The world of Pope's satires

Despite the fact that Pope made most of his money from subscriptions to his Classical translations, it is for his sharp and gritty satires that he is best remembered and justly revered. It is these that proved most entertaining and that, in literature, remained pertinent personal accounts of social history. During the Restoration and 18th Century satire was a popular generic choice for those writers who wanted to pass comment on some issue of contemporary life whilst still practicing their art. By definition satire is Œthe use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm etc. in speech or writing for the ostensible purpose of exposing and discouraging vice or folly¹. Satire is then necessarily didactic because its aim is to realign its target with a particular ideal from which the satirist believes it to have strayed. This definition alone though is not enough to help us define and examine why Pope delighted in this particular genre and why he used it as a vehicle for his political and moral beliefs.

Satire is distinct from pure didacticism because of its ability to entertain;

Complaint and teaching alone...do not themselves make satire...satire at all levels must entertain as well as try to influence conduct... (by) the joy of hearing a travesty, a fantastic inversion of the real world.

An inversion such as the realm of the Queen of Dullness in the Dunciad. Likewise Pope makes it clear that what he writes is not slander or lampoon, which is what litters the texts of the Grub Street writers, and which he attacks in The Dunciad with the lines, Œ"Here strip, my children! here at once leap in,/Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin,/And who the most in love of dirt excel,¹ (II 275-7). He makes his opinion clear on this in the lines;

There is not in the world a greater Error than that which Fools are so apt to fall into, and Knaves with good reason to encourage, the mistaking of a Satyrist for a libeller; wheras to a true satyrist nothing is so odious as a libeller, for the same reason as to a man truly Virtuous nothing is so hateful as a hypocrite.

In 1725 Pope wrote to his eminent friend Swift, of his desire for his proceeding poetry to be a, Œuseful investigation of my own territories....something domestic, fit for my own country, and for my own time;¹ This definition could apply to many types of works and it is possible that he was referring to the epic he had always wanted to write, just as Virgil had written the Aeneid to instill a sense of patriotism in his people, or like Milton whose Paradise Lost explained the Œways of God to men¹. However satires, in which he excelled, proved to be an excellent reflection of the moral and social climes of England in the 1730s. Rather than a purely historical account, a satire is a good illustration of personal contemporary experience within any given historical period. It is obviously biased because it is imbued with opinion, but it is this that gives us insight into a slice of contemporary life, so seeing how the larger social and political machinations turned the miniature cogs of the people.

 

Pope was reluctant to leave his position as a literary poet and turn to satire. In his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot Pope claimed that he had resisted the provocation of responding to slander directed at him until the publication of the Dunciad , ŒFull ten years slandered, did he once reply?¹ (l 374). However throughout his entire literary career Pope was the subject of constant literary attack. So much so that the body of critical literature against him was sufficient to earn itself the name ŒPopiana¹. These attacks were largely in the form of pamphlets. Pamphleteering in the Eighteenth century was a cheap and effective way of reaching a large audience often with topical and controversial issues. Those liable laws that did exist were rarely brought into play over personal attacks and so the people who wrote them stood to profit financially without the risk of legal action. Pamphleteering was one of the chief employments of the Grub Street hacks. Grub Street was a place, as Dr Johnson kindly put it Œmuch inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems.¹, and these inhabitants were less sympathetically described by Richard Savage as Œof very low Parentage, and without any Pretence of Merit,( are) aspiring to the Rank of Gentlemen,¹. The possible causes for attacking Pope were many fold. Let us look at some of those reasons and some of Pope¹s satirical responses.

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Pope¹s early success and affluence, in spite of deformities and irrespective of his unorthodox political and religious tendencies, was enough in itself to irk those hack writers whose hands were tied to the pens of their publishers. Pope had managed to beat the booksellers at their own game, making a fortune from subscriptions to his Classical translations, a thing which provided much fodder for the pamphleteers. Pamphlets dealt with questions from Pope¹s knowledge of Greek, ŒIf I did not understand Greek, what of that; I hope a Man may translate a Greek Author without understanding Greek,¹, to criticisms over his ...

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