ABSTRACT
No composition or publication details for this piece are firmly known; the imprint of the anonymous 16-page prose pamphlet entitled The Critical Specimen, in which the two passages of verse appear is ‘London: Printed in the Year, 1711’, a normal imprint for surreptitious publishing, and no advertisement for it has been found. Only five copies are known to survive, but even this low figure suggests that it was actually published to the extent of being circulated. It was not reprinted or collected or ever mentioned or acknowledged by Pope, and was first ascribed to him by Ault, in PW, I.ix–xviii, an attribution now routinely accepted (e.g. TE, VI.79–80). It is the earliest dated of Pope’s prose works. The humour of the pamphlet is characteristic of the parodic vein Pope would develop in prose works of this decade, both in papers in the Spectator and the Guardian and in pamphlets against Edmund Curll; and the attack on Dennis in relation to the Essay on Criticism very strongly suggests Pope’s involvement. Dennis’s Reflections, Satyrical and Critical, upon a late Rhapsody call’d, An Essay upon Criticism (1711), published 20 June 1711 (see Headnote to Essay on Criticism), had made Pope rethink a few lines, but had also stimulated other kinds of response, some of which he shared with John Caryll during discussion of the poem and its aftermath during 1711. Though he professed that Dennis’s book made him ‘very heartily merry in two minutes time’ (to Caryll, 19 November 1712, Corr., I.155), he recalled Dennis’s wounding image of him as a ‘hunch-back’d Toad’ into the period of composition of The Dunciad, and its inclusion and inversion in The Critical Specimen point convincingly to his authorship of the pamphlet and the verses it includes. Reference is also made in the pamphlet to ‘A Contention in Civility and good Breeding between the Critick and a little Gentleman of W—r F—t, in which the little Gentleman had some Advantage’ (PW, I.16–17), which is very pointedly aligned with Pope’s own viewpoint. There are no very obvious other candidates for its authorship, though it is just possible that John Gay, whom Pope became friendly with around 1711, had some involvement.
