House of Notes

"Who is this Pope that I hear so much about?" said George II; "I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in prose? I hear a great deal, too, of Shakespeare, but I cannot read him, he is such a bombast fellow." Alexander Pope, an only child, was born in London, on May 21,1688, the year of the Glorious revolution . His father, a linen-draper, was forty-two, his mother forty-six. Both were Roman Catholics , and his father, Alexander Sr., retired from business after his son's birth, perhaps because a new act of Parliament prohibited Catholics from living within ten miles of London. Between 1696 and 1700 Pope was tutored at home by a priest, and then enrolled in two Catholic schools, but he was largely self-educated. His religion would have made it impossible, at the time, to pursue a career in law or medicine or the Clergy even had he wished to: as a Catholic he was not, for example, permitted to attend a un