Not published by George Sherburn in his 1956 edition of Pope’s correspondence but later published in The Review of English Studies, New Series Vol. 9, No. 36 (November 1957), pp. 388-406; and by Sherburn in “Pope on the Threshold of His Career,” Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. XIII, No. 1 (Winter 1959), pp. 29-46.
A remarkably early and entertaining letter written as the young Alexander Pope was on the cusp of great fame.
A lively letter written by Pope at the age of nineteen to Antony Englefield, a close friend and mentor; the recipient was some fifty years older than Pope, and lived at Whiteknights, on the outskirts of Reading, about five miles from the village of Binfield in Windsor Forest, where Pope grew up. Only two earlier autograph letters of Pope are known to survive, sent in April and July of the same year to another elderly friend and neighbour Sir William Trumbull; these relatively short notes are in the British Library.
This letter was written by Pope at a time of high excitement, as he was then on his first extended trip away from home, to visit the poet, critic, and politician William Walsh (1662-1708) at his home in Abberley, about ten miles northwest of Worcester. Pope had gone to see Walsh specifically for advice about the composition of his “Pastorals;” these poems did not appear in print until a year after Walsh’s death, but surviving manuscripts show that Walsh made a notable contribution to the transformation of Pope into a “correct” poet, as he was later to acknowledge in both his Essay on Criticism and his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. One of these “corrected” manuscripts of the “Pastorals” is now at the Beinecke Library, Yale (OSB MSS FILE 19760).
Pope’s formal education was limited by the fact that he came from a Roman Catholic family, and the development of his literary talent was not so much from his schooling, as from his early contact with other Roman Catholics. Antony Englefield, who died in 1712 at the age of 75, was one of the most important of his early friends, he was the grandfather of Martha Blount, a girl two years younger than Pope who lived at Mapledurham on the other side of the Thames, and with whom Pope formed an enduring relationship; he was also the kinsman of John Caryll, more than twenty years Pope’s elder, whom Pope first met at Whiteknights when he was fifteen, and who became the closest friend of his youth.
Englefield had evidently written to Pope to enquire how he was getting on in Worcestershire, and Pope’s reply is composed in what he no doubt considered to be an appropriately humorous vein:
“I am very much obliged to you for ye kind letter you favourd me with, and the more for its length; for in it methinks I am conversing here in Worcestershire with the same good natur’d, merry conceited, learned & politique gentleman whom I have so often had the honour to talk with at Whiteknights. But let me tell you, I do not take it so well to be treated in so complementall a stile; wch seems rather design’d to prove yr wit, to yr friend, than yr sincerity: to be abus’d in a man’s own country, where ev’ry body knows him ridiculous enough, is tolerable at least; but to abuse one at so great a distance is unchristian & unreasonable in you. Well, enjoy yr beloved raillery, on condition that I may enjoy yr beloved letters; for I wou’d rather be ridicul’d by you, than not remembred. Cerainly Sir, you intend to make me extreamly proud, when you insinuate yt Sir William Trumbull expresses a desire of my return, wch were alone sufficient to draw me back before I were at ye end of my journey, if I cou’d have ye vanity to believe it.”
Pope continues at some length in the same manner, pretending at one point to be a young man of leisure: “My muse (from whom you say you expect such great matters) is ever unemploy’d when I can divert my self any other way.”
Whatever flattery there had been in Englefield’s letter is returned by Pope: “I know very well, Sir, & it is in vain to deny it, that you are the very mirrour of mathematicians, and the pole-star of astronomers! (at least, you are unquestionably the greatest genius that ever appear’d, for making of true and exact dialls; wch exceed, sometimes, the motion ev’n of Phebus himself). Nay, if you cou’d but be brought to confess it, I dare affirm, you are extremely happy in composing of quaint madrigalls, & anagramms. I am told for a certainty, you have penetrated to the bottome of the Rosiecrucian philosophy, and are writing a generall history of conjuration.”
George Sherburn describes this remarkable letter with some accuracy as “an unusual example of Pope’s early, self-conscious wit.”
For all its light-heartedness, however, it was written at a critical moment in the start of his literary career, as noted by Maynard Mack in his biography (p.117): “Returning from Abberley in September of 1707, Pope was far along toward a final text of the “Pastorals”, had begun the planning for and probably some snatches of the Essay on Criticism, was in the process of revising his translation of Statius, to which Walsh had evidently contributed, and at the urging of Trumbull had begun (or would very soon begin) the masterly rendering of some fragments of Homer that was to lead in a few years to his undertaking the Iliad. **The first phases of his preparation for a career in poetry were now over, and he was ready to try those wings in public that Walsh and his other early friends had helped him ‘prune.’”**
Provenance: This letter was once part of a small batch of Pope’s earliest correspondence which turned up in the enormous archive of the Trumbull papers, owned by descent by the Marquess of Downshire, and on deposit for a time, starting in 1954 but with limited scholarly access, in the Berkshire Record Office. In December, 1989, the Trumbull archive was put up for sale by the Marquess of Downshire at Sotheby’s. The bulk of the papers were offered in a special catalogue, comprising 63 lots, some of which were vast, and others devoted to letters and manuscripts of particularly notable figures; lot 61 consisted of Pope’s ten letters to Trumbull. “At the eleventh hour they were acquired by the nation direct from the Marquess of Downshire with the customary douceur arrangement, which seems to have been welcome on all sides.” – The Book Collector, Spring 1990, p. 94.
Sotheby’s were permitted to extract from the archive a small number of “lesser” papers, to be sold in a general sale of history and literature held later the same day, and it was in this sale that the present letter of Pope to Antony Englefield first made a public appearance. Aside from the two slightly earlier notes to Trumbull, only nine prior letters by Pope are known, but these survive only in printed sources. One is a letter to his friend Henry Cromwell, the first in a series printed in 1726 by Edmund Curll, much to Pope’s irritation. Four more are among those to William Wycherley which Pope himself had printed in 1729, but did not make public until a number of years later; and the other four, two to Wycherley, one to William Walsh, and one to an unnamed female correspondent, first appeared in a collection published once more by Curll, this time with Pope’s connivance, in 1735. In the absence of the originals of these nine letters, the degree to which Pope manipulated the text, as he was wont to do, can only be a matter of speculation. This letter to Antony Englefield, then, is chronologically the third by Pope to survive in manuscript, and the earliest to remain in private hands; it is very unlikely that an earlier one will ever come on the market.
