Mighty Contests

The story of Alexander Pope's first commission is quite well known. In the summer of 1711, Pope's long-standing friend John Caryll informed him of a quarrel between two of the most prominent recusant families in the Home Counties: the Fermors and the Petres. Caryll's young ward, Robert, Lord Petre, had been suggested to Henry Fermor as a potential husband for his daughter, Arabella. When the two finally met, however, Petre presumptuously snatched a lock of Arabella's hair to keep as a token. Caryll suggested that Pope should "write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again." "It was in this view," Pope later reflected, "that I wrote my Rape of the Lock, which was well received and had its effect in the two families."¹ The first version of this poem was written within a fortnight of Caryll's request, at which point the poem circulated in scribal form among the two families and their friends before it was printed in 1712 as the final piece in Bernard Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. A revised and expanded version of The Rape of the Lock was published by Lintot in 1714, this time with a lavish frontispiece and pictures illustrating each canto. The book was a runaway success. Lintot sold three thousand copies at one shilling apiece within four days. A second edition was in the press before the end of the week.

Besides its initial commercial success, The Rape of the Lock has enjoyed steady critical acclaim over the last three centuries. This recent volume of Anniversary Essays on Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, edited by Donald W. Nichol, is testament to the "broad spectrum of critical approaches" (xv) with which the Rape has been and continues to be read. We find eleven essays—including an introduction by J. Paul Hunter—focusing on all aspects of the Rape's genesis, production, milieu, and reception. This diversity of approaches is nothing new in and of itself. As Raymond Stephanson observes in his contribution to the volume, The Rape of the Lock has for many years "been a poem notoriously receptive to multiple and even oppositional interpretations" (124). Nichol draws attention to this up-front, writing that his objective in collecting such a variety of essays in a single volume is to "prove, if anything, what a remarkably resilient poem Pope created" (xxiv). Resilient, perhaps, but not indestructible. While there is a good number of sensible and scholarly essays here, one or two stretch the interpretive possibilities of Pope's text to the breaking point.

The volume opens with a preface by Nichol and with Hunter's short but lively introduction. A pair of superb essays follows: first, Pat Rogers on the role of courts and courtly behavior in the poem, and, second, Louise Curran on gallantry. Rogers flags Pope's odd and "seldom discussed" (12) choice of Hampton Court as the scene of the crime, rather than the more obvious choice of the Petre family home at Ingatestone Hall. The royal setting suggests that the Rape is, in one sense at least, a poem on affairs of state, and that the conduct of courtiers in the poem reflects in some way their behavior in the real world. As an intriguing parallel, Rogers notes the attempted courtship of Princess Anne in 1682 by John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave (28). Of course, the Earl of Mulgrave (and later Duke of Buckingham) was Pope's most steadfast patron during the early part of his career. Curran's definition of "gallantry" is rather different from Rogers's of "courtliness"—with Curran more interested in the influence of authors such as Milton and Voiture than in contemporary politics. Although the word "gallant" never features in any version of the poem, Curran illustrates how modes of gallantry inherited from various authors pervade The Rape of the Lock.

There is a certain trendiness to some essays in the volume—most obviously in those...