Who was Alexander Pope?

Alexander Pope was born in London on May 21, 1688, the year of the revolution that finally dismissed the Stuarts from the English throne. His father was a linen merchant, whose place of business was in Lombard Street in the city—a street more famous for its association with banks than with poetry. There is no reason to deny the fact that his father was in the trade in spite of the illiberal way in which the trade was then viewed. While the son was yet young, the father, having made at least a competency for himself, retired from business, and bought a country house at Binfield, not far from Windsor forest. Both parents were Roman Catholics, and the event of the year of Pope’s birth may be said to have proved fatal to the cause of the Roman Catholics in England. As a Catholic, Pope could not go to one of the public schools, and he never received the drilling in the classical languages that he might have obtained there. It is said that Pope taught himself to write by copying print, and throughout his life, his small fine hand-writing bore traces of its origin.

Pope received his early education from a priest, whom his father had given asylum, and who repaid the kindness by teaching the little boy the rudiments of Latin and Greek. The young Pope was afterwards sent in turn to two small Catholic schools; but as Catholic schools, they were not likely to be flourishing, and they seem to have been very bad. It is said that he left his first school for fleshing his youthful satire on the master, and, if the story be true, it is a characteristic beginning. His schooldays were over by the time that he was twelve, from which early age the poet carried on his own education. He says that he took to reading by himself “with very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry. In a few years I have dipped into a very great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets.” This would be capital training for a poet” but, unfortunately, the statement must be qualified. Voltaire, who personally knew Pope, declared that he could hardly speak or read a word of French; but the latter statement must surely be exaggerated. Pope’s knowledge of Italian also was limited, and not like that of Milton. He certainly was never a scholar in a strict sense of the word, but he could translate the classical authors in a way to gather their sense without paying much attention to the refinements or niceties of their language. A sickly child, Pope grew up deformed, and so short as to be almost a dwarf. Throughout his life he suffered a great deal from illness, especially severe headaches. An undercurrent of unhappiness caused by his bodily ailments, and a nervous irritability, which is not uncommon with very short men, can be traced through all his life. Unable to engage in the sports of boyhood, in the poetical phraseology of the time, the word “numbers” was used for poetry in imitation of the Latin numeric.

“I left no calling for this idle trade, No duty broke, no father disobey’d.
The muse but serv’d to ease some friend, not wife,
To help me through this long disease, my life.”

This last pathetic statement should always be borne in mind by all who deal with the biography of Pope. He showed poetical talent and yet he was described as a “genus irritable”, but Pope had physical reasons for his irritability. Asthma, in itself partly a disease of the nerves, was one of form of his illness; ultimately dropsy was superadded.
Pope never married. After his father’s death, his mother began living with him. He took up his residence at a villa, which he purchased at Twickenham, a place on the Thames, about twenty miles above London. If the windings of the river be followed, and a shorter distance by a straight road, this villa at “Twitnam”, as Pope preferred to call the place, was to the poet a constant delight. He took a keen interest in “the purest of all human pleasures—gardening; and the remains of the quaint grotto which he caused to be constructed underneath a high road, still exist. Here, Pope was visited by the most eminent men of the day, politicians and men of letters. He was proud to boast of his friendly intercourse with Lord Bolingbroke–the St. John to whom the Essay of Man is dedicated, as well as the assistance that Peterborough, the brilliant but erratic general, gave him. Probably no “statesman of the place” ever had nobler eulogy passed upon him than that with which Pope honoured Harley, Lord Oxford;

“A soul supreme in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
The lust of lucre and the dread of death.”

Pope was a good friend, but one the most endearing points about him was his strong affection for his mother. On her monument, he called his mother optima, mulierum amantissima. With genuine feeling he seems to have written these tender lines:

“Me let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age,
With lenient arts extends a mother’s breath,
Make languor smile and sooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep a while one parent from the sky.”

After his mother’s death he seems to have been more and more miserable as his disease increased upon him, until he died on May 30, 1744, an eminent man of letters, but never a happy man. He died at the age of 56.

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