In Our Time - Pope

Episode Date: November 9, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Alexander Pope. His enemies – who were numerous - described him as a hunchbacked toad, twisted in body, twisted in mind, but Alexander Pope is without doubt one of the greatest poets of the English language. His acerbic wit and biting satire were the scourge of politicians, fellow writers and most especially the critics. He was the first Englishman to make a living from his pen, free from the shackles of patronage and flattery. Indeed, his sharp tongue meant he couldn’t go out walking without his Great Dane and a pair of loaded pistols. He was a ferocious businessman too, striking tough deals with his publishers, ensuring he kept control of his work and was well-rewarded for it. So how did Pope manage to transform himself from a crippled outsider into a major cultural and moral authority? How did he shape our ideas about what a “modern author” is? Does his work still have resonances today or is it too firmly embedded in the politics, cultural life and rivalries of the period?With John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Jim McLaverty, Professor of English at Keele University; Valerie Rumbold, Reader in English Literature at Birmingham University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, his enemies, who are numerous, described him he was 4'4'6, as a hunchbacked toad, twisted in body, twisted in mind.

But Alexander Pope is one of the greatest poets in the English language. His wit and satire were the scourge of politicians and of fellow. writers. He was the first Englishman to make a living solely from his pen, freed from the shackles of patronage. His sharp tongue meant he couldn't go out walking without his great dane and a pair of loaded pistols. He was a

ferocious businessman and kept full control of his work, for which he was uniquely well rewarded. He was from a young age considered the greatest writer of his day. So how did he achieve this? How did he shape our ideas about what a modern author is? Does his work still have resonance, or is too firmly

embedded in the politics, cultural life and rivalries of the period. I'm joined by John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London, Valerie Rumbold, reader in English literature at Birmingham University, and Jim McClavity, Professor of English at Keel University. John Mullen, from very early in his life, Pope was an outsider in many ways. I know it's a term, but I think it's accurate here. In what ways was he an outsider? Well, you've mentioned one of them already, a very important one, which was that he was crippled, we would say, in his adolescence by something called Potts disease, which gave him a hunchback, his enemies

called it, a twisted spine. He was, he was in effect a kind of invalid for much of his life. He was in pain and discomfort. And also in ways which biographers have speculated about, it sort of excluded him from certain kinds of what we might call certain things about normal life. I mean, his relationships with women have always been a bit of a puzzle did he have a sex life at all? He was a kind of imbalid and also he was by religion an outsider. He was brought up a Roman Catholic.

At a time when being a Roman Catholic was pretty disadvantageous. There are actually laws against Roman Catholics living in the centre of London. They had to leave 10 miles outside of London. That's right. So he took up residence eventually in Twickenham. and that was because he was a religious outsider

and suspected always by people or suspectable by people of being therefore involved in anti-ministery, anti-monarchy politics because he lived through a time when the Roman Catholic monarch James II in the year of his birth had been deposed for being a Catholic.

And over there in France there are people his descendants and supporters claiming they should be running the country. So Pope's Catholicism marked him, branded him in some ways, as somebody necessarily excluded from normal civil life. He couldn't go to university because he was a Roman Catholic. He couldn't seek advancement even if he'd been able to in many professions. So he sits there and it is a paradox that you've mentioned in your introduction that although he succeeds in becoming the most famous writer of his age,

he is somebody who sees himself writing from outside the main cultural currents of his times. I don't dwell on it, but for those people, just as the start of this programme, who don't know enough here, just to emphasise the crippledness, he was four foot six, he had to wear a canvas corset, he sometimes patted out, made his legs look a little less spindly by wearing several pairs of stockings, and walking tired him and so we have a man who's

this long disease my life he called it yes and there's a kind of I think it's not fanciful to find in Pope's poetry a kind of exquisite sort of sensitivity which is almost part of his physique as part of his intellect and a kind of if you know

there's a kind of inwardness he lives through books and poetry and eventually he lives in quite a hostile and combative way through books and poetry when he becomes a satirist. But it's a kind of vicarious participation in his society. And just almost increasing the outsideness is that his parents were very elderly. To all effecting purposes, he had no friends.

he was brought up outside London, 10 miles outside of London. His main companions were elderly people who happened to be very intelligent literary people who spotted this boy because he was a child, I mean, he was illnesses when he was about 11 or 12 and so and so forth. And so it was intensified the isolation.

So the curious paradox, as you said, there he is isolated on his own. Yes. And yet he very soon, we've come back in a minute, very soon explodes and dominates the middle of society. Yes, I mean the thing you mentioned about sort of older companions from an early age. Because Pope is somebody who seems to, as it were, set out to become a poet

in quite a almost calculating way. And his elder companions quite often are people who are potential patrons or people who were great writers of an earlier age. And this pattern develops of him flattering them into patronage. And yet actually he's the one who's really got the tantarer. and the ambition. Jim McLevety, to carry on from what John said, he was extraordinary precocious,

and he had collected works by the time he was 29. Can you tell us how he arrived at that position so very quickly? Because that was most unusual, and thought perhaps to be rather vain. But there it was. Yes, improper, I think, almost, to publisher works that early. He sort of slips into publication, Pope, I think, from the sort of patronage and manuscript circulation,

John's been talking about. So his first published work is pastoral's start off as a very beautiful manuscript that gets past round friends and then it's seen by important people in certain sorts of London society. You emphasise very beautiful. He took great care of every aspect of his manuscripts and publication.

Yes, I mean he has very beautiful... When he's making a polished manuscript, very beautiful handwriting, and he can do very good imitation print as well. And the pastoral's is a... combination of imitation print and this beautiful italic hand and it circulates William Walsh, a critic friend, an MP

Congreve the playwright witcherly, an elderly playwright by a very elderly playwright by now and then Tonson the great publisher of the 17th century writes to him and says I've seen your pastoral I should like to publish it and so Pope sort of slips into publication very easily. He's only by 21

then, isn't you? He's younger than that, I think. I mean, he's 16 he says when he writes them. He gets the letter when he's 17 or 18 and then, yes, he's 21 when they're published, yes. And they were a success and on he drove through his 20s.

Yes, yes, with the essay on criticism, which is an attempt to, I think, write about both classical rules of criticism and reconcile them with newer approaches to criticism. Can you tell us a bit about that? Because if he's known generally is known as both a savage critic

and a man whose lines still live in our daily conversation, you know, to air is human, to forgive divine and so and so forth. But can you just tell us what he, why he should write an essay on criticism then and what it's about? Yes. It's instead of writing an essay on poetry, I think, and it may therefore show an awareness of a shift towards greater response to writing in various ways. That is, it's becoming more common, I think,

to write pamphlets in response to people's writing or to discuss them in the journals that are just starting out. And so Pope's dealing with some quarrels that are going on in French criticism and trying to show that they can easily be resolved. If you follow nature, you can follow the great writers and you can follow the rules as well.

You can reconcile the whole. whole thing. And at the same time he's trying to give advice about how the business of criticisms to be carried on within his society, both in the coffee houses and in the journals. And I think that's why he chooses to write that sort

of poem. Is it a John Mullen earlier said there was a sort of calculating factor about him? Is it an attempt to put himself thus early at the centre of the culture? Well I suspect so. One of the things about Pope is I think he always wants to be on both sides of anything. So

And he wants to be... Hence the couplet. Yes. Well, it fits very well. He wants to be on stage taking a bow and in the audience shouting, Bravo. And I think you can see that the essay on criticism is designed

to do that, to set that up, to explain how it might work. Alder Rumbold, could we take on the essay a little further? He writes that bad criticism is worse than bad writing. He attacks a theatre critic, John Dennis. It might surprise some of our listeners,

know, in the early 18th century's critics was such an established force that a man who wanted to be, as John Martin, once set out to be a great poet, thinks that they are worth my while to take on in a major poem. Well, critics were going to be very important in Pope's life, and I think two kinds of critics were going to be particularly important. One was the kind, what we might think of as a literary critic today,

people like John Dennis, who are responding in the various media that are then available to what's being published, what's being performed. But there's also another kind of critic that's very important. as Pope's career goes on. And that's what we might call a textual critic, or at the time people sometimes use the expression, verbal critics. And that was another emerging professional formation. People who, following on really from Richard Bentley in the late 17th century, who'd been looking at classical Greek and Latin literature and asking questions about how do we know that the text of this work should comprise these particular words in this particular. particular order. That kind of approach was being transferred in Pope's lifetime into reading English classics, notably Shakespeare. And it was going to be something that really engaged Pope. Was this a proper way to read and approach literature? So I think these two areas of criticism. One is Dennis,

very obvious, very much there in the essay on man and some reasons to think that the essay on man is what helps to get the lifelong animosity between those two men going. Because in that poem, Pope says that it would be a good thing to have open discussion about critical matters. But Apius reddens at each word you speak and looks tremendous with a threatening eye. And Dennis obviously recognises himself here because Appius was the title of a play he'd written. And Tremendous was supposed to be a favourite word of his. So it was the beginning of a horrible relationship And you started by quoting some of the approprious language

that Dennis and others who followed his lead used about Pope at different times. But later in his life, I think, later in Pope's life, I think the whole business of textual criticism becomes enormously important. And just to sort of bring to a conclusion this early, brief history, very brief history of his early days, He is not yet in his mid-20s when, as I understand it,

he totally established himself as a major writer with the rape of the lock, a mock heroic poem that satirises the stealing of a lock of hair from a lady. So it's lock of hair stolen from radio. This is discussed in terms of a rape. It's based on a real incident where an aristocrat took a lock of hair from an aristocratian. And so on.

Why was that so tremendously acclaimed, especially by those whom it satirized, the aristocrats? Well, I'm not sure to what extent those who were directly involved were quite that enthusiastic. The evidence about the girl principally concerned, the real life Belinda being a woman called Arabella Farmer, who was the heiress of one of the principal Catholic families. The evidence about her response is a little ambiguous, I think. But certainly one man who's commemorated in the poem who's made out. to be a very ineffective speaker indeed.

We do have some testimony that he was very put out indeed at being in this. But, yes, I would say the... But the people who bought that sort of poem were Irish regards another class people and they bought it in the shed loads and it became a great success. I think the sense that you could do that with what was essentially a trifle. The point about the lock being that Belinda's hairstyle features two absolutely symmetrical such locks and after the young man in the poem has borrowed a pair of scissors,

leaned over and removed one of them, There are many ways, some of them quite subtle, in which she feels completely exposed and vulnerable. So I think to be able to take that a silly prank at a party, as we might see it, and put it in a framework that makes it seem both enormously funny but also very significant. That's a considerable achievement. And I think that sense of significance has a lot to do with the expression you used, mock heroic, because just as, for example, the Iliad is about the anger of Achilles. This is about the anger of Belinda.

Can I, John Mullen, one of the literary devices Pope uses in this poem is the Mokairo, but the heroic couple. Can you give us a few examples of that and why he made it so effective? Well, the Rape of the Lock starts. I hope I can remember this. The Rape of the Lock starts with a rather good one, actually. what dire offence from Amherous Causes Springs, what mighty contests rise from trivial things.

Mighty contest, that couplet, that heroic couplet, was there, as the name implies, supposedly to translate great epic heroic Greek and Latin poetry into English. That's why it had been developed, really. And the great proponent of it in the 17th century was Dryden, who wrote some sad. but mostly wrote translations. And Pope, of course, as Valerie's mentioned, used that couplet to translate the Iliad and made lots of money and notoriety from doing so. But he also wonderfully used it

for all sorts of mocking Congress effects. And you can hear in that open cup, what mighty contests rise from trivial things. It's there actually on the side of the box trivial pursuits, the game that people sometimes play at Chris. And, and And mighty and trivial, and that's what the couplet in the rape of the lock is brilliant at doing, putting big and little things next to each other. And you get this sense throughout Pope. He uses an extraordinary subtle ways, this sense of incongruity, of surprises, of paradoxes within the couplet. Sorry, finish.

Well, so lots of his famous little phrases. You talk about his quotability earlier. have this kind of odd sort of balancing and incongruity about them. True witty's nature to advantage dressed, what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed. Of course, the rhyme makes it terribly neat. But if you look inside it and unpack it, there's always a sort of surprise.

So what is witty is actually what everybody thinks, not what only one person thinks. Dam with faint praise, assent with civil leer, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer. damn with faint praise. And you think about it and actually damn and praise, the way these opposites go together. That's something he discovered

as a kind of fears in his couplets. And it comes from the fact that in a sense, I think in all his most wonderful poetry, he's sort of misusing this poetic form which was developed for noble and solemn purposes. Would you take that on a moment, then Jim, and then tell us how he used it for noble and solemn purposes, but as it were, following Dryden,

in his translation of the Iliad. But do you think we have sufficient quotations for the mock heroic? Shall I go back to the heroic? It's up to you, but I want to go under the Iliad, but obviously I'm just fascinated by more and more... Let's talk about the Iliad. He translated the Iliad,

an imitation of Dryden, having translated the Ineer. And he... Oh, well, following him, not an imitation of him. And it was a stunning success in every way. For a start, financially, I understand he got the equivalent of a million pounds. It got the annual income of an aristocrat.

for this. It was by subscription and many, many people took it and so on. So can you tell us about the idiot and his translation? Yes, I think you've summarised it. It is again, surprisingly, a combination of patronage and the book trade really. You need a bookseller to support you, but you also need wealthy people who are willing to invest in the project. As you say, Dryden had already translated the Ineered. So in a way, it's an important cultural project.

it sort of brings Homer to the English. And obviously, if there's a growing reading public at this time, which there probably is, they won't all have Greek, and so it gives them access to Homer. That's why I think both Pope and Lintock, the bookseller, thought it was worthwhile. And the project is a combination. Pope gets, I think, 200 Guinness copy money for each volume, six volumes. But he also gets free copies which people subscribe for. and he gets a maximum of 750 free copies,

and people pay six guineas in total for those. That's how he gets the small fortune. Yes. Is there something about the British or English at that time, particularly because we've talked about London here a lot, that wants to be, beginning to allay itself with the classical world, beginning to empathise, beginning to see itself as the inheritors of Greek and so on, is that part of the appetite, or is it to be an educated person merely, as it well?

I think at this stage it's probably wanting to be an educated person and there's a very strong French influence. There's a sense that the civilities of the French court can be achieved within the English system which is less dependent on an absolute monarch and so on. There's to be an English version of classicism. And one of the things Pope is thought to do, generally said he did in the translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey,

is he makes it more refined. He improves homest theology, so it's more compatible with Christian theology, and he improves where he can the manners of the Greek hero, so they're more acceptable to English society at the time. Barry Rumble soon after he attempted to improve Shakespeare, didn't he, with his edition of Shakespeare, and run into some trouble for it? It was exactly the wrong moment for that kind of project.

The situation was that a publisher had had a Shakespeare edition, edited by the playwright Roe, and thought it would be a good thing to have, this revised to have a new one on the market and ask Pope to do it. And Pope's notion of what you did when you edited something like Shakespeare was very different from any notion that we would have.

We would expect, for example, if we're going to bookshop to choose ourselves an edition of a Shakespeare play, I think there's two things we'd expect that an editor would do. One is that the editor would show they understood the sources for that particular play and had made an adjudication of the varying degrees of authority between them.

in a systematic way. We'd expect that. We'd also expect that the editor would explain to us the usage of particular words and expressions by having very good knowledge of the way the language worked in Shakespeare's own time. Now those are the sorts of assumptions which in Pope's lifetime are not widespread. Those assumptions are really the property of that special group of textual editors who are really pioneers of this way of looking at things. So what is her to? that are coming along later an annoying Pope.

So what Pope does is assume that people want a reading text of Shakespeare and that they want some advice about what is particularly admirable in Shakespeare, and so he will indicate that to them. They also need some advice about those features of Shakespeare that are quite deplorable and that presumably Shakespeare wouldn't have done in the same way had he lived later. So he edited and cleans it up. That kind of thing. And makes it presentable for what he considers to be his,

his target audience. But of course that means he falls foul in a bad way of people who are starting to think in a different way about Shakespeare and thinking that we ought actually to examine the textual transmission in a systematic way and ask why these words in that order. And also that we should read the book Shakespeare new and try to see how the language of Shakespeare is actually working in Shakespeare's time not ours.

and that's really what causes the fuss about, it's the wrong moment for Pope's kind of project. And a critic called Theobald savages him, and is Theobald, John Mullen, one of the spurs for Pope writing, what I think you do anyway, what some considered it be his greatest poem, the Duncia,

where Theobald becomes, will you tell us, why, A, was Theobald the spur? Did Shakespeare spur him to write the Dunstan? Yeah, I think that was the immediate spur. I mean, I think that Pope, in the preface to those works he published when he was still only in his 20s, wrote, The Life of a Witt is a Warfare Upon Earth, and he wrote it as if it was a regrettable fact. But in fact, surely he had some relish for it, really.

I think he was temperamentally well ready to take on foes. But in his explanation of why he wrote the Dunciad was this man Theobald, who wrote a book, Theobald, by our standards, as Valerie has implied, is a much better editor of Shakespeare. He's a sort of beginnings of a proper Shakespeare scholar. But a book called Shakespeare restored, restored from the errors of Mr Pope. And that's it.

You know, that's it. And he becomes this sort of anti-hero of Pope's first version of the Dunciad, a poem he went on writing and rewriting throughout his life. The Dunciad being? Well, the Dunciad, the title, of course, echoes those epics, the Ineer. the Iliad. And Pope had what seems to me to be a stroke of genius. He wrote a great mock epic poem

about a topic which really had too little preoccupied great writers before. Stupidity. It's a poem about stupidity, all the various kinds of human stupidity. And what's the wonderful word he uses, dullness, the various kinds of dullness which he's seeing his culture. And Theobald, who becomes mispronounced as tibbled as the hero by the goddess of dullness. And we see a kind of progress, really, of all the kind of forms of rightly and literary stupidity that Pope found in his age. And the characters of the Dunciad, instead of being the heroes of ancient epic, are booksellers, publishers. Booksellers, critics, bad poets.

and anybody Pope who'd crossed Pope, I mean, as Pope kept his own record of people who wrote things against him. A scrapbook of... A scrapbook, indeed, which was marked up for future revenges. It's annotated in his sort of funny sort of little code of various kinds of markings. And people who wrote against him, and many, many people did, then found themselves in the Dunciad. I kind of think of the Dunciad, really, as like,

It's like a sort of little glass box, I think, in which he put people and then watched them like little insects crawling around the inside of it. And indeed, miniaturisation and making people like sort of strange, his enemies appear like strange kind of beasts or insects was one of his devices. Just curious, en passant, that you talk about Pope, who was what he was, very small man, miniaturising his enemies. In McLevittie, can you just tell us when he wrote this

he was already established as an extraordinary rich and in his day, in his stil and in the most famous poet of his day he considered himself to be so as well, isn't it? But he's somehow defined in a way by the Duncia that this savagery, this spitting, venomous, slaying, slaughtering talent. Can you develop that a little? Do you think that?

That he is like that. That he is defined by that and he is like this. Yes, well, it's partly that it provokes such a very strong reaction so that you get a pamphlet war. And of course, Pope is in many ways prepared for that and wants that. Indeed, he published a prose piece about bad writing before it in order to provoke people into attacking him,

so he could again attack them in the Dunciad. And the Dunciad, of course, in its second form, is produced as a mock scholarly edition relating to the Shakespeare, in which what people say about him can be put at the bottom of the page and refuted if necessary. So it's a sort of very chattering bookers. It does become then this attacked figure, this figure involved in controversy.

But he attacks the hacks, he attracts people who do it for money, and yet he hacks away, and he does those stuff for money, sort of outhacks the best of them, doesn't he? Yes, well, he thinks he's not a hireling. That's an important aspect of it, I think. And, of course, he is really, not being employed by the booksellers, he's employing the booksellers himself.

So his position is different. I agree with you that he's after money, but he's after money in a different way from somebody who's hired to write. Yes, but Valor Rumbold at this stage, he is already as a very young man, he's exceptionally controlling just about everything to do with this publication,

who publishes him, how they publish, how the page looks, how it's printed, how much money he gets, and so on and so forth. Yes, I think this is really very important about Pope. It's one of the things that looks to us from our point of view, most distinctively modern about him, that he really has got a sense that this is a way a person of appropriate talent

can make a living and with judgment and a certain degree of independence can do it in a way they needn't be ashamed of to pick up what Jim says. And I think there's a sense that the Homer translation provides a financial cushion, which certainly his family background couldn't have done for him, a financial cushion, which then enables him to make choices about what. he's going to publish and who he needs to please or not please. And one thing we've not mentioned so far, I think, is the extreme political polarization of this period.

And yes, in the Dunciad, he is attacking many people who he thinks have written foolish books. But if you look at these people one by one and ask, where did they stand in politics, by and large, they all are people who, or very many of them are people who are prepared to line up with the current regime, with Walpole's government, an example by John Dennis,

who's one of the most militant of Protestants. So there is a very strong political argument to this as well, I think. It is not simply personal dislike. It is these are people, for the most part, who are prepared to trumpet the virtues of a vision of modern commercial Britain that Pope would like to dissent from. Pope is very fiercely a Tory.

That's a little difficult to determine. Well, given that Pope was very fiercely any one thing. We're talking about a man of couplets. He was basically been everything. Tories call me Whig and Wings for Tory. That's another rhyming couple. He was very proud himself of keeping friends on both sides of the political divide, which he did to a remarkable extent. But clearly he's very conservative in many cultural ways,

even though he's very canny about learning to see what he can do for his views to advance his views in a modern commercialising marketplace. So he is very divided. But I think we should, I mean, before we lose the Duncya, because I do think it's one of the, It's, as it were, the greatest little red poem in the English language. And it's a work, the thing you are asking about Melbourne, about, you know, how come he makes all this money. Paradox, he makes a lot of the paradox in a way, because it's a, I think it's an incredibly abelient poem.

Actually, he loves Grub Street. He loves the hacks and dunces. I mean, he doesn't personally love them. He personally despises them. But he loves them as material for his writing. And actually, though, all these kind of booksellers having urinating things. competitions and diving into the sewers in a kind of parody of the games from Virgil's and Neo. It's fantastic fun. He loves it. And he loves the kind of display of kind of greed and

mercenariness that he can write about. And that's the paradox which brings all Pope's poetry alive, I think, that actually what he affects to kind of want to distance himself from is always what he's writing about. Yes, yeah It's difficult to move on from Stamry. Some of us find it quite impossible. But by that time, Ramboree, he was clearly celebrity, and we use that word, if we can lay it back,

I withdraw it, he was famous, and he even had a lady stalker. I mean, did he enjoy his fame? That's a very interesting question. I think he did encounter something we could meaningfully call celebrity in the sense that not only did his books sell well and people knew his name because of that. People wanted his picture. His picture was widely distributed. People wanted pictures of his home. He enabled his picture. He put it in the front of book after book, didn't they? But even images of where he lived were things that were saleable. News about him was of all was of interest.

And he writes about fame, I suspect as many famous people do, that it's a terrible nuisance. But you know, that they wouldn't be without it. So his poem to Arbuthnot, which is really talking about what it means for him to be a poet, starts with all kinds of nuisances turning up with their creative writing at his door. People who turn up at meal times because they know he'll be in, happy to catch me just at dinner time. People who want various services to help them get published or help get a play put on. People who are fed up because their wife has run away from home, and it can only be to do with wit and poetry and Pope.

Poor Cornice sees his frantic wife elope and curses wit and poetry and Pope. There's a certain kind of poet John Dunn was another who uses their own name as a rhyme word, you know, and Pope was certainly one of them. And so he complains about this and how people are hiding in the shrubbery and jumping, you know, coming in surreptitiously. I wonder you carry two loaded pistols. He went out with this great dame called Bounce. I don't think he would have been without it.

The lady stalker, as you call her, is an interesting character. because I think Stalker is a bit strong, but she did certainly write him a lot of letters in his later years. She did have to be asked not to demand so much attention. But I can't think of another writer before Pope who had that experience or had to deal with it. Jim, can we talk about his correspondence? Because he published his own correspondence. He was a one-man industry about his one-man industry, wasn't he?

And he managed by subtle, devious and cunning ways to publish his correspondence. and sort of pretending he was doing it in the public interest and to redeem his good name when in fact he'd set off the whole trail himself. That's quite right. And so he's building his reputation and he's telling people how to receive him in every possible way from the beginning. Yes, I think he thought the material was just too good to waste. And it also does feed into this culture of celebrity because people felt they were finding out what sort of man he was. And indeed, Ray Fallon becomes his friend and gives him money because he had money.

so much the charming, honest, faithful man that emerges in the correspondence. Pope publishes the correspondence by getting them printed first by his own private printer and then offering them to Curle, who's a rogue bookseller. And as soon as Curl gets them, Pope has him arrested for publishing the letters and of course exclaims that this is disgraceful and he's going to have to publish a standard edition himself which he will personally supervise to make sure that they come out right. And so Pope publishes his correspondence and then he's, He tricks, I don't think Swift really needed tricking, but he tricks Swift into publishing that correspondence as well later.

Swift was a great hero. Insofar as Pope had it, because we must have established that Pope had no single view on anything, but insofar as he viewed anybody with great admiration, it was Swift. Yes, and he thought that the friendship between them would go down to posterity, and so that was well worth giving the emphasis of a special volume of correspondence. Those letters of Pope's, it seems to me what Jim's described, kind of exhibits very well both what so, sort of fascinating about Pope and perhaps one of the reasons why he hasn't been I don't know, relist as he should have

been since his death. Pope's letters are terrific. They're absolutely wonderful, beautiful, brilliant witty letters like his poems. But they're incredibly artificial and contrived and even he even did sort of things

like there wasn't a proper correspondence with Addison so he simply took letters he'd written to other men and rewrote them and put Addison's name at the top and said he'd written them to Addison. But he was actually a cheat. It was a lot of the time, wasn't we mustn't let him go. In the Iliad, yes he was. In the Iliad, 12 of the books

were translated by two other people. The Odyssey. Sorry, the Odyssey. Sorry, the Odyssey. In the Odyssey still, all right, but you're not getting, you're such a bit translated by other people. He subcontracted some of the old. And he took full credit for it. Well, yes, but that, that he did. He got bored. Pope had a low boredom threshold and after a while with the Odyssey

he did get bored and subcontracted but his letters I think contravene to you make me lose my initial point about his letters sort of contravene the inquisitiveness of modern readers and biographers because they reveal in a way nothing about himself except what he wanted to reveal and that offends lots of readers now

so quite apart from the cheating and the tricks there was the cheating in the tricks. There's also this sense that in his poetry and letters, there he is, all the time, thrusting himself at you, and yet what do you know of his inner world? Very little. So the very modern question of what's he or she really like is not answerable in Pope.

But there is somebody else I'd like to bring in, this marvellous man, Joseph Spence, a friend of popes who forms the view. That Pope is very interesting, and it's worth writing down, as much first-hand testimony as he can garner. And again, I think this is something that would be very hard to parallel for an earlier writer. So Spence interviews Pope's very elderly mother and gets marvellous anecdotes like that when his late father was alive,

who was a merchant, his late father would set him a topic on which to write poetry, and then say, fie, these are not good verses, and sent him to do it again. And so testimony like this he's actually got from family members. Pope's elder sister remembers, for example, that when he was about three, He was knocked over by a cow in the street who carried off his hat on her horn and while he was filling a little cart with stones. Now, I can't think, again, of an earlier writer

for whom we have that sort of close testimony. Then Pope himself is asked, you know, what's more important description or other things in how a poet writes? And Spence writes down the answers. And this gives us a huge corpus of material which is, of course, not entirely unmediated. But he's astute, really, isn't it?

than the legate. And one of the best things about Spence is he always dates it and tells you who he got the story from and you can play these versions against each other. I want to come to Legacy in one moment. The one question before we come to that, who could stand up to him? Given his fame, his wealth,

the cleverness of his connections. I said over emphatically 10 minutes ago, but he was a Tory, which a lot of people do say. And then he immediately said, oh, but he kept in with a lot of the wigs as well. You could have fooled the wigs, I think, some of them, especially Walpole, but never mind. Who stood up to him?

When he's taking these people on, is he just slaying a field of Lilliputians or is somebody out there taking him on? Well, Lady Mary Wirtley-Montague and Lord Harvey was certainly capable of taking him on. Though the epistle, again, Pope's able to absorb the attack. They attack him versus to the imitative of Horace rather in the way that you talked about

at the beginning of the programme as being animal-like. And they say at the end, you know, he should go like cane through the world, marked out as an enemy to mankind. But Pope takes a lot of that and reworks it to turn it against them in the Arbuthnot poem. So they do take him on, and they make it rather a good job of it, but he's capable of coming back and reworking it for his own ends.

He was so famous in his own time, and there was then a quite sudden unlasting decline in his reputation. Why were the seeds of that in the fame of his time, a man who was for his time, or was something else going on, John Miller? Well, I think the seeds were there in that Pope became partly a convenient figure, that if ever you wanted to say, and people always want to say, new things are being written, isn't it all so much more interesting now than it used to be? Look how stayed the tastes of the past are compared to these of the new writers and the new readers.

So Pope was, if you rebelled against Pope, that was a way of rejecting the past. and it started happening very, very quickly after his death. And partly the forms in which he wrote poetry itself and satire in particular started seeming like yesterday genres. The big new thing was the novel. That was the genre of the new age. And it went on, you know, and it went on into the romance. And then the romantics. The romantics.

And if you wanted, if you were, no, Byron said Pope the most beautiful of poets. Byron was, Byron actually thought Pope was the greatest of all English poets, greater than. than even Milton or Shakespeare. But in a romantic way, it's... Yes, and it wasn't just, I think, kind of literary trend leaders. There's a wonderful bit in Jane Austen's sense and sensibility where Eleanor Dashwood says, Marianne and this man Willoughby, of course, turns out to be a cad. Or they get on terribly well.

They have the same taste in books. Willoughby admires Pope no more than is proper. And that's what you did. Pope became, you know, the remnant of a past age, kind of elegant, but... no longer speaking to what matters. Briefly, German, then, Vali. Why do you think? Would you want to have that?

I think Quote brought it on himself, in a way, by all these claims to be an honest and good man, and that led to a series of romantic and victory. He's been unlucky in his editors, romantic and Victorian editors, who wanted to condemn him because he didn't meet the standards he himself set. And it's a loss of sense of humour, I think, in a way, that leads to the diminishment of his reputation.

A loss of sense of humour. I would also say that just before he died, the great Whig Tory battles that had characterised most of his lifetime just fell apart with the fall of Walpole. And suddenly there wasn't a map to read important elements of his work by anymore. And I think when that happens, people's memory is very short and nobody wants to revive a dead politics immediately afterwards in order to read a writer that their parents used to enjoy.

And then, as John says, all sorts of changes in taste come along. But then Pope does continue to appeal. And it's interesting that in the 20th century, when his star started to rise again, one of the arguments being made about him was that some of his wit was like metaphysical wit, that you could read him alongside John Dong, which is perhaps a very hyper-ingenuous way of doing it,

but it shows his quality again. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Barry Rumbold, John Mullen, and Jim McClavity. Pope rises again, certainly with you three, and with many, many listeners. And next week we'll be talking about the presence, Rebolt. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.