SOURCE: “Pope on the Origins of Society,” in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 79-93.

In the following essay, Erskine-Hill discusses the political character of the third epistle of An Essay on Man, tracing the influence of contemporary debates, literary antecedents, and Bolingbroke on Pope's interpretation of the origins of society and government.

I

Most readers agree that Pope's poetry is comprehensively social, and few deny that, implicitly or explicitly, in a variety of ways, it is often political. It is then surprising that in the wave of critical and biographical discussion which has pursued the earlier volumes of the Twickenham Edition relatively little attention has been paid to Epistle III of An Essay on Man (May 1733), the one poem in Pope's canon in which he offers an account of the origin of society and...