Abraham Woodhead, ‘The Invisible Man’: His Impact on Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther

Abstract

A priest who often visited Alexander Pope in the mid-1730s once observed that the English Catholics had ‘not so good hands’ to defend their cause in the late seventeenth century. The poet briskly replied: ‘Sir, I beg your pardon, we had really some very clever men, engaged on our side …’ Then he mentioned Woodhead, but Spence misunderstood and wrote ‘Whitehead’. That Pope used the pronoun ‘we’ shows what side he was on, and that he gave the pre-eminence to Woodhead shows how well acquainted he was with the controversies of the last age, for Woodhead never signed his works, usually employing the initials R.H. In 1736, his first biographer Simon Berington would call him ‘this great, but almost unknown Man’.