91. The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

Some time early in 1712, The 7th Lord Petre, perhaps at a ball or card party, furtively snipped a lock of hair from the head of a young beauty, Arabella Fermor, and carried it off as a trophy. The Fermors and the Petres, two prominent Catholic families, stopped talking to one another, and Alexander Pope (another Catholic) was brought in, a poetic troubleshooter, to defuse the tension. This he did with the mock-epic The Rape of the Lock, a poem intended to ‘make a jest of it, and laugh them together again’. It apparently achieved its object, since Arabella Fermor ‘took it so well as to give about copies of it’ and later posed for a portrait in which she was shown wearing a prominent crucifix-necklace, one specifically described in the poem.

In the poem, Arabella appears as ‘Belinda’ (Arabella — Bella — Belinda) and Lord Petre is cast as ‘the Baron’. Canto I sees Belinda at her dressing-table; in Canto II she makes a pleasure cruise on the Thames (a joking reference to the sea-voyages of heroic poetry); Canto III is set in Hampton Court, where the barbering offence takes place; and Cantos IV and V are focused on a skirmish between the nymphs and fops, and the ascent of the lock to heaven, where it becomes a comet (comet, from kometes, ‘long-haired’).

The style is that of the mock-heroic, in which trivial actions are magnified as if they were the doings of gods or heroes. The work which almost certainly influenced the choice of title was Alessandro Tassoni’s mock-epic The Rape of the Bucket, from 1622. (‘Rape’ in both poems was ultimately from ‘rapere’, to steal or snatch, and did not have a primarily sexual signification.) In this piece of scholarly ludicrousness, two Italian towns, Modena and Bologna, go to war with one another over the theft of a bucket from a well. The gods take sides in the struggle, sometimes rather ridiculously. Saturn travels to the celestial parliament sitting on a chamber pot, and Juno is unavailable because she is having her hair cut.

The Rape of the Bucket was a best-seller in Italy and was known Europe-wide, and while Pope could have read it in Italian, he probably encountered it in English. A translation of the first part of Tassoni’s poem appeared in 1710, two years before the composition of The Rape of the Lock. ‘Done from the Italian into English Rhime’, it was the work of John Ozell, one of the powerhouses of English translation in the early eighteenth century, the man responsible for English editions of Molière, Racine, Cervantes, Corneille and many others. In 1712 he produced an important edition of the Iliad, which Pope drew on in his own translation.

But Mr Pope and Mr Ozell were not on very good terms. Ozell had attacked William Wycherley, a friend of Pope’s, and by doing so had drawn the wrath of the Scriblerians (Ozell was also satirized by Swift). In 1708 Pope caricatured Ozell as the very model of a time-serving literary hack:

Reviving Perrault, murdering Boileau, he
Slander'd the ancients first, then Wycherley;
Which yet not much that old bard's anger raised,
Since those were slander'd most whom Ozell praised.

Things went from bad to worse when Ozell was one of the fools mentioned by name in the Dunciad of 1729. That same year Ozell decided to bite back, as reported by Theophilus Cibber (son of Colley) in 1753:

Ozell was incensed to the last degree by this usage, and in a paper called The Weekly Medley, September 1729, he published the following strange Advertisement. 'As to my learning, this envious wretch knew, and every body knows, that the whole bench of bishops, not long ago, were pleased to give me a purse of guineas for discovering the erroneous translations of the Common Prayer in Portugueze, Spanish, French, Italian, &c. As for my genius, let Mr. Cleland shew better verses in all Pope's works, than Ozell's version of Boileau's Lutrin, which the late lord Hallifax was so well pleased with, that he complimented him with leave to dedicate it to him, &c. &c. Let him shew better and truer poetry in The Rape of the Lock, than in Ozell's Rape of the Bucket, which, because an ingenious author happened to mention in the same breath with Pope's, viz.

'Let Ozell sing the Bucket, Pope the Lock’,

the little gentleman [i.e. Pope, who never reached a greater height than 4’6”] had like to have run mad; and Mr. Toland and Mr. Gildon publicly declared Ozell's Translation of Homer to be, as it was prior, so likewise superior, to Pope's.’

The wars between the singer of the Bucket and the singer of the Lock seem as fevered and ridiculous as the battles between Modena and Bologna or the nymphs and fops of Hampton Court. One asks oneself why Pope was so angry with Ozell. An obvious answer presents itself. Ozell had committed the unpardonable sin of helping Pope write his best-known poem.

Consulted:
Hunt, John Dixon, ed.: The Rape of the Lock: A Casebook (Macmillan, 1968)
Rousseau, GS, ed.: Twentieth Century Interpretations of ’The Rape Of The Lock’: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1969)
Williams, Abigail: ‘John Ozell’, Dictionary of National Biography (Sept 2004)