The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1 / Poetry - Volume 1

by Alexander Pope

The subscription was a guinea for a quarto volume, and the donation of Allen, which Pope acknowledged in his will, was probably paid in part on this occasion. The copyright was purchased by Dodsley,[108] and from these united sources of emolument the book produced, as Johnson had heard, "sufficient profit."[109] It appeared on May 18, 1737, in folio and quarto, and a little later in octavo, that the various sizes might range with previous editions of the poet's works. In the preface he enters into a history of the fate which had attended his letters, and of the circumstances which compelled him to publish them, but with a studious avoidance of every question which had been raised by the collection of 1735. He says it is notorious what means have been taken to procure his correspondence, and disposes of the single instance which required explanation by enumerating among the methods "the transacting with people who dealt without names in the dark." He says that several letters have been ascribed to him which he did not write, and specifies examples, none of which appeared in the book sold to Curll. He says that the piratical editions contain various passages "which no man of common sense would have printed himself," and this he could assert with truth, because the greater part of the Cromwell series owed their publicity to Mrs. Thomas alone. He declares that he had not authorised any of the surreptitious impressions, but forbore to allege that the primitive impression was surreptitious, and shunned all allusion to its birth and parentage. He laments the need which exists for his own volume, and when he proceeds "to state the case fairly in the present situation," none of his reasons appertain to the work of P. T. He indulges in general declamation upon the enormity of procuring letters by disreputable contrivances, but carefully avoids affirming that any of those which first saw the light in 1735 were obtained in the manner he deprecates. He assures us, indeed, that his epistolary effusions are "emanations of the heart, and not efforts of genius," and adds, "this alone may induce any candid reader to believe their publication an act of necessity rather than vanity," which honestly interpreted implies that he was not the person who originally sent them to the press. The candid writer, however, omitted to inform the candid reader of the pains he had taken to render them worthy of his head as well as of his heart, and the falsification of the premises destroys the credibility of the inference. The silence of Pope upon the P. T. collection is, under the circumstances, equivalent to a confession of guilt. He gives an account of the surreptitious publication of his letters to Cromwell. He states the reason of the publication of his letters to Wycherley. He reverts once and again to what he justly called the sham volumes of Curll. He records the minutest wrong he can detect in the execution of any of the hostile schemes. But though the conduct of P. T. was the most flagrant of all; though the poet was believed to be the contriver of the plot, and his enemies taunted him with the fraud; though he professed to have learnt the details of the mystery, and half a dozen sentences, if he was innocent, would have set him right with both friends and foes; though the collection of 1735 was in its nature and extent far more important than the rest, and though it was the basis and primary cause of the edition he was ushering into the world, he yet relates no particulars, he offers no opinion, he ventures upon no denial. He endeavours instead to mask his evasion of the subject, and tries to confound the main point with subsidiary topics. There are wilful misrepresentations in his preface, and he was not restrained in his language by his homage to truth; but he had been baffled by the disclosures of Curll, and he was afraid to risk specific assertions which had been already exposed.

His correspondence with Atterbury, and several other letters, were printed for the first time in the avowed edition of Pope. He omitted as well as added, and left out some of the letters to and from Wycherley, some of the letters to and from Cromwell, some of the letters to ladies, and a few scattered letters from the remaining groups. In the letters he republished he here and there erased a sentence which had appeared in the volume of 1735, or inserted a sentence which was new. The minuter verbal alterations are numerous, but many of them are only corrections of errors of the press. In all essential particulars the collection of P. T., a little more sifted, is reproduced in the quarto of 1737. Pope had profited in the interval by the criticisms of the public. He set aside the portions of his correspondence which were condemned, he endeavoured to rectify the inconsistencies into which he had been betrayed in its reconstruction, and he sometimes altered a word or a phrase in the final revision to which he subjected the work. The changes leave it apparent that the Pope text and the P. T. text are identical in their origin, and neither of them are the text of the actual letters of the poet. His selection affords an imperfect test of the parts which he disowned as being counterfeited. He said in his advertisement of July 15, 1735, that he would reprint whatever was genuine in the surreptitious editions; but he relinquished this design, and wrote to Allen that "he was determined to leave out every syllable that could give the least ill example to an age apt to take it, or the least offence to any good or serious man."[110] He accordingly stated in his preface that he had not only omitted the letters which "were not his," but those which "were not approved of by him." Without committing himself to an assertion which might be refuted, he probably wished to obtain the benefit of the first alternative for letters which he had rejected under the last. Nevertheless in his eagerness to particularise any real forgery, he in effect accredited the entire collection of P. T. He had far greater interest in showing that it was not authentic than in damaging the trumpery volumes of Curll, and his forbearance to select a single instance of imposition from its pages is a plain proof that none existed for which he himself was not responsible. The charge of interpolation, which he had twice put forth in his advertisements,[111] and subsequently repeated to Allen,[112] was still more openly abandoned; for he tells us in his preface that the passages he omitted were "improper, or at least impertinent to be divulged to the public," and he no longer pretended that they were any of them spurious. He did not, in short, disown in his genuine edition one sentence of the volume of 1735, but practically receded from his previous allegations, which were mis-statements intended to persuade Caryll that he was not answerable for the garbling of the letters, and the world that he was not a party to their publication.

His acts continued to confirm his guilt. A little while after the quarto was published there appeared the 5th and 6th volume of the octavo edition of Pope's works, which the title-page says "consists of Letters, wherein to those of the author's own edition are added all that are genuine from the former impressions, with some never before printed."[113] This edition bears internal evidence of having been printed concurrently with the quarto itself. A sheet signed *Dd, the pages of which are numbered from 215 to 222, is interpolated in the quarto between the two last leaves of Dd, and the numbers are of necessity repeated on the succeeding eight pages. The interpolated letters of the quarto are equally an interpolation in the octavo, where they follow p. 116 of Vol. VI., on a duplicate half-sheet signed *I, and the paging is repeated on the half-sheet which follows. Consequently the octavo must have been struck off before the letters were interpolated in the quarto, or they would not have been printed in the octavo on an interpolated half-sheet. A second insertion tells the same tale. A few letters are added at the end of the quarto with the announcement that they had been published "since the foregoing sheets were printed off." These letters appear in like manner at the end of the octavo after finis. At the very moment, therefore, that Pope was compelling his reluctant friends to subscribe to his expurgated quarto, he was clandestinely printing an octavo edition in which he put back the whole of the omitted letters he allowed to be genuine, and his imperfect quarto was simply a fraud upon the purchasers for the purpose of accrediting his feigned reprobation of the P. T. volume.

One Watson, who assumed for the occasion the name of T. Johnson, printed a piratical edition of the new octavos. Dodsley filed a bill against him in Chancery on November 25 for the invasion of the copyright of Pope's edition in folio. On October 31, Dodsley had entered at Stationers' Hall, "The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., Vol. V. and Vol. VI. The second edition corrected. 8vo." He had omitted to enter the previous edition of the octavos, and in a letter which Watson wrote on November 30 he objected that the folio was not the book he had pirated, and that the octavo volumes were only entered at Stationers' Hall on October 31, which he says "was at least a full month after the publication of the edition complained of, and Pope's own first edition entirely sold before the octavo was entered." His meaning was that since the first edition of the octavo had not been entered, the entry of the second edition, which was subsequent to the piracy, came too late to secure the copyright. The greater part, however, of Watson's volumes were identical with the text of the folio which had been entered on May 18, and Watson did not persevere in his defence. He consented to deliver up the 1646 copies in his possession on the receipt of 25l., and to give Pope a bond in which he undertook to pay a penalty of 100l. if he ever again invaded his rights by printing any of his works.[114]

Pope's prohibition of Watson's work, coupled with his own publication of the octavos, is fresh evidence of the insincerity of his professed dissatisfaction with the P. T. selection. His apology for replacing in the octavos the letters he had rejected was that they were in process of being reinstated in a piratical edition of the quarto.[115] Pope had the power, which he used, to stop piratical publications, and at the same time he absurdly made the piracy the plea for publishing himself the condemned letters he had cast aside. His mode of relieving his disgust at their appearance, and of giving effect to his eager desire for their suppression was to lay hold of a hollow excuse for reprinting them.

While Pope proceeded against Watson he submitted to the piracies of Curll. His conduct once more betrayed that he was the author of the P. T. plot. Curll had all along persisted in printing the P. T. letters. He immediately seized the new letters in the quarto, and inserted them in his fifth volume of "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence." He was not content with usurping Pope's property. He insulted, defied, and accused him. Pope had the strongest motive in self-vindication to grapple with the charges of Curll, and he shrunk from the contest. He resented the infringement of his copyright by an indifferent person, and he could not willingly have endured to be despoiled by his mocking antagonist, and sit down quietly under the contumely and wrong. The bill filed against Watson discovers the cause of his forbearance. There we find that Pope in applying for an injunction was obliged to state that his quarto edition was the first publication of his letters "with his consent, direction, or approbation,"[116] and if he had filed a similar bill against Curll, the bookseller would have proved that he had purchased the P. T. edition, and that Pope had printed and sold it. Curll announced in September, 1735, that he had filed a bill against Smythe to compel the fulfilment of his contract, and he made Gilliver a party to the suit in consequence of his confession that Pope had purchased of him the old sheets of the Wycherley, and directed the rest of the P. T. collection to be printed to match them.[117] Smythe was a shadow who could not be reached. The facts remained, and Pope could not attempt to convict Curll of piracy without being himself convicted of having sold him the work. He had been worsted on this very point when he fought with his best weapon, the pen, and he did not dare to renew the conflict in a court of law where allegations could neither be passed over in silence, nor be met by evasions and quibbles. Any doubt that the motive for his toleration was fear was done away by his filing a bill against Curll the instant he pirated the Swift Correspondence which was entirely distinct from the P. T. transaction.

Pope had shown earlier that he was afraid to join issue with Curll before a legal tribunal. Curll inserted an advertisement in "Fog's Journal" of July 26, 1735, in which he accused Pope of having printed the P. T. collection, and of telling falsehoods in self-defence. The proprietor of "Fog's Journal" was induced by a threat of prosecution to apologise for the insertion of the advertisement, and Curll immediately reprinted it in the second volume of Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence, accompanied by a scornful account of Pope's interference. Pope did not venture to accept the taunting challenge. His vapouring ceased when he was dared to fight. He menaced the publisher of a newspaper, who would not brave a trial in a cause which was not his own, and tamely retreated before the real offender in person.

The octavo edition of 1737 enables us to put the veracity of Pope in repudiating the P. T. collection to yet another proof. In May and July, 1735, he published advertisements protesting that several letters ascribed to him in the P. T. volume were not his.[118] He prefixed to the octavo of 1737 a catalogue of surreptitious editions, in which he repeated that the P. T. publication "contained several letters not genuine."[119] He had hitherto been loud in exclaiming against the P. T. forgeries without being imprudent enough to name them. His caution relaxed as time wore on, and he had the courage to state on the title-page of the first octavo edition of 1737 that he had "added to the letters of the author's own edition all that are genuine from the former impressions." The spurious letters in the P. T. collection were thus declared to be the letters which were excluded from the octavo edition of 1737. They were seven in number. Three were letters, or extracts of letters, from Wycherley, two belonged to the section headed "Letters to Several Ladies," and two were letters to Gay. Unless they were really forgeries, Pope told and retold emphatic lies to discredit the P. T. collection, and establish his innocence, and the deceit would leave no doubt of his criminality.

Four letters out of the seven we know to have been genuine. The three letters of Wycherley were on the sheets transferred from the edition of his posthumous works which was published by Pope, and copies of two of them are among the Oxford papers. One of the suppressed letters to ladies exists in duplicate, and was sent by Pope to Miss Blount, and to Miss Marriot, the friend and neighbour of his coadjutor Broome. The letters are both originals in the handwriting of Pope. There are no means of verifying the remaining three letters, nor is it necessary to test them, when more than half the pretended forgeries are found to be authentic. Once again we have absolute evidence that his accusation of forgery was an acted clamour to screen himself. He finally adopted all the letters but seven, and his assertion that these seven were fabrications was a falsehood.

Besides the necessity Pope was under of rejecting some of the P. T. letters to bear out his mendacious charge of forgery, he had particular reasons for disclaiming three at least of the four letters which proceeded from his own pen. The letter he addressed to Miss Blount and Miss Marriot was a disquisition on a human monstrosity exhibiting in London. He had said in his Essay on Criticism that "vile obscenity should find no pardon." He was among the offenders he pronounced unpardonable, and often revelled in dull and studied indecorums which he mistook for wit. The laboured letter he esteemed so highly that he sent it to two of his female correspondents was more than ordinarily gross and stupid. The fancied humour appeared to the public revolting coarseness, and he cast out the letter because it excited disgust and contempt.