“Books and the Man”: Alexander Pope, Print Culture, and Authorial Self-Making

Alexander Pope's career in many ways marks the transition from a literary economy of patronage to one of the marketplace. Born in 1688, seven years before the expiration of the Licensing Act led to the flourishing of the British commercial press, Pope reached the age of twenty-one and published his first work in 1709, one year before the Statute of Anne (or Copyright Act) established literary property in terms in copyright; then went on to become the first author to make a fortune from the sale of his imaginative writing and the first to defend his rights to his own literary property consistently in court. ¹ Although one must be wary of turning writers into symbolic figures, Pope's career more than any other embodies the transition to a new literary economics of the marketplace, as he became the first major poet to support himself primarily through the sale of his writing to a commercial print public. At the same time, Pope became the first to define his own authorial identity in relation to this print market public, making his identity central to much of his later poetry. ² Pope's turn to explicit self-representation and the identity he constructed for himself, I will argue, must be understood in terms of his changing relationship to this dynamically emerging commercial print culture.