Pope and Prior Park: A study in landscape and literature

Abstract

Introduction Prior Park is an important and early example of a surviving, small-scale, eighteenth-century landscape, the seat at Bath of Ralph Allen (1693-1764), owner of the stone quarries from which Bath was built. It reflects the hand of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), and later Sanderson Miller (1716-1780) and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783). This paper exarnines Alexander Pope's involvement at Prior Park, and in doing so reassesses the garden as of national importance. Completed around 1742, approximately one year before Pope's death, it was the last garden that he was involved with, and it is here that he put into practice his theories on gardening from 1713, the summation of his experience. The thesis is that Prior Park, whilst containing emblematic and iconographic meaning, expresses at the same time a Romantic character that was not fulfJled to such an extent elsewhere by this date and as a consequence it is also argued that Pope's theories, as expressed at his own garden at Twickenham (with Sherborne Castle landscape as the catalyst), were inmlensely influential on the work of William Kent and that Kent developed no theories of his own — that is to say, the influence is from Pope to Kent and not vice versa as convention maintains.