide faceless readership; and his first volume of genuine Pope letters gives way to five succeeding volumes of dissipating miscellanies, a fiction, that is, made over into a series of lies. Pope's own edition is elegant, expensive, singular, and destined for a subscription readership. Curll's frontispiece for the 1735 Letters is a poor copy of an out-of-date portrait of the poet; Pope's frontispiece in 1737 is a newly commissioned profile of himself by Jonathan Richardson. Pope designed his 1737 Lettres as a companion volume to his collected works: its title page reads, ‘The Works of Mr Alexander Pope, In Prose’. But Pope's self-fashioning through the fiction of his published correspondence was not yet complete. It required a return to private life from the public subjects of the 1737 Letters, back to something like the pastoralism of mentoring friendship that characterised the Wycherley Letters in 1728. This last fiction Pope would devise with the Swift correspondence in 1741.

Collecting and publishing one's letters is for Pope a conscious artifice; it is no more an act of exhibitionism than sitting for a self-portrait would be. We might do well in fact to think of Pope's various editions of his letters as so many literary self-portraits, the equivalent in words of the many drawings, paintings and busts done of Pope in his lifetime. By making his four published volumes of the Letters into kinds of self-portraiture, Pope put the emphasis for the intimacy they shared with the reading public on his fictional self-narrative, and not on the private lives of his correspondents. Wycherley, Gay, Oxford, Lady Mary, Martha, and Swift all become characters participating in Pope's four epistolary constructions, distinguishable from their actual and historic namesakes by their placement between the manufactured covers of Pope's various books. This is not just a case of Pope's constructing a narrative within which to provide fictional personae for historic and actual people; fictionalisation for Pope is completed and legitimised by the print format. Characters cannot inhabit a fiction until that fiction is defined by typeface, paper, and endboards. Pope's Letters are just a particularly idiosyncratic instance of Pope's fictionalisation of himself and his contemporaries in all of his published work. Manuscript letters set in type, impressed on paper, and bound between covers become public objects and cease to be private confessions despite their apparent intimacies. When Pope names names or draws recognisable portraits of himself and others in his satires and his letters, he takes literary possession of those identities; those identities then belong to Pope's text—and become his copyright. The act of printing that text then achieves a sort of metamorphosis through which the actual and historic becomes the printed fiction. Pope, thus, is a Pygmalion with a twist: he turns various Galateas into statues—and then claims copyright.