45 pages • 1 hour read
Alexander PopeThe Dunciad
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1743A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Alexander Pope
Although today he’s considered one of the most important writers in English literature, opinions of Alexander Pope during his own time were very much divided. Pope (1688-1744) was a poet, translator, and satirist best known today, perhaps, for The Rape of the Lock, first published in 1712. He burst onto the English literary scene in 1709 with the publication of his Pastorals, which he followed up with An Essay on Criticism in 1711. By the time the first edition of The Dunciad appeared in 1728, Pope had become a contentious figure. His translations of Homer’s Iliad (1715-1720) and Odyssey (1725-1726) were hugely successful, but his editions of Shakespeare’s works (1725) were met with critical derision, much of it fueled by jealousy and by the commercial vogue for scathing criticism that was prevalent in the era. As his renown grew, Pope—who was already something of an outcast from traditional London society—found himself more and more often the subject of verbal attacks from other writers, and his works more frequently plagiarized by unscrupulous publishers.
Pope was born in London to a family of Catholics in 1688, the first year of the Glorious Revolution, which ultimately deposed James II, England’s last Catholic monarch. The young Pope was mostly educated at home, as English penal laws of the time prevented Catholics from teaching, attending university, and engaging in many other avenues of participation in civic life. The family eventually moved to Berkshire in 1700, and Pope’s education became even less formal. It was also around this time that Pope’s many medical troubles began. The most pronounced of these was a case of Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis of the spine that warped his spine and arrested his growth. As an adult, Pope stood only about four and a half feet tall and had a severe hunchback. All these factors only added to the ridicule he faced once he became a successful writer. While he maintained a robust and devoted circle of friends that included prominent authors like Jonathan Swift and John Gay, he also had many enemies. It was partly in response to their insults and criticisms that Pope wrote The Dunciad.
Literary Context: The Multiple Dunciads
In the early 1700s, England was experiencing a major publishing boom, and readers, printers, and booksellers were all hungry for more material. Prior to this period, high printing costs and restrictive legislation limited who and what could be published. Most popular writings before Pope’s day would have been written for the stage or by an author of independent means or sponsored by the court. By the time Pope published the first edition of The Dunciad, however, printing was cheap, and London was overflowing with journals, periodicals, chapbooks, broadsheets, newspapers, and subscriptions for the translated works of Homer, Virgil, and other classical writers. A new market in used books had arisen, and it became fashionable to fill one’s library with popular titles—with or without reading them.
This boom also led to a new kind of writer, one who wrote for pay and lived off those earnings. Political parties hired writers to put out essays praising their platforms or bashing the opposition; sometimes the same writer would even work for opposing sides. Booksellers fought to secure the works of new poets. Printers hastily cobbled together plagiarized editions of popular works, and critics made a living writing responses and diatribes whenever a new work was released.
Pope saw the profit motive as counter to the aesthetic and moral values he believed should be paramount in writing, and he was disgusted by the state of English letters at this time. He studied the Classics and translated many of them into English, and each publication was met with criticism that filled these new “hack” writers’ pockets. The final straw for Pope came when Lewis Theobald published Shakespeare Restored, an edition of Shakespeare’s works that claimed to fix all the damage Pope had done in his own edition. Pope, who had already thought about writing a satire on the subject, made Theobald his King Dunce for the first edition of The Dunciad in 1728.
The first edition was published anonymously, but everyone knew it was Pope’s work, and a slew of responses were printed almost immediately. Some publishers made money by putting out “keys” that sought to identify all the figures referenced, while others simply hired writers to insult Pope. Many of The Dunciad’s critics wouldn’t put their names to their words, but a few did, which Pope respected. What concerned him more, however, were the enemies he was making unintentionally: people who were named erroneously in some of the keys. To set things straight, he published the Dunciad Variorum in 1729. Thirteen years later, Pope returned to the work, publishing the New Dunciad as a sequel to the original, and to tie it all together neatly, he revised everything and published The Dunciad in Four Books in 1743 with Colley Cibber as his new King Dunce.
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