Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Lot 149
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 17 640
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1108948
Lot 149 | Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Estimate value
£ 15 000 – 25 000
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Seven autograph letters, six signed (‘A. Pope’), to his lawyer and close friend William Fortescue, Twickenham and n.p., [February 1723/4-4 April 1743]
12 pages, various sizes (155 x 97mm to 235 x 183mm), of which five are bifolia and six with integral address panels. Provenance: Arthur A. Houghton, Jr.; his sale, Christie's, 'The Library of Arthur A. Houghton, Jnr.', Vol. II, 11-12 June 1980, lot 383.

Letters giving a view into Pope’s thoughts on a range of literary, social and personal topics, freely expressed to a close friend during a fertile period of his career. Pope directs Fortescue to draft an agreement with Bernard Lintot for his translation of the Odyssey ([February 1723/4]), reports on the progress of his Moral Essays (21 September 1736), mourns his mother on the day of her death (‘All our Passions are Inconsistencies, & our very Reason is no better’, 7 June 1733), and provides detail on the social life which he regarded with such ambivalence: ‘I shall dye of Hospitality […]. Those who think I live in a Study and make Poetry my business, are more mistaken than if they took me for a Prince of Topinambou’ (23 August 1735).

Fortescue was a close friend of Pope and of John Gay, whom these letters also occasionally mention. Fortescue is the addressee of Pope’s First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (1733).
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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