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11 - Crime and punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2008

Pat Rogers
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
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Summary

Poetry and punishment in the early works

Punishment was more physical, and more visible, in Pope's day than it is in ours. The pillory was still in use at various locations around London, as were public whippings. Eight times a year those condemned to death were taken from Newgate Prison to Tyburn to be hanged: crowds lined the route and gathered for the show. Crime and punishment spawned their own literature, and Pope's lifetime coincided with an explosion in crime-related writing of all kinds. “Proceedings” at the Old Bailey were published regularly from the 1680s. Trials and punishments were widely reported in the newspapers; criminal biography (in both documentary and fictional forms) flourished. On the other side, as it were, there was considerable professional crossover between law and writing: many writers were educated at the Inns of Court, including such notable friends of Pope as Congreve, Rowe, and Warburton. Pope was friendly with several lawyers; one of them was celebrated in “Presentation Verses to Nathaniel Pigott,” and another, William Murray, later the Earl of Mansfield, was the addressee of the Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated.

Owen Ruffhead, Pope's first official biographer and himself a barrister, declared that Pope intended his work as a “supplement to the public laws,” and the metaphorical “lash” of satire was regularly invoked as his model. But Pope's attitude to crime and the law was actually much more complex than this. In an early letter to Henry Cromwell (1 November 1708 [Corr, i, pp. 51-2]), Pope jokingly compared his entry into print to a public execution, and likened Tonson's Miscellanies to the regular collections of malefactors' lives put out by the Ordinary (Chaplain) of Newgate.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Crime and punishment
  • Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
  • Online publication: 28 April 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521840132.012
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  • Crime and punishment
  • Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
  • Online publication: 28 April 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521840132.012
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Crime and punishment
  • Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
  • Online publication: 28 April 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521840132.012
Available formats
×