Reading Order
The Rape of the Lock Reading Order
The Rape of the Lock (first version 1712; expanded version 1714) by Alexander Pope is the greatest mock-heroic poem in English — a five-canto poem in heroic couplets that takes as its subject the true incident of a young nobleman (Lord Petre) cutting a lock of hair from a young noblewoman's (Arabella Fermor's) head without permission, causing a social catastrophe that Pope, commissioned to write a humorous poem to reconcile the families, transforms into an epic on the scale of Homer. Pope adds a sylph mythology (the spirits that guard young women's virtue are sylphs, who live in the air around beautiful women and are defeated when the woman loses her virtue), an epic battle fought with pins and scissors, a trip to the Cave of Spleen (a mock underworld), a celestial quest, and a conclusion in which the lost lock is transformed into a comet. The poem is a perfect demonstration of the mock-heroic method: everything in the poem is both genuinely funny (the epic machinery applied to a trivial social incident) and genuinely serious (the poem is also a meditation on female vanity, social convention, the status of women in aristocratic society, and the gap between heroic values and modern commercial culture). It is Pope's most accessible work and one of the most technically perfect poems in English.
Where to start
The Rape of the Lock (1714 five-canto version) — the Oxford World's Classics edition of Pope's Selected Poetry, edited by Pat Rogers (1994; 2008), is the most accessible scholarly edition with essential notes. The Twickenham edition (vol. 2, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson) is the standard scholarly text. Read the poem with the notes open — the classical allusions and social details reward annotation.
Complete The Rape of the Lock Book List
- 1Buy
Selected Poetry (Oxford World's Classics)
Alexander Pope (ed. Pat Rogers)·2008·The most accessible scholarly edition of Pope's poetry — includes The Rape of the Lock with essential notes; Rogers's introduction is the best short guide to Pope's mock-heroic method. - 2Buy
The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, Vol. 2: The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope (ed. Geoffrey Tillotson)·1940·The definitive scholarly edition with full historical commentary — essential for serious study; identifies every classical source and social allusion. - 3Buy
Alexander Pope: A Life
Maynard Mack·1985·The standard biography — Mack's account of the poem's genesis (the incident, Pope's relationship with Arabella Fermor, the commission from John Caryll) situates it in its social and personal context. - 4Buy
The Dunciad in Four Books
Alexander Pope·1743·The companion work — after the elegance of The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad shows Pope's mock-heroic method at its most savage, attacking the hack writers of Grub Street; the two together define Pope's career. - 5Buy
Pope's 'Rape of the Lock': A Casebook
John Dixon Hunt (ed.)·1968·Classic collection of criticism tracing the poem's reception from the eighteenth century to the twentieth — includes early responses, Victorian dismissals, and modern feminist and new historicist readings.
The Rape of the Lock — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Rape of the Lock about?
The Rape of the Lock (1714) by Alexander Pope is a mock-heroic poem in five cantos that takes as its subject a true incident: Lord Petre cut a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor's head without permission, causing a social scandal. Pope expands this trivial event into a full epic — complete with invocations, supernatural machinery (sylphs guarding the heroine's virtue), an epic battle, a journey to the Cave of Spleen, and a celestial conclusion. The poem is simultaneously a comedy about aristocratic vanity and a serious meditation on female status, social convention, and the gulf between heroic values and modern commercial culture.
What is the mock-heroic in The Rape of the Lock?
The mock-heroic is a literary mode in which the style and machinery of classical epic (Homer, Virgil) is applied to a subject deliberately beneath its dignity — so that the gap between the grandeur of the form and the triviality of the subject creates comic effect. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope applies epic conventions (divine intervention, the hero's arming, the descent to the underworld) to a society card game and a stolen lock of hair. The comedy cuts in two directions: it mocks the trivial social world of the poem's characters, and it also implicitly questions whether the values of the ancient epic world (heroism, honour, glory) are any more meaningful than the values of the modern social world (beauty, status, fashion).
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