ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Pope’s use of humour in The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris Concerning the Strange and Deplorable Frenzy of Mr. John Dennis (1713) in connection with the two pamphlets attacking the bookseller Edmund Curll (1716). Pope’s early prose works have begun to be considered more carefully in recent years but there is as yet very little discussion of The Narrative and the way it sets up a style of prose portraiture that Pope will use again, well after the reign of Queen Anne and the literary milieu. The chapter argues that Pope’s satiric humour in these works owes something to the humours-comedy tradition, but more particularly that his constructions of laughable character emerge from an intellectual history of conflating the ridiculous with ‘deformity’. That history provides a vantage point from which to explore what Pope invests of himself, emotionally and morally, in his early satire – the ‘form’ in his adversaries’ ‘de-formity’.
