The Boy in the Forest
In 1859 when the ‘Ladies’ Treasury’ magazine offered its readers a profile of Alexander Pope it was perhaps unsurprising that they offered this forest scene as illustration. For a mid-nineteenth century female audience the magazine chose to present Pope’s exceptional youthful works – especially the ‘Ode on Solitude’, the Pastorals and ‘Windsor Forest’ – as capturing the essence of his work with less discussion of his later career.
The Catholicism of Pope’s family deprived him of access to the more formal education which might have been expected for him. There were brief episodes of tutoring or more informal schooling but once his family settled away from London to Binfield Heath, he was largely responsible for his own reading and learning and much of his time was spent in the countryside.
This idea of the boy in the landscape is evocative indeed but what was he reading? We have to assume Shakespeare but we know in 1700 Pope read the works of George Herbert and had the first two volumes of ‘Don Quixote’. In 1701 he received a copy of Chaucer as a gift.In 1706 he acquired three volumes of Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ which were to fill his reading imagination for the whole of his life.
The Solitary Reader 