A literary career outside the universities
Pope was born in London in 1688 into a Catholic family. Religious restrictions and poor health shaped his education, much of which came through private study. His early poems brought him into literary circles, and An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock helped establish his reputation.
His translations of Homer brought financial independence and supported his life at Twickenham. There he created a garden and grotto while continuing a career of literary friendships and sharp disputes. The Dunciad and An Essay on Man carried his verse into satire and philosophical argument. He died at Twickenham in 1744.
A small offence on an epic scale
The Rape of the Lock grew out of a dispute between Catholic families after Lord Petre cut a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair. Pope transforms the incident through elevated language and supernatural attendants. First published in two cantos in 1712, it expanded into the five-canto poem. Lumitheca holds Leonard Smithers’s 1896 edition, which credits nine drawings by Aubrey Beardsley. The artist’s intricate clothes and patterned interiors give a later visual interpretation to the poem’s world of display and affront.
