Alexander Pope
and his Books

One of the very first books that Pope purchased as a boy was this copy of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, newly translated into English in 1700 by Peter Motteux. Pope bought the first two volumes of this translation as soon as they were published, spending two shillings. He was only twelve years old.

At the front of volume one, Pope cited with approval the judgement of the Jesuit scholar René Rapin on the genius of Cervantes. As a boy, Pope taught himself to write by copying printed books and this inscription is an excellent demonstration of his early eye for calligraphy.

As a teenager, Pope was engaged in a programme of translating the Greek and Latin classics into English heroic couplets, the form for which he would soon become famous. Following his fourteenth birthday in 1702, he translated the first book of Statius’s epic poem, the 'Thebaid', which he later exhumed and published with other verses in 1712.

Here we see Pope quoting a relevant line from the 'Thebaid' next to a passage mentioning the ‘Cave of Mithra’. Efforts have been made to keep the handwriting as close as possible in size and style to the printed italic notes in the margin. The implication is that Pope was very probably reading this folio of Stanley while making his translation.

Pope did more than just collate texts. In 1706 he bought a second-hand copy of Charles Cotton’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays for three shillings.

In the text of this book we can see Pope using the same crosses and commas to mark out important passages of text and adding his own commentary in the margins.

In 1717, at the age of twenty-nine, Pope published his collected works. He used the same imposing large quarto format, typeface, and layout as for his translation of the Iliad. The implication was that Pope, like Homer, was already an author of classical stature—an audacious statement by a poet so young. Each major poem has its own illustrated headpiece. The title page is faced by a large portrait of Pope, which needs to be folded twice to fit within the binding.

This copy is one of 120 printed on extra-thick royal paper. It is lavishly bound in crimson morocco leather, stamped with gilt detailing. The book was presented by Pope to Teresa Blount, though it does not have his inscription. However, it was almost certainly accompanied by a manuscript of the poem later published anonymously as ‘Verses Sent to Mrs. T. B. with His Works’.

By 1717, Pope has fallen out with Teresa, whom he had come to believe superficial, vain, and cruel. The ‘Verses’ makes a specific joke about her response to the book’s extraordinary red and gold binding: 

This Book, which, like its Author, You
By the bare Outside only knew,
(Whatever was in either Good,
Not look’d in, or, not understood)
Comes, as the Writer did too long,
To be about you, right or wrong;
Neglected on your Chair to lie,
Nor raise a Thought, nor draw an Eye;
In peevish Fits to have you say,
See there! you’re always in my Way!
Or, if your Slave you think to bless,
I like this Colour, I profess!
That Red is charming all will hold,
I ever lov’d it—next to Gold.

The poem balances broad wit with a cruel twist the knife, in the manner of much of Pope’s finer satirical verse. Teresa Blount is skewered both for her neglect of the poet and for her cupidity. According to the poem, the only reason she would keep the book is because she likes the plush binding.

Over the next twenty years, many of the Pope-Blount books were sold to libraries and private collectors in America, where they remain to this day. However, the Robinson brothers kept some of the most precious books for themselves. After Philip Robinson died in 1989, the remains of the collection passed to his wife, Marjorie Robinson, who bequeathed them to Newcastle University in 1998. They are now housed in Newcastle University Special Collections & Archives, in the Philip Robinson Library.