Catholic laws pushed young Pope ten miles from London
Born 21 May 1688 in the Glorious Revolution year, Alexander Pope grew up barred by anti-Catholic statutes from living within ten miles of London. From Berkshire exile he still became the Augustan age's defining satirist, coining lines we still quote without knowing the source.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was an English Enlightenment poet, translator, and satirist, a leading early-eighteenth-century voice of Augustan literature known for discursive verse and sharp mockery. Phrases such as damning with faint praise and to err is human; to forgive, divine entered common speech and crowd quotation dictionaries. His father was a Strand linen merchant; both parents were Catholic. In 1700 the family moved to Popeswood at Binfield, Berkshire, near Windsor Forest, to satisfy the residence ban on Papists near the capital.
Locals later claimed he drafted early poems under a beech nicknamed Pope's Tree. At Binfield, John Caryll the younger introduced him to London literary elders. From age twelve Pott disease—spinal tuberculosis—bent his spine and stopped his growth at about 4 feet 6 inches, bringing fevers and breathing trouble for life. Pastorals appeared in Tonson's 1709 miscellany to instant fame; An Essay on Criticism followed in May 1711 to equal praise. The Rape of the Lock, published in 1712 and revised in 1714, turned a real quarrel into mock-epic after Lord Petre snipped a curl from Arabella Fermor without asking.
Around 1711 he joined Tory satirists Swift, Parnell, and Arbuthnot in the Scriblerus Club, inventing pedantic Martinus Scriblerus to mock ignorance. He also wrote for Whig circles around Addison, contributing to Cato and to The Guardian and The Spectator, while beginning a laborious Iliad translation published from 1715 onward. Constraint—of body, of law, of party—became the pressure that shaped the polished couplet. Homer paid for a Twickenham villa in 1719, where a spring found during digging filled his grotto with the sound of running water. The Dunciad enraged its targets so much that, his half-sister recalled, he walked out with his Great Dane Bounce and kept pistols in his pocket.
Source: Alexander Pope
