POPE, Alexander. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. Three volumes in one.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), an only child, was born in London in 1688, the year of the Glorious revolution. His father, a linen-draper, was forty-two, his mother forty-six. Both were Roman Catholics, and his father, Alexander Sr., retired from business after his son’s birth, perhaps because a new act of Parliament prohibited Catholics from living within ten miles of London. Between 1696 and 1700 Pope was tutored at home by a priest, and then enrolled in two Catholic schools, but he was largely self- educated. His religion would have made it impossible, at the time, to pursue a career in law or medicine or the Clergy even had he wished to: as a Catholic he was not, for example, permitted to attend a university. A precocious child, he could read Latin, Greek, French and Italian while still very young, and (according to his own account of the matter) was already, at sixteen, writing the rather sophisticated verse later published as his “Pastorals.” Characteristically, however, he would destroy a great deal of his juvenilia, the continued existence of which might have detracted from the image of the poet as child prodigy which he desired, later in life, to propagate.