War, the Poetry of War, and Pope's Early Career

John Richardson, National University of Singapore

In Alexander Pope's Key to the Lock, his apothecary turned critic, Esdras Barnivelt, claims that the author of the Rape of the Lock "has ridiculed both the present Mi[nist]ry and the last; abused great Statesmen and great Generals" and has even included treaties and the "Royal Dignity it self" in his satire (Prose, I, 202).1 Barnivelt arrives at this conclusion by way of an allegorical reading that discovers, for instance, Belinda to mean Britain, Ariel to mean Robert Harley, and Ariel's perch on the mast in Canto 2 to mean Harley's direction of the South Sea Company (Prose, I, 185, 190).2 Such hidden meanings are, according to Barnivelt, part and parcel of the rough, competitive world of reading and interpretation (Prose I, 182-84). The Key is an ironic joke, and self-assured readers of irony, like one of Pope's most recent editors, confidently construe its purpose and effect as being to teach us "how not to read."3 Things are seldom, however, quite as straightforward as that. Although Barnivelt's allegorizing is inappropriate for the Rape, he is right to assume the importance of literary political contexts and meanings.