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Pope and Giles Jacob's "Lives of the Poets": The "Dunciad" as Alternative Literary History

Among the varied responses to Pope's Dunciad, the following passage from a letter to John Dennis has not received the attention it deserves: "In Mr. Alexander Pope's new Edition of his Dunciad, with Notes and Additions, I find he has done me the Honour to make me your great Friend and Second, in many Places of that extraordinary Piece; an Honour I could not expect; ... he has therein charg'd me with Facts of which I am innocent.. . and violently attack'd the Reputations of several ingenious Gentlemen, endeavouring to render me the Author of his Scandal."' The writer of the letter and, therefore, putative Author of Pope's Scandal is the obscure Giles Jacob, and he had offended Pope, as he acknowledges in this same letter, through his Lives of the Poets, published in two volumes in 1719 and 1720.2 Jacob is himself perplexed by his prominent role in Pope's satire: he is able to identify a specific affront o Pope in his criticism of Gay, but that hardly seems to account for what he calls "the great and disproportion'd Share of his violent Invectives which run thro' his Dunciad."3 Subsequent critics have done little to dispel this mystery, and Jacob's Lives themselves have enjoyed a largely deserved neglect.4 Nevertheless, it is possible to construct an account of the impact of the Lives on Pope and of the part they played in the birth and growth of the Dunciad. Some evidence survives of the expectations aroused by Jacob's volumes, and the Lives themselves readily reveal the sources of Pope's dissatisfaction with them. They offended him sufficiently to earn a ridiculous role in the annotation of the Variorum edition of the Dunciad, which appeared in 1729; they stimulated him to the creation of an important episode in the poem, that of the phantom poet in book 2; and, more important, they provoked him into expressing the general vision of literary history which reaches its climax in the imitation of the Aeneid in book 3. The origins of the Dunciad are shrouded in a mystery worthy of the cloudcompelling queen herself, and we can probably never hope to recover a wholly satisfactory account of them. For Pope's enemies, of course, there has never been a problem, and the question is not in dispute: the poem sprang from Pope's wounded vanity and resentment at Theobald's Shakespear Restored. Orator Henley is here their spokesman: "Mr Theobald in his Shakespear Restor'd, convicted Mr Pope of Ignorance, both of Shakespear, which He pretended to publish, and of the English Tongue, in numerous Instances. Mr Pope's little Bag of Choler burst within him on his sinking in Reputation, by that Attack of Mr Theobald, and he wrote a Dunciad