Pope’s Social Contexts

Pope’s earliest poems emerged from his various childhood and teenage relationships. For whom did he write those poems and by whom were they read? This chapter investigates Pope’s early social milieu through a focus on two specific communities: the Catholic diaspora of the Thames Valley and the friends of the late John Dryden, including Buckingham, Granville, St John, and Higgons. It traces Pope’s earliest contact with those figures and their influence on his poems. Reconstructing Pope’s connections to these circles provides essential context for understanding his early literary development. It also enables new understanding of his political awakening as a teenager. The final section of the chapter examines An Essay on Criticism (1711) within the context of similar poems by Buckingham and Granville, notably An Essay upon Satire (1679), An Essay upon Poetry (1682), and An Essay on Unnatural Flights in Poetry (1701). By ignoring Buckingham and Granville as irrelevant and second-rate authors, previous scholars have overlooked the fact that their poems were Pope’s principal generic models for the Essay

Miscellany Publication

This chapter addresses Pope’s hitherto neglected use of miscellany publication. With the exceptions of An Essay on Criticism, The Temple of Fame, and Windsor-Forest, all Pope’s early printed poems first appeared in miscellanies or periodicals. Three miscellanies are of particular importance: the sixth and final volume of Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies (1709), Bernard Lintot’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (1712), and Poems on Several Occasions (1717), also published by Lintot. A section is devoted to each of those miscellanies. Pope made his public print debut in the first one, was the guiding spirit behind the second, and the editor of the third. In his roles as contributor and editor, Pope encouraged friends to contribute to the collections too, dragging them from the world of clandestine scribal publication into that of print. The chapter scrutinizes the content surrounding Pope’s poems in these miscellanies and teases out the sophisticated political resonances of those texts. By 1717 Pope had transformed the miscellany from a mere vessel for minor occasional verse into a focal point for dissident wits who otherwise wrote principally for scribal publication.

Regime Change

Soon after the Hanoverian succession, Pope ceased writing original poems of consequence and instead began two new projects: his translation of the Iliad and the publication of his collected Works of 1717. This chapter asks what prompted this change of direction. The opening section traces Pope’s movements and those of his friends during the messy and unpredictable transfer of power in 1714. Although Pope’s private correspondence and manuscript poems signal his disaffection with the new regime, his public persona is distinctly apolitical. Pope countered accusations of treachery by disowning political readings of his earlier poems and by rebranding those works as timeless literary exercises. His translation of Homer and the publication of his Works were calculated to enshrine his reputation as an author of classic literary status. By publishing a Works and not a Poems on Several Occasions, this chapter argues, Pope inserted himself into a canonical tradition divorced from contemporary poems on affairs of state. His emergence as a literary colossus was motivated by political necessity as much as it was by raw ambition or vanity.

Manuscript Circulation

This chapter challenges enduring assumptions about Pope’s early uses of scribal publication. Drawing on a wealth of famous and hitherto overlooked or unknown manuscript sources, it reconstructs the early circulation of Pope’s poems. The chapter explores the methods by which Pope’s fair copy holographs circulated among select readers and, in the second section, examine important differences between the manuscript and printed texts of his poems. The third section traces the distribution of his early poems in contemporary manuscript miscellanies. Pope’s earliest manuscript readers, it argues, viewed him as the latest addition to a grand tradition of seventeenth-century royalist poetry. The last section of the chapter investigates what remains of Pope’s juvenile epic, Alcander, Prince of Rhodes. Tracing the textual history of the Alcander manuscript from its origins in 1701 to its destruction in 1717, it argues that the poem’s non-appearance in print was probably due to political factors rather than literary ones.

Introduction

When and how did Pope become the literary colossus we know today? Until now scholars of Pope’s early career have focused on his involvement with the so-called ‘Scriblerus Club’ comprising Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, and Parnell, and the circles of famous authors such as Joseph Addison and William Wycherley. This introduction begins by setting out a new context for understanding Pope’s early career: in the literary circles dominated by the Duke of Buckingham and his friends. It then explains the holistic methodological approach of the book and how its questions intersect with existing scholarship on Pope and his world. This is followed by a brief outline of the chapters.

Censorship and Political Editing

Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized literary editing as a political activity. This final chapter examines Pope’s overlooked role as the editor of Buckingham’s posthumous Works, published at the height of the Atterbury Plot in 1723. This controversial book was seized upon publication and censored by the government; as the editor, Pope himself was taken in for questioning. This episode was the most politically dangerous of Pope’s career. This chapter sheds light on Pope’s involvement in the edition and his immersion in the conspiratorial diaspora of Buckingham House. The subscription for the edition was used to disguise fundraising for Atterbury’s plot for a Stuart restoration; Atterbury, the Duchess of Buckingham, John Barber, and Mary Caesar were all involved in this plan. Why did Pope return to the conspiratorial fold after his retirement from political affairs in 1714? He too must have known about the plan and believed that it could succeed. By editing and emending Buckingham’s Works for the press, this chapter suggests, Pope found an opportunity to express ideas that he simply could not afford to ventilate under his own name.

Conclusion

This conclusion draws together the findings of individual chapters. It establishes that the political animus behind Pope’s verse can be traced back to his engagement with poets who have been lost to posterity; that his allusions to the great authors of the seventeenth century—Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Cowley—were usually refracted through the literary critical judgements of his milieu; that he consistently returned to the topic of dynastic politics through his early poems; that he emerged from his milieu because, unlike some of his contemporaries, he was willing to distance himself from politics by constructing himself as an aloof literary author. The conclusion explores the significance of this shift from political authorship to literary authorship and its influence on our modern ideas about the literary canon.

Windsor-Forest and the Politics of Panegyric

This chapter considers Pope’s most important early poem, Windsor-Forest, as a panegyric to Stuart monarchy. It traces the textual history of Windsor-Forest and investigates moments of contact between this poem and others by Pope’s friends and contemporaries, including Diaper, Higgons, Finch, Granville, and John Philips. It begins by exploring the enduring appeal of Stuart panegyric and the common motif of the renewed golden age before moving on to examine two of the most famous conceits of the poem: a fiat and a metamorphosis. Those motifs were frequently deployed by Pope’s contemporaries to reflect on current theories of monarchy. By studying the development of Windsor-Forest in context—and alongside parallel developments in contemporary politics—this chapter begins to explain when and why Pope’s political outlook turned from confidence to anxiety and disaffection.