The essays in this volume have been selected from those written over the past twenty-five years, and they represent about a third of the items published in that stretch of time. One item, Chapter 14, has not previously appeared in print. The others have been published in various places, some in relatively inaccessible locations including books which have been out of print for some time. Essays which were reprinted in Eighteenth-Century Encounters and Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (both 1985) have generally been excluded. There is one exception: Chapter 10, which came out for the first time in the former volume, has been reproduced here as the issues underlying its argument remain matters of strong contention in current historiography. Not more than one essay on any given poem has been included. Whilst no attempt has been made to cover every aspect of Pope's career, the selection is designed to embrace the work of every phase and the broad range of the poet's interests.

For the most part I have confined revision to small acts of refurbishment, by way of an attempt to regularize forms of reference and to correct any mistakes. The main argument has been left undisturbed in every single essay. It would be possible to swell the footnotes by incorporating the findings of recent scholarship, but to do this in any thoroughgoing way would distort the shape of the original. In those cases where the argument of an earlier essay would be called into doubt by subsequent research, I have naturally omitted the essay from this selection.