Alexander Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution.

His father
(also Alexander, 1646–1717) was a successful linen merchant in the Strand. The poet's mother, Edith
(1643–1733), was the daughter of William Turner, Esquire, of York. Both parents were Catholics.[4]
Edith's sister, Christiana, was the wife of famous miniature painter Samuel Cooper. Pope's education was
affected by the recently enacted Test Acts, which upheld the status of the established Church of England
and banned Catholics from teaching, attending a university, voting, and holding public office on penalty
of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt and went to Twyford School in about
1698/99.[4] He then went on to two Roman Catholic schools in London.[4] Such schools, while illegal,
were tolerated in some areas.[5]

A look-a-like of Pope derived from a portrait by William Hoare[6]

In 1700, his family moved to a small estate at Popeswood in Binfield, Berkshire, close to the royal
Windsor Forest.[4] This was due to strong anti-Catholic sentiment and a statute preventing "Papists"
from living within 10 miles (16 km) of London or Westminster.[7] Pope would later describe the
countryside around the house in his poem Windsor Forest.[8] Pope's formal education ended at this
time, and from then on, he mostly educated himself by reading the works of classical writers such as the
satirists Horace and Juvenal, the epic poets Homer and Virgil, as well as English authors such as Geoffrey
Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Dryden.[4] He studied many languages and read works by
English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. After five years of study, Pope came into contact with
figures from London literary society such as William Congreve, Samuel Garth and William Trumbull.[4][5]

At Binfield he made many important friends. One of them, John Caryll (the future dedicatee of The Rape
of the Lock), was twenty years older than the poet and had made many acquaintances in the London
literary world. He introduced the young Pope to the ageing playwright William Wycherley and to William
Walsh, a minor poet, who helped Pope revise his first major work, The Pastorals. He also met the Blount
sisters, Teresa and Martha, both of whom remained lifelong friends.[5]

From the age of 12 he suffered numerous health problems, including Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis
that affects the spine, which deformed his body and stunted his growth, leaving him with a severe
hunchback. His tuberculosis infection caused other health problems including respiratory difficulties,
high fevers, inflamed eyes and abdominal pain.[4] He grew to a height of only 1.37 m (4 ft 6 in). Pope
was already removed from society as a Catholic, and his poor health alienated him further. Although he
never married, he had many female friends to whom he wrote witty letters, including Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu. It has been alleged that his lifelong friend Martha Blount was his lover.[5][9][10][11] His friend
William Cheselden said, according to Joseph Spence, "I could give a more particular account of Mr.
Pope's health than perhaps any man. Cibber's slander (of carnosity) is false. He had been gay [happy],
but left that way of life upon his acquaintance with Mrs. B."[12]

Early career

Plaque above Pope's Grotto at Twickenham

In May 1709, Pope's Pastorals was published in the sixth part of bookseller Jacob Tonson's Poetical
Miscellanies. This earned Pope instant fame and was followed by An Essay on Criticism, published in May
1711, which was equally well received.

Pope's villa at Twickenham, showing the grotto; from a watercolour produced soon after his death

Around 1711, Pope made friends with Tory writers Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell and John Arbuthnot,
who together formed the satirical Scriblerus Club. Its aim was to satirise ignorance and pedantry through
the fictional scholar Martinus Scriblerus. He also made friends with Whig writers Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele. In March 1713, Windsor Forest[8] was published to great acclaim.[5]

During Pope's friendship with Joseph Addison, he contributed to Addison's play Cato, as well as writing
for The Guardian and The Spectator. Around this time, he began the work of translating the Iliad, which
was a painstaking process – publication began in 1715 and did not end until 1720.[5]

In 1714 the political situation worsened with the death of Queen Anne and the disputed succession
between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites, leading to the Jacobite rising of 1715. Though Pope, as a
Catholic, might have been expected to have supported the Jacobites because of his religious and political
affiliations, according to Maynard Mack, "where Pope himself stood on these matters can probably never
be confidently known". These events led to an immediate downturn in the fortunes of the Tories, and
Pope's friend Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, fled to France.

Pope lived in his parents' house in Mawson Row, Chiswick, between 1716 and 1719; the red brick
building is now the Mawson Arms, commemorating him with a blue plaque.[13]
The money made from his translation of Homer allowed Pope to move in 1719 to a villa at Twickenham,
where he created his now famous grotto and gardens. The serendipitous discovery of a spring during the
excavation of the subterranean retreat enabled it to be filled with the relaxing sound of trickling water,
which would quietly echo around the chambers. Pope was said to have remarked that: "Were it to have
nymphs as well – it would be complete in everything." Although the house and gardens have long since
been demolished, much of the grotto survives. It now lies beneath Radnor House Independent Co-ed
School and is occasionally opened to the public.[9][14]

Poetry

Mawson Arms, Chiswick Lane, with blue plaque to Pope

Essay on Criticism

Main article: An Essay on Criticism

An Essay on Criticism was first published anonymously on 15 May 1711. Pope began writing the poem
early in his career and took about three years to finish it.

At the time the poem was published, the heroic couplet style in which it was written was a moderately
new poetic form, and Pope's work was an ambitious attempt to identify and refine his own positions as a
poet and critic. The poem was said to be a response to an ongoing debate on the question of whether
poetry should be natural, or written according to predetermined artificial rules inherited from the
classical past.[15]

The 'essay' begins with a discussion of the standard rules that govern poetry by which a critic passes
judgment. Pope comments on the classical authors who dealt with such standards and the authority that
he believed should be accredited to them. He discusses the laws to which a critic should adhere while
critiquing poetry, and points out that critics serve an important function in aiding poets with their works,
as opposed to the practice of attacking them.[16] The final section of An Essay on Criticism discusses the
moral qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal critic, who, Pope claims, is also the ideal man.

The Rape of the Lock

Pope's most famous poem is The Rape of the Lock, first published in 1712, with a revised version
published in 1714. A mock-epic, it satirises a high-society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (the
"Belinda" of the poem) and Lord Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her head without her
permission. The satirical style is tempered, however, by a genuine and almost voyeuristic interest in the
"beau-monde" (fashionable world) of 18th-century English society.[17] The revised, extended version of
the poem brought more clearly into focus its true subject – the onset of acquisitive individualism and a
society of conspicuous consumers. In the world of the poem, purchased artifacts displace human agency,
and "trivial things" assume dominance.[18]

The Dunciad and Moral Essays

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable
sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2017) (Learn how and when to
remove this template message)

Alexander Pope, painting attributed to English painter Jonathan Richardson, c. 1736, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston

Though The Dunciad was first published anonymously in Dublin, its authorship was not in doubt. Pope
pilloried a host of other "hacks", "scribblers" and "dunces" in addition to Theobald, and Maynard Mack
has accordingly called its publication "in many ways the greatest act of folly in Pope's life." Though a
masterpiece which would become "one of the most challenging and distinctive works in the history of
English poetry", writes Mack, "it bore bitter fruit. It brought the poet in his own time the hostility of its
victims and their sympathizers, who pursued him implacably from then on with a few damaging truths
and a host of slanders and lies."[19]