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A POPE CHRONOLOGY Macmillan Author Chronologies

General Editor: Norman Page, Professor of Modern , University of Nottingham

Reginald Berry A POPE CHRONOLOGY

Edward Bishop A VIRGINIA WOOLF CHRONOLOGY

Timothy Hands A GEORGE ELIOT CHRONOLOGY

Norman Page A BYRON CHRONOLOGY A DICKENS CHRONOLOGY

F. B. Pinion A WORDSWORTH CHRONOLOGY

R. C. Terry A TROLLOPE CHRONOLOGY

Further titles in preparation

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Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ud, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, . A Pope Chronology

REGINALD BERRY Senior Lecturer in English University of Canterbury, New Zealand

M MACMILLAN PRESS ©Reginald John Berry 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-39907-1

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1988

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and Companies and representatives throughout the world

Typeset by Wessex Typesetters (Division of The Eastern Press Ltd) Frome, Somerset

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Berry, Reginald A Pope chronology.-(Macmillan author chronologies) 1. Pope, Alexander-Chronology I. Title 821'.5 PR3633 ISBN 978-1-349-08279-7 ISBN 978-1-349-08277-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08277-3 For Carolynne, Anthea and Aidan Contents

General Editor's Preface ix

Introduction xi

List of Abbreviations xiii

A POPE CHRONOLOGY 1

Principal Persons Mentioned 186

Principal Places Mentioned 193

Bibliography 196

Index 197

vii General Editor's Preface

Most biographies are ill adapted to serve as works of reference - not surprisingly so, since the biographer is likely to regard his function as the devising of a continuous and readable narrative, with excursions into interpretation and speculation, rather than a bald recital of facts. There are times, however, when anyone reading for business or pleasure needs to check a point quickly or to obtain a rapid overview of part of an author's life or career; and at such moments turning over the pages of a biography can be a time-consuming and frustrating occupation. The present series of volumes aims at providing a means whereby the chronological facts of an author's life and career, rather than needing to be prised out of the narrative in which they are (if they appear at all) securely embedded, can be seen at a glance. Moreover, whereas biographies are often, and quite understandably, vague over matters of fact (since it makes for tediousness to be forever enumerating details of dates and places), a chronology can be precise whenever it is possible to be precise. Thanks to the survival, sometimes in very large quantities, of letters, diaries, notebooks and other documents, as well as to thoroughly researched biographies and bibliographies, this material now exists in abundance for many major authors. In the case of, for example, Dickens, we can often ascertain what he was doing in each month and week, and almost on each day, of his prodigiously active working life; and the student of, say, David Copperfield is likely to find it fascinating as well as useful to know just when Dickens was at work on each part of that novel, what other literary enterprises he was engaged in at the same time, whom he was meeting, what places he was visiting, and what were the relevant circumstances of his personal and professional life. Such a chronology is not, of course, a substitute for a biography; but its arrangement, in combination with its index, makes it a much more convenient tool for this kind of purpose; and it may be acceptable as a form of 'alternative' biography, with its own distinctive advantages as well as its obvious limitations. Since information relating to an author's early years is usually scanty and chronologically imprecise, the opening section of some volumes in this series groups together the years of childhood and

ix X A Pope Chronology adolescence. Thereafter each year, and usually each month, is dealt with separately. Information not readily assignable to a specific month or day is given as a general note under the relevant year or month. The first entry for each month carries an indication of the day of the week, so that when necessary this can be readily calculated for other dates. Each volume also contains a bibliography of the principal sources of information. In the chronology itself, the sources of many of the more specific items, including quotations, are identified, in order that the reader who wishes to do so may consult the original contexts.

NoRMAN PAGE Introduction

In the , the poet famously condenses his life into the phrase 'this long disease'. Seen at length in a chronology such as this, the life of Alexander Pope is dominated rather by his dedication to friends and friendship, to the creation of a stable domestic situation for himself, and, centrally, to the discipline of the poet's profession. The evidence of these dominant aspects is found in Pope's correspondence and in the complex publication details of his own works and those of his contemporaries. The chronology delineates Pope's continuing respect for family values and his pursuit of the quiet country life at his villa, with his own landscaped garden. But Pope also spent much time away, visiting with well-to-do friends at their rural estates and commuting to London to deal with the business side of his literary career. Like many writers he spoke infrequently of his works in progress. But he left a detailed record of his intensive participation in the printing and publishing of his works. In two ways represented here, Pope was also fully engaged in a community of writers. On the friendly side, he always sought out the fellowship of men of genius. In particular, because his early participation in the (1713-14) so determined his later career, I have included in this chronology selected information about the parallel careers of Gay, Arbuthnot and Swift. On the hostile side, Pope's literary and financial successes (and his often prickly personality) attracted a jealous and vicious crew of detractors, as evidenced by the recurrent appearance in these pages of references to pamphlet and newspaper attacks on the poet, his works, and his character. More detailed information about these attacks can be found in Guerinot' s Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope and Rogers' Major of Alexander Pope. Full bibliographic descriptions of Pope's works are to be found in Griffith's Bibliography. Where works have gone into multiple editions I have not tried to include the dates of all of these, except occasionally to show the popularity of a particular piece, as with or . In some cases exact publication dates are not available, either because they are unknown or because sources give contradictory dates; some dates, therefore, may be only approximate. In the eighteenth-

xi xii A Pope Chronology century book world, the bookseller performed the modem-day function of publisher; here I have used the two terms interchangeably. A major resource for this chronology has been Pope's Correspondence, edited by George Sherburn. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from the letters are from this edition and can be located there according to the date of the entry. Because Pope edited his own correspondence for publication, and the originals for a proportion of the letters do not now exist, not all the information so derived may be accurate. Pope was also notoriously lax or inexact about dating his letters properly, as the extant letters show. And in certain cases, as well, Pope consciously fabricated letters for his own editions (see, for example, 20 July 1705 and 26 July 1734). The general matter of dating requires a brief explanation. Until 1752, and therefore through the whole of Pope's life, England followed the Julian or Old Style Calendar, whereas most of Europe had adopted the Gregorian or New Style Calendar almost two centuries earlier. The Julian Calendar was eleven days behind the Gregorian, and it started the year on 25 March. In this chronology all dates are Old Style, except that the year is taken to begin on 1 January. The assembly of a chronology implies not only a compiling of dates and events but also an understanding of the life extrapolated upon them. In that regard, I am indebted to the several narratives of Pope's career by Maynard Mack, especially Alexander Pope: A Life (1985). More personally, I owe this work to the inspiration provided by Peter Seary and Patricia Briickmann, who in a far• away place first taught me how to read Pope. Here, in another place far away, I have been helped by Helen Deverson, Kate Trevella, Gareth Cordery, Ronys Davey (Waiwetu), Stuart Foster (Matai), and also by Carolynne Berry. List of Abbreviations

AP Alexander Pope Ault Norman Ault, New Light on Pope (London: Methuen, 1949). CH Pope: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Barnard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). CIH Maynard Mack, 'Collected in Himself': Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of his Contemporaries (Newark, Del.: Delaware University Press, 1982). Corr. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). Mack, Life Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press; and New and London: W. W. Norton, 1985). Mack, Garden Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and City and Politics in the Later of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1969). PA J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711-1744 (London: Methuen, 1969). Sherburn George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). Spence , Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). TE The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols (London: Methuen, 1938--68).

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