Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope: Differing Philosophies with Identical Conclusions

Even today, after almost 300 years, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift stand as literary giants from the Eighteenth Century. Their monumental works, The Rape of the Lock and Gulliver's Travels, respectively, expose facets of contemporary English life the authors despised. The two wrote from positions of disadvantage in Britain: Pope was catholic, while Swift was Irish. The convictions formed by these backgrounds play a very important role in their literature. Many other contrasts may be drawn between the two, yet ultimately they are still both master satirists. Although Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift held slightly different philosophies and used different mediums, both exhibited their belief in social, political, and religious reform in Restoration-era England by showing readers, both blatantly and subtly, what they opposed.

In his The Rape of the Lock, Pope obviously shows that he is against the social practices of the day by dramatizing a feud within two aristocratic families. "What mighty contests rise from trivial things," he begins (L. 2 p. 1136). By exaggerating a simple argument over a lock of hair into a sprawling epic full of classical allusions, he is stating how ridiculous he finds many of the immaterial arguments that arise between groups of people. On a conscious level, this undoubtedly refers to the wealthy families of Europe who often let small, frivolous instances start rifts among themselves. However, on a deeper level, Pope could be arguing for religious equality in England, since as a Catholic he was denied many basic rights, and he probably felt that how one chose to worship God was irrelevant. This is comparable to the logic seen in Part 1 of Gulliver's Travels, where Swift uses the apparently extraneous big-ender/little-ender dispute to imply that the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism are nothing to start wars over.