Alexander Pope: A Life

Alexander Pope: A Life is a 1985 biography of the great eighteenth-century English poet by Maynard Mack, an American literary critic and Pope scholar who spent most of his career at Yale University. At more than 800 pages, Mack’s biography aims to be a definitive account of Pope’s life, and it was the first major biography of the poet to be published since 1900. At the outset, Mack points out that previous biographies have tended to emphasize Pope’s unappealing traits, including his vanity, deviousness, and quickness to take offense. Mack proposes to balance this picture with Pope’s equally-well testified generosity, courage, and loyalty. Noting in his preface, “There are few poets who cannot use an advocate,” Mack proposes to defend Pope as a man, as well as reevaluating his significance in literary history.

Mack’s account of Pope focuses on the disadvantages that Pope faced. As a hunchback, Pope was subject to scorn and ridicule, as well as ill-health that plagued him throughout his life. However, Mack emphasizes above all the suspicion and prejudice which Pope encountered as a Catholic in fiercely Protestant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Pope was born in London in 1688, the year the “Glorious Revolution” ensured a Protestant successor to the English throne. When he was a boy, the Test Acts imposed serious restrictions on Catholic education, preventing Catholics from working as teachers. As a result, Pope was educated at secret, illegal Catholic schools.

When Pope was twelve, a further law was passed preventing Catholics from living within ten miles of London. His family was forced to move to Berkshire, and his formal education came to an end. Pope taught himself by reading the work of Classical and English poets, including Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Mack draws on anecdotes from the period to illustrate the kind of day-to-day hostility that Pope and his family must have faced as Catholic outsiders.



At around the same time that his family moved to Berkshire, Pope developed Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis which caused him lifelong ill-health and deformed his spine.

Unable to attend university due to anti-Catholic legislation, Pope instead immediately began his career as a poet, publishing Pastorals when he was just twenty-one years old. Catapulted to instant fame, he became friends with a number of famous writers from across the political spectrum, including the Tory Jonathan Swift and the Whigs Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, founders of The Tatler. With their patronage, as well as the publication of further successful poems, Pope became a famous and wealthy man of letters, perhaps the first English writer to make his fortune by writing alone (at any rate, Pope himself believed he was the first). Mack stresses that Pope’s achievement is all the more remarkable under the circumstances imposed on him by his ill-health and Catholicism.

The bulk of Mack’s biography focuses on the poet’s friendships. Mack admires Pope’s loyalty and generosity to his friends, and through portraits of these figures, the biographer paints a wide-ranging portrait of eighteenth-century life. Besides Swift, Steele, and Addison, Pope offered friendship and support to John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera and John Arbuthnot, the inventor of the satirical character John Bull.



Alongside the life, Mack, a literary critic, offers extensive, original readings of Pope’s major works, including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Essay on Criticism, An Essay on Man, and Moral Essays. Mack strives to show that despite these works’ wealth of now-obscure reference, they contain insights that remain valuable to a modern reader. Mack also documents the financial success Pope enjoyed from his translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. Pope’s reputation—although not his purse—was damaged when it became known that Pope had been assisted in his translation of the Odyssey by two minor poets, William Broome and Elijah Fenton.

Pope had a number of close women friends. One of these, a Catholic woman named Martha Blount, was a lifelong correspondent of Pope’s. Previous biographers have suggested that theirs was a romantic love affair. Mack argues that Pope was in love with Blount’s sister Teresa and that Teresa is probably the young woman depicted in the background of Charles Jervas’s 1717 portrait of the poet. Mack also explores Pope’s friendship with the writer and noblewoman Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

In closing, Mack examines Pope’s influence and legacy in the following centuries, siding with those critics who see Pope as an essentially moral thinker rather than a frivolous satirist.



Mack’s biography remains an essential reference work for Pope scholars, but the book has not been as well received by general readers as Mack hopes in his preface. While some reviewers found the book highly readable—“as entertaining as it is masterly” (Publishers’ Weekly)—the majority raised concerns about Mack’s academic prose style: “Mack talks down to readers in a garrulous style replete with near-clichés” (Kirkus Reviews). Nevertheless, for readers wishing to know more about Pope’s life, Mack’s book remains the go-to biography.