SOURCE: “Alexander Pope's Correspondence as Fiction,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 304, 1992, pp. 925-28.

In the following essay, Brown plumbs the depth of Pope's instinct for self-fashioning in his letter writing, explaining the role of the poet's concept of fiction in his approach to publishing his assorted collections of letters during his lifetime.

As early as 1706 in letters exchanged with William Wycherley and in 1712 with Caryll, we find Pope speculating and encouraging speculation about the possibility of his ‘epistolary fame’. Pope first explores the notion tentatively and with classical models in mind, but the impulse is a telling one and shows us a young man compulsively fascinated with the public presentation of himself. Pope's posturing in his early letters causes Wycherley to wonder at times whether he is ‘more Complimented than abused’ by Pope, and even to observe that he finds Pope ‘a man of...