Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was born on 21st May, 1688, in Lombard Street, London. From the day of his birth Pope was weak and sickly in body; and the extreme sensibility of his nerves, the feebleness of his digestive organs, and the general fragility of his constitution, made his life, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, a long disease. In boyhood he nearly sank under the influence of an uncontrollable hypochondria; in middle age he was dependent for ordinary comfort on the constant care of women. He was bald and deformed and almost a dwarf.

At the age of five he had already displayed sufficient signs of promise to be chosen by an aunt as the reversionary legatee of all her books, pictures and medals. His education in its beginnings and progress corresponds very closely with its ultimate results. Pope was by necessity rather than choice a self-educated man; and he never became a scholar. He taught himself writing by copying from printed books, and hence acquired the practice of minute calligraphy crowded into nooks and corners of paper -- a practice which afterwards in Pope's case almost developed intself into a mania and obtained for him from Swift the epithet of 'paper-sparing' Pope. From the family priest, whose name was Banister, he learnt the accidence of Latin and Greek, when 8 years of age; and afterwards successively attended two small Catholic schools, one at Twyford near Winchester, which he is said to have left in disgrace, and the other in London, kept by a convert of the name of Deane. About this time must be dated the famous incident of the boy Pope's visit to Will's Coffee-House, the sole occasion (according to his account to Spence) on which he ever beheld Dryden.

Quitting Mr. Deane's seminary for his father's house at Binfield, Pope, now 12 or 13 years of age. At about eight years of age he had translated part of Statius, who next to Virgil continued through life his favourite Latin poet; and at 12 he had composed a play founded on the "Iliad." At Twyford he had prepared himself for this effort by the study of Ogilby's Homer, followed by that of Sandys' Ovid; and now that he was left to follow his own inclinations, his studies continued to pursue the same direction. "Considering," he told Spence, "how very little I had when I came from school, I think I may be said to have taught myself Latin, as well as French, or Greek; and in all these my chief way of getting them was by translation."

Alexander Pope's literary career began in 1704, when the playwright William Wycherley, pleased by Pope's verse, introduced him into the circle of fashionable London wits and writers, who welcomed him as a prodigy. He first attracted public attention in 1709 with his Pastorals. In 1711 his Essay on Criticism, a brilliant exposition of the canons of taste, was published. His most famous poem, The Rape of the Lock (first published 1712; revised edition published 1714), a fanciful and ingenious mock-heroic work based on a true story, established his reputation securely. In 1713 Pope published Windsor Forest, which endeared him to the Tories by referring to the Peace of Utrecht. In 1714 his work “The Wife of Bath” appeared, which, like his “The Temple of Fame” (1715), was imitative of the works of the same title by the 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. In 1717 a collection of Pope's works containing the most noteworthy of his lyrics was published. Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad was published in six volumes from 1715 to 1720; a translation of the Odyssey followed (1725-1726). He also published an edition of Shakespeare's plays (1725).

His first acquaintance with Swift connects itself with the publication of "Windsor Forest" early in 1713. In the summer of the same year Swift returned to Ireland, after performing services of inestimable value to the Tory party, but disappointed in his just hopes of episcopal preferment. Later in the year he paid another visit to England, in order to heal if he could the breach widening from day to day between the Tory chiefs Oxford and Bolingbroke. In the succeeding winter commenced a correspondence between him and Pope which was continued for a quarter of a century.

In 1714 Pope had published specimen passages from the Odyssey in one of Lintot's "Miscellanies;" and soon afterwards, and during the greater part of the following year, he was engaged upon the translation of the Iliad. In the autumn of 1714, he visited Oxford in order to benefit by her libraries, and in 1715 the subscribers received their copies of the first four books. The volumes completing the Iliad were published in 1717, '18 and '20; and the stamp of completeness set upon the whole by the well-known dedication to Congreve. The translation of the Odyssey occupied Pope and his conductors from 1723 to '25, by which latter year the whole work (including the Batrachomyomachia by Parnell) had been absolved. The proceeds of the Iliad brought to Pope a sum exceeding £5000, even after deducting the payments for the assistance which he had received in the notes. The "Odyssey" produced between £3000 and £4000 in addition, in which are not comprehended the sums paid to Fenton and Broome, who had contributed half the work. Pope's dealings with his coajutors, like most othe pecuniary transactions of his life, have been exposed to much angry comment.

Soon after the publication of the first volume of Homer, he removed with his parents from Binfield to Chiswick, where they settled in the spring of 1716, for a sojourn which was not to extend over more than a couple of years. By this time Pope had already become a welcome guest in the fashionable circles of the metropolis and its vicinity. The death of his father took place at Chiswick in October 1717. The blow was keenly felt. Very soon after his father's death Pope removed with his mother from Chiswick to Twickenham, early in 1718, after purchasing the lease of a house and five acres of land on the banks of the Thames. The house itself he left very much the simple habitation he had found it; but the garden and grounds he laid out with enthusiastic care. Landscape gardening was one of the passions of the age; and or horticulture in general Pope had conceived a taste from the days of his childhood on the borders of Windsor Forest. The Twickenham grotto and gardens he created became one of the delights of his life. It was here that the Iliad was completed; and henceforth Pope's name was eagerly sought by the booksellers.

Pope and his friend Swift had for years written scornful and very successful critical reviews of those whom they considered poor writers; in 1727 they began a series of parodies of the same writers. The adversaries hurled insults at Swift and Pope in return, and in 1728 Pope lampooned them in one of his best-known works, "The Dunciad," a satire celebrating dullness. He later enlarged the work to four volumes, the final one appearing in 1743. In 1734 he completed his Essay on Man. Pope's last works, Imitations of Horace (1733-1739), were attacks on political enemies of his friends. But towards the close of his life Pope had lost most of his literary enemies, as he had been deprived of most of his intimate associates and friends. Yet popular fame surrounded him. When curiosity drew him to the theatre to witness one of the first performances of Garrick, the knowledge of Pope's presence filled the confident actor with an anxiety approaching awe. But gradually the end was approaching.

The last months of Pope's life were passed chiefly in the society of Warburton, though he was still ocassionally able to visit his older friends, Lord Bolingbroke and Marchmont, at Battersea: while Martha Bount, towards whom his affection remained unabated, solaced him by her occasional presence in his own home. Pope died after an open and free acknowledgement of the faith from the profession of which he had never swerved, and in a calm tranquillity, on the 30th of May, 1744. He was buried, according to the directions of his will, in Twickenham church, near the monument which his filial piety had erected to his parents. He desired no inscription on his tomb; but the officious devotion of Warburton, 17 years later, placarded a blank monument with an epigram written by Pope himself.