Until recently, all of us knew the essential facts and interpretations regarding The Rape of the Lock. It was written as a jeu d'esprit to unify two neighboring Catholic families in hopes that Arabella Fermor and Robert, Lord Petre, would be reconciled. In 1712 it appeared in two cantos; in 1714 in five, with the full machinery of the sylphs and gnomes; and in 1717 in Pope's first collected Works, with Clarissa's speech added. The poem, we were told, sets Pope's fragile culture against the superior culture evoked in his parody of epic devices. Pope does not taint Homer's epic, but the modern pseudo-heroes whose moral diminution is well reflected in the sylphs and the trivial act of cutting off a woman's lock of hair. On this hypothesis, even Clarissa, Pope's own spokeswoman, provides good sense because that is all such a world can aspire to. As three shrewd and very different modern commentators have put it, “in mock-epic a dignified genre is turned to witty use without being cheapened in any way”; “the essence of Pope's wit in the Rape of the Lock lies in … the appeal of a better world of noble manners and actions. Cutting the lock is … more than absurd”; or in another severe judgment, Pope's lines “do violence to Homer's passages, adulterate them, because the weak and sordid modern culture adulterates the simple purity of the Homeric life.”