The Rape of the Lock

Overview

Written and published

Two-canto version written 1711 and printed in Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (May 1712); enlarged five-canto version published by Lintot in March 1714; Clarissa's speech added in the Works of 1717

Genre

Mock-heroic (Pope's subtitle calls it 'An Heroi-Comical Poem'): the forms and machinery of classical epic applied to a trivial social quarrel

Form

Heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter) in five cantos, 794 lines in the standard numbering

Occasion

Robert, Lord Petre, cut a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor; the Catholic gentleman John Caryll asked Pope to write a poem that would laugh the two families back into friendship

Setting

London and the Thames on a single day: Belinda's bedroom at noon, a boat trip upriver, and an afternoon party at Hampton Court; with excursions to the Cave of Spleen and the sphere of the moon

Narrator

A self-conscious epic narrator who invokes the Muse, addresses his characters, comments on the action and finally claims to immortalise Belinda

Protagonist

Belinda, a fashionable young beauty modelled on Arabella Fermor

Epic models

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and Milton's Paradise Lost, with Ovid, Catullus, Ariosto and the mock-epics of Boileau (Le Lutrin) and Garth (The Dispensary)

Machinery

Sylphs and gnomes adapted from Rosicrucian lore in the Comte de Gabalis (1670) of the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars

Key themes

Triviality and greatness; beauty, time and mortality; female honour and the marriage market; commodities and empire; the uses and limits of epic

Context

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was the son of a Catholic linen merchant in London. Because Catholics were barred from the universities, from public office and from living within ten miles of London, the family moved to Binfield in Windsor Forest, where Pope educated himself largely by reading, above all Homer, Virgil and the English poets from Spenser to Dryden. A tubercular infection of the spine left him stunted and in chronic pain. By 1711 he was already known for his Pastorals (1709) and An Essay on Criticism (1711). The Rape of the Lock made him the most admired poet of his generation, and in 1715 he began publishing the translation of the Iliad that would make him financially independent (Mack 1985) (Rogers 2007).

The poem grew out of a real quarrel within the small, intermarried world of the Catholic gentry. Some time in 1711 Robert, seventh Baron Petre, then about twenty, cut off a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty, and the jest caused a breach between the two families. Pope's friend John Caryll of Ladyholt, a friend of both families, suggested that Pope write a poem that would turn the affair into laughter. The first version, in two cantos and 334 lines, appeared anonymously in Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations in May 1712. By then Petre had married another heiress; he died of smallpox in 1713, the year before the expanded poem appeared (Tillotson 1962) (Erskine-Hill 1975) (Rumbold 1989).

In 1713 Pope rebuilt the poem in five cantos, against the advice, as he later reported, of Addison, who thought it perfect as it stood. He added what the critics of the day called the 'machinery' of epic, the supernatural agents who intervene in the action, here the sylphs and gnomes; he added Belinda's toilet, the game of ombre and the descent of the gnome Umbriel to the Cave of Spleen; and he prefaced the poem with a letter to Arabella Fermor. The new version was published by Lintot in March 1714. A last major addition came in the Works of 1717: Clarissa's speech in Canto 5 (RL 5.7–34), which Pope said was meant to make the moral of the poem plainer (Tillotson 1962).

Mock-heroic was a well-established form by 1714. Tassoni's La secchia rapita (The Stolen Bucket, 1622), Boileau's Le Lutrin (1674–83), on a quarrel over a church lectern, Dryden's Mac Flecknoe (1682) and Samuel Garth's The Dispensary (1699) had all set the grand style against petty subjects. Pope's originality lay in the delicacy of the treatment and in the density of his allusions. Almost every episode corresponds to an epic convention: the invocation, the arming of the hero, the sacrifice before battle, the speech of the commander to his troops, the epic games, the descent to the underworld, the council, the battle of the gods and the final apotheosis (Broich 1990) (Terry 2005) (Jack 1952).

The text quoted in this guide is the five-canto poem as it stood after 1717, including Clarissa's speech; its line numbers agree with the standard Twickenham Edition, and references are given by canto and line (RL 3.147–54). The prefatory letter to Arabella Fermor is not included in it. In that letter Pope explains the 'machinery' as borrowed from the Rosicrucians, whose doctrine he found in 'a French book call'd Le Comte de Gabalis', and assures Mrs Fermor that the character of Belinda resembles her in nothing but beauty. The letter's tone is gallant and teasing, but also faintly condescending: Pope apologises for using 'hard words before a lady', and the compliment and the joke cannot easily be separated (Tillotson 1962) (Rumbold 1989).

Plot overview

The poet asks the Muse what could make a well-bred lord assault a lady and a lady reject a lord. At noon Belinda is still asleep. Her guardian sylph, Ariel, sends her a dream in which he explains that the spirits of dead coquettes become sylphs, who protect chaste young women from seduction, and warns her that some dreadful event threatens her that day. Woken by her lapdog Shock, she forgets the dream on reading a love letter and sits down at her dressing table, where she and her maid perform the rites of beauty as solemnly as priestesses before an altar.

Belinda sails up the Thames towards Hampton Court, admired by all. Her two curled locks have caught the eye of the Baron, who has already built an altar of French romances and prayed to Love for success. Ariel summons the sylphs, describes their duties, and assigns each a part of Belinda to guard; fifty are set to defend her petticoat. At Hampton Court Belinda defeats the Baron and another player at the card game of ombre, narrated as an epic battle. Over coffee the Baron, armed with a pair of scissors supplied by Clarissa, cuts off one of the locks. Ariel withdraws when he discovers an earthly lover in Belinda's heart, and a sylph who interposes is cut in two.

The melancholy gnome Umbriel descends to the Cave of Spleen and brings back a bag of sighs and passions and a vial of tears. Emptied over Belinda and her friend Thalestris, they turn grief into fury. Thalestris sends her beau Sir Plume to demand the lock, which the Baron refuses to return, and Belinda laments the loss of the curl and her visit to court. In Canto 5 Clarissa urges good humour and good sense, since beauty must fade; nobody listens. Thalestris calls to arms, and the beaux and belles fight a battle of frowns, fans and snuff. Belinda overcomes the Baron with a pinch of snuff and threatens him with a bodkin, demanding the lock.

The lock, however, has vanished. Some think it has gone to the sphere of the moon, where all things lost on earth are kept, but the Muse saw it rise into the heavens as a new star, like the lock of Queen Berenice in ancient poetry. The poet tells Belinda to stop mourning: her own beauty will die, but the lock, and her name, will live in the poem.

Book by book

Characters

The beau monde

Belinda

A young beauty, modelled on Arabella Fermor, the poem's heroine and its epic 'hero'. She is presented as admirable and absurd at once: radiant, self-possessed, triumphant at cards, but also vain, fiercely conscious of her reputation, and capable of a violent rage over a curl. Ariel's discovery of an 'earthly lover' in her heart suggests a hidden desire beneath her coquetry. Critics have read her as the object of Pope's satire, of his admiration, or of a society that makes women into objects.

The Baron

The 'adventurous Baron', modelled on Robert, Lord Petre, who cuts the lock. He is the poem's epic adversary: he prays and sacrifices before his enterprise, fights at ombre, swears by the lock as Akhilleus swears by the sceptre, and in the final battle dies only in the lover's metaphorical sense. His pride in his trophy shows the possessiveness behind gallantry.

Clarissa

The lady who lends the Baron the scissors and who, in the 1717 version, delivers the poem's moral speech on good sense and good humour. Her speech parodies Sarpedon's speech in Iliad 12. Her double role, accomplice and moralist, makes her one of the poem's most debated figures.

Thalestris

Belinda's friend, named after a queen of the Amazons and traditionally identified with Mrs Morley, a member of the circle around the Fermors. She inflames Belinda's anger, speaks for honour as reputation, calls Clarissa a prude and leads the attack in the final battle.

Sir Plume

Thalestris' beau, vain of his amber snuff-box and clouded cane, sent to demand the lock. His speech is a string of oaths and fillers. He is usually identified with Sir George Browne, who is said to have resented the portrait.

Betty

Belinda's maid, the 'inferior priestess' at the toilet. She is praised for work done by the sylphs, a small joke that also points to the unseen labour behind fashionable display.

The sylphs and gnomes

Ariel

Belinda's guardian sylph and chief of the sylphs. His name recalls both the spirit in Shakespeare's The Tempest and a rebel angel in Paradise Lost. He sends the warning dream, marshals the sylphs like a general and assigns their posts, but must withdraw when he finds an earthly lover in Belinda's heart.

The sylphs

Airy spirits, once coquettes, who protect women's chastity by distracting them with new vanities. Among them are Zephyretta, Brillante, Momentilla and Crispissa, who guard the fan, the earrings, the watch and the lock. They are the poem's equivalent of the gods of epic, beautiful, fragile and absorbed in trifles.

Umbriel

A 'dusky, melancholy sprite', a gnome, once a prude. He descends to the Cave of Spleen and returns with the bag of sighs and the vial of tears that turn Belinda's loss into fury and grief. He watches the final battle with delight.

Spleen

The goddess of melancholy and ill humour who lies in her cave attended by Pain, Megrim, Ill-nature and Affectation. She personifies the fashionable malady of 'the vapours'.

Others

Shock

Belinda's lapdog, who wakes her with his tongue, and whom Ariel himself undertakes to guard. Shock stands for the poem's world of pets and ornaments, which Belinda's society values as highly as people.

The narrator

The epic poet, who invokes the Muse, addresses Belinda and the Baron, comments on the folly of mortals, and finally claims to immortalise the lock. His voice moves between mock solemnity, gallant compliment and real moral observation.

John Caryll

Pope's friend, a Catholic gentleman, to whom the poem is dedicated in its third line ('This verse to Caryll, Muse! is due'). He suggested the poem as a means of reconciling the families of Petre and Fermor.

Themes

The trivial and the great

The poem's first couplet announces its subject as 'mighty contests' that 'rise from trivial things'. Throughout, the gap between epic forms and fashionable trifles is the main source of comedy: the arming of a hero becomes the application of cosmetics, a battle becomes a card game, a descent to the underworld becomes a visit to the home of bad temper. The method exposes a society that treats trifles as if they were matters of life and death.

Yet the poem never quite dismisses the trivial. Its world of lacquer, silk and china is rendered with such loving precision that it acquires its own beauty, and the poem itself is a work made out of 'trivial things'. Pope's ability to find poetry in teacups and petticoats is the reason why readers have long debated whether the poem satirises or celebrates the world it describes (Brooks 1947) (Jack 1952).

Honour, reputation and female virtue

The word 'honour' recurs at key moments. Ariel says that what men call honour is really the work of the sylphs; Thalestris speaks of honour as reputation, at whose shrine virtue itself is sacrificed; the Baron's honour lies in his trophy. The poem separates honour as public reputation from virtue as an inner quality, and suggests that the beau monde has lost sight of the second.

Feminist critics have explored how the poem represents a society in which women's value depends on their beauty and their marriageability, and in which their 'honour' is policed by gossip. Whether the poem criticises that system or reinforces it, by mocking Belinda and offering Clarissa's advice to accept it, is a central question of modern criticism (Pollak 1985) (Rumbold 1989).

Beauty, time and mortality

Beneath the comedy runs an awareness of time. The day moves from noon to evening; beauty is 'frail' and 'must decay'; Clarissa reminds her listeners that 'locks will turn to gray'; and the poem ends with Belinda's death. The lock is a part of her that can be preserved only by being cut off and transformed into poetry.

This concern links the poem to the epic tradition, in which the hero's awareness of death drives his pursuit of glory. Clarissa's speech, modelled on Sarpedon's in the Iliad, makes the connection explicit: beauty, like heroism, is honoured because it is mortal (Mack 1967) (Wasserman 1966).

Commodities, trade and empire

Belinda's world is made of things from distant places: gems from India, perfumes from Arabia, combs of tortoiseshell and ivory, coffee, tea, china, lacquered tables from Japan, an Indian screen. The poem registers the flood of goods produced by British commercial expansion, and its rhetoric often makes people and objects interchangeable.

Laura Brown has argued that the poem's representation of Belinda's toilet participates in the ideology of empire, presenting the goods of global trade as natural tributes to English beauty and erasing the labour and violence by which they were acquired. The routed cards compared to 'Asia's troops, and Afric's sable sons' bring the imagery of colonial war into the drawing room (Brown 1985) (Brown 1993).

Appearance and reality

The poem is preoccupied with surfaces: mirrors, cosmetics, painted china, the shimmering, colour-changing sylphs. Belinda is a work of art made at the dressing table, and her concern after the rape is chiefly what will be seen. The sylphs themselves are invisible to the characters, and their power is a kind of social illusion.

Pope's own art is a matter of polished surfaces, and the couplet is an instrument of display. The poem is thus implicated in the culture of appearance it describes, and part of its achievement is to make the reader aware of this complicity (Brooks 1947) (Deutsch 1996).

Epic and its uses

The poem is a sustained conversation with epic, especially with Homer, whom Pope was preparing to translate, and with Milton. It uses epic conventions to measure the beau monde, but it also tests those conventions, showing how much in epic, its quarrels over prizes, its divine interventions, its boasts and its scales of fate, can look absurd when transposed.

The question of whether mock-heroic belittles the epic or honours it is among the poem's richest. Pope reveres Homer, but by setting Sarpedon's speech in Clarissa's mouth or Akhilleus' oath in the Baron's he lets the heroic and the fashionable comment on each other (Jack 1952) (Doody 1985) (Williams 1993) (Terry 2005).

Motifs

Zeugma

The figure in which one word governs two others in different senses, as in 'stain her honour, or her new brocade' or 'sometimes counsel take--and sometimes tea'. Pope uses it to set moral and trivial things on the same level, revealing a society's confused values in the grammar of a single line.

Catalogues

Lists in the epic manner run through the poem: the objects on the dressing table, the duties of the sylphs, the possible disasters, the cards at ombre, the transformed bodies in the Cave of Spleen and the lost things on the moon. Pope's catalogues mix sacred and profane, serious and trivial, and their order is often itself the joke.

Omens and fate

Ariel's dream, the 'black omens' of Canto 2, the narrator's warnings during the card game, the patch-box that falls three times and the silent parrot all parody the portents of epic. The poem plays at a world governed by Fate in which nothing more serious than a curl is at stake.

Religious ritual

Worship is constantly displaced onto secular objects: Belinda adores the 'cosmetic powers' at her altar, the Baron builds an altar to Love, coffee is served at 'shining altars of Japan', and the lock is 'sacred'. The motif shows a society whose devotion is directed at beauty and pleasure.

Breakable china

China vessels appear repeatedly as emblems of fragility, often beside female chastity: 'some frail China jar receive a flaw', the screams at the rape compared to those when 'rich China vessels' fall. The association suggests that a woman's honour, like porcelain, is valuable because it can break.

Symbols

The lock

Belinda's curl is at once a trivial ornament, a trap for men, a symbol of her beauty and chastity, and a synecdoche for her whole person. Its cutting enacts a symbolic violation; its transformation into a star turns it into a symbol of poetic immortality. It is the poem's equivalent of the prizes over which epic heroes quarrel, like Briseis in the Iliad.

The sylphs

The sylphs are the social conventions and vanities that govern a fashionable woman's life, made visible as tiny spirits. They are delicate, beautiful and ultimately powerless before real desire, and they symbolise both the charm and the fragility of Belinda's world.

The dressing table

The toilet stands for the construction of beauty as art and for the global trade that supplies it. It is altar, armoury and shop at once.

The Cave of Spleen

The underworld of the poem symbolises the dark side of the beau monde: melancholy, affectation, malice and hysteria, the passions that lie beneath polished manners and turn grief into rage (Gubar 1977).

The star

The lock's final transformation into a star symbolises the power of poetry to preserve what time destroys. It also completes the mock-heroic pattern by giving the trivial the classical honour of a constellation.

Critical debates

Satire or celebration?

Is the poem a satire on the vanity and moral confusion of the beau monde, or an affectionate celebration of its beauty? Early readers mostly saw a gentle satire with a clear moral. In 'The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor' (1943), reprinted in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), Cleanth Brooks argued that the poem is neither, but a work of complex irony: Pope admires Belinda's beauty and recognises its value even as he exposes its absurdities, and the poem holds these attitudes in balance rather than choosing between them.

Brooks's essay became a model for New Critical reading. Later critics have accepted his sense of the poem's doubleness but questioned whether its balance is as neutral as he suggested, asking whose values it finally endorses (Brooks 1947) (Hunt 1968).

Gender and the poem

Feminist critics have examined the poem's representation of women. Ellen Pollak argued that the poem reproduces the myth of passive womanhood characteristic of its period: Belinda is admired as an object, mocked for her pride, and offered through Clarissa the advice to accept her place and marry. On this reading the poem's charm makes its ideology seem natural.

Others, such as Valerie Rumbold, have set the poem in the context of the actual women Pope knew, including Arabella Fermor herself, and have noted the constraints on the lives of Catholic gentlewomen. Discussion has also focused on the title's 'rape', whose sexual sense the poem keeps in play, and on whether the comedy trivialises sexual violence or exposes a society in which a woman's reputation counts for more than her person (Pollak 1985) (Rumbold 1989) (Gubar 1977).

Commodity culture and empire

Laura Brown's Alexander Pope (1985) read the poem in relation to the commercial expansion of early eighteenth-century Britain. The dressing table, loaded with goods from India and Arabia, presents the products of trade as if they were natural tributes to Belinda's beauty, and the poem's elegance depends on the invisibility of the labour and violence behind those goods.

Brown developed this argument in Ends of Empire (1993), linking the representation of women as consumers and adorned objects to the ideology of imperial expansion. Her readings have made the toilet scene and the card battle central to discussions of the poem and of commodity culture more generally (Brown 1985) (Brown 1993).

Mock-heroic and epic

Does the poem mock the epic, or does it use the epic to mock a society that falls short of it? Ian Jack, in Augustan Satire (1952), described the poem as a distinctive 'heroi-comical' work in which the epic is not the target but the standard. Maynard Mack and others emphasised that Pope was the period's great translator of Homer and that the poem's allusions honour the tradition.

More recent work on the genre, such as that of Ulrich Broich and Richard Terry, has suggested that the relation is less stable. The comic transposition of epic conventions can expose what is excessive or absurd in the epic itself, and mock-heroic may be one sign of a culture's growing distance from heroic values. Carolyn Williams has studied how Pope's Homer and his mock-heroic share an anxiety about manliness (Jack 1952) (Broich 1990) (Terry 2005) (Williams 1993).

Clarissa's moral and its irony

Pope said that Clarissa's speech was added in 1717 'to open more clearly the moral of the poem', and some readers take it as the poem's authoritative statement: good sense and good humour are the remedies for vanity and anger. Others point out its ironies. Clarissa provided the scissors; her speech is ignored; it is answered by a call to arms; and its advice, that women should keep their power by keeping their temper, accepts the system it describes.

The parody of Sarpedon's speech complicates matters further. Earl Wasserman argued that Pope's allusions carry their whole original context into the poem, so that the reader is meant to hear Sarpedon's heroic ethic beneath Clarissa's social prudence, measuring each against the other (Wasserman 1966) (Pollak 1985) (Tillotson 1962).

The machinery added in 1714

The sylphs, the game of ombre and the Cave of Spleen were added when Pope expanded the poem to five cantos. Pope later told Joseph Spence that Addison had advised against the change, and he was proud of having ignored the advice. Critics have generally praised the additions for transforming a slight occasional piece into a fully realised mock-epic, with its own supernatural order and its own underworld.

The machinery raises interpretive questions. The sylphs may be read as allegories of social convention, as the poem's imitation of epic gods, or as a parody of Rosicrucian occultism. Their withdrawal at the moment of the rape, when Ariel finds an earthly lover in Belinda's heart, places the turning point of the plot in her psychology rather than in fate (Tillotson 1962) (Brooks 1947) (Rousseau 1988).

The occasion and the real people

How far should the poem be read in relation to its occasion? Pope's own account, the dedication to Arabella Fermor and his correspondence with Caryll suggest a poem meant to reconcile, and also suggest that it may not have entirely succeeded: Pope later wrote that some of those concerned took offence. Historical criticism has recovered the Catholic world of the Petres, Fermors and Carylls, a minority bound by intermarriage and by legal disabilities.

Knowledge of this context changes the poem's tone. The light comedy becomes a tactful intervention in a close community, and the dedication's mixture of compliment and condescension can be read as a careful negotiation with a real woman who had been made a public figure (Erskine-Hill 1975) (Rumbold 1989) (Sherburn 1956) (Mack 1985).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. What does Pope gain by expanding the two-canto poem of 1712 into the five-canto poem of 1714?

   Consider the sylphs, the toilet, the game of ombre and the Cave of Spleen. How does each correspond to an epic convention, and how do they change the poem's scope and tone?

2. How does the toilet scene (RL 1.121–48) work as both a religious rite and an arming scene?

   Look at the words 'altar', 'priestess', 'rites' and 'arms'. Compare the arming of Homeric heroes, and think about what is being worshipped and what kind of battle Belinda is preparing for.

3. Choose three examples of zeugma and explain what each reveals about the values of Belinda's world.

   Begin with 'stain her honour, or her new brocade' and 'counsel take--and sometimes tea'. Ask whether the figure equates the two terms or invites the reader to separate them.

4. What is the function of the sylphs? Are they a satire on fashionable women, a parody of epic gods, or something else?

   Consider Ariel's speech in Canto 1 on the origin and duties of the sylphs, the commands in Canto 2, and why Ariel abandons Belinda in Canto 3.

5. How does the game of ombre anticipate the cutting of the lock?

   Follow the fate of Belinda's queen of hearts and her narrow escape from codille. What do the narrator's warnings at RL 3.101–4 suggest?

6. What is the significance of the Cave of Spleen as the poem's underworld?

   Compare the descents of Odysseus and Aeneas. What does Pope locate in his underworld instead of the souls of the dead? Consider the handmaids and the transformations.

7. Is Clarissa's speech the moral of the poem?

   Compare it with Sarpedon's speech in Iliad 12. Consider who speaks it, how it is received, and what its advice asks women to accept.

8. How does the poem play with the double meaning of 'rape' in its title?

   Consider the Latin sense of seizure, the language of the cutting scene, the word 'ravish'd', and Belinda's last couplet in Canto 4.

9. Does the poem satirise or celebrate the world it describes?

   Consider Brooks's argument for a balanced irony, then consider passages of loving description and passages of sharp satire, such as the hanging judges in Canto 3.

10. How seriously should we take the final claim that the Muse will make the lock and Belinda immortal?

    Compare the epic promise of fame and the classical sources (Berenice's lock, Romulus). Note the turn to mortality in the last lines.

Further reading

• Broich, Ulrich. The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem. Translated by David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Brooks, Cleanth. 'The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor.' In The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
• Brown, Laura. Alexander Pope. Rereading Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
• Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
• Deutsch, Helen. Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Doody, Margaret Anne. The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Erskine-Hill, Howard. The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
• Fairer, David. Pope's Imagination. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.
• Gubar, Susan. 'The Female Monster in Augustan Satire.' Signs 3, no. 2 (1977): 380–94.
• Hunt, John Dixon, ed. Pope: The Rape of the Lock. A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1968.
• Jack, Ian. Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660–1750. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.
• Mack, Maynard, ed. Translations of Homer: The Iliad. 2 vols. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vols. 7–8. London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
• Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: W. W. Norton, 1985.
• Pollak, Ellen. The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Rogers, Pat, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Rousseau, G. S., and Pat Rogers, eds. The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Rumbold, Valerie. Women's Place in Pope's World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Sherburn, George, ed. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
• Terry, Richard. Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
• Tillotson, Geoffrey, ed. The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 2. London: Methuen, 1940; 3rd ed., 1962.
• Wasserman, Earl R. 'The Limits of Allusion in The Rape of the Lock.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65, no. 3 (1966): 425–44.
• Williams, Carolyn D. Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning. London: Routledge, 1993.