‘The Picture of the Prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of Mr Pope in twenty Noblemen’s Houses,’ wrote Voltaire in 1733.
Alexander Pope’s start in life was not promising. A crippled hunchback, suffering chronic ill-health, he was, as a Catholic, excluded from Court, allowed to live no closer to Westminster than Chiswick. His ‘Rape of the Lock’, a mock epic satirically inflating a ludicrously minor incident in polite society, became the first bestseller after the 1710 Copyright Act, but brought him a mere £22.15s.
Yet the poet who, according to Samuel Johnson, ‘never drank tea without a stratagem’, knew how to exploit his work’s succès de scandale.
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