The Rape of the Lock was first published anonymously in two cantos in 1712. Alexander Pope was 24 and enjoyed a promising career as a poet which, as Samuel Johnson said, had become "the business of his life". He had published some verses and completed An Essay on Criticism, which marked his claim to authority in literary matters. Yet he was in a very real sense an outsider. He suffered from tuberculosis of the bone that left him hunched and deformed, leading him once to lament "this long disease, my life". He was also a Roman Catholic and, in the circumstances of the day, considered a subversive. He was, for example, denied access to the great universities.
So his real academy became the London coffee houses among the wits and hacks. The Rape of the Lock is addressed to just such an audience of the cultural and the articulate literati who haunted Will's or Button's. He stirred up envy and enmity even here, and once declared that "the life of a wit is warfare upon earth ... one must have the constancy of a martyr". The Rape of the Lock is itself an image of warfare in miniature.
The poem is set in a self-confident and expanding world, of burgeoning trade and steadily increasing comfort. Yet it is also an arena of conflict where peace and harmony are continually imperilled and where the boundaries between order and chaos are constantly threatened. The narrative is based upon a real incident in what we might now describe as "the war of the sexes". A certain Lord Petre had the courage - or folly - to surreptitiously cut off a lock of hair from the pretty head of a young lady named Arabella Fermor; just as the ravishment of Helen led to a long and bloody war, so the theft of the lock led to coldness between the two families involved. Pope was commissioned, by a friend of both sides, to compose a poem that might mollify all parties. "It was in this view," Pope wrote later, "that I wrote my Rape of the Lock."
It is of course written in the genre known as "mock-heroic", although Pope makes sure that the mockery does not go too far. He was translating Homer's Iliad at approximately the same time, and there is a subdued but implicit contrast between the exploits of the classical armies and the manoeuvres of Belinda and the Baron. It is a world of delicacy and refinement, but not one that survives intense scrutiny; like the world of Brobdingnag as seen by Gulliver, it can be monstrous and disgusting. When the values of the classical world are applied to it, it is superficial and absurd. Nevertheless it shimmers with a strange beauty, as if transience had been caught eternally and a painted mist become a sculpted form. It may all be artifice, like the poet himself who, as Johnson said, "hardly drank tea without a stratagem". But it is brilliant artifice. It is the great art of unreality.
It was composed in the verse form of the heroic couplet, mediated by the iambic pentameter that has been a constant presence in English poetry; it seems to close down its argument and description with each clinching rhyme, but at the same time it evokes a world of intricate and harmonious order. It is life measured as a dance. Pope's own description was of a "whimsical piece of work ... a sort of writing very like tickling". No critic could give a better account.
It was a success at the time. It sold 3,000 copies in the first four days, and proceeded through several editions. But Pope was attacked by those who disliked him anyway. He was accused of salaciousness and scandal-mongering. "Of all blockheads," John Dennis wrote, "he is the most emphatically dull ... 'tis such sad deplorable stuff." Pope was never one to suffer foolish critics willingly, however, and he had his revenge. In response to the virulent criticism, he devised A Key to the Lock, a prose narrative supposed to reveal the papist tendencies of the poem and to expose the poet as a subversive renegade.
It was a brilliant parody of the worst excesses of the allegorical critics of the period, who would peer through the "machinery" of the latest drama or epic to uncover unhealthy political tendencies. It was a satire on those who provide abstruse explanations of the most innocent narrative or who unnecessarily complicate a simple theme. But it is also a brilliant exercise in self-interpretation: with the purpose of divulging the secret meaning of The Rape of the Lock as a papist tract, he uses great ingenuity and subtlety in his analysis. He forestalls obloquy and ridicule by indulging in them. But it is also a mighty act of self-promotion, whereby The Rape of the Lock becomes a significant document. In that, of course, he has been proved triumphant. Never has so great a poem emerged from so trivial a cause. The stolen hair has achieved immortality.