For instance, most of the prose works listed above were published anonymously and never acknowledged by Pope, who sought thereby to protect himself from personal attack and his poetry from biased critical judgment. As a result, decisions about the canon must often be highly speculative.
In the year of Alexander Pope's birth, 1688, a Protestant, William of Orange, was invited to the throne, replacing James II, a Roman Catholic. As a Catholic, Pope--who was born in London to Alexander Pope, a merchant, and his second wife, Edith Turner--was prevented throughout his life from assuming any public office. In addition to religious difficulties, Pope was continually afflicted by serious physical problems that Samuel Johnson describes in his Lives of the English Poets as follows:
The person of Pope is well known not to have been formed by the nicest model. He has, in his account of the "Little Club," compared himself to a spider, and by another is described as protuberant behind and before. He is said to have been beautiful in his infancy; but he was of a constitution originally feeble and weak; and as bodies of a tender frame are easily distorted, his deformity was probably in part the effect of his application.
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