10 - Pope and the poetry of opposition

Summary

Inroduction

It is long since Pope has been seen as reclining in the bosom of a complacent eighteenth-century establishment. In the middle and later decades of the last century a particular focus was directed on to the Pope of 1729-43 as a poet of political opposition. Pope's target was here seen as the long premiership of Sir Robert Walpole and the generally unenlightened attitudes of King George I and King George II. Then, towards the end of the last century, a sharper focus was directed on to the less overtly political implications of some of Pope's earlier works, notably Windsor-Forest and The Rape of the Lock, with the result that a concern with, probably a sympathy with, Jacobite attitudes was detected. (Jacobites were those who held that the exiled royal line of the Stuarts, rather than the incumbent line of the Hanoverians, were the true kings of Britain.) One consequence of this later work was to suggest an ideological substructure for Pope's more salient poetry of political opposition in the period 1729-43.

We have abundant discussion of the earlier phase in Pope's career. Whilst it is wrong to impute direct involvement in the Jacobite movement by association, it cannot be without significance that so many of the poet's closest friends among the Catholic gentry and nobility had extensive links to the leaders of the Rising in 1715/16, and several members of their families took an active part in the rebellion. More complex issues arise in the case of the Atterbury Plot, a decade later, and in the later phase when Pope became associated with the Patriot opposition to Robert Walpole in the 1730s.