Pope was a parvenu and an outsider. His enemies like to say so, and they were right in a deeper sense than they can have known. What particularly angered the dunces, it has been said, was the fact that Pope had ‘ made a fortune by literature and [was] thus free of the captivity they [were] enslaved to’. There is a massive irony here, for Pope was peculiarly disadvantaged when he started out. He did not have it made for him. In retrospect, it is easy to suppose that great writers were bound to come through – that Alfred Tennyson was always Lord Tennyson, prosperous, secure and famous. It is a misleading assumption in general, and a wild distortion in the case of Pope. He inherited one disability, Catholicism. And within a few years he had contracted another in the shape of Pott's disease, which left him a crippled dwarf. Either would have been enough to set him outside ordinary society: to limit his educational opportunities, to curtail his civic responsibilities, to blight his prospects. If we want to understand Pope's own social situation, we must give full weight to these two handicaps against which he pitted his will and his talent.

Of the two, his physical disability is the easier to allow for today. Much more strange to us is the slur involved in belonging to the Catholic faith. This was not just a matter of popular attitudes. It was an affair of the statute-book. After the heady innovations of James II, there was no likelihood that Williamite ‘toleration’ would extend to accepting papists as fully paid-up members of society.