The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1 Poetry - Volume 1

Although we were to suppose, against the evidence, that the poet had given up the whole of the originals, he must still have retained copies. He avowedly inserted six letters of the Dean in the quarto to clear up the history of the publication, and four of the number belong to the years 1732 and 1733, which shows that Pope continued to have the command of the correspondence at the period of its appearance in 1741. Indeed copies of five of the published letters of Swift to Pope, with eight that are unpublished, are in the Oxford papers, and since none of the six, which the poet contributed to the quarto, are among them, more must have existed, unless he had kept the originals. That he had never parted with them is the just conclusion from the facts,[139] and his note is one of those instances in which he had recourse to the licence he allowed himself of "equivocating genteelly." The letters of Swift to Gay may be presumed to have been returned to Swift, when the Duke of Queensberry examined Gay's papers after his death. The expressions in the Dean's child-like postscript of August 24 gave a colour to the notion that he had also got back his letters to Pope. The admission suggested to the poet to draw up a note which, read by the ordinary rules of language, affirms that the letters to himself were returned, as well as the letters to Gay, but in which the return of the letters, by a forced construction, might be made to apply to Gay alone, who is the immediate antecedent. This accounts for the death of Gay having been fixed upon for the era of the alleged restoration to the Dean of his correspondence with Pope, though there was no connection between the events, and though the choice of so early a date left unexplained the appearance in the quarto of the subsequent letters of Swift. That "any mention made by Mr. P. of the return or exchange of letters should be industriously suppressed" by Mr. P. "in the publication," was a necessary consequence, or it would have been manifest that the only letters which had been returned were those of Gay. By evasions like these the poet satisfied a conscience that held a lie to be justifiable, provided it was couched in language which could be wrested by the deceiver into a different sense from what it bore to the deceived.

The correspondence between Swift and Bolingbroke completed the series, which Pope complained was printed without his consent. Of the eight letters from Bolingbroke, seven were written in conjunction with the poet. These joint compositions, like the partnership letters of Gay, are exactly those which would have been returned to Pope. One of the number furnishes evidence, which almost amounts to a demonstration, that the collection of 1741 proceeded from himself. When he brought out the avowed edition of his letters in 1737, he inserted at the end of the volume a letter of Swift, a letter of his own, and the joint letter from himself and Bolingbroke, of which Curll had obtained a copy. This little supplement was ushered in by a notice which says, "Since the foregoing sheets were printed off, the following letters having been published without the consent of their writers, we have added them, though not in the order of time." Whatever the motive the announcement was deceptive. The letter of Swift was his reply to the joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke--that very reply which the poet boasted a month or two before could not be produced surreptitiously, because it had never been out of his custody. Nobody else, by his own showing, had the power to make it public, no earlier impression of it is known to exist, and, as will be seen by comparing it with the copy from the Oxford papers, it was printed with omissions and variations, which must have been the act of the poet, or he would have restored the genuine readings when he included it in his appendix. In juxtaposition with it is a letter from Pope to Swift, dated December 10, 1725, which in like manner has never been found in any prior publication, and which of all his letters to the Dean is the single one we are certain was in his power when the quarto of 1737 was in the press. He transcribed the original at the time it was written, and sent a copy to Lord Oxford, ostensibly to let him see the way in which he was mentioned in it, but partly, perhaps, because the poet thought well of the production.[140] This letter of December, 1725, reappears in tho quarto of 1741, with the addition for the first time of a postscript by Bolingbroke. A copy of the entire performance is among the Oxford papers, and reveals the fact that the Pope portion, and the Bolingbroke portion, are both abridged in the published version. Yet although the persons who brought out the collection of 1741, had the manuscript before them, or they could not have given Bolingbroke's share of the letter, they nevertheless, by a marvellous coincidence, print Pope's share precisely as it had been printed by Pope himself in 1737. The conclusion is irresistible that the editor of the quarto of 1737, was the editor of the collection of 1741. The postscript of Bolingbroke was not written when he was in the house with Pope, but was added subsequently when he got back to Dawley,[141] and its omission from the volume of 1737 was due to the circumstance, that the poet had not then received back his correspondence from Swift, and only possessed a copy of his own carefully composed essay.

The letter of Bolingbroke to Swift, in which the poet had no share, was commenced at Aix-la-Chapelle on August 30, 1729, and completed at Dawley on October 5. Pope appears not to have seen it before it was sent; for four days later, on October 9, he says to Swift, "Lord Bolingbroke has told me ten times over, he was going to write to you. Has he or not?" The elaborate epistle of Bolingbroke was a reply to a letter which Swift had addressed to Pope, and the consequent interest that Pope would have had in the answer, may have induced the author, proud of his production, to provide him with a copy; but however he came by it, a copy was deposited by him in Lord Oxford's library, where, as in the quarto of 1741, it is the single example of an epistle by Bolingbroke alone. Swift had by him a quantity of Bolingbroke's correspondence, some of which would have been full as appropriate as the specimen that is given, and it is a weighty fact in the question whether the Dean or the poet furnished the materials to the printer, that the one letter selected was the one letter that Pope possessed. The three letters which are inserted from Swift to Bolingbroke incline the scale to the same side. The first relates in part to Pope, the conclusion of the second is addressed to him, and the third is the answer to the letter of August 30, 1729. It was never pretended that the Dean received back his letters to Bolingbroke, and it was not his habit to make copies; but with our knowledge that the poet and Bolingbroke had much of their correspondence with Swift in common, we may be sure that these three letters, at least, had been in the hands of Pope, and if he did not retain the originals, it would in 1729, the year to which they all belong, have been in accordance with his common practice to transcribe them.

Thus what was printed of the correspondence, and what was not printed, concur to show that Pope must have been the source from which it was derived. The history of the circumstances under which the publication took place will confirm this inference. Pope asserted that the quarto was "copied from an impression sent from Dublin." There is now proof in abundance that the Dublin edition, which came out as the seventh volume of Swift's works, was copied from an impression sent from England. Mr. Deane Swift, a cousin of his famous namesake, and the son-in-law of Mrs. Whiteway, informed Mr. Nichols, in 1778, that "he was the only person then living who could give a full account how Faulkner's seventh volume, that is, how Swift's and Pope's correspondence came to be, not first printed, but first published in Ireland."[142] The italics are Mr. Swift's own, and the fact on which he laid such especial emphasis is at once attested and explained by the statement of Faulkner himself to Dr. Birch in August, 1749. "Mr. Pope," he said, "sent to Ireland to Dr. Swift, by Mr. Gerrard, an Irish gentleman, then at Bath, a printed copy of their letters, with an anonymous letter, which occasioned Dr. Swift to give Mr. Faulkner leave to reprint them at Dublin, though Mr. Pope's edition was published first."[143] Faulkner also solicited the sanction of Pope, and we have the poet's summary of the application, in the letter he wrote to Mr. Nugent on August 14, 1740: "Last week I received an account from Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, that the Dean himself has given him a collection of letters of his own and mine, and others, to be printed, and he civilly asks my consent, assuring me the Dean declares them genuine, and that Mr. Swift, Mrs. Whiteway's son-in-law, will correct the press, out of his great respect to the Dean and myself. He says they were collected by some unknown persons, and the copy sent with a letter importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable picture of the Dean, and his private character appearing in those letters, and that if he would not publish them in his lifetime others would after his death." It is manifest from these particulars that Faulkner was not then aware that Pope himself had sent the correspondence to Swift, and the conviction was only forced upon his mind by subsequent events. But the bookseller could not be mistaken on the point that the letters were handed to him in print. As he later told Dr. Birch that the Dean had given him leave to reprint them because they were printed already, so he proclaimed that his volume was a reprint at the time. He inserted at the end of his first edition the few new letters which were added in the quarto of 1741, and says that he found them in the London impression "after he had reprinted the foregoing sheets." Faulkner had no sort of motive to deceive. Whether the letters were in type or in manuscript he had equally received them from Swift, and obtained his authority to publish them.

If further testimony is required it is supplied by Pope. To the mention of Mrs. Whiteway in Lord Orrery's letter of 1738 the poet appended a note in which he says, "This lady since gave Mr. Pope the strongest assurances that she had used her utmost endeavours to prevent the publication--nay, went so far as to secrete the book, till it was commanded from her, and delivered to the Dublin printer, whereupon her son-in-law, D. Swift, Esq., insisted upon writing a preface to justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it, and to lay it upon the corrupt practices of the printers in London; but this he would not agree to, as not knowing the truth of the fact." It was therefore a book, and a printed book, which was delivered to Faulkner, since if the collection transmitted to the Dean had been in manuscript, Mrs. Whiteway and her son-in-law would not have laid it upon the corrupt practices of the printers, and it must have been transmitted from England, or they would neither have laid it upon the printers of London, nor have proposed "to justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it." The story was told him while it could be refuted if it was false; but he did not venture to question the existence of the printed volume, and had nothing more to say than that he did not personally know that it was due to the corrupt practices of the London booksellers. He might have gone further, and stated that he knew the booksellers to be innocent.