Alexander Pope in the Making

Joseph Hone

The most comprehensive exploration to date of Pope's early career
Offers fresh insight into the ideological landscape of eighteenth-century literature
Provides new readings of major works by Pope alongside previously overlooked texts

Alexander Pope in the Making

Joseph Hone

Description

How did Alexander Pope become the greatest poet of the eighteenth century? Modern scholarship has typically taken Pope's rise to greatness and subsequent remoteness from lesser authors for granted. As a major poet he is treated as the successor of Milton and Dryden or the precursor of Wordsworth. Drawing on previously neglected texts and overlooked archival materials, Alexander Pope in the Making immerses the poet in his milieux, providing a substantial new account of Pope's early career, from the earliest traces of manuscript circulation to the publication of his collected Works and beyond.

In this book, Joseph Hone illuminates classic poems such as An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Windsor-Forest by setting them alongside lesser-known texts by Pope and his contempories, many of which have never received sustained critical attention before. Pope's earliest experiments in satire, panegyric, lyric, pastoral, and epic are all explored alongside his translations, publication strategies, and neglected editorial projects. By recovering values shared by Pope and the politically heterodox men and women whose works he read and with whom he collaborated, this book constructs powerful new interpretive frameworks for some of the eighteenth century's most celebrated poems.

Alexander Pope in the Making mounts a comprehensive challenge to the 'Scriblerian' paradigm that has dominated scholarship for the past eighty years. It sheds fresh light on Pope's early career and reshapes our understanding of the ideological landscape of his era. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature, history, and politics.

Alexander Pope in the Making

Joseph Hone

Alexander Pope in the Making

Joseph Hone

Author Information

Joseph Hone, Academic Track Fellow, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University

Joseph Hone is Academic Track Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is the author of Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne (2017) and The Paper Chase (2020). He is one of the volume editors of The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope.

Alexander Pope in the Making

Joseph Hone

Reviews and Awards

"Joseph Hone's meticulous, powerfully argued new monograph Alexander Pope in the Making, puts a different spin on how Pope used print publication strategically to build his youthful identity . . . Hone assembles plenty of evidence to make the case that, contrary to his public self-presentation, Pope's identity as a writer was formed not by the Scriblerus Club but by the habits of "innuendo and ambiguity" used by Catholic and Jacobite insiders to strengthen their community and avoid public attention during years of active religious persecution and Jacobite sedition." - Sophie Gee, Times Literary Supplement

"Another excellent new study, Joseph Hone's Alexander Pope in the Making [directs] us toward the strategic manner in which Pope constructed himself as a "classic author" during his lifetime, seeking to fix his reputation before others could fix it for him." - Clare Bucknell, New York Review of Books

"a very good work of scholarship that sets out to paint a highly political version of the young Pope's formation as a covert or cultural Jacobite in the time of Queen Anne . . . He gets there by performing a deep dive into the archives and it is fascinating" - Robert Phiddian, Australian Book Review

"Alexander Pope in the Making offers not merely a new interpretation of the poetry but also a way of reading that considers the context from which the poetry emerged. This new light on a poet who is often deemed difficult creates a modern appreciation for both Pope and his contemporaries. Hone's work is a valuable contribution to the study of 18th-century literature." - M. H. Kealy, CHOICE

"This elegant and adroit investigation of the literary and political coteries in which the young Alexander Pope came to maturity offers a radically different version of the poet's early life." - Peter Davidson, Literary Review