Alexander Pope

Stephen's 1880 work blends history with literary criticism to provide what he called a 'sketch' of Pope for the interested reader. In a conversational and enthusiastic style, Stephen describes how childhood shaped the poet and presents his life through the lenses of time, place, and works.

Blending history with literary criticism and general reflections with hard facts, this biography from 1880, which places the man in the context of his greatest works, remains a useful starting-point for the study of Pope, not least because it gives an overview of earlier biographies. Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) came from a distinguished family of politicians, jurists and writers, and was the father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. His literary career began with writing about his great passion, the Alps, and he became a noted author and critic, and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He was a friend of John Morley (1838–1923), the general editor of English Men of Letters, who commissioned him to write three biographies for the first series, on Swift, Pope and Johnson. Stephen's Sketches from Cambridge, published anonymously in 1865, is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.