ABSTRACT
In Leslie Stephen's biography of Alexander Pope for Macmillan's influential late Victorian English Men of Letters (EML) series, the reader is presented with an image of the eighteenth century as the rule of 'bright, clear common sense'. If Aestheticism was the most visible manifestation of a late Victorian mutable social economy, Leslie Stephen's biography of Pope for EML was one of the surprising places in which the pressure on the concept of 'sincerity' was encountered, albeit in a more muted form. Aestheticism's trope of the mask had troubling implications for the social and stylistic markets in which masculinity had been inscribed and traded. Stephen's sense, in Pope, of 'every department' of thought being supremely enlightened in the eighteenth century was demonstrated by the catholicity of EML's biographical and authorial canon. While most of the eighteenth-century authors in the series were dramatists, novelists, and poets, Samuel Johnson was included because of his critical common sense.
