When The Dunciad in Four Books hit the stands in the autumn of 1743, making The New Dunciad old hat after barely eighteen months, Samuel Richardson grumbled in a letter to his friend and sometime client of his printing house, the poet and cultural factotum Aaron Hill, that 'I have bought Mr Pope over so often, and his Dunciad so lately before his last new-vampt one, that I am tir'd of the Extravagance; and wonder every Body else is not.' Richardson especially resented the poem's editorial apparatus, sprawling ever deeper into the reader's domain of interpretation:

LRB 17 March 2005 | PDF Download