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Pope, Lady Mary, and the Court Poems (1716)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Halsband
Robert Halsband*
Affiliation:
Hunter College, New York 21, N. Y.
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Extract

So much ink has already been spilt in discussing the relationship between Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that one may very well hesitate before adding his jot. Yet the interaction of these two uncomfortably brilliant personalities is of exceptional interest both for their psychological drama and for the literature they wrote because of each other. As drama their relationship may be divided into three acts: friendship, estrangement, and enmity. Unfortunately, with the sparse documentation that survives, the action must be patiently reconstructed from fragmentary clues. Since both chief actors had complex, if not crafty minds, their motives are not simple, and must be carefully and sceptically determined. To favor either Lady Mary or Pope is to distort their drama; one must try instead to judge impartially on the basis of the facts that remain. At present, with valuable new data added to a fresh appraisal of the old, an account may be given which is less equivocal and more credible.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , March 1953 , pp. 237 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 Richard F. Jones, “Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century,” JEGP, xxiv (1925), 33-60; Marion K. Bragg, The Formal Eclogue in Eighteenth-Century England, Univ. of Maine Studies, 2nd Ser., No. 6 (1926); Richmond P. Bond, English Burlesque Poetry 1700-1750 (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), p. 113.

2 Pope, Prose Works, Vol. I: 1711-1720 (Oxford, 1936), p. xcv.

3 R. H. Griffith, Alexander Pope: a Bibliography (Austin, Texas, 1922, 1927), i, ii, 546. Its publication is announced in the Post Boy and in the Post Man of 24-27 March.

4 Friday, 16 March (from reports in the Flying Post of 15-17 March and in the Daily Courant of 17 March).

5 As George Sherburn points out—The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1934), p. 168 n.—this is an attempt to implicate Joseph Addison, who had no part in the controversy.

6 Griffith, i, i, SO.

7 Pope, Prose (1936), pp. xcviii-cviii; Sherbum, Early Career, pp. 167-171; Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll (London, 1927), pp. 50-55. W. Moy Thomas' assertion—N&Q, 7th Ser., ix (1890), 515—that Lady Mary wrote the Advertisement and arranged for the publication is unsupported by any evidence.

8 The Curliad (London, 1729), p. 20; Curll's preface to the second volume of Pope's literary correspondence, reprinted in Pope's Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope (London, 1871-89), vi, 436.

9 Lady Mary, Letters and Works, ed. Wharncliffe, 3rd ed. rev. by Thomas (London, 1861), i, 423, 432, 446.

10 It was sold at Sotheby's in 1935, and is now in the Arents Collection of the N. Y. Public Library.

11 Among the Wortley MSS. now owned by her descendant the Earl of Harrowby, who has kindly allowed me to use it.

12 Walpole, Letters, ed. Toynbee (Oxford, 1903), I, 90; Walpole's marginalia in Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands, 2nd ed. (London, 1748-58), i, 84 (copy in the British Museum).

13 Walpole, Letters, ii, 297.

14 Letters and Works (1861), ii, 419. As I demonstrated in an article on the literary source of “Carabosse” Lady Mary departs from her model to insert this list: “An Imitation of Perrault in England: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's ‘Carabosse’,” Comp. Lit., iii (1951), 175.

15 See the letter to Pope from his friend Jervas the painter in 1715 or 1716 (Elwin and Courthope, viii, 19-20).

16 Pope, Works, ed. Warton (London, 1797), ii, 332 n. (an anecdote by Pope's friend Richardson the younger).

17 Spence, Anecdotes, ed. Singer (London, 1820), p. 292.

18 “Anecdotes of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Pomfret,” Appendix 5, Correspondence, Vol. 14, ed. Lewis, Lam, Bennett (New Haven, Conn., 1948), p. 242, n. 6.

19 Some confusion may arise from the fact that in his MS. (B) Pope annotated two lines in the eclogue with their parallels in Virgil; and he made similar notes in several of the other eclogues. There is no reason to give this any more importance than as clever display of his familiarity with the Latin originals.

20 Works (London, 1751), vi, 56.

21 MS. note by Spence among the Spence Papers owned by James M. Osborn, who kindly made it available to me.

22 Walpole's marginalia in Dodsley's Collection, i, 84. The two words in brackets are conjectural.

23 She is usually identified as the Duchess of Roxburgh, several times by Walpole, whose informant was Lady Mary. The Duchess, who died in 1718, apparently took no part in the ensuing controversy.

24 Letters quoted in Sherburn, Early Career, p. 204.

25 Huntington Library, Loudun MSS., ff. 7411, -12, -14, -17, -19. We do not know exactly which version of “The Drawing-Room” was being circulated. It is significant that the 1716 printed version omits 14 lines which appear in the version included in B, D, and E (above). The Loudun MS. f. 7419 cited here refers to “The Drawing-Room,” and not to an imitation of Dorset's ballad as I mistakenly assumed in a recent article: HLQ, xiii (1950), 411.

26 A Supplement to the Works of Alexander Pope (London, 1757), pp. 71-72; Sherburn, “Walpole's Marginalia in Additions to Pope [ed. George Steevens] (1776),” HLQ, i (1938), 478.

27 Gay, Poetical Works, ed. Faber (London, 1926), p. 134.

28 “Anecdotes of Lady Mary,” op. cit., 242-243.

29 Early Career, pp. 168-169.

30 Pope, Prose (1936), p. xcvi. Still another similar assumption is given below in n. 40. With even more subjective embellishments, it appears in the most recent biography of Pope: Bonamy Dobrée, Alexander Pope (New York, 1952), pp. 59-60.

31 Elwin and Courthope, vi, 241.

32 Both pamphlets are reprinted in Elwin and Courthope, x, 462-476, and in Prose (1936), pp. 257-266, 273-285.

33 “Ladies of Quality” is a commonplace in newspaper advertisements of the period. We find frequent notices in the Daily Courant through March and April 1716 that benefit performances at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane are announced “At the Desire of Several Ladies of Quality.”

34 “Epistle to Mr. Jervas,” Elwin and Courthope, iii, 213. Its publication is announced in the London Gazette for 17-20 March and in the Daily Courant for 24 March. When Pope reprinted this poem after his quarrel with Lady Mary, he changed the name to Worsley, thus transferring the compliment to Frances, Lady Worsley.

35 Poetical Works (1926), pp. 107-108, 78. Gay's sensitivity to his own satiric writing is shown by his blunting the court satire in Rural Sports when he reprinted it in 1720.

36 The Rape of the Lock (1714), Canto iv, 11. 149-160.

37 Poetical Works (1926), p. 150.

38 Samuel Johnson, “Gay,” Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill (Oxford, 1905), ii, 276.

39 Elwin and Courthope, vi, 225.

40 This generalization is also made by William Henry Irving—John Gay, Favorite of the Wits (Durham, N. C., 1940), p. 139—but he does not pursue it through its ramifications in Pope's revenge on Curll. And when he writes that Lady Mary was “angry enough apparently to suggest at least a beating for Curll,” we see how close he is to Sherburn's and Ault's theory.

41 Lives, iii, 154.

42 Anecdotes, p. 160.

43 Referring to the Dunciad (1728).

44 The Curliad (1729), p. 21.

45 Pope continued solicitous for Gay's preferment even after the Court Poems. In Dec. 1716 he writes to Martha Blount: “Gay is well at court, and more in the way of being served than ever” (Elwin and Courthope, ix, 271). Gay was finally awarded a court post in 1727 but declined it.

46 “Epistle to Methuen,” Poetical Works (1926), p. 163.

47 Elwin and Courthope, vi, 417. Since the only source for this Congreve letter is Pope's edition of his own letters (Cooper, 1737) it should be viewed with suspicion but not necessarily with incredulity.

48 Dunciad, ed. Sutherland (London, 1943), p. 104 n. It is quoted by Sherburn (Early Career, p. 204), who takes it all at face value. Support for part of Pope's statement is seen in Curll's advertisements; in the Evening Post of 31 March-3 April 1716 he lists as just published “Court Poems … with a Preface giving some Account of the Author …,” but a week later (7-10 April) in the same paper: “Mr. Pope's Court-Poems …”

49 One result of Pope's footnote is an attack on him which accuses him of writing “The Drawing-Room” and then passing it off as Lady Mary's: Pope Alexander's Supremacy (London, 1729), p. 14. This charge is patently false in view of our proof that Lady Mary was the author of the eclogue.

50 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1935 (New York, 1936), p. 39.