Pope Criticisms

Charity shops can be home to a delightful array of curious objects and one of the most interesting, for me personally at least, are the book collections. I could spend forever pouring over the shelves, pulling out various titles and fawning over the covers.

I read an article today where in which a charity shop in Shrewsbury received a very rare 366 year old copy of Varia Opuscula Theologica by Doctoris Francisco Suarez. 

Suarez was a Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, not to mention a leading figure of the School of Salamanca movement, and is considered today to be among the greatest scholastics. 

Tom Cotton of Oxfram Bookshop in Shrewsbury with Varia Opuscula Theologica. Image: Catholic Online

This book was first published in 1599, and in 1679 this Latin text was forbidden and banned by Pop Innocent XI. With this came the destruction and burning of all found copies of the book. This copy sports a stamp signifying it's origin, which indicates it came from a Roman library collection.

The value of books should never be underestimated, and I commend and admire the individual who took the time and effort to hide and preserve this book.

Now, moving on to other Pope criticisms but in a very different context.

I found a book in a charity shop in York a week ago and admittedly the first thing that attracted me was the small, thin and rather faded red spine and gold lettering.

© Victoria McAfee 2015

Upon pulling the book off from the shelf I was delighted to see the intaglio detailing on the cover and then came the realisation of the name 'Pope'.

© Victoria McAfee 2015

Once home I realised I had a third edition in my eager hands. 

This was first published in 1896, and this particular copy is a beautiful 105 years old, published in 1910. The copy has been edited by John Churton Collins, and is also accompanied by a preface, a memoir of Pope, an introduction to the poem and in-depth notes on the piece.

The author of An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope, was an 18th century English poet, best known for his satirical verse, his translation of Homer and his use of the heroic couplet. Pope is the second most quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after William Shakespeare.

Alexander Pope by Michael Dahl

Bitesize Facts on the poem

An Essay on Criticism is one of Pope's first major poems.
There is some debate as to when it was first created. Most say it was first published anonymously in 1711. Collins addresses this in his introduction; it has been documented 'on the titled page of the quarto of 1717' that it was written in 1709, a date which is 'repeated in every succeeding edition', however Pope himself told Richardson it was written in 1707 and printed in 1709.

It was written in the heroic couplet style; a moderately new form of English poetry most commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, referring to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter.
The poem is said to be a response to an ongoing debate on the question of whether poetry should be natural, or written according to predetermined artificial rules inherited from the classical past, [Rogers 2006].

Quotes from An Essay

"To err is human, to forgive, divine."

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,

Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found."

"True wit is nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed,

Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,

That gives us back the notion of the mind."

- VM

Question: Do you have any amazing charity shop finds? If so, let us know below!