Details

POPE, Alexander. Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends. London: printed by J. Wright for J. Knapton in Ludgate-street, L. Gilliver in Fleet-street, J. Brindley in New Bond-street, and R. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1737. Quarto. Collation as Griffith 454; this copy complete. Half-title, “The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose”; title-page printed in red and black with the vignette portrait of Pope in profile (after Richardson, “Amicitiae Causa”); head-pieces engraved by Fourdrinier after Kent. Griffith 454; ESTC T5513; Rothschild 1633. The hyphenated imprint (“Ludgate-street,” “New Bond-street”) confirms the quarto issue, as against the unhyphenated folio — the primary point by which Griffith distinguishes the two.

The first authorised edition of Pope’s correspondence, and one of the most calculated acts of self-presentation in English letters. Edmund Curll had already printed Pope’s youthful letters without consent; when, in 1733, he advertised a scandalous “Life” of the poet and solicited materials, Pope saw his opening. Writing from October 1733 under the pseudonym “P. T.,” he secretly fed Curll the sheets of his own letters, engineering the “unauthorised” printing of 1735 that in turn justified this corrected, authorised edition of 1737 — polishing, and in places even fabricating, his correspondence to shape his epistolary self for posterity. His subsequent action, Pope v. Curll (1741), established for the first time an author’s property in his own letters.

A nice point of issue: in the quarto (as in the folio) the names of the nobility are discreetly veiled by dashes — only the octavo printed them in full. As the bibliographer Claude Willan observes, “buyers of folios might value discretion; buyers of octavos, indiscretion” (The Library, 2011).

One of no more than five hundred copies in all three formats. The publishers’ advertisement in the London Gazette, 8–12 February 1736/7, states it plainly: “No more will be printed than Five Hundred, the Reason for which is, that when a larger Number were printed of the former Poetical Volumes, the Proprietors were considerably Losers, by their being immediately Pyrated in an incorrect and scandalous Manner” — and, of the subscription itself, “the Number being so small, and the Books to be delivered as soon as the Subscription is full.” Subscriptions were taken at one guinea for the quarto or large folio, half a guinea for the small folio, by the four booksellers named in the imprint. Five hundred covers quarto, large folio and small folio together: the subscription-only quarto accounts for a fraction of that number. The quarto was never offered for public sale — the Daily Post announced that “none of the edition in quarto will be to be sold, the whole number being subscribed for.” Pope himself wrote to Ralph Allen on 6 November 1736 that his prose was “above 3 quarters printed, & will be a book of 50 & more sheets in 4°” (Sherburn, Correspondence, IV, 41 and n.).

Provenance

Thomas Payler of Ileden, in the parish of Kingston, Kent (d. 1771) — armorial bookplate to the front pastedown, recorded in the Franks collection at the British Museum as Franks 22949, entered exactly as “Payler, Thomas. (Arms. Payler quartering Turner),” style Jacobean Armorial (Gambier Howe, Franks Bequest: Catalogue of British and American Book Plates, British Museum, 1903–04, vol. II, p. 339; a second, anonymous Payler plate follows as no. 22950).

“Jacobean” is an acknowledged misnomer of the collectors’ classification: it denotes not the reign of James I but the heavy decorative armorial manner running from the Restoration through the early Georgian years, which gave way to the rococo “Chippendale” manner from about 1745 (de Tabley, A Guide to the Study of Book-Plates, 1880; Castle, English Book-Plates: Ancient and Modern, 1892).

Quartering is the device by which a single shield carries the arms of more than one family. The field is divided into four compartments, numbered from the top left as the viewer faces it — the dexter chief, the place of honour — and an heir who acquires a second coat, whether by marriage to an heiress or, as here, by taking a name and arms under a settlement, places the coat he principally bears in the first and fourth quarters and the acquired coat in the second and third. The order is therefore not decoration but a statement of which name the bearer holds first (Woodcock and Robinson, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry, Oxford, 1988; Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry, London, 1909). The plate itself settles the order here: the bend charged with three pierced mullets of six points, between lions passant guardant, occupies the dexter — the first and fourth quarters — while the fer-de-molines and ermine of Turner occupy the sinister. It is Payler quartering Turner, as Franks records, and as the Act required of a man who had taken the name; Hasted gives the order the other way about.

He was born Thomas Turner, and took the surname and arms of Payler by private Act of Parliament: “An Act to enable Thomas Turner Esquire, and his Issue, to take and use the Surname and Arms of Payler,” 30 George II, c. 19 (1757). The original Act survives among the Records of the House of Lords at the Parliamentary Archives (HL/PO/PB/1/1757/30G2n43). Acts of this kind were the standard instrument where an estate passed sideways under a name-and-arms clause — a condition imposed by will or settlement obliging the heir to assume the testator’s surname and armorial bearings, so that a name extinguished in the male line should be carried on by whoever took the property. The Payler baronets of Thoralby in Yorkshire had failed in the male line; the Kentish line at Ileden succeeded to the Payler interest and, by the Act, to the name. A private Act was necessary because family estates of this period were commonly locked in strict settlement and could not be varied by private agreement: Parliament alone was competent to authorise the change. Hasted records that he “changed his name to Payler, for which an act passed, and resided at Ileden, and died possessed of it in 1771” (The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol. 9, Kingston).

The subscriber. The entire run of the quarto was sold to subscribers before publication, so every copy began in the hands of a named subscriber: presumably Payler was among them. The Act of 1757 fixes the plate to the fourteen years between that statute and his death in 1771, which supports rather than contradicts the reading — a subscriber of 1737 would have signed as Thomas Turner and plated the book two decades later under the name Parliament had granted him. The plate’s design, with its putti, scrolled mantling and mask, sits exactly where the Jacobean manner was yielding to the Chippendale, as one would expect of an engraving made on or soon after the Act.

Monreith House, Wigtownshire — ancient seat of the Maxwells of Monreith (Clan Maxwell), in the parish of Mochrum. The volume carries the house shelf label, lettered “MONRIETH HOUSE LIBRARY / Please return this book to shelf” with the shelfmark M3 supplied in manuscript. The label is a modern one made for the house, and the transposed spelling of the estate name is the label’s own: the house, its parish record and every published form of the name are Monreith (Historic Environment Scotland, Canmore site 62801). We reproduce the label as it reads rather than silently correct it. The library was formed by Sir Herbert Maxwell, 7th Bt. (1845–1937) and his father — MP, Fellow of the Royal Society, Knight of the Thistle, President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Chairman of the National Library of Scotland; grandfather of the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, of Ring of Bright Water.

Literature

R. H. Griffith, Alexander Pope: A Bibliography (Univ. of Texas Studies), nos. 454–455; ESTC T5513; The Rothschild Library, no. 1633; D. F. Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. J. McLaverty (Oxford, 1991); G. Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1956), IV, 41 and n.; M. Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (Yale, 1985); C. Willan, “‘Mr Pope’s Penmanship’: Edmund Curll, Alexander Pope, and Rawlinson Letters 90,” The Library (2011); P. Rogers, “The Case of Pope v. Curll,” The Library (1972); H. Brown, “I could publish my own heart” (Oxford DPhil, 2022); V. Coenen, Presenting a Self (2015). On the bookplate: E. R. J. Gambier Howe, Franks Bequest: Catalogue of British and American Book Plates bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks (London, 1903–04), II, 339, no. 22949; Lord de Tabley (Leicester Warren), A Guide to the Study of Book-Plates (1880); E. Castle, English Book-Plates: Ancient and Modern (London, 1892). On heraldry and quartering: T. Woodcock and J. M. Robinson, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry (Oxford, 1988); A. C. Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry (London, 1909). On the family and the Act: E. Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol. 9 (Canterbury, 1800), Kingston; An Act to enable Thomas Turner Esquire, and his Issue, to take and use the Surname and Arms of Payler, 30 Geo. II, c. 19 (1757), Parliamentary Archives HL/PO/PB/1/1757/30G2n43; W. P. W. Phillimore and E. A. Fry, An Index to Changes of Name (London, 1905).

Condition

Binding slightly worn. Within, the paper is snow-white — an unimaginable state of preservation after two hundred and ninety years. Complete, the red-and-black title with its vignette portrait present, the engraved head-pieces crisp and sharp, the sheets firm, bright and unmarked throughout. The Payler armorial bookplate and the house shelf label are preserved in situ. Further photographs and a full condition report gladly supplied on request.

Pope’s authorised Letters of 1737: the volume with which England’s foremost poet took command of his own correspondence — the subscription-only quarto that was never offered for sale, snow-white within.

Atelier Zweig · Item AZ-POPE-LETTERS-1737