Pope and plagiarism

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2005 by Richard Terry

Pope is the poet of the English Augustan age whose peace of mind and posthumous reputation were most disturbed by allegations of plagiarism. This article discusses his general sensitivity to the ethics of literary borrowing and the numerous accusations of plagiarism that were made against him in his lifetime. It also considers Pope's use of the plagiarism allegation as part of his own satiric practice. Finally, I explore the way that critical writing in the later eighteenth century, especially in the aftermath of Joseph Warton's influential critique, comes to define the nature of Pope's achievement in terms of an inherently plagiaristic aesthetic.

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Plagiarism, if not quite the oldest profession, has been with us for a long time: the distinction between acceptable and culpable borrowing is applied even by the ancient critics, and the actual term 'plagiarism' (as referring to literary theft) is coined by Martial, a poet who seems to have been unusually vexed by appropriations of his own work. (1) General abominations of plagiarism, and attacks on specific plagiarists, are particularly common in the English Augustan era. (2) This is a period, moreover, in which the two-sidedness of the plagiarism issue is especially in evidence: for just as there is a transgression involved in the act of plagiarism itself, so there can also be one in alleging it, or in falsely purporting to bring it to light. It is certainly the case that few literary controversies of the time proved insusceptible to being garnished by the additional accusation of plagiarism; and not even the greatest writers were above being impugned, or above impugning others, on this precise ground. In the 1690s, for example, the high-profile poets Dryden, Blackmore, and Garth became ensnared together in a poisonous web of claims and counterclaims about plagiaristic practice; and two decades later Joseph Addison felt obliged to defend his Spectator essays from the accusation that 'I have translated or borrowed many of my Thoughts out of Books which are written in other Languages'. (3) The possibility that a writer's posthumous reputation could be sullied by allegations of plagiarism even led some authors, or their associates, to lay down advance protestations of non-plagiarism. Denham does this, for example, on behalf of his friend Abraham Cowley, when writing that 'To him no Author was unknown, Yet what he wrote was all his own', lines that were later to be comically plagiarized by Swift in 'Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift D.S.P.D.': 'To steal a hint was never known, But what he writ was all his own'. (4)

Among poets of the English Augustan era, however, the one whose peace of mind was perhaps most disturbed by allegations of plagiarism was Alexander Pope, and this essay will explore some of the ramifications that the plagiarism issue has for his career. One issue I shall set aside here, as having recently been explored in detail by Roger Lund, is whether the aggressive ironies unleashed on Pope's enemies in the Dunciad include actual plagiarism from their writings. (5) My essay will instead concentrate on the following matters: Pope's general sensitivity to the ethics of literary borrowing; the role played by the plagiarism allegation in satiric attacks on him in his lifetime; Pope's use of the same allegation in the prosecution of his quarrels; and the way that, in a less overtly tendentious way, critical writing after Pope's death comes to define the nature of his achievement in terms of an inherently plagiaristic aesthetic. (6)

Oliver Goldsmith, in his biography of Thomas Parnell, relates a practical joke played by Parnell on his friend Pope. Parnell had happened to be around when Pope was reading out parts of a new, unfinished poem, The Rape of the Lock, to Jonathan Swift. Parnell found reason to leave the room, but not before committing to memory Pope's description of Belinda's toilette, which he then set about translating into Latin verse. The next day, when Pope was reading the poem to another group of friends, Parnell publicly rebuked him for stealing that episode, and produced his Latin version as evidence of a prior source. Pope was startled at this public revelation of a detail about the poem's composition so darkly secret as to have escaped the notice even of the author. After a teasing pause, he was put out of his confusion, but the incident is a curious earnest of an issue that was to impact both on Pope's career and on his literary posterity. (7)

From early in his career, Pope seems to have been alert to the trespass that could be caused by over-reliance on other authors' works: an early letter to his poetic mentor William Walsh, for example, enquires nervously 'how far the liberty of Borrowing may extend'. (8) Even as a fledgling author, he was aware of whisperings about the derivative nature of his own compositional practice, though reassured that those writers who most wanted to raise the issue were 'such whose writings no man ever borrowed from' and so who had 'the least reason to complain'. (9) He seems to have taken a particular interest, too, in allegations of plagiarism that had been traded between three earlier poets, two of whom he greatly respected: Dryden, Garth, and Blackmore. Pope's own resentment of Blackmore as a desecrator of the true glory of epic was shared by Dryden, but Dryden had a particular gripe against Blackmore's career as an epic poet: namely, that the idea for Blackmore's original epic poem, Prince Arthur (1695), had been filched from the description in Dryden's essay on the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) of an epic project that the author had proposed to himself but never pursued. (10) Dryden believed that Blackmore had stolen his intellectual property: in the preface to the Fables he complains that 'it was not for this noble Knight that I drew the plan of an epic poem' and accuses