Making It New

Abstract

The richness and audacity of the Works of 1717 make it all the more astonishing that for several years Pope’s mind had largely been elsewhere, on the most ambitious undertaking he ever undertook — the translation of Homer’s Iliad. What drew him into it, he later told Spence, ‘was purely the want of money’;¹ but having once conceived of this vast undertaking, he embarked on it in the most splendid manner, with a contract that marked a watershed in publishing history. Publishing by public subscription was a method which did away with the need for a patron (all the subscribers became patrons of a sort) and also secured the poet’s profit in advance, as Dryden had discovered in his handsome subscription volume of Virgil (1697). But Pope’s contract with the rival publisher to Dryden s, Lintot, was the basis of a fortune: six volumes for which he earned two hundred guineas each, plus seven hundred and fifty copies of the translation — on the best paper, with choice engravings — to distribute among subscribers to his own profit (M500 or so). Lintot’s share of the bargain was possession of the copyright and the proceeds of publishing the poem in various larger and smaller formats, on cheaper paper.