Alexander Pope

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Standard Name: Pope, Alexander
As well as being a translator, critic, and letter-writer, AP was the major poetic voice of the earlier eighteenth century, an influence on almost everyone who wrote poetry during his lifetime or for some years afterwards.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Mary Jones
An Advertisement in the volume itself is uncharacteristically humble in tone for MJ . It disclaims ambition and says it was quite accidental, that her thoughts ever rambled into rhyme. It calls her writings the...
Anthologization Anne Finch
Pope selected for his and Bernard Lintot 's anthology, Poems on Several Occasions, a poem he addressed to AF , as well as her responding poem, and half a dozen more by her.
Foxon, David F. English Verse 1701-1750. Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Finch, Anne. The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition. McGovern, Barbara and Charles H. HinnantEditors , University of Georgia Press, 1998.
68-70
Foxon, David F. Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade. McLaverty, JamesEditor , Clarendon Press, 1991.
48-50
Anthologization Martha Fowke
Five poems by MF (as Mrs. Fowke) appeared in good poetic company (with Pope , Prior , Susanna Centlivre , Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , and others) in Anthony Hammond 's A New Miscellany, published on 19 May 1720.
death Joan Whitrow
She was buried, according to her own instructions in the garden of Mathias Perkins , her executor,
“People. Joan Whitrow”. The Twickenham Museum.
beside the main road in Twickenham, across from the theatre. Her burial place was magnificently marked, in...
Dedications Catharine Trotter
She had begun work on these remarks during the winter of 1739. They appeared anonymously, dedicated to Pope , in tribute to his argument about the congruence of self-love and benevolence. According to Thomas Birch
Education Maria Callcott
She was, she said, mainly self-educated from the books which were all around her. (She read Pope 's Homer at nine.) She studied Sanskrit, Persian, and Icelandic as an adult. She later believed firmly that...
Education Jane Johnson
She was without formal education.
Whyman, Susan E. The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800. Oxford University Press, 2009.
162
She told a cousin that her favourite reading had been the Bible ever since she was a girl.
Arizpe, Evelyn, Morag Styles, and Shirley Brice Heath. Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts. Pied Piper Publishing, 2006.
31
Historian Susan E. Whyman argues that it was through epistolary...
Education Sarah Josepha Hale
Sarah Josepha Buell (later SJH ) was taught at home by her mother, with her father and her brother Horatio (then a law student) joining in for such higher branches of learning as writing, Latin...
Education Anna Swanwick
At home her mother had read to her daughters, while they sewed, Greek and Roman history, and writers like Pope , and Cowper . At four Anna could recite long passages from Milton 's L'Allegro...
Education Sybille Bedford
The idea had been that Jack and Suzan Robbins should select a boarding school for Sibylle and have her to stay for the holidays. Instead, with the money provided by her family and trustees, they...
Education Elizabeth Barrett Browning
EBB 's early immersion in fairy stories and popular tales was followed by a more ambitious course of reading that began around the age of seven with history, classical poetry, and some of Shakespeare 's...
Education Robert Browning
Like Alexander Pope , Browning was an autodidact, educating himself in his father's vast library. In 1828 he began reading Greek at London University but dropped out in his second term.
Thomas, Donald. Robert Browning: A Life Within Life. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
10, 18-19
Education Tabitha Tenney
Whether or not TT 's education was Puritanical (most sources about her life have no higher status than gossip) she was well read in the emergent canon of English literature, from Shakespeare and Milton through...
Education Elizabeth Grant
EG refers to a number of texts that influenced her as a child. She learned to read by the age of three, taught by loving aunts, and remembered in particular Puss in Boots, Bluebeard...
Education Eliza Fletcher
Grandmother Brudend and a paternal aunt educated Eliza with poetry and stories. The letters of Elizabeth Singer Rowe were important in her reading. It was said, however, that her grandmother over-encouraged her in precocious display...

Timeline

2 May 1709
Poetical Miscellanies. The Sixth Part was published, including Pope 's Pastorals and poems by Anne Finch (which are placed between work by Pope and Swift ).
28 February 1712
The Whig physician-poet Sir Richard Blackmore published his best-known work, the physico-theologicalCreation: a Philosophical Poem. Its grandiose style was praised by some respected critics of the day, but scorned by Pope and his Tory friends.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
May 1712
The publisher Bernard Lintot edited and published MiscellaneousPoems and Translations, by several Hands.
December 1713
Richard Steele published Poetical Miscellanies; it included poems by Pope , Anne Finch , and himself (including praise of the unnamed and only recently identified young Elizabeth Tollet ).
19 May 1720
A New Miscellany, edited by Anthony Hammond , included work by Pope , Prior , William Bond , George Sewell , Susanna Centlivre , Delarivier Manley , Eliza Haywood , Martha Fowke , and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .
December 1722
Alexander Pope edited and published his late friend Thomas Parnell 's Poems on Several Occasions.
19 June 1725
Dorothy Stanley , née Milborne, published by subscription Sir Philip Sidney 's Arcadia Moderniz'd, in four books (coinciding with the thirteenth edition of the original romance).
English Short Title Catalogue.
Before 22 April 1739
Anne Dodd , for almost thirty years the best-known of all the Londonmercuries or trade publishers, died, leaving the business to her daughters.
2 May 1742
Lady Euston , formerly Lady Dorothy Boyle , died of her husband's ill-treatment within seven months of her wedding.
14 January 1744
Mark Akenside published a lengthy, influential, philosophic poem in blank verse entitled The Pleasures of Imagination: the faculty which, he argues, the artist uses to apprehend and to imitate the wonders of God's creation.
18 March 1748
Robert Dodsley first offered for sale his influential Collection of Poems by Several Hands.
By March 1756
Joseph Warton published An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope.
1759
Adam Smith published with the Scottish firm of Millar, Kincaid and BellThe Theory of Moral Sentiments.
15 November 1763
The House of Lords learned of the existence of the scurrilous, obsceneEssay on Woman by Thomas Potter and John Wilkes , after its private, thirteen-copy edition for members of the Hell Fire Club had...
1767
At auctions of copyright, Richardson 's Clarissa was valued at £600, but Addison and Steele 's Spectator at £1,300, Shakespeare at £1,800, and Pope at £4,400.