Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was born on May 21, 1688 in London, the son of Alexander Pope senior, a linen merchant, and his second wife Edith Turner. Both parents were Roman Catholics, and the year of his birth proved consequential: the Glorious Revolution that winter replaced the Catholic James II with William and Mary, and a series of penal statutes soon tightened restrictions on English Catholics ^[1]. Catholics could not attend Oxford or Cambridge, hold public office, vote, or (after 1700) live within ten miles of London. The family withdrew from the capital, settling eventually at Binfield in Windsor Forest, Berkshire, around 1700 ^[2].

Formal schooling was therefore brief and irregular. Pope learned his letters from a priest, spent short spells at Catholic schools at Twyford and in London, and after the move to Binfield taught himself, reading voraciously in English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek ^[1]. He later said he had been his own master from about the age of twelve. The forest years gave him both a library education and the pastoral scenery that colored his earliest verse.

At roughly the same age, illness marked him for life. Pope contracted tuberculosis of the bone, now identified as Pott disease, probably from infected milk. The disease curved his spine, halted his growth at about four feet six inches, and left him with headaches, respiratory trouble, and chronic pain that he later called, in a letter, this long disease, my life ^[3]. He required help dressing and wore stiffened bodices to hold himself upright. The combination of religious exclusion and physical fragility shaped nearly every choice in the career that followed.

Precocity opened doors that the law had closed. As a teenager Pope circulated verses among retired men of letters in the Windsor Forest neighborhood, including the former diplomat Sir William Trumbull and the aging playwright William Wycherley, who introduced him to London literary circles ^[2]. His Pastorals, written by his own account at sixteen, appeared in Jacob Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies in 1709 and drew immediate notice ^[1].

Two years later, at twenty three, Pope published An Essay on Criticism (1711), a verse treatise on taste and judgment that supplied English with phrases still in circulation, among them the observation that a little learning is a dangerous thing and the line to err is human, to forgive divine ^[4]. The essay won praise from Joseph Addison's influential Spectator and established Pope as the most promising poet of his generation.

His reputation was sealed by The Rape of the Lock, first published in two cantos in 1712 and expanded to five in 1714. The poem transformed a real quarrel between two Catholic families, sparked when Lord Petre snipped a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair, into a mock epic complete with sylphs, a card game rendered as battle, and machinery borrowed from Homer and Milton ^[2]. Critics from Samuel Johnson onward have treated it as the finest mock heroic poem in English ^[5]. Windsor Forest (1713), celebrating the Peace of Utrecht, aligned him publicly with Tory circles, and he grew close to Jonathan Swift, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, and Thomas Parnell, with whom he formed the Scriblerus Club in 1714 to satirize false learning ^[1].

The central question of who was Alexander Pope in his own time has a plain answer: he was the poet who made literature pay. In 1713 he announced a translation of Homer's Iliad by subscription, delivering it in six volumes between 1715 and 1720. The Odyssey followed in 1725 and 1726, completed with the assistants William Broome and Elijah Fenton. The two projects earned Pope roughly nine or ten thousand pounds, an enormous sum that freed him permanently from patrons and from political hire ^[1]. The classicist Richard Bentley reportedly judged it a pretty poem but not Homer, yet Johnson called the Iliad translation the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen ^[5].

Independence purchased, Pope turned editor and then satirist. His 1725 edition of Shakespeare modernized and sometimes flattened the text, and the scholar Lewis Theobald exposed its errors in Shakespeare Restored (1726). Pope answered by installing Theobald as king of the dunces in The Dunciad (1728), a mock epic tracing the empire of Dulness over hack writers and corrupt booksellers. He enlarged it repeatedly, and in the final four book version of 1743 replaced Theobald with the poet laureate Colley Cibber ^[2].

The 1730s brought his mature ethical poetry. An Essay on Man (1733 to 1734), addressed to his friend Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, surveyed the human place in the order of creation and yielded the famous conclusion that the proper study of mankind is man ^[4]. Around it he grouped the Moral Essays and the Imitations of Horace, loose adaptations of Roman satire aimed at Walpole's Britain. The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) defended his own career and fixed his enemies, above all Lord Hervey as Sporus, in couplets of lasting venom ^[1]. Among Alexander Pope achievements, contemporaries counted equally his perfection of the heroic couplet: balanced, antithetical, compressed lines that no rival matched.

Pope never married. His closest attachments were to two women he met in his twenties. With Lady Mary Wortley Montagu he conducted a witty correspondence while she traveled to Constantinople, but the friendship collapsed around 1722 into a bitter enmity that fed some of his cruelest satirical portraits ^[2]. With Martha Blount, a Catholic neighbor from his Berkshire years, he maintained a lifelong intimacy; he addressed the Epistle to a Lady to her and left her the bulk of his estate ^[1].

In 1719, flush with Homer money, Pope leased a villa at Twickenham on the Thames, then a village upstream from London. There he laid out five acres of gardens and excavated his celebrated grotto, a tunnel under the road decorated with minerals, shells, and mirrors, which became one of the sights of the age and an early monument of the English landscape garden movement ^[6]. He lived at Twickenham with his widowed mother until her death in 1733, and entertained Swift, Bolingbroke, and the painter Jonathan Richardson there.

Daily life remained a struggle. His deformity made him a target; enemies published caricatures of him as a hunchbacked ape, and the dunces he attacked answered with pamphlets mocking his body and his religion ^[3]. He was also a careful manager of his own image, arranging the semi-authorized publication of his letters in the 1730s through an elaborate scheme involving the pirate bookseller Edmund Curll, an episode that helped shape early copyright practice ^[2].

Through the late 1730s Pope stood as the unofficial laureate of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. The two dialogues published as the Epilogue to the Satires (1738) pressed political attack about as far as the law allowed, and after 1738 he largely gave up new satire, telling friends that verse could not reach men unashamed of exposure ^[1]. He planned a grand philosophical and patriotic scheme, including an epic on the legendary Trojan founder Brutus, but completed little of it.

His final sustained effort was the New Dunciad of 1742 and the revised four book Dunciad of 1743, which closes with a vision of universal darkness burying all as Dulness extinguishes art, science, and religion ^[4]. The revision cost him a late quarrel with Cibber, who retaliated in pamphlets that wounded him more than he admitted.

By 1744 asthma and dropsy were added to his lifelong ailments. Attended by friends including Bolingbroke and cared for by Martha Blount, he died at his Twickenham villa on May 30, 1744, nine days after his fifty sixth birthday ^[1]. He accepted the last rites of the Catholic Church, remarking that it looked right, and was buried beside his parents in St Mary's Church, Twickenham, having refused Westminster Abbey ^[2].

For half a century after his death Pope defined what English poetry was supposed to sound like. Samuel Johnson's life of Pope in the Lives of the Poets (1781) asked whether, if Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found, and treated his craftsmanship as the standard of the art ^[5]. The Romantics rebelled against exactly that standard: Wordsworth and Coleridge took his polish for artifice, and a long nineteenth century debate over his rank, joined by Byron in his defense, kept the poems controversial. Twentieth century critics, from the editors of the Twickenham Edition of his works onward, restored him to the center of the canon as a satirist and moralist of the first order ^[2].

Hard Alexander Pope facts support the scale of the legacy. After Shakespeare he is among the most quoted writers in English; the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations carries more than two hundred entries under his name, including hope springs eternal, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and damn with faint praise ^[4]. He effectively invented authorship as an independent profession in England, using subscription publishing and shrewd control of copyrights to live by his pen alone ^[1].

His material traces survive as well. The grotto at Twickenham still exists beneath a school and is periodically opened to visitors, while his portrait by Jonathan Richardson and others hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London ^[6]. Three centuries on, the compressed wit of his couplets keeps him what he made himself: impossible to ignore.