Parodying Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard: Richard Owen Cambridge’s An Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly Room

Abstract

Current studies of the poetry of the eighteenth century seem only to have just begun to redress a perceived imbalance in the depth of interest and attention that has recently been devoted to the various works of the first great poet of the era, Alexander Pope.² Not surprisingly, the last decade or so of the twentieth century proved to have been something of a golden age of Pope criticism. The long-awaited appearance of Maynard Mack’s massive biography of the poet in 1985 marked the mid-point of a decade that saw more serious scholarly interest in Pope’s work than ever before. The tercentenary of the poet’s birth (in 1688) prompted not one but two impressive collections of commemorative essays, both of which quickly took their place among the numerous articles and the dozens of full-length studies relating to Pope’s work that had appeared since 1980. If, as Margaret Anne Doody lamented in 1988, it was still ‘very hard to find lovers of Pope outside the classroom’, there were nevertheless some substantial indications that his status in the classroom — despite the increased demand to represent hitherto less canonical voices and modes on university reading lists — had grown ever more secure. Charles Kerby-Miller’s fine edition of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) was reissued in 1988, and Steven Shankman’s scrupulously detailed edition of Pope’s Iliad (1743) — a model of academic scholarship — finally made it to bookstores in 1996.³

The Athenians were so fond of Parody, that they eagerly applauded it, without examining with that propriety or connection it was introduced This love of Parody is accounted for by an Excellent French Critic, from a certain malignity in mankind, which prompts them to laugh at what they most esteem, thinking they, in some measure, repay themselves for that involuntary tribute which is exacted from them by merit.

— Richard Owen Cambridge, ‘The Preface’ to The Scribleriad, 1751¹