Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was born on 21 May 1688 in London to a Roman Catholic linen-merchant family, in the year of the anti-Catholic Glorious Revolution.

Barred from universities and formal schooling by penal laws against Catholics, Pope educated himself, mastering Latin, Greek, French, and Italian at home.

Around age twelve Pope contracted Pott's disease, which stunted his growth to about four feet six inches and left him with lifelong ill health and a curved spine.

Pope's verse treatise An Essay on Criticism, published in May 1711, brought him early fame and produced enduring phrases such as 'To err is human, to forgive divine'.

Pope's mock-heroic masterpiece The Rape of the Lock first appeared in 1712 and was expanded to its full five-canto form in 1714.

Pope's subscription translation of the Iliad appeared in six volumes between 1715 and 1720 and made him financially independent, a rarity for a poet of his time.

In 1719 Pope settled at a villa by the Thames at Twickenham, where he created his famous grotto and gardens and entertained literary friends.

Pope's satirical epic The Dunciad, ridiculing dullness and his literary enemies, appeared anonymously in 1728 and was repeatedly revised until 1743.

Pope's philosophical poem An Essay on Man was published in 1733-1734 and became one of the most widely read poems of the eighteenth century.

Alexander Pope died at his villa in Twickenham on 30 May 1744 and was buried in the nave of St Mary's Church, Twickenham.