Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2009
Summary
What's Property? dear Swift! you see it alter
From you to me, from me to Peter Walter,
Or, in a mortgage, prove a Lawyer's share,
Or, in a jointure, vanish from the Heir,
Or in pure Equity (the Case not clear)
The Chanc'ry takes your rents for twenty year:
At best, it falls to some ungracious Son
Who cries, my father's damn'd, and all's my own.
Shades, that to Bacon could retreat afford,
Become the portion of a booby Lord;
And Hemsley once proud Buckingham's delight,
Slides to a Scriv'ner or a City Knight,
Let Lands and Houses have what Lords they will,
Let Us be fix'd, and our own Masters still.
(Pope, Imitations of Horace: Sat.II.ii.167-80).Pope's enlargement on the terms of his key question – “what's Property? dear Swift!” – enlists the discourse of humanism in order to argue for the kinds of virtue possible in a corruptible world. A key part of his strategy in defining virtue involves distinguishing the multiple meanings attaching to property. Considered in its public role as the means by which material value passes from one generation to the next, property “alter[s]” in a process whose degeneration follows a line from father to “ungracious Son,” the “booby Lord” who betrays his father's delight. But Pope's lines also distinguish the mobility of real property from a capacity for self-possession that is both “fix'd” and sustained by the companionship of the like-minded. This is not the self-possession of the bourgeois subject – “Scriv'ner” or “City Knight” – with his characteristic acquisitiveness and malleable personality.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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