1734 Pope’s physician, John Arbuthnot, wrote to Pope on this day, informing the poet that he (the doctor) was dying. Arbuthnot, as famous for his wit as his medical expertise (he attended Queen Anne), was a fellow member, with Pope and Swift, of the Martin Scriblerus satirists’ club. Arbuthnot is credited with inventing for it the caricature of Anglo-Saxon philistinism, ‘John Bull’.
No poet was ever less like the beefy British stereotype than Alexander Pope. He was severely disabled from early childhood by bone disease that left him ‘hunchbacked’ (as the cruel description was) and a virtual dwarf at 4 feet 6 inches tall. Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, describes Pope in ‘middle life’:
He was then so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female attendance; extremely sensible of cold, so that he wore a kind of fur doublet, under a shirt of a very coarse warm linen with fine sleeves. When he rose, he was invested in bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarcely able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender, that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid, for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it very difficult for him to be clean.
Pope was of necessity physically closer to his physician than any other human being. The news of his friend’s impending death (from asthmatic and kidney problems) provoked one of the poet’s ‘Horatian Epistles’.
In his ‘Advertisement’ to the poem (published 2 January 1735) Pope makes clear that it is conceived as (1) an apologia pro vita sua, and (2) a response to the many attacks ‘not only on my writings … but my person, morals, and family’.
The ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot’ is famous for its satirical portraiture of ‘Sporus’ (Lord John Hervey) and ‘Atticus’ (Addison). As remarkable are the poet’s candid depiction of his own ‘person’. He candidly holds the mirror up to his own disfigurement:
There are, who to my person pay their court:
I cough like Horace, and, though lean, am short.
According to Johnson, the caricatures of Pope (which habitually pictured him as a monkey, or a dwarfish monster) caused him great pain. But in the Epistle, while frankly anatomising himself, he revolves the central question of how deformation has formed the writer:
Why did I write? what sin to me unknown
Dipp’d me in ink, my parents’, or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.
I left no calling for this idle trade,
No duty broke, no father disobey’d.
The Muse but serv’d to ease some friend, not wife,
To help me through this long disease, my life,
To second, Arbuthnot! thy art and care,
And teach the being you preserv’d, to bear.
His disease may have been long. His life, alas, was not. He died aged 66, some nine years after Arbuthnot.