SOURCE: “Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the Literature of Social Comment,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740, edited by Steven N. Zwicker, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 307-29.

In the following essay, Landry compares the careers of Montagu and Alexander Pope. Despite the differences between the two writers, the critic observes, “their lives and writings tell us much about the forging of a national and imperial identity that would become disseminated around the globe.”

Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were both born in the year of the Glorious Revolution, 1688-89. Divided by family circumstance and political allegiance, they have been coupled by literary history. Pope was a Catholic linen merchant's son, born in the City of London, who had to make his own fortune in the literary marketplace by means of such ventures as translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English for a...