SOURCE: “Assumptions and Ironies,” in Women's Place in Pope's World, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 1-24.

[In the following essay, Rumbold investigates post-Restoration cultural attitudes about women and gender in light of Pope's religious and political sympathies as well as his physical infirmities, suggesting implications for both his career and poetry.]

1

Although the few celebrated poems in which Pope sets women in the limelight provide the natural focus for any attempt to understand his attitude to the sex, it is important to remember that the vast bulk of his output is concerned only tangentially with issues of gender. In effect, he can write at length about the human race as if it were entirely masculine. Furthermore, when his attention is not specifically drawn to some female friend or heroine, his casual references to women frequently relapse into dismissive commonplace.

This was a period in which women of the middle and upper classes learned to see themselves less as skilled housewives or assistants in the family business than as leisured companions.¹ Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, writing in The Spectator, repeatedly urged women towards the ideal of a sex ‘created as it were for Ornament’, ‘formed to temper Mankind’, and endowed with ‘gentle Softness, tender Fear, and all those parts of Life, which distinguish her from the other Sex, with some Subordination to it, but such an Inferiority that makes her still more lovely’.² Yet if women's elegant leisure was the natural destiny of a sex created for men's delight, it was also, in line with motives less easily professed, a proud declaration of the wealth that allowed husbands and fathers to maintain wives and daughters in idleness, as conspicuous consumers of the luxury goods which so excited the commercial imagination of the age. The extravagance and frivolity with which contemporary moralists taxed women were in effect the occupational hazards of a role which it suited men to have them play; and against this background outright misogyny became less acceptable than the politely patronising attitude expressed in such characteristic expressions as ‘the fair sex’.³ Although Pope was to an extent insulated by the old-fashioned style of housekeeping which persisted in many Catholic families, this was nevertheless the ordinary view of women in the wider culture for which he has often been cast as prime spokesman. Yet, ironically, as far as contemporary definitions of gender were concerned, he found himself in a peculiarly difficult situation.⁴

Religion, politics and illness combined to bar Pope from the full enjoyment of the privileges reserved for men in his society. If, as he states in Characters of Women, it is the distinction of woman to develop her personality to the full only in private life, his disqualifications from public life brought him to a condition in that respect parallel to hers, despite his easy assumption that he belongs to the busy world of men:

But grant, in Public Men sometimes are shown,
A Woman's seen in Private life alone:
Our bolder Talents in full light display'd.
Your Virtues open fairest in the shade.(5)

As a Roman Catholic Pope was excluded from the universities, from public office, and from the inheritance or purchase of land, all three factors which traditionally distinguished upper-class males.⁶ Pope's characteristic eagerness to belittle the advantages he lacked should not blind us to the actual importance of such deprivations: critics of his Homer translation were quick to claim that he ‘doth not understand Greek thoroughly, for he never was at any University’; and when he attacked the sterility of university education he was surely in part reassuring himself that he had missed nothing worth having.⁷ Others might have frowned on an enthusiasm for the classics in which translations encountered in childhood had played so large a part, but Pope rather congratulated himself on having learned to read for the meaning, to discern ‘the greatness of Homer's beauties through all the rags that were flung over him’.⁸ Exclusion from public office, like exclusion from university, helped to foster a derisive attitude which is at least partly defensive. The post most appropriate to his talents would have been the laureateship; but the impression given by the Dunciad is that the unobtainable distinction is beneath contempt. As consolation for the impossibility of a paternal inheritance in land he turned to Horace and asserted the sufficiency of a rented home for a rational life of hospitality and decent frugality:

… not happier …
In Forest planted by a Father's hand,
Than in five acres now of rented land.(9)

He ridiculed the conventional patriarchal motive in acquiring property:

“Pity! to build, without a son or wife:
“Why, you'll enjoy it only all your life”.

(Satires, II.ii.163)

And he went on to detail with glee the pitfalls that beset fathers intent on transmitting estates to their posterity. Yet despite such disclaimers, his letters show that his lack of an heir was frequently in his thoughts, and in the end he compromised by leaving a newly purchased house to his old and dear friend Patty Blount, a choice of heir which enraged his half-sister by its denial of the claims of family.¹⁰ Catholic disabilities cast their shadow even over this last tribute to the most enduring of his friendships: ‘I must desire you to say nothing of what I tell you concerning my purchase of the House in town, which is done in another's name’, he wrote to Hugh Bethel.¹¹

In addition to his exclusion from public life as a Catholic, Pope shared the long eclipse of his Tory friends after 1714, exchanging the brief glamour of association with men in high office for systematic contempt for a court life identified with corruption.¹² His heroes are men denied office, set apart from the artificial supports to self-esteem implicit in the public life that is now as closed to them as it is to Pope. To the first Earl of Oxford, once Queen Anne's Treasurer, he writes:

In vain to Desarts thy Retreat is made;
The Muse attends thee to the silent Shade:
'Tis hers, the brave Man's latest Steps to trace,
Re-judge his Acts, and dignify Disgrace.
When Int'rest calls off all her sneaking Train,
And all th'Obliged desert, and all the Vain;
She waits, or to the Scaffold, or the Cell,
When the last ling'ring Friend has bid farewel.(13)

In this talk of ‘Desarts’ (not the most obvious term for a country house full of admiring family and friends) we have an echo of the poetry of retirement as it flourished among Royalists after the Civil War, when the implied alternative of a public life was no longer real.¹⁴ Yet even defeated Royalists, once they had compounded for their estates, were better off in many ways than Pope.

In particular, Pope was to suffer chronic ill health from adolescence until his death at the age of fifty-six: the privacy doubly forced on him as a Catholic and a Tory was further limited by Potts' Disease, a tubercular infection of the bone which progressively disabled him.¹⁵ Because of this he could not seriously think of emigrating as his friend Edward Blount did after the collapse of his scheme for procuring Catholic civil rights (although he soon repented of the idea and came home).¹⁶ Indeed, Pope's family could see no point in his learning modern languages as it was obvious to them that he would never be strong enough to travel, and envy of opportunities he would have known how to use to the full plays its part in his satire of the English fop on the Grand Tour: ‘Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too’.¹⁷ If resettlement in a Catholic country was the most obvious escape from internal exile, an alternative or supplementary compensation (also practised by Edward Blount) could be the cultivation of a satisfying family life in rural retirement (Corr., I, 425; II, 86). This was the path taken by Pope's friend John Caryll, whom Pope delighted to praise as a patriarch and upholder of old-fashioned social virtues. However, Caryll's preoccupation with the interests of his relations sprang from a strong identification with family, supported by a happy and fruitful marriage which Pope was prepared to praise but not to imitate.¹⁸ Less than five feet tall and deformed by curvature of the spine, he was acutely conscious of being ‘that little Alexander the women laugh at’; and he declared, ‘I have no way so good to please 'em, as by presenting 'em with any thing rather than with my self’ (Corr., I, 114; II, 290). This was no basis for seeking a wife; and when Caryll offered to give his god-daughter Patty Blount a dowry if that was all that stood between them, Pope made clear the limits of their relationship: ‘I have no tie to your God-daughter but a good opinion, which has grown into a friendship with experience that she deserved it’ (III, 75).

Thus the interests and responsibilities of a husband and father were no more available to him than the public reinforcements of masculine self-esteem denied by his religion and politics; and it is poignant that his image of his role in his own family, after his father's death, places him as mother, with all the gain in tenderness and eclipse of autonomy which maternity implies:

Me, let the tender Office still engage
To rock the Cradle of reposing Age.(19)

For many years he made strenuous efforts to live up to expectations of male robustness: at the first onset of chronic illness in adolescence he went riding regularly in the hope of preserving his health; as a young man he actively sought the reputation of a rake; one hot day in 1735 he exhausted himself by surrendering his coach to a woman with a broken arm and walking three miles into Oxford; and in the next year he was dragged into the Thames when Catherine Talbot missed her footing while he was helping her into a boat.²⁰ All this was really beyond him; and he admitted as much when he wrote in anticipation of a visit to the second Earl of Oxford's Cambridgeshire home at Wimpole that ‘while you used Manlyer Exercises’ he would ‘nod over a Book in your Library’ (Corr., III, 53). As he declined with age into increasing dependence, he confessed more readily his need for a quiet, regular, passive existence (IV, 68, 147, 179, 419). He needed a nurse more than a valet; and it was a female attendant who was able to reveal the detailed indignities recorded in Johnson's Life:

Most of what can be told concerning his petty peculiarities was communicated by a female domestick 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 a bodice made of stiff canvass, being scarcely 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. … The indulgence and accommodation which his sickness required, had taught him all the unpleasing and unsocial qualities of a valetudinary man. He expected that every thing 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.²¹

It is suggestive that this corseted, querulous figure makes Johnson think not just of a spoilt child, but of a spoilt female child. Lord Bathurst had shown similar intuition when he upbraided Pope for neglecting his health: ‘Is it not enough to have the headache four days in the week, and to be as sick as a breeding woman the other three?’; and Pope himself exclaimed when his plans were curtailed by illness: ‘Would to God I were like any other thing they call a Man!’ (Corr., III, 299; IV, 293). In effect, like ‘a breeding woman’, he had to plan his activities around the whims of his body. It cannot have been easy to accept that ‘Manlyer Exercises’ were not for him.

2

Pope's beautifully poised ‘Ode to Solitude,’ allegedly first written at the age of twelve, and later carefully revised, is a fine example of a poem that generalises about the human condition from an essentially male viewpoint. It makes a good place to start an exploration of women's place in his work at large, for, despite its precocious origins, it concerns itself with an ideal that remained dear to him throughout his life:

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
          In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
          In winter fire.
Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
          Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night: study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
          With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
          Tell where I lye.

(TE, VI, 3)

The first stanza alone raises two major issues which affected women's standing in the eighteenth century: education and inheritance.

Education is, ironically, the theme that the contemporary woman reader—Pope's mother, for example—would be most likely to miss. Not being schooled in the classics, she would probably not register the Horatian echo in the first line by which the poet places his poem in its tradition. To be deaf to such allusions is to experience eighteenth-century writing in a muted, often puzzling way; yet this, however mitigated by translations, was the condition of most of the period's female readers. There is, for example, the cautionary tale of young Mrs Pilkington, helping Swift to sort his letters from Pope:

‘But, Sir’, said I, ‘here is a Latin Sentence writ in italics, which, I suppose, means something particular; will you be so kind as to explain it?’ ‘No’, replied he, smiling; ‘I will leave that for your husband to do’.²²

The tag turned out to be embarrassingly indecent, so female curiosity was duly punished (Pilkington, p. 67). For educated men the classical languages were a symbol of their cultural superiority, marking their graduation from the female tutelage of the nursery to the male world of public life. When Fanny Burney's father expressed disapproval of Dr Johnson's offer to teach her Latin, their mutual friend Hester Thrale commented tartly, ‘because then She would have been as wise as himself forsooth’.²³ She may have been remembering a Johnsonian remark that caused Boswell characteristic disquiet:

Whether he meant merely to say a polite thing, or to give his opinion, I could not be sure; but he said men knew that women were an overmatch for them; and therefore they chose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves. I must have this more amply discussed with him.²⁴

The second of the factors highlighted in the first stanza of the ‘Ode’ is, however, by far the more important, since the complex of customs and beliefs evoked by the phrase ‘paternal acres’ lies at the heart of long-established assumptions about women's role and function. The belief that property belongs by nature to men and that their sons are its natural heirs may have been immemorial, but it was nonetheless vividly present to the imagination of the age: Richardson brings Clarissa to her death through her brother's rage at seeing his ‘natural’ dependant made a proprietor in her own right, and Jane Austen uses the dispossession of women in favour of men as a trial of female character in Pride and Prejudice.²⁵ Pope himself was caught up in a similar situation when his old acquaintance Michael Blount, admittedly with the full sanction of custom, required his mother and sisters, including Pope's beloved Patty, to leave home on his marriage, and subsequently failed to pay regularly the allowances on which they were expected to maintain themselves. In this case Pope was fired by indignation and exerted himself over many years to obtain adequate support for Patty (see chapter 5.3).

An important though by no means universal rationalisation of the restriction of inheritance to males is expounded by Boswell, whose obsession with the perpetuation of estates in the male line led him into a protracted disagreement with his father:

My father and I had a warm dispute at night on male and female succession. I argued that a male alone could support a family, could represent his forefathers. That females, in a feudal light, were only vehicles for carrying down men to posterity, and that a man might as well entail his estate on his post-chaise, and put one into it who should bear his name, as entail it upon his daughter and make her husband take his name … I fell upon a most curious argument which diverted my own fancy so much that it was with difficulty I could preserve my gravity when uttering it. ‘If’, said I, ‘you believe the Bible, you must allow male succession. Turn to the first chapter of Matthew: “Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob”, &c. If you are not an infidel, if you do not renounce Christianity, you must be for males’. Worthy man! he had patience with me. I am quite firm in my opinion on this point. It will not do to say a grandson by a daughter is as near as a grandson by a son. It leads into a nice disquisition in natural philosophy. I say the stamen is derived from the man. The woman is only like the ground where a tree is planted. A grandson by a daughter has no connection with my original stock. A new race is begun by a father of another name. It is true a child partakes of the constitution of his mother, gets some of his mother's blood in his veins. But so does he as to his nurse, so does he as to the ox whose beef he eats. The most of the particles of the human frame are changed in a few years' rotation. The stamen only continues the same. Let females be well portioned. Let them enjoy liberally what is naturally intended for them: dowries as virgins, a share of what their husbands have while wives, jointures when widows. … In every age some instances of folly have occurred to humble the pride of human nature. Of these, the idea of female succession is one of the most striking.²⁶

Elsewhere he refers tellingly to ‘the opinion of some distinguished naturalists’:

Our species is transmitted through males only, the female being all along no more than a nidus, or nurse, as Mother Earth is to plants of every sort; which notion seems to be confirmed by that text of scripture, ‘He was yet in the loins of his father when Melchisedeck met him’ (Heb. vii. 10); and consequently, that a man's grandson by a daughter, instead of being his surest descendent, as is vulgarly said, has, in reality, no connection whatever with his blood.²⁷

To the ancient world the female contribution to conception had been far from obvious. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Apollo upholds Orestes' claim that he is not kin to the mother he has murdered; and his reasoning is essentially the same as that outlined by Boswell.²⁸ Aristotle, offering a theoretical account of conception, likens the process to carpentry: the father is the carpenter, the mother the wood, and the child the finished product; and this model is taken up by Thomas Aquinas, who stresses its hierarchical implications:

The generative power in a female is imperfect in relation to that which is in a male. And so, just as in the arts, an inferior art disposes the matter while the superior art imposes a form, as said in the Physics, so female generative power prepares the matter while male active power fashions the matter which has been prepared.²⁹

The pervasive metaphorical pattern insists that women are not originators. For Boswell woman is soil to the seed, for Aristotle and Aquinas she is the raw material to the craftsman, and behind both analogies we sense her affinity with primeval chaos awaiting the male word of God in creation. Indeed, both levels of this metaphor are brought together in Aquinas's account of the conception of Christ, in which he is at pains to establish the passivity which Mary shared with all women: ‘either she effected something, which would make her the father of Christ, or she effected nothing’ (LII, 55). Not suprisingly, researchers down to Boswell's time frequently assumed that the natural order must display this hierarchy—hence the hostile response of John Cook to William Harvey's equally erroneous but dissection-based claim that the mother, not the father, produced the preformed embryo:

As the Earth seems a Nidus for all Seeds of Vegetables, so the Ova of the Female serve for the like Use … to think otherwise would be making Woman the chief Person in the Creation, in as much as she is supposed to contain her Species, both materially and formally, in her self, and needs only a little of the Spirit of the Male Sperm to set those Animalcula in Motion; so that instead of God's giving Woman for a Help-mate to Man towards Procreation, he is thus made Woman's Help-mate; and so hath the least share in this Action; whereas by Nature he was designed the chief Agent in it, and that from his Loins should proceed all Mankind … which the Text of St. Paul well alludes to, when he says of Levi, that he was yet in the Loins of his father, when Melchisedeck met him.³⁰

More in accord with the assumed order of things was the rival animalculist (homunculist) theory, which identified the preformed embryo in the male spermatozoa, a theory familiar to modern readers from the opening of Sterne's Tristram Shandy.³¹ It was also familiar to Mrs Pope, who was shown ‘some of the semen masculinum with animalcula in it’ when her son took her to Mr Hatton's clock and microscope shop (Corr., I, 465). Perhaps even for those few mothers who understood the implications of the supposed homunculus it was too academic a theory to impair their sense of relationship to their children; but if they needed a theory that would enable them to take the credit, or—perhaps more likely—the blame for the way their children turned out, they could turn to the belief that offspring were also influenced by their mothers' behaviour and disposition before birth and by their milk afterwards. The latter notion provides grounds for maternal self-congratulation in the verse epistle which Pope, or perhaps Swift, put into the mouth of Bounce, Pope's Great Dane bitch:

Before my Children set your Beef,
Not one true Bounce will be a Thief;
Not one without permission feed,
(Though some of J—'s hungry
Breed)
But whatso'er the Father's Race,
From me they suck a little Grace.(32)

Although the chimerical homunculus owed its ‘discovery’ to the new technology of the microscope, its power lay in old-fashioned assumptions about the structure of society—hence its appeal to the reactionary sentiments of Boswell and the fictional Walter Shandy. From such a point of view the order implicit in the social organisation of England before the Civil War was still valid:

So long as a person occupied an inferior status within a household—as a child, servant, apprentice, or even as a wife—and was subordinated to the head, his social identity was altogether vicarious. The family was represented to the larger community by its head—its patriarch, as it were—and thus those whom he commanded were ‘subsumed’ in his social life. Thus, the father-master of each family was both its link with society as a whole and its authority, and his status was universally recognised.³³

Despite radical attempts during the Civil War to form an understanding of society on new foundations, this old-established order still underlay the mainstream of political theory; and therefore debate about the nature of parenthood had distinct political overtones.³⁴ This, rather than any zeal for women's rights, is clearly the principal reason why John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government (composed before 1683, published in 1689), makes claims favourable to the status of wives and mothers.³⁵ His context is Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (composed in the early 1640s, published in 1680), a defence of Stuart absolutism on the grounds that God gave Adam a fatherly power over his descendants which was absolute, and that all present kings enjoy the same power either by inheritance or by usurpation.³⁶ Under the pressure of the Exclusion Crisis Locke attempted to undermine the doctrine of Adam's sole authority by arguments as relevant to the domestic as to the political hierarchy: he showed that if Adam's authority rested on having begotten his children it could not logically have extended to Eve; he pointed out that Filmer's use of the commandment ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ (Genesis 20:12) to support sole paternal power involved supressing the mother's right; and he cited numerous other Biblical texts in which the rights of mothers paralleled those of fathers (Locke, pp. 231, 201-4). Indeed, the assertion that mothers also have authority is useful by definition to advocates of contractual obligation, since the existence of natural rights not acknowledged by existing social arrangements suggests that those arrangements must be contractual rather than natural. Even Hobbes, who as a defender of absolutism might be expected to deny the authority of mothers, finds it convenient to attribute power over their children to mothers in the state of nature. In this scheme the father gains authority over the child only by the mother's consent to marriage, which places her and her belongings in his power.³⁷

In the politics of the state, the revolution of 1688 constituted a blow to hereditary absolutism, yet in most families and in society at large the heirs of Adam, in whose supremacy Filmer's thinking had its roots, reigned relatively unshaken. Mary Astell, realising that political and social doctrines were out of step, takes a polemical delight in restating the orthodox connection:

Again, if absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in a Family? Or if in a Family why not in a State; since no Reason can be alledged for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other? If the Authority of the Husband, so far as it extends, is sacred and inalienable, why not that of the Prince? The Domestick Sovereign is without Dispute elected; and the Stipulations and Contract are mutual; is it not then partial in Men to the last Degree, to contend for, and practise that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families, which they abhor and exclaim against in the State? For if Arbitrary Power is evil in it self, and an improper Method of Governing Rational and Free Agents, it ought not to be practis'd any where, nor is it less, but rather more mischievous in Families than in Kingdoms, by how much 100,000 Tyrants are worse than one.³⁸

Yet, however illogical, patriarchy in the home was to endure long after its abandonment as a justification for absolutism in the state.

The remaining stanzas of the ‘Ode’ further reveal the importance of male privilege in Pope's conception of the Good Life. His Happy Man has the air of having stepped fresh from Filmer's world, endowed like Adam with a divinely given rapport with his environment:

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
          In winter fire.

He does not simply possess his ‘paternal acres’ but relies on them to serve his needs, without, as far as the rhetoric is concerned, any necessity for laborious human mediation. Secure at the apex of the hierarchy that sustains him, he rests in a vision of the fruitful earth in which work is at most a peripheral concern. Indeed, the way language works to suggest that the land is his willing servant is reminiscent of Carole Fabricant's perception that landscape is in effect seen as female in this period, requiring from the owner discipline and protection in return for service and pleasure.³⁹ Sustained in this way, the Happy Man lives as if the Fall had never happened.

Although men, if rich enough, could avoid the curse of work laid on Adam after the Fall, women had for the most part to accept their curse in full:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

(Genesis 3:16)

After the dissolution of the monasteries this was the only career available to well-born Englishwomen; and its consequences constitute the most obvious impediment to those aspects of the Good Life that Pope's poem next commends:

Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
          Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night: study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
          With meditation.

The careers of Alice Thornton and Hester Thrale show vividly the distance between their sex and Pope's Happy Man.⁴⁰ Mrs Thornton bore nine children between 1651 and 1668, of whom six died at birth or soon afterwards; and of the thirteen borne by Mrs Thrale between 1763 and 1781 only four survived. Even when not actually incapacitated, these women were absorbed in the constant distractions of life with small, often ailing children, and only in widowhood did they enjoy anything approaching the quiet that the Happy Man takes for granted. The best commentary is by Mrs Thrale herself, responding to criticism for not having recorded more of Dr Johnson's sayings:

Little do these wise Men know or feel, that the Crying of a young Child, or the Perverseness of an elder, or the Danger however trifling of any one—will soon drive out of a female Parent's head a Conversation concerning Wit, Science or Sentiment, however She may appear to be impressed with it at the moment: besides that to a Mere de famille doing something is more necessary & suitable than even hearing something; and if one is to listen all Even^g and write all Morning what one has heard; where will be the Time for tutoring, caressing, or what is still more useful, for having one's Children about one: I therefore charge all my Neglect to my young ones Account, and feel myself at this moment very miserable that I have at last, after being married fourteen Years and bringing eleven Children, leisure to write a Thraliana forsooth;—though the second Volume does begin with M^r Johnson.

(Thraliana, I, 158)

It is hardly surprising that the women Pope loved best had either completed their families or never had children at all.

Another factor which tended to set women apart from the calm of the Happy Man was the use of space in the home. Although Mrs Thornton and Mrs Thrale escaped the literal confinement to a shared sitting room deplored by Virginia Woolf, we still have the sense from their writings that their husbands were peripheral to life in the home, pursuing outside interests or retiring to privacy inside, while their wives stood at the centre, overseeing children and servants and entertaining all comers.⁴¹ When Jane Austen, herself notoriously constrained by the publicity of the family sitting room, makes Mr Bennet rebut his wife with the zeugma ‘first, that you will allow me the free use of my understanding on the present occasion; and secondly, of my room’, she ironically affirms the link that Mr Bennet's wit denies (Austen, p. 101). Even in the Pope household the contrast between chaotic female community and calm male retirement could be sharply defined:

His Mother quite childish … fell out of her Chair, as she was fuggeling her clothes that did not sit easy under her, into the fire, upon the Fender, her head broke in Three places; Mrs Racket sitting working in the Window—Mr Pope never knew either, tho' in the house.⁴²

The vignette easily takes on archetypal overtones: while the man whose activities give prestige to the household applies himself unhearing to his central concerns, his married sister sits with her sewing, keeping his mother company.

Yet finally, despite the ‘Ode's’ uncritical investment in the male privilege that alone can offer ‘paternal acres’ to be enjoyed in alternate ‘study and ease’, the genre in which Pope is working points him towards implications of retirement which he develops in ways ironically closer to the acceptable behaviour of women than of men. Although ‘innocence, which most does please, / With meditation’ is in full harmony with the programme of serious reading urged on women by The Spectator, it is in marked tension with much that Pope was to spend his life doing, especially when seen in the context of the desire to be ‘unseen, unknown’; for however one part of him may yearn for retirement and simplicity, the author in him needs a place in the public eye (The Spectator, I, 152-59). Similarly, in his final refusal to pay tribute to his individuality (‘not a stone / Tell where I lie’) he suggests that to do otherwise would imply a moral taint, a scruple which is far closer to the contemporary reality of female than of male decorum. What the ‘Ode to Solitude’ does is to give Pope a space in which to indulge the choice of being as women have to be, secluded from the world in which men make names for themselves, for like all such retirement poems its ostensible purpose is to repudiate the world of business, power and status. Thus the ‘Ode’ takes its place in his life with the other contexts which he established for the ideal of self-effacing virtue: his retirement to Twickenham, his devotion to his aged mother, his repudiation of court favour, and his limitation of his own memorial to a brief note of his death on the stone on which he had commemorated the virtues of his parents.⁴³ Here, as if he had never been famous, he denies any identity beyond that of his parents' son, yet his officious literary executor William Warburton, incapable of honouring a sentiment so contrary to the public status of a great poet, imposed upon this simple monument a grandiose and tasteless claim:

Who never flattered folks like you.
Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.(44)

These were indeed Pope's words; but with the title he had given them, ‘Epitaph For One who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey’, they were carefully distanced from autobiography: their appearance on his tomb as a public claim to have surpassed the integrity of the great poets of antiquity would have horrified him. The contrast between the intended and the actual memorial points the irony of his relation to the world in which he was so anxious to distinguish himself; for despite the appeal of a pure, powerless self-abandonment, that world remained the necessary context for his poetry.

3

In taking a wider view of the place of women in the poems not specifically concerned with gender it is convenient to begin with three ambitiously generalising works: the Essay on Man, the Essay on Criticism and Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men.

In the Essay on Man, which seldom registers the existence of more than one gender, God, the representative human being, ‘the poor Indian’ and the representative child are all male; and Pope's propositions about human nature are illustrated for the most part with examples from the public life of men, notably from history and the professions (TE, III.i). The process is clear in his enumeration of the ‘happy frailties’ proper to various sub-groups of the species:

Shame to the virgin, to the matron pride,
Fear to the statesman, rashness to the chief,
To kings presumption, and to crowds belief.

(Essay on Man, II.242)

Since all a woman can do is marry or wait to marry, her doings naturally require less coverage.

When in Epistle III Pope considers the origin of society, he begins with the impulse to procreation in which women were supposed to find the significance of their lives. His treatment of the mating of animals stresses mutuality: ‘Each sex desires alike’; and when the young are born ‘the mothers nurse it and the sires defend’, a division of labour which he does not explicitly interpret as a hierarchy (lines 119-26). Human couples are initially differentiated from the animals by the longer association required by their offspring's prolonged helplessness, from which distinctively human social feelings grow:

And still new needs, new helps, new habits rise,
That graft benevolence on charities.

(line 137)

As an account of marriage this is remarkably free from implications of subordination; but later, when Pope returns to the family to trace from it the origins of government, women have simply disappeared, and ‘father’ and ‘son’ alone represent the experience of family life (lines 211-34). As authority is now vested in the father, the invisible mother must belong to the subordinate off-spring caste, despite the inability of the myth to explain how she got there. It is evident that the apparent equality of mother and father in the animal kingdom can have no place in a myth of the human family which justifies the basic hierarchy of society. Although Genesis does not figure in this non-Biblical account of social and political origins, its justification of female subordination and the reflections of the doctrine in traditional social structure are implicit in Pope's assumption that this is not an issue.

Whereas the Essay on Man looks to the first principles of human life, the Essay on Criticism looks to a highly developed world of literary culture (TE, I, 239-326). It is a poem which fully bears out the envious words of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: ‘Happy the race of men / Born to inform or to correct the pen.’⁵ Although the summarising statement that ‘Most men are born with some Taste, but spoil'd by false Education’ may be understood of people in general, the use of terms like ‘Taste’ and ‘Education’ suggests that the real subject is men—and men of the upper classes at that. The poor are hardly less represented in this world than are women, who appear only as personifications, sexual chattels or examples of poor judgement. As personifications they uniformly extend their patronage to male achievers, as if female authority can be countenanced only symbolically: ‘High on Parnassus’ Top her Sons she [Greece] show'd’ (line 94). Even for a personification, female gender entails the risk of sexual appropriation: once Criticism is personified as the Muse's handmaid, sexual harassment is inevitable: ‘Who cou'd not win the Mistress, woo'd the Maid’ (line 105). Metaphor too assumes a system in which women are chattels:

A Muse by these is like a Mistress us'd,
This hour she's idoliz'd,
the next abus'd.

(line 432)

What is this Wit which must our Cares employ?
The Owner's Wife, that other Men enjoy.

(line 500)

Women also figure as silly, corruptible creatures: only fools ‘value Books, as Women Men, for Dress’ (line 305). In the reign of Charles II, which exposed them to libertine amusements, they showed by their easy corruptibility that the only female virtue is the virtue which has never known temptation:

The Fair sate panting at a Courtier's
Play,
And not a Mask went un-improv'd
away:
The modest Fan was lifted up no more,
And Virgins smil'd at what they blush'd before.

(line 540)

Political interference, in metaphor as in fact, goes hand in hand with sexual transgression as Pope condemns the age when ‘Jilts ruled the State’ (line 538).

Perhaps the most striking example of a poem which professes to consider the species but actually focuses on the male sex is Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men.⁴⁶ In this context, ‘men’ evidently means ‘people’, for Queen Caroline forms a quartet with three men, and of the six sketches which close the poem, two are of women; but the catalogues which define the diversity of the species are, in effect, relevant only to the sex which experiences the status of bishops, judges, chancellors, ministers or kings; the education of squires, tradesmen, soldiers, scriveners or churchmen; and the variety of mood produced by business, gambling, hunting and parliamentary debates. There is the usual tendency to regard women as accessories (‘If Fortune or a Mistress frowns’) and as fools (‘What made. … Europe a Woman, Child, or Dotard rule?’, ‘Women and Fools must like him or he dies’); while as phenomena they rank with the most perplexing objects of curiosity unveiled by the theory of the ruling passion: ‘Priests, Princes, Women, no dissemblers here’.⁴⁷ It has often been assumed that Characters of Women was written as a pendant to Characters of Men, but the secondary status of the former is even more striking when it is realised that it was in all probability the first to be conceived: the option of leaving Characters of Women in first place and presenting Characters of Men as a pendant considering the male sex ‘only as contradistinguished from the other’ clearly does not exist for Pope.⁴⁸

Various passages throughout Pope's poetry remind us that the systems which structured public life operated for the most part on the assumption that all full members of society were male: ‘the whole Course of Modern Education … which confines Youth to the study of Words only’ attacked in Dunciad IV, and the political system which it supports, are primarily the business of men, as is the world of commerce, and in the latter connection it is noteworthy that the only women shown as active financial agents are Phryne and Sappho (Sir Robert Walpole's mistress Maria Skerret, and her friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), whose usurpation of a male role merely confirms their disgrace as creatures of a corrupt court.⁴⁹ It is more surprising to find that when Pope turns to his own family, it is his father rather than his mother who emerges as an individual. Adapting Horace's autobiography to his own, he focuses on his father's moral worth, although Horace here makes no direct reference to his father:

Besides, my Father taught me from a Lad,
The better Art to know the good from bad
…
For Right Hereditary tax'd and fin'd,
He stuck to Poverty with Peace of Mind.(50)

Yet there is no reason to think that his mother was a less loyal Catholic, or less impressive in her moral influence. Even in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which Pope recalls the praise which Horace bestows on his father, once we penetrate the aura of affectionate reverence which surrounds both parents, we find that the stress falls squarely on his father: all we learn of his mother's character is, ‘that harmless Mother thought no Wife a Whore’.⁵¹ Nothing could be further from the truth than to suggest that this shows a lack of interest in his mother, as the end of the poem amply demonstrates: the difference in emphasis is a sign of the general hiddenness of female identity in a culture rich in precedents for exploring the qualities of men.

Complementary to the male-centredness of Pope's culture is the fact that the women who do figure in it often do so as objects comparable to other things that a man might wish to possess:

And Curio, restless by the Fair-one's side,
Sighs for an Otho, and neglects his bride.(52)
And if we count among the Needs of life
Another's Toil, why not another's Wife?(53)
Think we all these are for himself? no more
Than his fine Wife, alas! or finer Whore.(54)
Why, if the Nights seem tedious—take a Wife.(55)
For, mark th'advantage [of money]; just so many score
Will gain a Wife with half as many more,
Procure that beauty, make that beauty chaste,
And then such Friends—as cannot fail to last.(56)

The moralist points the absurdity; but the stress falls squarely on male folly rather than on any claim for women's autonomy. Similarly, there seems to be no particular irony in Pope's rendering of Horace's ‘amabilis hospes, / Comes in uxorem’ as ‘fond of his Friend, and civil to his Wife’, although the line could easily be read out of context as a gibe at a complacent husband.⁵⁷

Whatever the precise weighting of this strain in Pope's satire, it is obvious that at least in casual references he has no difficulty in accepting the associated doctrine that whether women succumb or chastely resist, their energies are centred on sexual relationships with men. In his epigram ‘To a Lady with the Temple of Fame,’ which he inscribed in Patty's presentation copy, the joke underlines this assumption.⁵⁸ The only females in the Temple itself are the fickle goddesses Fame and Fortune; and women's absence is only to be expected, since the nearest they come to fame is the good repute of preserving their chastity:

What's Fame with Men, by Custom of the Nation,
Is call'd in Women only Reputation:
About them both why keep we such a pother?
Part you with one, and I'll renounce the other.

Like Pope's poem, The Tatler's project for a table of fame had honoured only men; and ironically the only female considered is the Roman Lucretia, whose status as the heroic wife who, unable to avoid rape, expressed her refusal by suicide confirms what Pope's joke suggests, that the whole drama of a woman's life is contained within her relation to the other sex.⁵⁹ Yet Lucretia more than anyone would be sensitive to the impropriety of publicity, so it is only to be expected that Mr Bickerstaff should offer an implicit rebuke to the woman who had proposed her: ‘I did not think it proper to place her there, because I knew she would not care for being in the Company of so many Men without her Husband’.

Women's physical allure accounts for their sole representation in the summary of the glories of Rome which Pope admires in Addison's medals:

In one short view subjected to your eye
Gods, Emp'rors, Heroes, Sages, Beauties, lie.(60)

Helen of Troy understandably had a place in Horace's summary of the deeds that have inspired great poetry; but in Pope's paraphrase of this passage the discussion is moved to a higher and therefore an entirely masculine plane:

Sages and Chiefs long since had birth
E're Caesar was, or Newton nam'd,
These rais'd new Empires o'er the Earth,
And Those new Heav'ns and Systems fram'd.(61)

In a system that confines women within sexuality, chastity is necessarily woman's characteristic virtue and lust her characteristic vice. Of chastity in itself Pope has very little to say, except for the paradoxical praise of married love: ‘Chaste as cold Cynthia's virgin light, / Productive as the Sun’.⁶² Moon and sun are to become increasingly potent symbols in Pope's writing about women; but the flimsiness of this enthusiasm for chilly fecundity helps to explain why chastity figures less as a theme than as the assumption behind satirical condemnation. As early as his adolescent imitation of Rochester's ‘On Nothing’ Pope was conscious that desire was simply inadmissible for women when he praised silence as ‘the only Honour of the wishing Dame’.⁶³ The problem of chastity and the value set on it is also crucial to the ‘Epilogue to Jane Shore’, written for the actress Anne Oldfield, herself notoriously a kept woman, to be spoken at the conclusion of her portrayal of Jane Shore, mistress to Edward IV.⁶⁴ Pope makes her begin in mock surprise that virtuous ladies are prepared to applaud the representation of a whore; but then she reflects that it is only ‘wicked custom’ that makes them pretend a horror of unchastity that they are far from feeling. Moreover, despite the value set on it by custom, chastity cannot in her view be equated with virtue:

The godly dame who fleshly failings damns,
Scolds with her maid, or with her chaplain crams.

(line 21)

That there are more deadly sins than one comes very well from a woman who lives by disregard for that one, and it is fitting that she should conclude with an ironic reference to the conventional equation of virtue with chastity when she refers to the royal mistress as ‘in all the rest so impudently good’ (line 48; my italics). On the other hand, although Pope makes Mrs Oldfield suggest that women have vices and virtues to which chastity is completely irrelevant, the very fact that he presents her as so concerned to play down its value may confirm for the women in the audience that brazen it as she may, sexual continence is still properly the mainspring of their moral universe. A similar underlying morality is found in the irreverent satire ‘A Roman Catholick Version of the First Psalm, For the Use of a Young Lady’; for here a text which recommends religion to men as a means of attaining prosperity is travestied as one which recommends chastity to women as a means of attaining sexual satisfaction, as if this means to a woman all that material and spiritual prosperity means to a man.⁶⁵ As in the words written for Mrs Oldfield, Pope plays with the recognition that society seems to preach a ludicrously narrowing morality to women; yet one effect of the self-consciously wicked pose is undoubtedly to focus women's attention on sexuality as their proper realm.

A similar libertine knowingness emerges in representations of girls torn between chastity and desire, which clearly has nature on its side:

Th'advent'rous Lover is successful still,
Who strives to please the Fair against her Will.(66)
As some coy Nymph her Lover's warm Address
Nor quite indulges, nor can quite repress.(67)
While a kind Glance at her Pursuer flies,
How much at variance are her Feet and Eyes!(68)

Although in more soberly moralising contexts Pope may condemn the mature sensuality which enables fortune-hunters to ‘win rich Widows by their Chine and Brawn’ (it is not in any case nearly as flattering to the conqueror as the melting reluctance of the ‘coy Nymph’), he is positively repelled by women who can suppress their sexuality not through virtue, but, as he sees it, through avarice:

In Love's, in Nature's spite, the siege they hold,
And scorn the Flesh, the Dev'l, and all but Gold.(69)
Shall One whom Nature, Learning, Birth, conspir'd
To form, not to admire, but be admir'd,
Sigh, while his Chloe, blind to Wit and Worth,
Weds the rich Dulness of some Son of earth?(70)

However powerful the ideal of chastity may have been for the female decorum of the period, the libertine tradition of the Restoration wits remained a powerful influence for Pope, and the image of the girl whose chastity fights a losing battle remained deeply attractive to him. In contrast with the vices of cold calculation, seductibility at least proved that a girl's heart was in the right place.

This vein of feeling is closely allied to the familiar notion of women's softness, a major premise of Pope's Characters of Women. This is the characteristic that enables women to be tender mistresses, mothers and general comforters, but it also confirms their deficiency in the mental powers on which humanity prides itself. Proper judgement depends on firmness: hence it is natural to Pope to couple ‘women and fools’ to denote the unthinking part of mankind. In his imitation of Horace's essay on the practicalities of extra-marital sex, for example, Pope uses this phrase where Horace mentions only fools, after which Pope launches into a satire on extremes in women's dress for which there is no parallel in the original.⁷¹ The phrase also appears in a revealing context in Characters of Men, when Wharton's inconsistent behaviour is explained by his compulsion to win praise even from those whose praise is not worth having:

Born with whate'er could win it from the Wise,
Women and fools must like him or he dies.

(line 182; TE, III.ii, 30)

In the Dunciad the degeneracy of the aristocracy is blamed in part on the silly mother, who, with her addiction to fashionable frivolity, ‘begg'd the blessing of a Rake’; but Pope sounds bitterest in his reflections on the memorial poems that women ask him to write:

Each Mother asks it for her Booby Son,
Each Widow asks it for the Best of Men,
For him she weeps, and him she weds agen.(72)

For such women all values are levelled in the corrupt flux of their bodily affections. Women are regularly associated with fluidity, men with firmness, and in Pope's view, the hack writers who flatter the royal family understand all too well the distinction between manly panegyrics (‘Rend with tremendous Sound your ears asunder, / With Gun, Drum, Trumpet, Blunderbuss & Thunder’) and mellifluous feminine vacuity:

Then all your Muse's softer Art display,
Let Carolina smooth the tuneful Lay,
Lull with Amelia's liquid Name
the Nine,
And sweetly flow through all the Royal Line.(73)

Pope's crowning example of female softness is the ‘Harlot form’ of Opera, who, with her insistence that music should be concerned less with meaning than with pretty noises, leads the attack on order in Dunciad IV.⁷⁴ This epitome of frivolity and dependence provides not so much a softening of the cares of state as a subversion of legislative duty:

By singing Peers upheld on either hand,
She tripp'd and laugh'd, too pretty much to stand.

(line 49)

Although the style of femininity that Pope so contemptuously associates with prostitution and cultural decline in this passage was brought into particular prominence by the contemporary aspiration to bring up daughters in genteel idleness, and by the role of moneyed women as consumers of the silks, china and tea that consolidated family status in polite society, it was also a logical development of a long physiological tradition. Hippocrates had declared that ‘a woman's flesh is more spongelike and softer than a man's’; and Aristotle had used the criterion of temperature to account for the deficiencies he perceived in women, assuming that men must be hotter to account for their unique ability to ‘cook’ the dynamic semen to perfection:

Everything reaches its perfection sooner in females than in males—e.g., puberty, maturity, old age—because females are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature. While it [the female foetus] is within the mother, then it develops slowly on account of its coldness, since development is a sort of concoction, concoction is effected by heat, and if a thing is hotter its concoction is easy; when, however, it is free from the mother, on account of its weakness it quickly approaches its maturity and old age, since inferior things all reach their end more quickly.⁷⁵

Not surprisingly, Aristotle found a general lack of robustness characteristic of female animals:

Again, the female is less muscular and less compactly jointed, and more thin and delicate in the hair—that is, where hair is found; and, where there is no hair, less strongly furnished in some analogous substance. And the female is more knock-kneed, and the shin-bones are thinner; and the feet are more arched and hollow in such animals as are furnished with feet.⁷⁶

Since the human race is nature's highest work, the natural distinction of sexes is there developed to its greatest extent:

The fact is, the nature of man [i.e. the species] is the most rounded off and complete, and consequently in man the qualities or capacities referred to are found in their perfection. Hence woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment.

(IX. 1. 608b)

For European women the ancient consensus gained additional authority by its transmission through the New Testament in the doctrine of ‘the weaker vessel’.⁷⁷ Thus, by the time Pope teased Patty Blount with the definition of her sex as ‘matter too soft a lasting mark to bear’, the complex of physiological, mental and moral assumptions which had accumulated around the polarisation of firm male and fluid female was generally accepted as part of the natural order.⁷⁸ It remained, however, an ambivalent distinction: despite Swift's vehemence in declaring that ‘there is no Quality whereby Women endeavour to distinguish themselves from Men, for which they are not just so much the worse’, he still felt the need to confirm that the dearest of his women friends had a proper softness as well as the less conventional qualities for which he respected her: ‘With all the softness of temper that became a lady, she had the personal courage of a hero’.⁷⁹ For Pope too the myriad associations of the notion of women's softness were to provide grounds for responses ranging from utter loathing, through irritation, amusement and patronising compliment, to sympathy, admiration and devoted love.

Notes

1. For varying interpretations of this change, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London, 1977), pp. 199-201, 325-404; Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago, 1985), pp. 1-76; Laura Brown, ‘The Defenceless Woman and the Development of English Tragedy’, Studies in English Literature, 22 (1982), 429-43.

2. The Spectator, edited by Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), I, 242, 433; II, 70.

3. Katharine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (London, 1966), pp. 166-80.

4. On the role of the Catholic mistress of the house, see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (London, 1985), pp. 28-29. Old-fashioned housekeeping is a virtue for which Pope praises his Catholic friends Elizabeth and John Caryll. (See Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (London, 1975), pp. 80-82.) The Blount Papers include letters and recipes of Mary Eugenia Blount which emphasise the managerial role of a Catholic housewife on a country estate in the generation after Pope (Blount Papers, c. 65).

5. Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), II.199 (Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of Women, hereafter Characters of Women); The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, 11 vols. (London, 1939-69), III.ii, 66-67 (hereafter TE).

6. For a summary of Catholic disabilities, see John M. Aden, Pope's Once and Future Kings: Satire and Politics in the Early Career (Knoxville, 1978), pp. 3-20.

7. J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope 1711-1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York, 1969), p. 40; Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, edited by James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1966), nos. 14-31.

8. Spence, no. 29; for the influence of Cowley's versions of Latin verse, see TE, VI, 4-5.

9. Imitations of Horace, Satires, II.ii.133, 135 (TE, IV, 65).

10. No-one ever seems to have called Martha Blount ‘Martha’; and I have therefore adopted the diminutive ‘Patty’ which was used by everyone who was on first-name terms with her. For the house Pope gave her, see chapter 9.5; for Pope's half-sister, Magdalen Rackett, see chapter 2.2.

11. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956), IV, 509 (hereafter Corr.). For an account of Bethel, an old mutual friend of Pope and Patty, see TE, IV, 346-47.

12. See for example the triumph of Vice which concludes Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I, lines 141-70 (TE, IV, 308-9).

13. Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford, line 27 (TE, VI, 239-40).

14. Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 1600-1760, 2 vols. (Oslo, 1954-58), I, 60-62.

15. Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, This Long Disease, my Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, 1968), pp. 7-86.

16. Eamon Duffy, ‘“Englishmen in Vaine”: Roman Catholic Allegiance to George I’, Studies in Church History, 18 (1982), 345-65 (pp. 347-62); Corr., I, 424-25; II, 176. (Edward Blount was only remotely related to Patty.)

17. Spence, nos. 26, 51; Dunciad B, IV.294 (TE, V, 373).

18. Erskine-Hill, Social Milieu, pp. 72-82; Corr., I, 123.

19. An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, line 408 (TE, IV, 127).

20. Spence, nos. 69, 71; Norman Ault, New Light on Pope, with some Additions to his Poetry hitherto Unknown (London, 1949), pp. 301-307; Corr., III, 493; The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, edited by Harold Williams, 5 vols. (revised edition, Oxford, 1965), IV, 528 (hereafter Swift Corr.)

21. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), III, 197-8.

22. Memoirs of Mrs Pilkington, 1712-1750, Written by Herself (London, 1748-54; reprinted 1928), p. 62.

23. Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776-1809, edited by Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd edition, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1951), I, 502.

24. Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., edited by Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (London, 1936), p. 118; cited by Mrs Thrale, Thraliana, I, 171-72.

25. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady, edited by Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 53-54, 56, 77-78; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, edited by Frank W. Bradbrook and James Kinsley (Oxford, 1970), pp. 23, 54, 62.

26. Boswell in Search of a Wife 1766-1769, edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (London, 1957), pp. 270-72.

27. Boswell's Life of Johnson, edited by George Birkbeck Hill and revised by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-50), II, 414.

28. Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (London, 1957), II, 335.

29. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, with an English translation by A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1963), I.xxi-xxii; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin text and English translation, 61 vols. (Blackfriars, Cambridge, 1963-76), LII, 55.

30. John Cook is quoted in Louis A. Landa, ‘The Shandean Homunculus: The Background of Sterne's “Little Gentleman”’, in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Essays in Honour of Alan Dugald McKillop, edited by Carrol Camden (Chicago, 1963), pp. 49-68 (p. 57). For an account of the various theories see Joseph Needham, A History of Embryology, 2nd edition, revised with the assistance of Arthur Hughes (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 37-44, 205-11.

31. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, edited by Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford, 1983).

32. ‘Bounce to Fop’, line 49 (TE, VI, 368); for attribution see Pat Rogers, Eighteenth Century Encounters: Studies in Literature and Society in the Age of Walpole (Brighton, 1985), p. 36.

33. Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1975), pp. 65-66.

34. For refusal of the patriarchal model, see Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, edited by Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 77-78.

35. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 1970), p. 51.

36. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, edited by Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1949).

37. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, edited by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford, 1960), ch. 20, pp. 129-31.

38. Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage, 5th edition (Dublin, 1730), p. 66.

39. Carole Fabricant, ‘Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses: The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8 (1979), 109-135.

40. The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, edited by Charles Jackson, Surtees Society, 62 (Durham, 1873); Mary Hyde, The Thrales of Streatham Park (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

41. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 2nd edition (London, 1931), pp. 99-100.

42. George Sherburn, ‘New Anecdotes about Alexander Pope’, Notes and Queries, 203 (1958), 343-49 (p. 348).

43. For the significance of Pope's retreat to Twickenham see Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope (London, 1969); for his care of his mother see chapter 2.3-4 below; for his instructions for the addition to his parents' monument, see his will, printed in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, edited by Norman Ault and Rosemary Cowler, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1936-86), II, 506.

44. For Warburton's impact on Pope and his circle, see chapter 9.1, 5; for the monument see TE, VI, 376.

45. The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, edited by Myra Reynolds (Chicago, 1903), p. 100.

46. Epistle I of the Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), addressed to Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham (TE, III.ii, 15-38: hereafter Characters of Men).

47. Characters of Men, lines 55, 152, 183, 177.

48. Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope's ‘Opus Magnum’ 1729-1744 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 64-65, 76-77, 79.

49. Dunciad IV, note on 501 (TE, V, 391); Epistle to Bathurst: Of the Use of Riches, lines 121-24 (TE, III.ii, 101-2).

50. Imitations of Horace, Epistles, II.ii.54, 64 (TE, IV, 169).

51. Horace, Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1929), Satires I.vi.71-99; To Arbuthnot, line 384 (TE, IV, 126).

52. To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals, line 43 (TE, VI, 204).

53. To Bathurst, line 27 (TE, III.ii, 88).

54. Epistle to Burlington: Of the Use of Riches, line 1 (TE, III.ii, 136).

55. Imitations of Horace, Satires, II.i.16 (TE, IV, 5).

56. Imitations of Horace, Epistles, I.vi.77 (TE, IV, 241-42).

57. Imitations of Horace, Epistles, II.ii.189 (TE, IV, 179).

58. The Temple of Fame (TE, II, 253-89); ‘To a Lady with the Temple of Fame’ (TE, VI, 127-28).

59. The Tatler, edited by Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1987), II, 34.

60. To Mr Addison, line 33 (TE, VI, 203).

61. Imitations of Horace, Odes, IV.ix.9 (TE, IV, 159).

62. ‘Two Choruses to the Tragedy of Brutus’, II, line 23 (TE, VI, 153).

63. ‘On Silence’, line 26 (TE, VI, 18).

64. TE, VI, 113-15; for a detailed account of Anne Oldfield, see DNB.

65. TE, VI, 164-66: the title is a malicious addition by the publisher Edmund Curll, for whose relations with Pope see TE, IV, 356-57.

66. ‘Prologue design'd for Mr. Durfy's Last Play’, line 5 (TE, VI, 101).

67. Windsor Forest, line 19 (TE, I, 150).

68. Pastorals, ‘Spring’, line 59 (TE, I, 66).

69. Imitations of Horace, Epistles I.i.131 (TE, IV, 289); The Second Satire of Dr. John Donne, line 23 (TE, IV, 133).

70. Imitations of Horace, Epistles, I.vi.40 (TE, IV, 239).

71. Imitations of Horace, Sermones, I.ii.27-34 (Sober Advice from Horace) (TE, IV, 76-79).

72. Dunciad B, IV.286 (TE, V, 372); Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, line 107 (TE, IV, 319).

73. Imitations of Horace, Satires, II.i.25, 29 (TE, IV, 7).

74. Dunciad B, IV. 45-70 (TE, V, 345-48).

75. Ann Ellis Hanson, ‘Hippocrates: Diseases of Women’, Signs, 1 (Winter 1975), 567-84 (p. 572); Aristotle, Generation of Animals, I.xx (p. 103), IV. vi (pp. 459-61); and see Suzanne Said, Women and Female in the Biological Treatises of Aristotle (Odense, 1982).

76. Aristotle, Historia Animalium, translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (The Works of Aristotle, edited by J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, IV; Oxford, 1910), IV.11.538b.

77. Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1984), pp. 1-6.

78. Characters of Women, line 3 (TE, III.ii, 46).

79. Jonathan Swift, ‘A Letter to a Young Lady, on her Marriage’, Irish Tracts and Sermons, edited by Herbert Davis and Louis Landa (Oxford, 1968), p. 93; ‘On the Death of Mrs. Johnson’ (i.e. Esther Johnson, affectionately known as Stella), Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces, Fragments and Marginalia, edited by Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1969), p. 229.

Abbreviations

Corr.: The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956)

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 63 vols. (London, 1885-1900)

EC: The Works of Alexander Pope, edited by Whitwell Elwin and William John Courthope, 10 vols. (London, 1871-86)

HW Corr.: The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, edited by W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (London, 1937-83)

Hervey: Lord Hervey's Memoirs, edited by Romney Sedgwick (London, 1952)

LM Essays: Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, edited by R. Halsband and I. Grundy (Oxford, 1977)

LM Letters: The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1965)

LM Life: Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, corrected edition (Oxford, 1961)

Lothian MSS: Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian Preserved at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, Historical Manuscripts Commission (London, 1905)

Prose Works: The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, edited by Norman Ault and Rosemary Cowler, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1936-86)

Spence: Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, edited by James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1966)

Suffolk Corr.: Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk and her Second Husband the Hon. George Berkeley, edited by J. W. Croker, 2 vols. (London, 1824)

Swift Corr.: The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, edited by Harold Williams, 5 vols. (revised edition, Oxford, 1965)

TE: The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, 11 vols. (London, 1939-69)