SOURCE: "Pope, Publishing, and Popular Interpretations of the Dunciad Variorum, in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 279-95.

In the essay below, Rogers provides a publishing history of the various editions of The Dunciad, stating that they show Pope was "a brilliant poet and acute businessman, sensitive to the follies of the world and highly current with contemporary printing and bookselling practice."

Alexander Pope has often been portrayed, both during his lifetime and in this century, as a plotting, spiteful little man who used his pen to exact vengeance upon friend and foe alike, often for petty transgressions. Nowhere, according to such critics, is Pope's true nature more evident than in the multiple versions of his Dunciad Variorum. Samuel Johnson asserted that the poem was an elaborate means of revenge, in which Pope "endeavoured to sink into contempt all the writers by whom he had been attacked" [Lives...