Literary Politics and Political Satire: Paul Whitehead and Alexander Pope

Paul Whitehead (1710–74) first made his name as a poet, as the author of two verse satires, The State Dunces (1733) and Manners (1739). Both are attacks on the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, who served from 1722 to 1742, officially as First Lord of the Treasury, but in the sneers of his enemies as “prime minister,” a master of corruption and self-aggrandizing ambition. Both poems were successful on first publication, winning the accolade of unauthorized Edinburgh reprints, and both were reprinted at intervals during Whitehead’s life, finally standing at the head of the posthumous collected edition of his poetry prepared by his friend Captain Edward Thompson in 1777. Both involve Alexander Pope: The State Dunces takes the form of “an epistle to Mr. Pope;” Manners has a central passage that contrasts its author to Pope. But whereas the first treats Pope with admiration, and urges him to enter the political fray on the side of virtue and against Walpole, the later poem regards him with envy, and hints that he should be prosecuted as a libeller. This change in attitude is surprising, not least because in the intervening years Pope had become ever more severely critical of Walpole’s regime. His chosen medium, it is true, had not been the extension of The Dunciad to include politicians advocated in The State Dunces; instead, he had used the device of “imitations” of satires and epistles of Horace as a means of cloaking his observations with an obliquity that gave pleasure to the reader while rendering prosecution more difficult. Latterly Pope had abandoned his Horatian stalking horse and in the two dialogues “something like Horace” entitled One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, published in May and July of that year, he had spoken out in his own person about the corruption of politics and culture that he saw around him. Surely Whitehead should have approved and written in support of Pope, yet he does not. This apparently contradictory behaviour raises questions that cannot be answered with any certainty because information is lacking. Pope must have been aware of Whitehead’s poems, but he never mentions him in his poems or in his surviving letters. Whitehead destroyed his own personal papers before his death. The friends who left written reminiscences knew him only in his later years, when the professed republican and free-thinker enjoyed a steady income from a sinecure at Court, and lived, as Pope had done before him, in a villa in the Thames-side village of Twickenham. Most of what we know about Whitehead in the 1730s are these two poems and the reactions they provoked. They repay study as examples of successful political satires of the period, and such study may take us some way to an explanation of Whitehead’s apparent volte-face. Some way only; questions will remain, along with possibilities that cannot be ruled out. The paucity of evidence encourages, and to some extent justifies, conjecture and even speculation. While every care has been taken to distinguish facts from hypotheticals in what follows, the reader should be prepared to exercise more than normal academic caution. In March 1733 Walpole proposed in the House of Commons to abolish the customs duties charged on wine and tobacco unloaded at the port of London, and instead to levy excise taxes on wine and tobacco that left the port for sale in England. Walpole had good arguments for doing this: simplification of port procedures, elimination of opportunities to game the system, increased revenue from taxing consumption that would relieve the strain on the land tax. Unfortunately for his scheme, Walpole had …