CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Alexander Pope
The Drawings: List of Illustrations
Title Page
Introduction
Notes
Letter to Mrs. Arabella Fermor
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
Canto I
Canto II
Canto III
Canto IV
Canto V
The History of Vintage
Copyright
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE GEE
A hideous crime is committed at a fashionable London society gathering. The victim is the beautiful, innocent Belinda, her attacker is the dastardly Baron, and his weapon of choice is a pair of scissors . . .
Pope’s mock-epic is the sharp and witty tale of the most famous bad hair day in the history of literature.
Alexander Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688. He was brought up a Roman Catholic at a time when the laws of England were prejudicial towards Catholics and when he was young his family had to move away from the capital as a result of these laws. As a child Pope suffered from a severe illness that stunted his growth. He wrote from a young age and published his first poems when he was only sixteen years old. He first published The Rape of the Lock in 1712 and its success made him famous. He later expanded the poem in 1714 and 1717. Pope went on to write many more works including translations of Homer, The Dunciad and An Essay on Man. He was also a keen landscape gardener. He died in Twickenham on 30 May 1744.
Pastorals
An Essay on Criticism
Windsor Forest
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry
An Essay on Man
Moral Essays
Imitations of Horace
Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot
The Dunciad
1. THE DREAM
2. THE BILLET-DOUX
3. THE TOILET
4. THE BARON’S PRAVER
5. THE BARGE
6. THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
7. THE CAVE OF SPLEEN
8. THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES
9. THE NEW STAR
When he was twenty-three years old, Alexander Pope drafted The Rape of the Locke, the poem that was destined to make him the most famous writer in England. When the poem was first published in 1712 readers were captivated by its brilliance: its perfect couplets, the world of wealth and glamour it depicted – a setting that also seemed so brittle it might break apart completely. No one had written like this before. For the first time, ordinary people could imagine the allure, the privilege, and the fragility of upper-class life in England. And though many would try, no one quite managed to match the poem’s vitality and freshness until, one hundred years later, an unknown young woman from Hampshire published a novel called Pride and Prejudice.
Pope took the idea for the poem from a friend named John Caryll, who told him about a scandal that had just broken concerning two of England’s leading Roman Catholic families, the Fermors and the Petres. The families had become involved in a quarrel, provoked by a lovers’ tiff between Lord Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone, and the lovely, youthful Arabella, eldest daughter of the Fermor family. While at a party in the country, Lord Petre had snipped a lock of Arabella’s hair without first asking her permission.
The Fermor family took offence at the prank, more offence than the trifle seemed to merit. John Caryll, who was a mutual friend of both parties, had reasons of his own for wanting to mend the breach. Caryll was also the head of an old and distinguished Catholic family, a self-appointed custodian of English Catholicism. By the early eighteenth century Catholics had been subject to more than a century of prejudice and persecution following the Protestant reformation. The great Catholic houses, once the most ancient, noble and wealthy in England, had shrunk to a beleaguered minority holding out against persecution, imprisonment, and punitive legislation. Caryll was loathe to permit a schism between two such important families.
So he asked his friend Alexander Pope, still largely unknown, to write verses to ‘make a jest of it, and laugh them together again.’ Pope jumped at the idea, recognising that the story had everything he needed to write a poem that might make his name.
Young and obscure, but brilliantly talented, Pope was desperate for fame. But until now it had seemed that Fortune was against him. Like the others, he was Catholic, but in contrast to the Carylls, the Petres and the Fermors, he was socially undistinguished. His father was a textile importer in London, a successful businessman, but modest nonetheless. Pope was born in London in 1688, but by the time he was four years old his family had been exiled by the passing of a punitive Act that forced all papists to live more than ten miles from Hyde Park Corner. In 1692 the Popes moved to the village of Hammersmith, and six years later to Binfield, in Windsor Forest. As a Catholic, Pope knew that he could never have a university education, obtain professional qualifications, nor, indeed, inherit property of his own.
More was to come. When he was about twelve years old, Pope contracted ‘Pott’s Disease’, or tuberculosis of the spine, a condition that was to leave him a lifelong invalid. His growth was stunted, and as a young man he was well on his way to becoming a hunchback. He was almost always in pain, very often bedridden. In later life his back had to be laced tightly into a brace before he could stand at all.
These circumstances seemed to inspire Pope to even greater heights of ambition. His dream was to become as important an English poet as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. Incredibly enough, he was destined to see that dream come true.
Pope had a couple of pieces of luck. Close to his parents’ house in Binfield lived Sir Anthony Englefield, also a distinguished Catholic, and a man of considerable cultural and intellectual sophistication. Sir Anthony took a shine to the young Pope and engineered introductions to a few noteworthy people, including the famous dramatist William Wycherley. Pope used his acquaintance with Wycherley to insinuate himself into the fringes of literary and artistic life in London, and from there, by sheer force of talent and determination, he rose to the greatest heights of literary celebrity.
The second piece of luck, of course, came when John Caryll, also a neighbour, told him about the episode with Arabella Fermor’s hair. At the time, Caryll may not have known, or perhaps chose not to explain, all of the details. But as it happened, Pope had heard rumours about Arabella Fermor from another source.