ID 1108948
Lot 149 | Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Estimate value
£ 15 000 – 25 000
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).
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