From the Writers Trail:
S) Alexander Pope 1688-1774. Poet, satirist. The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad. Translated Homer’s Iliad while living with his parents in Mawson Row from 1716-19.
House in Mawson Buildings, now the Mawson Arms pub, Chiswick Lane South W4 2QD (plaque and sign below)
Alexander Pope, 18th Century poet who lived in Mawson Row by the Griffin Brewery The Chiswick Calendar 2021 (see more below)
Alexander Pope: Blue Plaque
Fuller’s: The Mawson Arms, Chiswick, gallery
1. Chiswick History – People by Gillian Clegg
Gillian Clegg wrote: The poet, essayist and writer, Alexander Pope (1688-1744), lived with his parents in Mawson Row, Chiswick between 1716 and 1719. The house where he lived now contains the Mawson Arms pub. Some of Pope’s original translation of The Iliad was drafted on the backs of letters addressed to `Mr Pope’ at his house in `ye New Buildings, Chiswick’. In 1719 Pope moved to his villa in Twickenham where he constructed a celebrated grotto. Due to a childhood illness Pope was diminutive and disabled. He never married but had many friends including Lord Burlington of Chiswick House to whom he dedicated his essay entitled On Taste.
2. Alexander Pope at Chiswick House and Marble Hill – English Heritage – blog by Emily Parker, extract below:
An intellectual in Chiswick
Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688 into a Catholic family. The laws and penalties laid out against Catholics in this period were to shape his early life. After spending his adolescence living in Windsor Forest, by 1716 the Pope family was living in Chiswick – a blue plaque marks his time living at Mawson’s buildings in Chiswick Lane South. By this point Pope had already written some of his most famous works including An Essay on Criticism (1711) and The Rape of the Lock (1712). During his time at Chiswick he was also working on his translation of the Iliad. He formed friendships with some of the leading intellectuals and poets of the time, including Jonathan Swift and John Gay.
Chiswick Timeline Writers Trail
Read more stories via the Writers Tales page.
3. Alexander Pope, 18th Century poet who lived in Mawson Row by the Griffin Brewery The Chiswick Calendar 2021 (extract and image below)
“He lived in Chiswick between 1716 and 1719, when he was already successful. It seems to have served as a little interlude between his early years as a teenager and young man in Berkshire and his later years as master of his own house in Twickenham, during which he hung out with the 3rd Earl of Burlington at Chiswick House.
He was translating The Iliad while he was living here, which gave him the money to build his villa in Twickenham, where he lived for the rest of his life.”
Images above: pages from Pope’s translation of the Iliad
The Chiswick Timeline of Writers & Books lists around 425 writers who have written a book and lived in Chiswick W4, or written books about the area. See A Quick Guide.