SOURCE: “A World of Artefacts: The Rape of the Lock as Social History,” in Literature and History, Vol. 5, No. 2, Autumn 1979, pp. 183-93.

In the following essay, Nicholson counters accepted readings of The Rape of the Lock by outlining the social, economic, and political implications of thematic changes in the revised version of the poem.

I

When Geoffrey Tillotson, in the final paragraph of his introduction to the ‘Twickenham’ edition of The Rape of the Lock, comments that ‘the second version is inexhaustible,’¹ readers cannot help reflecting upon the fact that generations of commentators on the poem as well as the detailed annotations offered editorially by Tillotson himself conspire to undermine his remark. Indeed the wealth of scholarship revealed by those annotations demonstrates conclusively that almost every line in The Rape echoes, parodies, adapts or rephrases moments of a literary tradition reaching from the Bible to the reign of...