26. The Dunciad

Chapter 26 is the longest in the book. The Dunciad was written in two separate phases of Pope’s career, the late 1720s and the early 1740s. The first version, in three books and with Lewis Theobald (‘Tibbald’) as anti-hero, was published in 1728 and re-issued in 1729 in a fuller form, increasing its burlesque of literary and critical pedantry. The poem celebrates the home of the goddess Dulness in Rag-fair, a market-place near the Tower of London where rags and ragged writings of all kinds are sold, and the triumph of its ‘values’ over the world of the court and the town. Parodies of Virgil’s Aeneid provide models of the perversion of ‘heroic’ language and forms into their opposites. Pope returned to the poem to add a fourth book in 1742, and the full four-book version, with Colley Cibber replacing ‘Tibbald’ as King of the Dunces and with Grub Street and ‘Bedlam’ (a foundation for the reception and cure of the mentally ill) as Dulness’s new home, appeared in 1743. Through extensive analyses of key extracts from both versions and all four books, the chapter illustrates and examines the dark but riotous world of Dulness and its denizens. Book four is particularly well represented, as the apogee of the work. The argument, implicit throughout, is rendered fully explicit in the conclusion of the chapter. The narrative, which tells of the extinction of language, learning and light, is conveyed with a spirit which exemplifies what Pope’s own poetry represents: the survival and celebration of his consistent commitment to all that is genuinely creative. His last poem, the fourth book of The Dunciad, is a final enactment of ‘wit’s wild dancing light’.