An Essay on Criticism

Alexander Pope was born in 1688, the year of the “Glorious Revolution” in England, when James II of England was overthrown by his daughter, Queen Mary, and her Dutch husband, William of Orange (who then became William III of England). James II was overthrown in part because he was believed to be Roman Catholic and thus unfit to lead Protestant Great Britain. By the time of Pope’s rise in popularity, Queen Anne (James’s other daughter) was on the throne; she would be the last Stuart monarch before the Hanover George I was brought in to replace the Stuart line in 1714.

At this time, The Test Acts (1673) meant that Roman Catholic subjects in Great Britain could not hold public office since the government required office-holders to take communion in the Anglican (Church of England) Church; the Test Acts were not repealed until 1829. As a result, one of the most significant sociohistorical contexts for Pope’s writing, and in particular for his role as a critical voice in this era, is his overt Catholicism coupled with the anti-Catholic sentiment that prevailed in 18th-century Great Britain.

In An Essay on Criticism, Pope positions his voice between the Roman Catholic faith of ancient Britain, which he says was “[w]ith tyranny, then superstition joined” (Line 687), and the Roman Catholic figure of Erasmus, an Augustinian monk who he says “[s]temmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age” by reviving interest in classical learning (Line 695).