Pope’s Fashionable Hand Book

Abstract

In this remarkable account of the physical and mental effects worked upon him by his efforts to translate Homer’s Iliad, the twenty-four-year-old Pope writes to his friend John Caryll of a trance-like state in which the “Moving Power [of] Fancy” renders him physically torpid, the mind is “in the Whirle of its giddy motion,” and reality and fantasy are become indistinguishable. The power of Fancy is likened to the otherworldly transports that arise from witches’ Sabbaths and is thereby associated with the occult, the forbidden, the enchanted realm of moral disorder. Before indulging this conceit of himself as a “witch whose Carcase lies motionless” in the throes of a demonic poetic fancy, Pope imagines himself as “the picture of January in an old Salisbury Primer.” He pictures himself, that is, as an engraving in a devotional manual. This identification of poetic activity with book illustration will recur in Pope’s correspondence and public comments, as in the recollection to Joseph Spence in which he ties his beginnings as a poet to his reading of Ogilby’s translation of Homer (“that great edition with pictures”) and Sandys’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, both seventeenth-century editions famous for their lavish woodcut illustrations. Such comments—brief and allusive but key accounts for Pope of the origins of imaginative activity and poetic production—suggest that his mastery of the techniques of eighteenth-century high print culture arises in part from his beginnings as a consumer of texts and images in books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.