The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE RAPE OF THE LOCK AND OTHER MAJOR WRITINGS

  ALEXANDER POPE was born in London in 1688, the son of a well-to-do cloth merchant who thought it prudent soon afterward to retire from trade in order to avoid penalties against Roman Catholics. Though never especially religious himself, the poet remained loyal to the family faith, even when conversion to the Church of England would have brought social and political rewards.

  Pope showed very early an extraordinary gift for language, and at the age of eight became enraptured with poetry through an illustrated translation of Homer. In childhood he contracted tuberculosis of the spine, which left him hunchbacked and diminutive, and reinforced a conviction that his best hope for achievement was as a writer. When he was twelve his family moved to Binfield, near Windsor, where a number of distinguished older men encouraged his poetic development, and in 1709 he launched his career with a set of four pastorals. Soon afterward ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1711) gained fame, and ‘Windsor Forest’ (1713) used familiar scenes from his youth to develop an impressive historical and political view of England. By the time the mock-epic ‘Rape of the Lock’ was published (1712, with an augmented version in 1714), Pope stood unchallenged as the greatest poet of the age.

  With the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the writers and statesmen with whom Pope was allied found themselves in permanent opposition, and as literary rivalries surfaced as well, he found himself impelled to criticize a culture that he regarded as artistically degraded and politically corrupt. Meanwhile he settled in a riverside villa at Twickenham, where he cultivated extensive gardens and devoted himself to the arduous labour of translating Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (the latter with the help of others), which made him financially independent. After a period of withdrawal from publication, he re-emerged in 1728 as a trenchant satirist. The first version of the ‘Dunciad’ (1728) was followed in the 1730s by a long series of poems in a mode of conversational commentary, many of them brilliantly adapting ‘Epistles’ and ‘Satires’ by Horace. Pope’s views on psychology and culture were further expressed in a set of four ‘Epistles to Several Persons’ and in the ambitious ‘Essay on Man’. His final major work was an enlarged and revised ‘Dunciad’ in 1743; he died the following year.

  LEO DAMROSCH, Research Professor of Literature at Harvard University, was educated at Yale, Cambridge and Princeton, has taught at the universities of Virginia and Maryland, and is the author of eight books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and culture, including The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius.

  ALEXANDER POPE

  The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  LEO DAMROSCH

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  This collection first published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Introduction and notes © Leo Damrosch, 2011

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194629-0

  Contents

  Chronology

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Texts

  EARLY POEMS

  An Essay on Criticism

  Windsor Forest

  Prologue to Mr Addison’s Tragedy of Cato

  The Rape of the Lock

  Epistle to Mrs Teresa Blount

  Eloisa to Abelard

  Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady

  From the Iliad

  LATER POEMS

  [Two epigrams]

  An Essay on Man

  Epistles to Several Persons

  I To Sir Richard Temple, Lord Cobham

  II To a Lady

  III To Allen Lord Bathurst

  IV To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington

  The Fourth Satire of Dr John Donne Versified

  An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

  [Imitations of Horace]

  Satire, II, i

  Satire, II, ii

  Epistle, I, i

  Epistle, II, i

  Epistle, II, ii

  Ode, IV, i

  Ode, IV, ix

  Epilogue to the Satires

  The Dunciad

  PROSE WRITINGS

  From the Preface to the Iliad

  From the Preface to The Works of Shakespeare

  From Peri Bathous, or: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry

  Selected Letters

  Notes

  Chronology

  1688 21 May Born, son of Alexander Pope, linen merchant, and his second wife Edith Turner Pope. In December, in the Glorious Revolution, the Catholic James II is forced to abdicate in favour of his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange.

  1692 Reacting to restrictions on Catholics in trade, Pope’s father moves his family to Hammersmith, outside London.

  1700 The family retires to Binfield in Windsor Forest and near Windsor Castle, where the boy’s poetic talent is recognized and encouraged by his family and by distinguished friends of advanced years. Contracts tuberculosis of the spine, stunting growth and causing agonizing headaches.

  1702 Queen Anne succeeds to the throne. Start of the War of the Spanish Succession.

  1704 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. Famous victory by Marlborough at Blenheim, for which the nation will later reward him with Blenheim Palace.

  1705 Begins writing Pastorals.

  1707 Meets Martha and Teresa Blount and forms lifelong friendship, especially with Martha.

  1708 St Paul’s Cathedral completed, thirty-five years after construction began.

  1709 First publication of Pope’s poems, in a London miscellany.

  1710 Tory ministry formed under Robert Harley and Henry St John (later Lords Oxford and Bolingbroke).

  1711 ‘An Essay on Criticism’ immensely successful. Occasional contributions to the new periodical Spectator, and short-lived friendship with its co-editor Joseph Addison.

  1712 First version of ‘The Rape of the Lock’, in two cantos.

>   1713 Forms Scriblerus Club with Swift, John Arbuthnot, John Gay, and Thomas Parnell. Treaty of Utrecht ends the War of the Spanish Succession; the peace is celebrated in ‘Windsor Forest’. Addison’s tragedy Cato, with a prologue by Pope, a great success.

  1714 Expanded five-canto ‘Rape of the Lock’. Death of Queen Anne and accession of George I ends the Tory ministry, forcing Bolingbroke into exile. Swift reluctantly accepts position as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in his native Dublin.

  1715 First volume of Iliad translation, funded by subscriptions paid by wealthy purchasers (further instalments in each of the next three years). Infatuation with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, soon to become an enemy. After failure of a Jacobite rebellion intended to restore the Stuart monarchy, legislation further restricts Catholic rights.

  1716 In response to the anti-Catholic measures the Pope family moves to Chiswick, close to London.

  1717 Pope publishes a volume of Works, including some new poems, notably ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ and ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’. Collaborates with Gay and Arbuthnot on a farce, Three Hours after Marriage. Death of Pope’s father.

  1718 Pope leases villa and garden of five acres at Twickenham, where he will spend the rest of his life, and moves there with his mother. Death of Parnell.

  1719 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. Death of Addison.

  1720 Final instalment of Iliad. South Sea Bubble financial crash, in which Pope is less affected than many of his friends.

  1721 Robert Walpole comes to power at the head of a Whig coalition; Pope’s political friends will remain in opposition for the rest of his life.

  1723 Pope’s friend Bishop Francis Atterbury on trial for involvement in a new Jacobite plot; Pope testifies on his behalf. After conviction, Atterbury goes into permanent exile in France. Bolingbroke is pardoned and returns to England, devoting himself henceforth to writing.

  1724 Swift’s Drapier’s Letters, exposing a British scheme to enrich profiteers by debasing Irish coinage, makes him a national hero there.

  1725 First volumes of translation of the Odyssey, with assistance from two collaborators. Six-volume edition of Shakespeare, with preface and notes by Pope.

  1726 Final instalment of Odyssey. Lewis Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored attacks Pope’s edition. Swift visits Pope, and publishes Gulliver’s Travels.

  1727 In collaboration with Swift, two volumes of Miscellanies. Swift’s final visit to England. Death of George I, succeeded by George II.

  1728 Final volume of Miscellanies, including Peri Bathous. First edition of ‘Dunciad’ in three books, with Theobald as anti-hero. Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera an unprecedented hit.

  1729 ‘Dunciad Variorum’, expanded with pseudo-scholarly prefaces and notes. Swift, ‘A Modest Proposal’.

  1730 The actor Colley Cibber appointed Poet Laureate.

  1731 Epistle IV ‘To Burlington’, first of four poems later collected as Moral Essays.

  1732 Fourth volume of Miscellanies. Death of Gay.

  1733 Epistle III ‘To Bathurst’. First three books of ‘An Essay on Man’. First poems in a series of ‘Imitations of Horace’. Death of Pope’s mother.

  1734 Epistle I ‘To Cobham’. Final book of ‘Essay on Man’. More Horatian imitations.

  1735 ‘An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ (Arbuthnot dies shortly after publication). Epistle II ‘To a Lady’. Second volume of Works. Pope’s letters published by Edmund Curll in an ‘unauthorized’ edition at which he secretly connives.

  1737 More Horatian imitations. ‘Authorized’ edition of letters. Death of Queen Caroline.

  1738 Final imitations of Horace, concluding with ‘Epilogue to the Satires’.

  1740 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded.

  1741 Memoirs of Scriblerus, compiled by Pope from contributions by the now-disbanded Scriblerus Club.

  1742 ‘The New Dunciad’ (Book IV). Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews. Swift, succumbing to dementia, officially declared of unsound mind. Handel, Messiah. Walpole driven from office and elevated to the House of Lords.

  1743 Final four-book ‘Dunciad’, with Cibber replacing Theobald as the anti-hero.

  1744 30 May Death of Pope.

  1745 Deaths of Swift and Walpole.

  Introduction

  Alexander Pope was the greatest British poet for over a century, from the death of Milton in 1674 to the advent of Blake and Wordsworth in the 1790s, yet of all our great poets he is perhaps the least read today. In part this neglect is due to his own choices, especially the inclusion of hundreds of topical references in his later poems that became dated as quickly as they were inserted. But his mastery of sounds, rhythms, and images is nothing short of brilliant, and his insights into human nature are often crystallized so memorably that they have taken root in our common language. ‘Hope springs eternal’ sounds like a proverb, but it began as an iambic pentameter line by Pope, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast.’1 In ‘An Essay on Criticism’, published in 1711 when he was only twenty-three, familiar expressions repeatedly startle by turning up in their original contexts: ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’; ‘For fools rush in where angels fear to tread’; ‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing’; ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.’2 Few people are likely to have realized, until the poem was quoted partway through the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that the title is a line from Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, expressing Eloisa’s grief at the peace her broken and guilty heart can never know; or as another of his poems has it, ‘The soul’s calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy’.3

  Pope aspired to be a poet of wisdom, and lines like these fulfil that aspiration. Byron called him ‘the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence … His poetry is the Book of Life.’ 4 Samuel Johnson, still one of his most insightful critics, declared admiringly that he had ‘a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do’.5 Yet the story of Pope’s career is also one of frustration and lowered aspirations. His extraordinary talent was recognized very early, and by his mid-twenties he had published several masterpieces, including ‘The Rape of the Lock’. For the next decade he toiled at translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey that won him financial independence and would remain standard for nearly a century. But he originally intended to build a career in the manner of Virgil, Spenser, and Milton: after beginning with pastoral and georgic verse, he would assume in due course the mantle of the great epic poet of his age. It was not to be. He could translate epics, and he could write witty mock-epics, but readers didn’t care for the elevated grandeur of epic itself. Its scope and narrative energy were being domesticated in a new form, the realist novel, and Pope found himself playing the role that many poets after him have had to play: an eloquent outsider critiquing a culture that no longer pays much attention.

  From the beginning, Pope had painful handicaps as well as great abilities. He was born in London into a well-to-do and loving family that warmly encouraged his literary aspirations, but in an era of anti-Catholic repression he was debarred from most careers and even from owning property. In childhood he contracted Pott disease, in which a tubercular infection spreads to the spine. The usual consequences of this condition are progressive bone loss, nerve pain, and deformity, and he experienced all of them. As an adult he was weak, hunchbacked, and four and a half feet tall, condemned to continuous discomfort in what he wryly called ‘this long disease, my life’.6 Amorous by temperament, he formed close friendships with several women, but seems never to have had a sexual relationship, bitterly aware that he was ‘that little Alexander the women laugh at’.7 As his poetic talent matured, he understood that it was not only his best claim to recognition, but offered an imaginative realm that co
uld provide relief from too much actuality. ‘Let me tell you,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘my life in thought and imagination is as much superior to my life in action and reality as the best soul can be to the vilest body.’8

  Pope’s emotional yearnings and sense of exclusion came together unforgettably in 1712, when he was just twenty-four, in the mock-epic ‘Rape of the Lock’, which dramatizes an incident in which a wilful young aristocrat publicly embarrassed a young belle by snipping off a lock of her hair. Flirtation and seduction are described with an unmistakable note of poignant yearning, which became still more apparent two years later, when Pope unexpectedly brought out an enlarged version. Now female attractions were represented by lovely aerial spirits called ‘sylphs’, in playful imitation of the gods who watch over mortals in classical epic:

  Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,

  Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;

  Transparent forms too fine for mortal sight,

  Their fluid bodies half dissolved in light …

  Some in the fields of purest ether play,

  And bask and whiten in the blaze of day …

  The sylphs’ chief function is to protect the chastity of their young charges, but they are no match for the social game in which rakish ‘sparks’ pursue women who have every intention of ‘melting’:

  What guards the purity of melting maids

  In courtly balls, and midnight masquerades,

  Safe from the treach’rous friend, the daring spark,

  The glance by day, the whisper in the dark;

  When kind occasion prompts their warm desires,

  When music softens, and when dancing fires?

  The whole point of the game is consummation, and Pope makes brilliant use of the whalebone braces that undergirded the voluminous gowns of the time:

  To fifty chosen sylphs, of special note,

  We trust th’ important charge, the petticoat;

  Oft have we known that sev’n-fold fence to fail,