The Shape and Size of Pope's Garden

Abstract

MAYNARD MACK'S The Garden and the City (University of Toronto Press, 1969) is valuable not only because it so sensitively interprets the emblematic nature of Pope's retirement at Twickenham but because it conveniently gathers together many illustrations, plans, and written accounts of Pope's garden and grotto which were previously scattered and difficult of access.' The picture that emerges is fairly clear except in one very important feature-the relationship of house, grotto, and garden to one another. As far as I am aware, no one (not even Professor Mack) has questioned the accuracy of John Searle's Plan of Mr. Pope's Garden, 1745 (Figure 3), yet there is an evident discrepancy between it and the plans of the grotto made by Searle (Figure 1) and by Pope himself (Mack, Plates 22, 23) in the 1740s, and the contemporary map by John Rocque, An Exact Survey of the City's of London ... and the country near ten miles round begun in 1741 and ended in 1745, 1746 (Figure 2). Searle's Plan of Mr. Pope's Garden (but not his separate largerscale plan of the grotto) shows the grotto tunnel running obliquely beneath the villa and the road. All the grotto plans, however, show this tunnel at a right angle to the Thames-side front of the house and therefore to the road also.2 The only engraving of the house which