The Distribution of Wealth in Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst

Abstract

Abstract This article examines Pope’s treatment of financial inequality in the Epistle to Bathurst through a reading of the process of composition and revision recoverable from the manuscripts and editions published in Pope’s lifetime. In the 60 years since the publication of Earl Wasserman’s reading of the poem and edition of the Huntington Library manuscripts, the Epistle to Bathurst has been one of the poems by Pope that has been regularly revisited by critics. Perhaps for this reason there has been a striking lack of consensus about the way the poem treats its announced theme—the use of riches. This lack of consensus in its reception is complemented by the poem’s complex textual history. Close attention to the process of composition and revision reveals the difficulties Pope faced in incorporating his address to Lord Bathurst, with its tautologous image of ‘oeconomy’ joined with ‘magnificence’, within a poem that abounds in grotesque examples of noble misers and spendthrifts and of the corruption of financial skulduggery and luxurious consumption. By this means, the Epistle can be shown to be not so much a ‘manual of capitalist piety’ as a critique of specious justifications of extreme financial inequality.