ABSTRACT
On more than one occasion Swift expressed regret over the topicality of Pope’s satire. He pointed out that the day-to-day affairs of London, however sensational, would quickly be forgotten; even at the time of writing, a witty allusion to some metropolitan rogue or fool might well be simply mystifying to a reader twenty miles from the capital. In another way Pope’s eagerness to name contemporary names could defeat the avowed purpose of his satire. Instead of extinguishing the dunces of the age he might succeed only in conferring on them the immortality of great art. ‘Take care the bad poets do not outwit you,’ Swift warned him, ‘as they have served the good ones in every Age, whom they have provoked to transmit their Names to posterity. Maevius is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will be as well known as you if his name gets into your Verses.’ 1 Swift’s fears were prophetic. One reason for the eclipsing of Pope’s reputation in the nineteenth century was that he was felt to have been ignobly enmeshed in the mundane and the trivial. Francis Jeffrey reproved the writers of the early eighteenth century because ‘they never pass beyond “the visible diurnal sphere”, or deal in any thing that can either lift us above our vulgar nature, or ennoble its reality’. 2 And, to take Swift’s second point, Pope has certainly endowed the dunces 2with a dubious kind of immortality. The details of obscure lives and works have been patiently exhumed by editors and commentators in order to elucidate the names preserved in the amber of The Dunciad, the Epistles, and the Imitations of Horace.
