Pope at Chiswick

Alexander Pope celebrated the virtues of the domestic throughout his life and yet one of his homes, Chiswick, remains largely neglected by scholarship. This article considers why the poet was drawn to the village in 1716, describes the resort in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and discusses why he found residence there to be uncomfortable. I further argue that the discontents of this period were expressed in the texture of his epistolary prose. Attention to the locale finally affords a keener understanding of his more celebrated homes in Windsor Forest and Twickenham.