Clubs of Quidnuncs

John Mullan

• The Dunciad in Four Books by Alexander Pope, edited by Valerie Rumbold
  Longman, 456 pp, £55.00, August 1999, ISBN 0 582 08924 7

Marginalia can sometimes seem the best way into a writer’s head. Those, like Blake and Coleridge, who could not help scribbling in the margins of what they were reading let us imagine their thoughts just as they spring into life. Inspiration and irritation can appear equally raw. If you want to catch sight of Alexander Pope in the hatching of his satire, and you have a British Library reader’s card, you can call up item C.116.b.1-4, unpromisingly described by the electronic catalogue as ‘A Collection of 24 works, lettered “Libels on Pope”, being attacks on Pope and Swift’. Although the catalogue gives no indication that this is so, the four volumes in fact contain Pope’s own collection of attacks on himself. He has written at the front of the first volume a slightly amended quotation from the Book of Job: ‘Behold it is my desire, that mine Adversary had written a Book. Surely I would take it on my Shoulder, and bind it as a crown unto me.’ Grist to my mill, he might as well be saying. Many of the pamphlets are annotated in his own hand, leaving us the traces of both original irritation and original inspiration.