SOURCE: “The Ideology of Neo-Classical Aesthetics: Epistles to Several Persons (1731-5),” in Alexander Pope, Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 94-127.

In the following essay, Brown reveals inconsistencies in the rhetorical devices used in Epistles to Several Persons to address questions of morality, gender, and pastoral aesthetics, elucidating the conflicted status of Pope's ethics in the face of emerging capitalism.

We know from the Advertisement to the ‘death-bed’ edition of the Epistles to Several Persons that Pope saw a direct connection between these poems and the Essay on Man.¹ Together they were to frame Pope's opus magnum, a discursive epic on humankind conceived as a dilated version of the Essay on Man. That longer and evidently uncompletable work was, according to Pope's prospectus, to begin with the four epistles of the Essay on Man, and to move on to a book on reason, science, learning and their misuses, a book on...