SOURCE: “Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the Literature of Social Comment,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740, edited by Steven N. Zwicker, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 307-29.

[In the following essay, Landry compares the careers of Montagu and Alexander Pope. Despite the differences between the two writers, the critic observes, “their lives and writings tell us much about the forging of a national and imperial identity that would become disseminated around the globe.”]

Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were both born in the year of the Glorious Revolution, 1688-89. Divided by family circumstance and political allegiance, they have been coupled by literary history. Pope was a Catholic linen merchant's son, born in the City of London, who had to make his own fortune in the literary marketplace by means of such ventures as translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English for a distinguished list of wealthy subscribers, who paid in installments to receive their multi-volumed sets over several years. Pope earned about £5000 each from these translations, or, at a “conservative estimate,” the equivalent in today's money of about £100,000 from each.¹ Lady Mary Pierrepont, daughter of the Earl (later Duke) of Kingston, married in 1712 a fellow Whig, Edward Wortley Montagu, who would soon become ambassador to Constantinople. “A strong sense of propriety led her, as a woman and an aristocrat, not to publish any of her writings under her own name.”² Pope was a Tory with Jacobite leanings; Montagu supported Sir Robert Walpole.

Pope never traveled to Turkey, while Montagu's journey there as the wife of the British ambassador from 1716 to 1718 secured her literary fame. Her posthumously published letters of 1763, Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, Among other Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks, established her reputation as a woman of letters, since people from Samuel Johnson to Lord Byron read and praised them.³ Johnson is supposed to have said that Montagu's letters were the only book he ever read for pure pleasure, while Byron claimed to have practically memorized them by the age of ten. Eventually Montagu would leave England and her husband for a wandering life in Italy and France.⁴

If Pope, master of five rented acres at Twickenham, figures the suburban intellectual, Montagu epitomizes the expatriate adventurer, whose aristocratic rank enabled her independence but also meant she could only really practice it abroad. As an adventurer-writer, with a strong influence on Lord Byron, she comes to signify a gender-bending kind of English expatriate eccentricity often named “Byronic,” but nearly a century before Byron first left the British Isles. Both Pope and Montagu represent two forms of Englishness that came into being during British imperial expansion. Despite their differences, their lives and writings tell us much about the forging of a national and imperial identity that would become disseminated around the globe.

Such fundamentally differing social views as theirs could well have proved an unbridgeable gap, but once upon a time Pope and Mary Wortley Montagu became friends and neighbors in Twickenham after she returned from Turkey. Then they quarreled—about what, exactly, no one is certain—and ended up celebrated enemies. Horace Walpole delighted in airing their dirty linen in public: “Their quarrel is said to have sprung from a pair of sheets, which, coming down suddenly to her house at Twickenham, she borrowed; and not returning, he sent for, and she sent them back unwashed. Her dirt, and their mutual economy, make the story not quite incredible.”⁵ Now about those unwashed sheets: dirt, filth, blood, the state of unwashed gameiness, is always attaching itself to Montagu in the anecdotal record. How much of this attributed filth is empirically verifiable, and how much might constitute the revenge of certain men of letters on a witty writing woman who flouted public opinion and condescended to them? Ironically, when Pope satirizes Montagu, he often represents her as wallowing in dirt of the dirtiest sort, namely country filth: he strips her of her aristocratic taste and metropolitan sophistication and portrays her as that lowest form of life, from a suburban point of view, the backward hunting gentry:

Avidien or his Wife (no Matter
which,
For him you'll call a dog, and her a bitch)
Sell their presented Partridges, and Fruits,
And humbly live on rabbits and on roots.

(Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased, lines 49-52)⁶

Montagu herself was much more infuriated by the double-barreled slur that could always be claimed to be a double-edged compliment in Pope's First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated: “From furious Sappho scarce a milder Fate, / P-x'd by her Love, or libell'd by her Hate” (lines 83-84). In other words, expect no less from intimacy with Montagu than slander, poison, or hanging. “P-x'd” here quickly glances off syphilis, the obvious general referent for “pox,” to light upon the disease of smallpox with which she was widely associated. Having suffered from smallpox as a young woman, she still bore the scars, but by writing “P-x'd by her love,” Pope assures us that only Montagu—the woman who had popularized the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox in England by inoculating her own children—could be meant. Pope deviously covers himself by disguising his attack as a potential compliment.

Such passionate disavowal intimates the heat that had gone before. Byron believed that after Lady Mary's return from Turkey, Pope declared his amorous designs upon her person, and she laughed in his face, a story supported by Montagu's own granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart.⁷ Reading Pope's poem to Gay of 1720, it is tempting to agree he might well have declared a passion for “wortley,” hoping to attract her “eyes” to his “structures”—his perfect grounds at Twickenham, and his verse:

Ah friend, 'tis true—this truth you lovers know—
In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow,
In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes
Of hanging mountains, and of sloping greens:
Joy lives not here; to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where wortley casts
her eyes.
What are the gay parterre, the chequer'd shade,
The morning bower, the ev'ning colonade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,
To sigh unheard in, to the passing winds?
So the struck deer in some sequester'd part
Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;
There, stretch'd unseen in coverts hid from day,
Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.

(“To Mr. Gay, who wrote him a congratulatory letter on the finishing his house”)

Stimulated by his desire for (Mary Wortley) Montagu, Pope constructs an erotic landscape in which to fantasize about her. The “hanging mountains” and “sloping greens” owe their inspiration to an image of a female body. As so often in landscape poetry, the topography becomes eroticized and feminized, and the male poet is held hostage by the projections of his own imagination. As in Marvell's “The Garden” and Rochester's “A Ramble in Saint James's Parke,” such erotic encounters are doomed to incompletion. We notice that only the poet's image of Wortley, projected as the topography of his garden, and not her body itself, is reflected in the Thames. His imagination is feverishly dominated by her absence, her absent presence.

Having failed to draw Wortley into his grounds, his designs, his private world, Pope represents himself as a wounded deer, the victim of blood sports. She is the huntress, and he the hunted, she the predator, and he the prey. In her absence he is, like the deer, driven to seclusion, where, “stretch'd” out “unseen,” he “bleeds” away his life “drop by drop,” and “paints” “his life away,” while thinking of her. These lines are a little orgy of onanistic imagery. But the wounded deer also figures as more than a merely conventional erotic metaphor, as we shall see. This matter of blood sports will prove a further marker of difference between Pope and Montagu, a point to which we shall return.

The literature of social comment during this period, whether in prose or verse, was very much the currency of polite culture, an important commodity in its own right. And increasingly, in the course of the eighteenth century, the authoritative polite voice came to be associated not so much with London itself as with the environs of London, the suburbs, and a metropolitan culture that claimed to know—and to seek to regulate—the countryside as well as the urban scene. Regulation, or good stewardship as Pope would have it, often meant removing blood from the landscape, tidying away the effluvia of game- and livestock-rearing and killing, of field sports and agriculture, in order that the sanctity of picturesque greenness, of English verdure, might be perceived undisturbed.

Coupled as friends, coupled as enemies: Pope and Montagu have been biographically linked, but they have not been ranked equally within early eighteenth-century literary culture. Pope has long been regarded as the supremely canonical poet of the early eighteenth century; he succeeded in making himself into a monument, the very icon of the major poet, in his own time and has never disappeared from view since. For most twentieth-century criics, Montagu has merely figured as a woman writer and epistolary stylist, as remarkable for her appearances in Pope's satire as for her learning. That Montagu's works are now available in authoritative scholarly editions owes something to feminist interest in recovering neglected women writers during the past twenty-five years. While scholars working in feminist literary history, colonial discourse, and postcolonial theory have recently latched onto Montagu, some Pope scholars have reevaluated his works in ways influenced by these new fields.

For Laura Brown, Pope is a master tropologist of the discourse of imperialism and the fetishism of commodities. Building on the work of Reuben A. Brower and Louis A. Landa,⁸ Brown represents Belinda in The Rape of the Lock, arming herself at her dressing-table for combat in the marketplace of sexuality, as a touchstone at the very heart of eighteenth-century literary culture: “The image of female dressing and adornment has a very specific, consistent historical referent in the early eighteenth century—the products of mercantile capitalism … Women wear the products of accumulation, and thus by metonymy they are made to bear responsibility for the system by which they are adorned.”⁹ Brown is particularly interested in discovering how the very structures, conventions, and syntax of literary works bear the marks of the psychic and social anxieties generated by capitalism and empire-building. Thus Brown reworks earlier formalist studies of Pope to achieve a new level of engagement with history and political ideology.

Ellen Pollak's Poetics of Sexual Myth and Brean S. Hammond's Pope similarly attend to questions of ideology and history as they figure in poetic forms.¹⁰ For Pollak, ideology means the ideology of gender and sexual difference. Her feminist study finds Pope an upholder of ideas of sexual difference and women's inferiority, while Swift emerges as an iconoclastic nayasayer to gender ideology, despite the misogyny of some of his poems. Applying a form of Marxist ideology critique—derived from Pierre Macherey—to the contradictions of Pope's writing, Hammond gives us a sense of Pope's simultaneous wielding of cultural authority and exclusion from social power.¹¹

This line of inquiry presents a Pope positioned at the center of elite literary culture. Yet his social position was in many ways marginal rather than typical, as Hammond indicates, and his satires directed at the Walpole administration and the Hanoverian dynasty shimmer with the peculiar energy of disaffection. Yet how politically disaffected was Pope? Had he any utopian longings for a radical subversion of contemporary society? It is tempting to read the very furtiveness and political risks involved in Jacobite discourse as a sign of a form of utopian social critique.

For some years there has been a growing interest in the possibility of Pope's Jacobitism, his continuing loyalty to the house of Stuart, over and above his openly Oppositional stance toward the Hanoverian succession and Walpole. If Pope were a Jacobite, he would have been committed to seeing the German Protestant house of Hanover replaced by the English but Catholic house of Stuart. Being Catholic, Pope was an obvious target of suspicion of treasonable Jacobite sympathies, so it would have been only prudent for him to keep any involvement in Jacobite activities secret. Besides, like his close, and most notoriously disaffected friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, Pope also seems to have been keen to advance the cause of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the hero of the so-called “Patriot Opposition,” as Christine Gerrard has most recently shown.¹² The Patriot Opposition consisted of Whigs loyal to the Hanoverian succession, hence “patriotic,” and opposed to the leadership of Sir Robert Walpole, therefore in “opposition” to the current government. So there is considerable evidence for Pope having played both sides against the middle in his hope for some dramatic change in English politics.

Yet there remains to be explained that violent energy in much of Pope's social and political commentary, an energy which we might associate with political subversion, even radicalism, in spite of the conservatism of many of his ideas—such as his belief, shared with Bolingbroke, who wrote a treatise on the subject, that a “Patriot” king, such as the Prince of Wales, or more riskily, a Stuart returned to the throne, could transform English culture. It is tempting to attach to Pope something of the romance of adherence to lost causes, at least to what Douglas Brooks-Davies calls an “emotional Jacobitism,” rather than a commitment to a program of political action.¹³ Two very persuasive articles by Howard Erskine-Hill offer readings of Pope's poetry according to a Jacobite code, in which knowing readers would have delighted.¹⁴ Once the case for such a code has been made, images of conquest, rape, or violent seizure, whether by scissors or swords, and mentions of William I, “the Conqueror,” in Pope's poetry, offer themselves as charged with a furtive allusiveness to the Revolution of 1688-89 and William III.¹⁵

A debate in the Times Literary Supplement in 1973 between the literary critic Pat Rogers and the social historian E. P. Thompson raised the issue of whether or not Pope's helping his half-sister, Magdalen Racketts, and her husband and son, who were prosecuted for deer-stealing and Jacobite agitation in the early 1720s, might help document that he was a Jacobite sympathizer. Rogers didn't and still doesn't think so, and he has recently published an incisive review of the evidence,¹⁶ but in Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, Thompson makes a persuasive case for Pope's alignment with the Windsor and Waltham “Blacks,” those deer-stealers who blackened their faces for better cover by night and were so harshly prosecuted by Walpole on the grounds of Jacobite conspiracy.¹⁷

According to Thompson, Pope might have been a bit more radical in his sympathies than most literary critics have seen fit to observe. Thompson finds Pope's poem Windsor-Forest of 1713 a premonition of things to come under the Hanoverian dispensation (George I accedes in 1714), in which forest law would soon come back into force and the new Black Act would make deer-stealing and associated suspicious activities capital crimes. Within crown forests, the protection of deer was the overriding consideration, and forest inhabitants could expect to have their crops eaten by deer. Forest law, if strictly enforced, assured the deer free passage at the inhabitants' expense and could also prevent the cutting of timber or peat or turf without a special license. “At least, this was so in theory,” as Thompson puts it. “Claim and counter-claim had been the condition of forest life for centuries.”¹⁸ As Thompson explains, a forest may appear to be simply woodland and heath, uncultivated land, but in fact it has its own complex economy, providing for royal sport through deer-keeping but also traditionally allowing extensive compensatory common rights to forest inhabitants, including rights to pasturage of livestock, timber and firewood, the cutting of peat, turf, heath, fern, and furze, and the digging of sand and gravel.¹⁹

According to Thompson, Pope's vindication of Queen Anne's relaxed attitude toward forest law and commoners' cultivation and use of the forest aligns him with poachers and resisters of the repressive Walpole machine. Thompson's Pope does not emerge exactly as a poet of the people—Windsor-Forest may endorse Blacking, but in order to celebrate Queen Anne as legitimate, and congenial, monarch: “And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns” (line 42). But having once read Thompson's presentation of the documentary evidence of Pope's involvement with the Racketts alongside his analysis of Windsor-Forest, few readers will remain unswayed in the direction of a Pope whose social comment on the Hanoverians and the Walpole regime should be read as an arrow “expertly flighted and with a shaft of solid information.”²⁰

Pope was a master of self-promotion, as well as of self-preservation. He perfected turning political disenfranchisement into satirical literary triumphs. This technique made him appealing to some women writers of the time, for who better could serve as a model of the disenfranchised still succeeding in the literary marketplace?²¹ As a London linen merchant's son, a Catholic, a Jacobite sympathizer, if not an active conspirator, and a sufferer from Pott's disease, or tuberculosis of the spine, Pope had many disadvantages to overcome to enter into polite society. He stood only four feet six inches high, and was very hunchbacked, requiring in middle age a stiff set of linen stays to hold himself upright. The disease also brought him severe headaches, fevers, sensitivity to cold, and respiratory difficulties as his spine collapsed. His biographer Maynard Mack observes that by the time Pope had become a successful poet, “he was already established in his own mind and in the minds of others as a dwarf and a cripple.”²² According to Kristina Straub, anti-Catholic bigotry often combined with homophobia, so that Pope was also at particular pains to distance himself from homoerotic associations and sexual ambiguity.²³ Yet Pope counted among his friends some of the wealthiest and most influential members of the aristocracy and gentry. How did he manage it?

Pope's ideas about the proper conduct of the country gentleman as a landowner and shaper of the countryside were crucial for his social rise, overriding his sometimes unpopular political sympathies. Fashioning the English countryside and becoming an exponent of fashionable aesthetics became for Pope a ticket to dining at some of the most admired country houses in the land.²⁴ And he had the nerve to advise lords and great landowners about the landscaping design of their estates from the perspective of his leased five acres at Twickenham, even then a suburb of London.²⁵ And so we have a paradoxical figure, Pope as the influential gardening advisor and embodiment of polite literary culture, stamping more than one generation of landowning toffs with his own peculiarly London-merchant-middle-class, Catholic, politically disaffected, physically disabled, image and aesthetic preferences. Thus does the Twickenhamization of the English countryside come into being, a movement largely attributable to the influence of suburban intellectuals like Pope.

Beyond having been meticulously edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, Montagu's work has not received the same kind of scholarly attention as Pope's. There is no Montagu industry—as yet. Indeed such scholarly finds as Montagu's marginalia in a set of the fourth edition of Robert Dodsley's A Collection of Poems in four volumes by Several Hands (1755) that belonged to the British Consul at Venice, Joseph Smith, have only recently come to light.²⁶ In “The Politics of Female Authorship,” Isobel Grundy examines these marginal notes, enabling us to observe closely the tension Montagu felt regarding her poetic gifts—on the one hand, the desire to claim her own poems when they appeared in print (“mine,” she writes, or “wrote 2 months after my marriage”); on the other, indignation at appearing in print without either knowledge of it or permission for it, and even greater indignation at misattribution (“I renounce & never saw till this year 1758”). Discovering that without either her permission or her knowledge, a number of her poems had been in print for ten years in the century's most popular anthology, made her furious. By 1758, when Montaguwrote her marginalia, she was, according to Grundy, “an old woman” “unhappily” involved in too many battles and thus “too insecure to accept willingly the role of published poet.”²⁷

What Robert Halsband labels the Turkish Embassy Letters in his complete edition of Montagu's correspondence have become once again, as she wished, her chief bid for literary fame. Three books and a cluster of recent essays²⁸ testify to a resurgence of interest in Montagu under the rubric of colonial discourse and Orientalism, within the terms described by Edward Said.²⁹ Analyzing the various portraits of herself in Turkish dress that Montagu commissioned, Marcia Pointon constructs a complex model of aesthetic agency for Montagu: “The spectacle of Ottoman culture—of feminized Ottoman culture—enabled Montagu to be both viewer and viewed, to bridge the gap between self as object of another's pleasure and self as narcissistic, a gap that was a powerful ingredient of eighteenth-century social discourse and social function.”³⁰ Pointon answers the question of what Montagu was seeking in Turkey, and in having herself figured in Turkish dress, in terms of pleasure and compensation for losses suffered elsewhere, through smallpox and aging.

Questions such as these will always return us to the imperial observer, not the colonized, or more subtly, the unheard or repressed Oriental other within the texts of western imperialism.³¹ In an abstruse but provocative essay, Srinivas Aravamudan has coined the term “Levantinization” for the mechanism by which Montagu attempts to escape from pure Englishness into Turkishness, but fails. “To run or throw a levant was to make a bet with the intention of absconding if it was lost,” Aravamudan observes. He attributes to Montagu a form of “intellectual wagering without accountability.³² Montagu must abandon her fantasy of assimilation to Ottoman culture, her fantasy of going Levantine. The letters of ambassadorial travel close with a definite return home to Englishness. Aravamudan proposes that we attempt to read Montagu from the position of occluded postcolonial others, that we “tropicalize” her imperial text as we read it.

No scholarly consensus is likely to be reached regarding the critical force of Montagu's celebration of cultural difference during her stay in the Ottoman empire. I am inclined to agree with Meyda Yegenoglu that we should not underestimate the effect of Montagu's positioning within a system of Orientalist representations, however much she might have wished to celebrate the differences between Turkish and English culture. In typically imperial fashion, Montagu regards the purpose of travel to foreign parts as escape from domestic conventions, from scandal and the social demands of home. In “Constantinople, To [William Feilding],” Montagu writes first of her delight in finding a very English form of rural retirement in Turkey, the picturesque little farm that is like a suburban garden:

Give me, Great God (said I) a Little Farm
In summer shady and in Winter warm,
Where a clear Spring gives birth to a cool brook
By nature sliding down a Mossy rock,
Not artfully in Leaden Pipes convey'd
Nor greatly falling in a forc'd Cascade,
Pure and unsulli'd winding through the Shade.
All-Bounteous Heaven has added to my Prayer
A softer Climat and a Purer air.

(lines 1-9)³³

Then, having established herself comfortably in an English-style retreat, but with a warmer climate and less damp and sooty air than England could offer, she sets her sights on the Ottoman splendor of Constantinople, only to return quickly to the pleasures of retirement:

          Yet not these prospects, all profusely Gay,
The gilded Navy that adorns the Sea,
The rising City in Confusion fair,
Magnificently form'd irregular,
Where Woods and Palaces at once surprise,
Gardens on Gardens, Domes on Domes arise,
And endless Beauties tire the wandring Eyes,
So sooths my wishes or so charms my Mind
As this retreat, secure from Human kind,
No Knave's successfull craft does Spleen excite,
No Coxcomb's Tawdry Splendour shocks my sight,
No Mob Alarm awakes my Female Fears,
No unrewarded Merit asks my Tears,
Nor Praise my Mind, nor Envy hurts my Ear,
Even Fame it selfe can hardly reach me here,
Impertinence with all her tattling train,
Fair sounding Flattery's delicious bane,
Censorious Folly, noisy Party rage,
The thousand Tongues with which she must engage
Who dare have Virtue in a vicious Age.

(lines 92-111)

The pleasures of Turkey are largely its absences, its differences from home. Obviously, Montagu has sought a foreign field that is forever not England, thank God, and where the weather's better, because the sun shines much more often. Montagu glories in her ideal Turkish retreat precisely because it is so far removed from English social demands. She imagines from a pleasing distance exactly what she is escaping from in London, where her rank and marriage would always assure a certain stark publicity.

When the letters from the Turkish embassy were published, Montagu was posthumously subjected to intense public scrutiny. Reception of her letters in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century tended to focus on whether or not readers agreed with her reports of Turkish places and customs. Following most immediately in Montagu's footsteps, Elizabeth, Lady Craven, who traveled to Constantinople in 1786 and published her own journal in letters in 1789, so disliked Lady Mary's letters that she dismissed them as forgeries, observing “that whoever wrote L. M——'s Letters (for she never wrote a line of them) misrepresents things most terribly—I do really believe, in most things they wished to impose upon the credulity of their readers, and laugh at them.”³⁴

In 1813, Byron's friend and traveling companion, John Cam Hobhouse, annotated his copy of Montagu's letters so contentiously that he seems to have delighted in attempting to refute her point by point, especially with regard to Turkish manners, proclaiming that:

her representations are not to be depended upon—Some of her assertions none but a female traveller can contradict, but what a man who has seen Turkey can controvert, I am myself capable of proving to be unfounded—From what I have seen of the country, and from what I have read of her book, I am sure that her ladyship would not stick at a little fibbing; and as I know part of her accounts to be altogether false I have a right to suppose she has exaggerated other particulars—³⁵

Hobhouse's disputes with Montagu revolve around issues of taste, in which he figures as a traditional anti-Turkish Englishman. On page 149 of the letters, for instance, when Montagu praises the Turks for having “a right notion of life” because “They consume it in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics, or studying some science to which we can never attain,” Hobhouse adds a penciled note: “—vile music, bad wine & in such eating as would disgust any but a Turk.” If Montagu relished her experiences of Ottoman culture to the point of near Levantinization, Hobhouse, by contrast, seems to have had such a miserable time in Constantinople that he merely confirmed his anti-Turkish prejudices at every turn. His is the more typical experience of English travelers in the period, in itself evidence of the unusually culturally relativist nature of Montagu's vision.

Today Montagu is read primarily as an aristocratic foremother of feminist inquiry, with all the problems this entails. As a woman with an inherited title, she spurned the vulgarity of the commercial marketplace, yet her desire for applause and fame made her continuously seek it in devious ways. Her satiric impulse was as strong as Pope's, and although it was more respectable than his in coming from an aristocrat, such an impulse was simultaneously much less acceptable coming from a woman. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's cultural heirs include such twentieth-century English women travelers to Turkey as Freya Stark and Christina Dodwell.

Pope's legacy can be seen today in the National Trust taste for stately homes and gardens, the Tory garden festivals of the 1980s and 1990s,³⁶ the “Heritage Industry” generally, and less obviously, much of the propaganda against hunting. Because along with the industries of countryside-worship and tourism,³⁷ Pope helped to create a suburban attitude toward the ecology of rural life, from game laws and field sports to the proper attitude toward animals as sentient beings and the desirability of vegetarianism.³⁸ If we take Thompson's case seriously, then Pope's criticism of aristocratic and moneyed excess, his squeamishness at blood sports, his interest in vegetarianism, and his hoping to make all estates, even the countryside at large, as tame and picturesque as a suburban garden, point in the direction, however covert or tenuous, of what today would take the form of an alignment with class struggle from below.

Notice Pope's ambivalent representation in Windsor-Forest of the seasonal round as one bloody field sport after another, with vigorous young Englishmen, their own blood “fermented” by youthful spirits, forever seeking something or someone to kill:

          Ye vig'rous Swains! while Youth ferments
your Blood,
And purer Spirits swell the sprightly Flood,
Now range the Hills, the gameful Woods beset,
Wind the shrill Horn, or spread the waving Net.

(lines 93-96)

After the harvest at summer's end, autumnal partridge-netting (lines 97-104) and pheasant-shooting (lines 111-18) give way to wintry harehunting and woodcock- and songbird-shooting (lapwings and larks) (lines 119-34), while spring brings fishing (lines 135-46), and summer returns with the pursuit of the hart, the royal chase (lines 147-64):

See! the bold Youth strain up the threatning Steep,
Rush thro' the Thickets, down the Vallies sweep,
Hang o'er their Coursers Heads with eager Speed,
And Earth rolls back beneath the flying Steed.
Let old Arcadia boast her ample Plain,
Th'Immortal Huntress, and her Virgin Train;
Nor envy Windsor! since thy Shades
have seen
As bright a Goddess, and as chast a Queen;
Whose Care, like hers, protects the Sylvan Reign,
The Earth's fair Light, and Empress of the Main.

(lines 155-64)

That seasonal round of blood sport is how we know all's right with England, the empire, and the world. The shot larks may “fall, and leave their little Lives in Air” (line 134), the glorious plumage of the pheasant may make his death peculiarly poignant, and the human desire to kill something may even corrupt other species: “Beasts, urg'd by us, their Fellow Beasts pursue, / And learn of Man each other to undo” (lines 123-24). But however philosophically ambivalent Pope may sound, his criticism of the bloodiness of field sports functions both literally, as in these two lines, and more metaphorically elsewhere, as a parenthetical intrusion. The ultimate argument of the poem is that these sports are preferable to war. Father Thames is succinctly explicit in his prophecy regarding a future Pax Britannica: “The shady Empire shall retain no Trace / Of War or Blood, but in the Sylvan Chace” (lines 371-72). Imperial Britain demands that “Arms” be employed on somebody, so let them be “employ'd on Birds and Beasts alone” (line 374).

Blood sports may just be preferable to war, and the unfolding of hunting seasons for game may assure social harmony in the realm at a regrettable price, but one thing is unambiguously clear: the ideology of governance as good stewardship. This preoccupation recurs throughout Pope's writing, including his praise of Anne as lax enforcer of forest law in Windsor-Forest. In previous reigns—William I's, and by coded insinuation, William III's—the tyranny of forest law laid waste to vast tracts of land for royal pleasure in the chase, and subjects were as expendable as, though less well fed than, his majesty's deer:

What wonder then, a Beast or Subject slain
Were equal Crimes in a Despotick Reign;
Both doom'd alike for sportive Tyrants bled,
But while the Subject starv'd, the Beast was fed.

(lines 57-60)

The return of a Stuart to the throne has not only restored hunting to its proper place in the cycle of things, but allowed commoners to repossess their rights in the forest. Because Anne has not been “displeas'd” to see “the peaceful Cottage rise” or “gath'ring Flocks on unknown Mountains fed,” or “yellow Harvests spread” “O'er sandy Wilds”:

The Forests wonder'd at th'unusual Grain,
And secret Transport touch'd the conscious Swain.
Fair Liberty, Britannia's Goddess,
rears
Her chearful Head, and leads the golden Years.

(lines 86-92)

Pope's praise of Anne as a good steward, summarized in the punning line “And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns” (line 42), parallels his self-praise as generous host in The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased twenty years later:

Content with little, I can piddle here
On Broccoli and mutton, round the year;
But ancient friends, (tho' poor, or out of play)
That touch my Bell, I cannot turn away.
'Tis true, no Turbots dignify my boards,
But gudgeons, flounders, what my Thames affords.
To Hounslow-heath I point, and Bansted-down,
Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own.

(lines 137-44)

Pope's poetic support for this principle of stewardship was most crucial, I think, in making his work appeal to his aristocratic patrons and friends—the Bathursts, Burlingtons, Bolingbrokes, Cobhams, etc.:

          Who then shall grace, or who improve the Soil?
Who plants like bathurst, or who
builds like boyle.
'Tis Use alone that sanctifies Expence,
And Splendour borrows all her rays from Sense.
          His Father's Acres who enjoys in peace,
Or makes his Neighbours glad, if he encrease;
Whose chearful Tenants bless their yearly toil,
Yet to their Lord owe more than to the soil;
Whose ample Lawns are not asham'd to feed
The milky heifer and deserving steed;
Whose rising Forests, not for pride or show,
But future Buildings, future Navies grow:
Let his plantations stretch from down to down,
First shade a Country, and then raise a Town.

(Epistle to Burlington, lines 177-90)

And this ideology of the proper good stewardship of land involves a managerial relation to the rural and the natural world. So does the suburban desire to tidy up the countryside as if it were one's own garden.

A suburban consumer's attitude like Pope's often proffers a sensitivity toward animal sensibilities that makes one peculiarly likely to find things in the country—still the scene of food production and animal excretion as well as extermination—less than lovely. The suburbanite itches to manage and regulate such things, such flows, that the country might be generally picturesque and pleasant to walk in. Visiting the countryside even today is second only to watching television as Britain's favorite pastime: “On a summer Sunday afternoon, the Countryside Commission estimate that eighteen million people, two fifths of the population, like to get away from it all and go to the country.”³⁹ The historical triumph of walking in the countryside over hunting, riding, and field sports is bound up with the Twickenhamization of the countryside, and in Pope and Montagu we can see some of this conflict being played out, as it is still being played out, however residually, in social antagonisms and debates in Britain today.

So let us keep in mind Pope as a figure of exclusion mainstreamed, as a Jacobite canonized, and as a suburban intellectual. For the land-improving classes, Pope served as a legitimating arbiter of taste. Thanks to his influence, the standards applied to country estates were increasingly suburban. As a poet of social criticism and satire, as a promoter of the industry of domestic tourism, particularly of the stately home and country park variety, and as a critic of blood sports and a would-be vegetarian pronouncer upon the proper management of the English countryside, Pope often sounds oddly like our contemporary, despite some obvious differences. He insinuates Montagu into his satires as filthy Sappho or a rustic, if not plebeian, poacher, living off rabbits and roots; and she ventriloquizes him incriminating himself as a toady, a snob, and a seditious fool.

When Montagu takes her revenge on Pope, she does so by ventriloquizing his own verse, with its mannerisms and pretensions made absurdly self-revealing. She so closely shares a certain metropolitan social space around Twickenham that she can twist Pope's own texts inside out. He is for her the chief symptom of the very commercialization and vulgar cheapening of the culture he himself affects to deplore. Her satirical strategy exposes Pope's self-proclaimed superior taste as a cloak for the envy felt by members of the middle-class like himself toward social superiors. Through her ventriloquization of his voice in a poetic epistle to Bolingbroke, we observe how Pope's greed and his perpetual financial cramp drive him to write splenetic attacks on other people's feasts. According to Montagu, his sycophantic relation to Bolingbroke is based on snobbery as well as bad politics—Opposition to the Hanoverians, Whigs (such as Edward Wortley Montagu and Lady Mary), and Sir Robert Walpole; possibly Jacobite treason. Far from being content to “piddle here / On Broccoli and mutton, round the year,” Pope envies the rich their elaborate repasts:

          When I see smoaking on a Booby's board
Fat Ortalans, and Pies of Perigord,
My self am mov'd to high poetick rage
(The Homer, and the Horace of the Age).
Puppies! who have the insolence to dine
With smiling beauties, and with sparkling wine,
While I retire, plagu'd with an Empty Purse,
Eat Brocoli, and kiss my antient Nurse.
          But had we flourish'd when stern Henry reign'[d]
Our good Designs had been but ill explain'd;
The Ax had cut your solid Reasoning short,
I, in the Porter's Lodge, been scourg'd at Court,
To better Times kind heaven reserv'd our Bir[th,]
Happy for us that Coxcombs are on Earth.
          Mean spirits seek their Villany to hide,
We shew our venom'd Souls with noble Pride,
And, in bold strokes, have all Mankind defy'd;
Past o'er the bounds that keep Mankind in aw[e,]
And laugh'd at Justice, Gratitude and Law:
While our Admirers stare with dumb surprize
Treason, and Scandal, we monopolize.
Yet this remains our more peculiar boast,
You scape the Block, and I the Whipping-Post.

(P[ope] to Bolingbroke, lines 76-98)

From Montagu's point of view, it is evidence of the absurdity of the times that Pope and Bolingbroke can command the attention of the reading public with a seeming monopoly on the literature of impolite comment—treason and scandal—while denouncing the current government so openly. Once upon a time, during the reign of Henry VIII, Bolingbroke would have been beheaded for such treason, and Pope merely horse-whipped, as appropriate for one from the meaner, servile classes.

I think we have to admit that Lady Mary gives as good as she gets. It is hard not to credit much of her portrait of Pope, though the picture might be abhorrent to some Pope fans. Now where is she positioning herself, exactly, in order to ventriloquize Pope's self-incrimination? I think that much of her identity is staked on a certain kind of upper-class female identification with the culture of hunting and blood sports. Precisely what antagonizes Pope and gives him profound ambivalence about hunting culture is what gives her a sense of superiority, in spite of the official gender-ban on women speaking their minds in this period. The semiotics of riding the country, or surveying the nation from a position of dominance and horse-mastery, seems crucial to her identity—even to her bodily integrity and her health, as she reiterates over the years:

You'l wonder to hear that short silence is occasion'd by not having a moment unemploy'd at Twictnam, but I pass many hours on Horseback, and I'll assure you ride stag hunting, which I know you stare to hear of. I have arriv'd to vast courrage and skill that way, and am as well pleas'd with it as with the Acquisition of a new sense. His Royal Highness hunts in Richmond Park, and I make one of the Beau monde in his Train. I desire you after this Account not to name the Word old Woman to me any more; I approach to 15 nearer than I did 10 year ago, and am in hopes to improve ev'ry year in Health and Vivacity.

(letter to Lady Mar, August 1725)⁴⁰

Proficiency at riding to stag-hounds gives Montagu the pleasure of “the Acquisition of a new sense.” She is happier making “one of the Beau monde” in the Prince's train out hunting than in more urban or domestic settings. She is the English type of hunter-gatherer, not the settled agricultural type. The stewardship of land, dynastic preservation of the large estate, don't really come into it. She writes of riding and hunting sounding more like a pleased insider within English culture than she does almost anywhere else in her writing.

What is striking in this picture is the absence—are they an excluded middle?—of the rural lower classes, some of whom do participate in hunting and country sports, and some of whom do still hunt-and-gather, if not poach, and eat rabbits and root vegetables. They are the modern representatives of the use-rights-seeking, poaching, hunting-without-property-qualification Blacks, with whom Pope may have sympathized more than he was prepared to say openly. A gardener who could identify, to a certain extent, with gatherers and hunters of the lower classes, he was at least ambivalent about the importance of field or blood sports within English culture. And about hunting as a rural lower-class activity he had something, however covert or brief, to say.

The compensations which a Pope and a Montagu sought through literary production differed. Pope's writing must be connected with a desire to acquire symbolic as well as commercial capital, with upward mobility, in short, while Montagu's writing seems often to have served her as a compensation for failed romance and thwarted desires—political, sexual, and touristic.⁴¹ In spite of being a woman and resenting gender restrictions, Montagu has more scope for acting than Pope; she can see the point in physical dash, and riding and hunting as sport and exercise; and, as a consequence, she seems to resent other people's pleasures less than he does. Pope becomes much more fanatical as he is more restricted in his outlets, and more dependent upon the generosity, if not charity, of others, for his pleasures than is Montagu. By my definition, he is more thoroughly “suburban” than she is, much more likely to seem like our contemporary, unless we make a habit of nomadic tourism or take up the life of expatriate exile.

Yet both Pope and Montagu seek to aestheticize and immortalize the minutiae of their very existences in writing, to compose an aesthetics of the everyday. This desire for control over one's own landscape, one's own small patch, is a profoundly domestic and self-righteous way of viewing the world. And the more one seeks to make one's life and its terrain one's own, each consumer purchase reflective of one's tastes and politics, the more vegetarianism and animal rights seem to come into play, and the more the notion of field sports and hunting as part of a national identity comes to seem abhorrent. Some protesters may advocate the rights of foxes over the rights of farmers or riders to hounds, but is there not also a desire to be forever rid of the symbolic privilege of toffs on horseback? To be a plain Alexander Pope getting his own back at a Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? The literature of social comment has usually been dependent upon such breaches.

Notes

1. See David Foxon and James McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 51-101; this passage p. 101.

2. Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 24.

3. LETTERS of the Right Honourable Lady M——y W———y M————e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, Among other Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks; Drawn from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers, 3 vols. (London: Printed for T. Becker and P. A. De Hondt, 1763). The modern scholarly edition, which labels these the “Turkish Embassy Letters,” is The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-67).

4. The recent publication of Montagu's Romance Writings, ed. Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), provides new autobiographical evidence of this period of Montagu's life, in the “Italian Memoir,” pp. 81-105.

5. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace with the assistance of Edwine M. Martz (London and New Haven: Oxford University Press and Yale University Press, 1965), vol. xxxiv, p. 255.

6. All quotations from Pope's verse are taken from The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text With Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963). See also The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, 11 vols. (London: Methuen, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-69).

7. “Her own statement … was this; that at some ill-chosen time, when she least expected what romances call a declaration, he made such passionate love to her, as, in spite of her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an immoderate fit of laughter; from which moment he became her implacable enemy,” “Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu,” in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 37.

8. See Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) and Louis A. Landa, “Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm,” in Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 178-98.

9. Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 112, 118. See also Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

10. Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Brean S. Hammond, Pope (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986).

11. Three studies illustrate the value of bringing explicitly politicized forms of literary inquiry to bear on eighteenth-century texts, a movement that began in the mid-1980s. See Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown's introductory essay in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 1-22, and the essay in that volume by John Barrell and Harriet Guest, “On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem,” pp. 121-43. Most recently, Colin Nicholson has investigated Pope's own financial investments in relation to his satires in Writing & the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

12. Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

13. See Douglas Brooks-Davies, Pope's Dunciad and the Queen of Night: A Study in Emotional Jacobitism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) and The Mercurian Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).

14. Howard Erskine-Hill, “Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in His Time,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15, 2 (1981-82), pp. 123-48, and “Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism?,” in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 49-69.

15. The most recent study in this vein is Murray G. H. Pittock's Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

16. See Pat Rogers, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 168-83.

17. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

18. Ibid., p. 31.

19. Ibid., pp. 29-32.

20. Ibid., p. 294.

21. See Claudia N. Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), and my The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 43-55.

22. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 153. See also Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, “This long Disease, my Life”: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 7-82.

23. See Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 69-88.

24. See Peter Martin, Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984); John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), and Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992); and Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

25. Malcolm Kelsall, The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 59, 78.

26. Robert Dodsley, A Collection of Poems in four volumes by Several Hands, 4th edn. (London: Printed by J. Hughs for R. and R. Dodsley, 1755). In 1982 the set was held by the Pforzheimer Library, New York, but it has since moved to the British Library (shelfmark C.107.dg.28).

27. Isobel Grundy, “The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Reaction to the Printing of her Poems,” The Book Collector, 31, 1 (1982), pp. 19-37; this passage on p. 37. The set contains six volumes in all, though Montagu seems to have annotated only the original four from 1755. Volumes v and vi were published in March 1758, the year in which Montagu made her notes, but Grundy opines that, given the slowness of the mails between London and Venice, she probably never saw them (pp. 22-23).

28. See Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1991); Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers: and Meyda Yegenoglu, “Supplementing the Orientalist Lack: European Ladies in the Harem,” in Mahmut Mutman and Meyda Yegenoglu (eds.), Inscriptions 6: Orientalism and Cultural Differences (Santa Cruz: Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993), pp. 45-80. Lowe gives us a Montagu whose feminist identification with Turkish women in the hamam disrupts the monolithic othering of Orientalism (Critical Terrains, pp. 40-52). Yegenoglu counters with a sharp critique that reveals how inescapable certain Orientalist assumptions remain, even for so unconventional an Englishwoman as Montagu. In order to position herself in the women's baths, Montagu has to assume a masculine, Orientalizing, voyeuristic gaze. Any possible homoeroticism is overcome by Montagu's assuming the position of a colonial male observer (“Supplementing the Orientalist Lack,” pp. 67-70).

29. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978; London and New York: Penguin, 1995).

30. Marcia Pointon, “Killing Pictures,” in John Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 39-72; this passage p. 63.

31. Yegenoglu is the best and most incisive critic on this question, in “Supplementing the Orientalist Lack.”

32. Srinivas Aravamudan, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization,” ELH, 62, 1 (1995), pp. 69-104; this passage p. 70.

33. All quotations from Montagu's poetry are taken from Essays and Poems, ed. Halsband and Grundy.

34. A journey through The Crimea to Constantinople. In A Series Of Letters from the right honourable Elizabeth Lady Craven, to his serene highness The Margrave Of Brandenbourg, Anspach, and Bareith. Written In the Year M DCC LXXXVI (London: Printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1789), p. 105.

35. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M——y W———y M————e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, among other curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks. Drawn from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers, A New Edition, Complete in One Volume (London: Printed for John Taylor, 1790), MS. notes by John C. Hobhouse, AM, 1813. British Library shelfmark: 1477.b.29.

36. See John Roberts, “The Greening of Capitalism: The Political Economy of the Tory Garden Festivals,” in Simon Pugh (ed.), Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 231-45.

37. See Carole Fabricant, “The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property,” in Nussbaum and Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century, pp. 254-75.

38. See Pope's contribution to The Guardian, no. 61, “Against Barbarity to Animals” (21 May 1713) in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1. The Earlier Works, 1711-1720, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press and Basil Blackwell, 1936; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968); and Epistle iii of the Essay on Man (lines 152-68 and 241-68).

39. Nigel Duckers and Huw Davies, A Place in the Country: Social Change in Rural England (London: Michael Joseph, 1990), p. 155.

40. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Halsband, vol. 11, pp. 54-55.

41. Here I agree with Elizabeth Bohls: “The most painful, deeply repressed, inarticulate and virtually inarticulable longings of eighteenth-century British women were, I suspect, not sexual but finally political,” Women Travel Writers, p. 45.

Further Reading

Aravamudan, Srinivas, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization,” ELH, 62, 1 (1995), pp. 69-104.

Barrell, John and Guest, Harriet, “On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem,” in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 121-43.

Brower, Reuben A., Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).

Brown, Laura, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

———. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).

Erskine-Hill, Howard, “Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in His Time,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15, 2 (1981-82), pp. 123-48.

———. “Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism?,” in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 49-69.

———. The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

Fabricant, Carole, “The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Consumption of Private Property,” in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 254-75.

Foxon, David, and McLaverty, James, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Gerrard, Christine, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

Grundy, Isobel, “The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Reaction to the Printing of her Poems,” The Book Collector, 31, 1 (1982), pp. 19-37.

Grundy, Isobel, ed., Romance Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

Halsband, Robert, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).

Hammond, Brean S., Pope (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986).

Hunt, John Dixon, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

———. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992).

Kelsall, Malcolm, The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Landa, Louis A., “Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm,” in Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 178-98.

Lowe, Lisa, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Lowenthal, Cynthia, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994).

Mack, Maynard, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).

———. Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press; New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1985).

Martin, Peter, Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1984).

Pointon, Marcia, “Killing Pictures,” in John Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 39-72.

Pollak, Ellen, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Rogers, Pat, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Rumbold, Valerie, Women's Place in Pope's World (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Sherburn, George (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).

———. The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).

Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Thomas, Claudia N., Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).

Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

Yegenoglu, Meyda, “Supplementing the Orientalist Lack: European Ladies in the Harem,” in Mahmut Mutman and Meyda Yegenoglu (eds.), Inscriptions 6: Orientalism and Cultural Differences (Santa Cruz: Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993), pp. 45-80.