Alexander Pope

by John Richardson
ca. 1737

Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library, lwlpr17205

This image appeared as a vignette on the title page of Pope's Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, And Several of his Friends, 1737. W.K. Wimsatt explains:

[the choice of the etching was] no doubt carefully prompted, by Pope himself for the important role of title-page medallion in the authorized volume of his Letters brought out in quarto and folio by Knapton, Gilliver, Brindley, and Dodsley in May 1737. Three letters from Pope to Richardson concerning this etched profile survive, one of them hitherto unpublished. Apparently in February of 1736 [1737] Pope wrote to Richardson in Queen's Square, Bloomsbury: "The business of this, next to the Assurances of my true affection, is to desire you to send me inclosd to my Lord Cornburys near Oxford Chappel the Exact size of the Plate for the title page of my book. Which is wanted so far as to stop the printing the Title." On 3 March he wrote again, from Twickenham:

I hope your friend has done justice to your Work, in rolling off that excellent Etching in My Titlepage which will be the most Valuable thing in the book. As soon as they, together with the Headpiece & Initial letter to the Preface are done, & the Sheets quite dry, I must desire your Care again to cause them to be very cleanly packed up & sent to the Printer's Mr Wright on St Peter's hill, who should give his Receit for them & return him also the Copper Headpiece & Letter to the Preface. You know the least Dirt thrown on the best Work, or best character, will spoil the whole Grace of it. And pray acquaint Mr Knapton, that I will satisfy him in the amplest manner he pleases, as well as be obliged for his Care ...

And on 20 April he wrote again: "I desire, you dear Sir, to give the Bearer ye little Plate of my Profile, wch is wanted for another Book."

The Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope and Several of His Friends appeared on 19 May, 6 two days before Pope's birthday, in three formats: quarto (Griffith 454, 455), large folio (Griffith 456), and small folio (Griffith 457). The title pages of all three were embellished with the youthful-looking, keen profile to right within a nearly circular linear frame, inscribed beneath: "Amicitiae Causa" and "J. Richardson f." (Later on, this medallion would be flattened out and Pope's head oppressed under a lowered ceiling for the sake of two extra lines of type on the title page of The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope in Prose, Vol. II, 1741 [Griffith 531].)

Pope's own preoccupation with portraiture, both verbal and visual, is suggested in a passage of the short "Preface" to the Letters of May 1737, where he protests the spontaneity of his letters, "... as they flow'd warm from the heart, and fresh from the occasion." "Had he sate down with a design to draw his own Picture, he could not have done it so truly.... If an Author's hand, like a Painter's, be more distinguishable in a slight sketch than in a finish'd picture, this very carelessness will make them the better known from such Counterfeits, as have been, and may be imputed to him, either thro' a mercenary, or a malicious design." ("'Amicitiæ Causa': A Birthday Present from Curll to Pope," in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature , University of Chicago Press, 1963, 341-9)