The Epic of Bibliography: Alexander Pope and Textual Criticism
Tom Davis
This paper is a review of:
Vander Meulen, David L, ed. Pope's Dunciad of 1728: a History
and Facsimile . Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,
1991.
It was published in Text 6 (1995).
It is a commonplace to say that Alexander Pope recognised and feared what
the coming explosion of print would do to our consciousness, and so wrote
his epic, the Dunciad, in protest. I am writing this review
when that period of domination is coming to an end: when the printed book
is being displaced, replaced, by electronic text. I am also conscious, as
a bibliographer, that one of the byproducts of the coming age of the book
that Pope disliked most was the rise of bibliographical and textual scholarship,
which is why he chose as monarch of his hell a textual critic. As an editor
himself he understood textual scholarship very well, and so made his principal
attack on it not in the content of the poem, but, with cunning appropriateness,
in its carefully stage-managed bibliography. It seems to me that the basis
of his attack is true, and the fact that we are moving into a position where
we can look back on the dominance of the paper book, as he was able to look
forward at it, enables us to see this truth. Moreover the period of transition
that we are going through has produced its own debates about the nature
and value of the book, and book-scholarship, that resonate curiously with
the debates enshrined in The Dunciad. Since the argument is
essentially about the nature of textual reproduction, it is rather appropriate
that the context of this discussion should be a review of a reproduction
of the first edition of Pope's Dunciad .
It may be helpful to remind readers of the textual history of this poem.
The book under review is a facsimile of a particular copy of the first edition
of the first version of The Dunciad of 1728: the copy now in
the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, in which one Jonathan
Richardson (1694-1771) recorded in manuscript, apparently at Pope's request,
his collations of an early MS of the poem. The book is jointly published
for the University Press of Virginia and the New York Public Library by
the University Press of Virginia with a long and highly skilled textual
introduction by its editor, David L. Vander Meulen. The whole production
is very beautiful, and very expensive.
The first edition of The Dunciad which it replicates was published
in 1728. It was anonymous, with a deceitful title page that announced it
as a reprint of an earlier and non-existent Irish edition. This first version
of the poem is quite lightly annotated by a mock-editor, who was of course
Pope himself; the hero of the poem, who is therefore its villain, since
everything in this work is inverted, is Lewis Theobald, for reasons not
unconnected with Theobald's devastating Shakespeare Restor'd, a
scholarly attack on Pope's insufficiently scholarly edition of Shakespeare.
Many other individuals are attacked in the poem too. They figure not as
names in this edition but as blanks: dashes, usually with appended initials,
as in "C--l" or "C--r", that together with the rhyme
and metre, hint at but do not completely specify the referent of the blank.
On its publication The Dunciad became part of a pamphlet war,
an interpretive polyphony of text and counter-text. Edmund Curll, seeing
himself in "C--l", published a twenty-four page Compleat
Key to the Dunciad, only ten days after its appearance. Pope issued
two more printings of the poem within a month, each giving rise to a new
edition of Curll's annotations, and other keys were produced to join in
the fray, including a pirated edition with the blanks filled in. All of
this was precisely part of the aesthetic project, since it duplicated the
proliferation of editions, conjectures, and vitriol that is the stuff of
editorial scholarship: it gave Pope the variety that enabled him to produce
the Variorum Dunciad, as, apparently, he had planned all along.
This came out the following Spring: it collected and commented on the annotations
and variants that the textual proliferation had produced, dealing indiscriminately,
or rather with mock-discrimination, with those written by Pope and those
emanating from his enemies. This publication then elicited further keys,
and further editions and revisions, and so on--indefinitely. Pope parodied
and pilloried editing not only by producing a mock edition, but by inventing
a self-perpetuating machine, a greater Dunciad, that went on creating itself
and generating jokes against bibliography long after his death. Textual
and bibliographical scholarship of the Dunciad simply continued the project,
squabbling over editions and annotations, right up to the present: as Vander
Meulen points out, "the standard Twickenham Edition even quotes Curll
for identifications that Pope and his commentator Scriblerus fail to make"
(p.21).
The concepts of author, authority, editor, and text are thoroughly beset
with riddles and paradoxes. This edition, which is the first, announces
itself as (at least) the second, a reprint of an earlier Dublin edition.
This convinced bibliographers until well into the nineteenth century. The
book is anonymous. It claims that it was printed for Anne Dodd (in fact,
it was probably printed for Alexander Pope). The Irish reference is to suggest
that Swift wrote it, and Swift collaborated with this confusion, calling
himself the causa sine qua non of the poem; he may indeed have
had some hand in it. The editor of the poem (who is its author) in his preface
suggests that the supposed author (who didn't exist) wrote it in a pastiche
of the style of Pope, who is the person who actually wrote it, and announced
his intention as editor as provoking the author (that is, himself) to produce
'a more perfect edition' (v). And so on.
On a bibliographical level too this text is subversive, and self-subverting.
Pope, suggests Vander Meulen, planned "to publish a fuller edition
in which he could contend that this first one (which would serve him by
provoking the dunces to make responses that he could incorporate in the
second) was published without his authority" (p.18). Its textual fluidity
is remarkable. It underwent three major revisions, "in thirty-three
separate editions and about sixty impressions and issues" (p.23). The
complexity, and the bibliographical mayhem that ensued, is a wonderful example
of how the poem went on creating its own content (that is, attacking bibliographers)
in a live and vivid way long after the death of its author:
Although Pope later denounced the 1728 Dunciad as "Imperfect"
and "surreptitious," he took his characteristic care in its production,
not only reading proof but also issuing the book in both ordinary- and fine-paper
formats. Within three weeks of the first publication on 18 May, so-called
second and third editions also appeared ... In actuality, each of these
was merely a reimpression from standing type, with roughly one gathering
in each reset. The same is true of a second "Third Edition" (P768)
which must have followed shortly but whose publication date is uncertain.
Determining which of the first two issues had priority has occasioned
some of the nastiest squabbling in Pope studies since the original War of
the Dunces... (p.31).
It is pleasant to see that T.J.Wise was part of this train of squabblers,
and therefore became a character in the greater Dunciad. Wise, of course,
was a satire against bibliography in his own right: had this extraordinarily
corrupt individual--bibliographer, forger, book-collector and book-destroyer:
the man who ripped pages out of books in the British Museum to create entirely
spurious books which he then donated to the British Museum--not existed,
then only the black imagination of Alexander Pope could have invented him.
In the greater Dunciad Pope succeeded in creating a book that
has no boundaries. Part of the power of the printed book is that it is bounded:
it is separate from its readers. As I read I create meaning in collaboration
with the inked marks on the page. But there is a myth of the book that tells
me (deceivingly) that these marks are a boundary I cannot cross: I am on
the outside of their meaning, and they are on the inside. And they are fixed,
forever. Transgression of this magic boundary is only allowed to textual
editors, who rather thrillingly have in their control the right to alter
the fixed text. All of this is deconstructed in The Dunciad. The
distinction between author and editor is mocked and subverted; the process
of annotation, which attempts to control and specify meaning, is made impossible.
The protagonists of this epic are not fixed individuals, but blank signifiers,
whose referents were to be, as the (un)editor of the 1728 edition says,
'clapp'd in as they rose, fresh and fresh, and chang'd from day to day'
(vii). Since the whole point of annotation resides in the notion that obscurities
are in principle resolvable, and words, especially names, have a specific,
fixed, and discoverable reference, this makes the business of editorial
annotation absurd. And of course Pope's mocking notes, in successive editions,
add to the creative chaos, and further cast doubt on the
whole business of annotation. And, as this editor intelligently remarks,
on the distinction between author and reader. The blanks, which the reader
is invited to fill in (as Jonathan Richardson filled them in in the Berg
Dunciad) transgress the boundaries of the book by making it
collaborative:
the work became what our age might call "interactive,"
in that the text became subject to modification by readers' comments, many
of which were recorded in the notes (and, when they thus became part of
the text, literally affected the shape of the work (p.25).
The destruction of the boundaries of the book go even further:
what the Dunciad's keys and many of its footnotes--especially
those incorporating identifications from the keys--do for their host work
[is to] translate fiction into fact; they connect the world in the text
with the human world outside of the book. Pope's initials and blanks do
not inevitably refer to living people, but the filled blanks and the notes
make them do so (p.25).
And every time the book is edited, the mockery continues: the Twickenham
editor of the Variorum, with wonderful (I hope conscious) irony,
mixes in his own scholarly annotations in with Pope's anti-scholarly ones.
The greater Dunciad, the drama of bibliography that emanates from Pope's
poem, is the justification for this book. At first this justification is
hard to see: as soon as one opens it one is faced with one of the problems
of reproduction. It is not easy to read the text of the 1728 Dunciad
in this version, since the original printing was on thin paper, and the
show-through is lovingly reproduced in this facsimile; harder still because
the MS annotations (which are themselves extremely difficult to read) distract
from and occasionally obscure the text. But because the text was designed
to take its part in a bibliographical drama of edition and counter-edition,
the specificity of its appearance and the texture of its pages can be said
to have a meaning that those of other works do
not possess. And the annotations show a contemporary reader in the very
act of interacting with the poem, and announce its collaborative, boundless,
status.
Nonetheless, any reproduction of The Dunciad cannot help but
take its part in the ironic attack on bibliography that is its theme, and
this book is no exception. Precisely for the reason that what it does, it
does so well. Consider this: the bibliographical investigation in the introduction
to the facsimile is meticulous, its presentation lucid and judicious; but
relatively few will find it interesting, and, in the centre of this book,
surrounded by this good scholarship, is a poem about the dullness of good
scholarship: an attack, by a careless, creative editor on the meticulous
tedium of a correct editor. Or consider this: the first edition of Pope's
Dunciad , that 'scurrilous, obscene, and impious Satire', first appeared
in the form of 'an
unprepossessing little pamphlet of fifty-two pages' . It has now appeared
again, in the form of a very beautiful book of xvii+174 pages. The main
purpose and point of this fine piece of bookmaking is to reproduce, as utterly
exactly as possible, one copy of the original unprepossessing pamphlet.
And indeed it does: the quality of the photography is quite extraordinary.
The battered, torn, folded, and dirty scraps of 18th century paper positively
glow from the page: the incompetent variation in inking, the aforementioned
show-through, even the dirty and completely blank end papers, are enshrined
in the generous margins and thick cream stock of this handsome edition.
The eighteenth-century printers clearly had other things on their minds
when they impressed the first version; whereas this book is meticulously
printed, in two colours, so that the sepia page numbers and headline rules,
on a very delicately sepia-tinted paper, could be distinguished
(rather subtly) from the black text, and even more subtly allude to the
handsome brown binding and the dirty brown of the original book, here carefully reproduced.
The comparison is irresistible--even the colours suggest it: it is a bug
preserved in amber.
However, there were other motives in the publication of this book than making
the physical appearance of the 1728 Dunciad "available
to a wider audience" (p.ix) than the presumably extremely small number
of people who have called it up from wherever it is kept in the NYPL. This
is revealed rather clearly in a Foreword by the Curator of the Berg Collection,
Lola L. Szladits. She lists with possessive pride their other Pope holdings:
when the 1728 The Dunciad was bought in 1941, she says, it
"joined what has now become a group of about one hundred and fifty
early editions of Pope--a collection that ranks only about tenth in the
number of such items but stands at the forefront in their significance.
On the shelves surrounding this book are such volumes as... " and a
list follows. "Only about tenth..." is a revealing phrase: what
complex calculations, what carefully maintained league tables it reveals.
Tenth in Pope, but fourth in Dryden, perhaps, ninth in Milton, second equal
in Swift?
This accounts for a curious feeling about possessing the review copy of
this beautiful book. It is not, after all, a text that most people would
buy: the academic libraries will have it, and that is where the relatively
few people who wish to look at it, or even read it, it will
go in order to do so . Owning one's own copy seems somehow unnatural:
intruding, perhaps, on some quite different reproductive transaction. The
source of this unease, I suggest, may be this. Great academic libraries
are faced with an unfortunate paradox. The principal point of libraries,
clearly, is to make books available for people to read. But the most expensive
acquisitions, the ones that are most precious, the most bestowing of merit
and status, will almost inevitably be the
least read. And a book that is not being read is not living a very rich
or interesting existence, closed, on a shelf, mostly hidden, showing only
its not particularly beautiful spine. One cannot hang a book on a wall:
one can display it, of course, but that too doesn't feel very satisfactory.
Books under glass are sad dead things, prevented because of their value
from being valuable: from being read.
One way of getting round this problem is to clone the book: to reproduce
the reproduction (all printed books are reproductions) and send copies out,
like floating seeds, to other libraries. A primary purpose of that exercise
must be to exalt the original, of which the clones are only copies, and
therefore to magnify the library that possesses it. This justifies and celebrates
not only the possessing library, but also the act of possession itself,
and so the business is collaborative, and somehow essentially private between
libraries: a kind of mating ritual, conducted between these great institutions,
as they help and encourage each other to multiply.
Of course, it will be said that the other purpose of great libraries is
preservation, and this is true. But I would maintain that this preservative
purpose is subservient to the main purpose: books should be preserved so
that people can read them. If books are seen as valuable possessions only,
if they are fetishised and hoarded (in a way that T.J.Wise would not find
unfamiliar) and boundaries are set between the book and the reader, then
the life of the book, and the life of the library that contains it, is negated.
It is, in fact, a question of reproduction. An obvious way to keep rare
books safe and, at the same time, make them available, is to reproduce them,
not in expensive facsimiles like the one I have in front of me, but as photocopies.
But this promiscuous copying is felt in some quarters to be counter-productive:
cheap reproductions are somehow illegitimate, and deprive the parent version
of status. The Director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at
the University of Texas is quite explicit about this:
Changing technology raises some dramatic questions for HRC.
With the advent of Xerox and other cheap copying techniques, the uniqueness
of the HRC holdings becomes threatened. The purpose of the 9 million literary
manuscripts at HRC has been to gather in one place materials not available
elsewhere as a support to full research. We will not purchase materials
which have already been Xeroxed and/or microfilmed. Why should we? If copies
exist elsewhere, why should we spend the dollars and the talent to purchase
and classify them? These technology-instituted issues are immensely critical
to HRC.
Critical indeed. "9 million literary manuscripts."
Suddenly one begins to perceive the sheer weight of what is at issue in
the politics of reproduction.
This quotation is taken from G.T.Tanselle's article "Reproduction
and Scholarship". Tanselle engages with this issue with fierce
precision, and is (rightly) completely dismissive of this possessiveness.
But he too does not believe in photocopying. The question is, he says, exactly
what is it that is reproduced, when reproduction takes place?
Even if the production of copies were always accurately handled
and even if the reproductions themselves were never distorted or misleading
in their representation of the originals, they would still be unsatisfactory.
... The essential fact one must come back to is that every reproduction
is a new document, with characteristics of its own, and no artifact can
be a substitute for another artifact. (pp.33-4)
Well, yes and no: it all depends on what you want the artifact for. For
instance, I didn't feel the need to machine-collate a number of copies of
volume 42 of Studies in Bibliography in order to read Tanselle's
article, and in fact am quite happy to work from a photocopy, since I don't
think that the possibility of error, or the variation in reading experience,
is sufficient to justify the effort in doing anything else. The same would
go for Tom Jones, for most purposes of reading that book. This
is a perfectly normal and sensible procedure. If you ask an engineer to
machine a metal rod a meter long, he or she will probably ask "For
what purpose?" in order to find out what kind of tolerances in measurement
would be required. This is because a metal rod exactly one
meter long is an impossibility. Similarly, what most readers, like most
human beings, do in most circumstances is to measure effort against reward.
I suggest that Tanselle's "essential fact" is transcendental,
having the same mode of (non )existence as the one-meter rod. Since the
anchor of his position is transcendental, to disagree with it to be made
to feel somehow sinful: to use photocopies is to be, Tanselle's says, not
a serious reader. I wish to disagree. If, as he explicitly suggests, all
serious readers are or should be bibliographers (p.29), then it is difficult
to see why so few people are members of the Bibliographical Society. It
is also an insult to the vast majority of serious readers.
This concern about reproduction is very much part of the culture of the
book, and its attendant bibliographical scholarship; and it is about to
pass out of existence. The equation, where utility is weighed against effort,
has recently changed rather radically, in that access to reproduction has
become vastly easier. Here is another distinguished librarian:
Dr Terry Belanger has recently predicted the increasing disinclination
of major research libraries in North America to maintain large permanent
collections of paper-based books of any kind. Current stock, he foresees,
will become gradually depleted and then destroyed. The economic pressures
to contract are just too great to be resisted. In place of the books we
know, libraries will keep banks of master-texts/master-negatives/master-disks
from which temporary off-screen reading copies will be produced-- "temporary
physical manifestations of a permanent electronic ideal."
This quotation, from D.F. McKenzie's Bibliographical
Society Centenary Lecture, delivered in July 1992 but not published
until 1993 , is already out of date: I can from my desk, and within minutes,
summon up the text or the page-images of hundreds of books and manuscripts,
including, for instance, the most precious of all English Literary manuscripts,
the British Library's Beowulf MS. The temporary paper realisation of these
'banks of master-texts' will not take place in a library, but will issue
from my own printer. And this, surely, is the way libraries will go, and
in many cases are going. Two weeks ago I read in my daily paper that the
British Library is planning to stop taking a copy of every single book published,
and so no longer exercise its full rights as a copyright library. Today, I read this:
The Library of Congress is planning to convert into digital
form its most important items, and those in the collections of all public
and research libraries in the US. The project would create a vast "virtual
library" of digitised images of books, drawings, manuscripts and photographs.
They would be sent through networks to computer screens and high-definition
television sets, accessible to millions of students and researchers.
McKenzie argues against this flight from the paper book in somewhat similar
terms to Tanselle's, but with a warmth and eloquence that I find moving
and persuasive:
Any simulation (including re-presentation in a database--a copy
of a copy) is an impoverishment, a theft of evidence, a denial of more exact
and immediate visual and tactile ways of knowing, a destruction of their
quiddity as collaborative products under the varying historical conditions
of their successive realisations. [We should] pay respect to the richness
of evidence all textual forms themselves contain, and to the skilled labour
that went into the choice of their materials, design, and execution. The
signs we read in the artifacts we keep tell us of the lives lived by men
and women who had identities just as distinct and valuable as our own (pp.
24-5)
I find this powerful and convincing, but then, I would: I am a bibliographer,
and have spent a good part of my working life paying, and teaching, exactly
that respect, ever since I first learned it, from reading McKenzie's "Printers of
the Mind", 25 years ago. But I also know this: that libraries are
not for bibliographers, they are for readers, and so are books. It is much
more important that books should be read than that they should be
examined by bibliographers, by an enormous order of magnitude. And this,
certainly, was the view expressed by Alexander Pope.
Which brings me back to The Dunciad . What I wish to suggest
about this text is that the values that it embodies and defends are those
of a pre-book culture; and the post-book culture, into which we are moving,
is in interesting ways similar to the milieu of Pope, and different from
the book-culture espoused by McKenzie, by Tanselle, by all of my work as
a bibliographer, and by the hero of The Dunciad . The best
way to see this is to try to look backwards, as Pope looked forwards, at
the paper book. One of the consequences of living, as we do, at the end
of its dominance as the most authoritative, the most culturally valued means
of communication of information, is that we can begin to guess at the nature
of the spell that it has had over us: the illusions that it has fostered;
the myth that we have lived because of it.
The text that is coming, electric text, is like speech: fluid, impermanent,
profuse, diffuse. It is also boundless, as meaning is boundless: there is
no end to the referentiality of language, just as there is no end to the
hypertext links in the World-Wide Web. The medium that electronic text has
replaced, book text, is the opposite of that: solid, apparently permanent,
exact, precise, confined. Consider the ease of creating and disseminating
electric text, where I can write what I like at the speed almost of speech,
and distribute it to a thousand people in a moment, with a keystroke; and
each of those people can keep it for ever, or, more likely, dismiss it with
a keystroke. Or change it: as it flows into their computer, they can not
only restyle it--set it, for instance, in 12 point Palatino leaded 6 points--but
they can find and replace anything in it, or completely rewrite it: they
can make it theirs. Or they can come back to me and criticise it, or add
to it, or engage in any kind of dialogue about it, with dazzling brush-fire
speed, heat, and immediacy. Just like the audience that interacted with
Pope's poem.
Contrast this with the sheer effort and investment of money required to
create and disseminate book text, the work of copyists and compositors and
copy-editors and printers and binders and agents and distributors and booksellers--and
many others. For this reason the book appears to have intrinsic value: it
is solid, labour made it, it has, it seems, a worth of its own. It is immensely
refereed. This conveys the illusion that fixed meaning resides in it: the
weight of the book in my hand seems to be the weight and solidity and permanence
of knowledge in it. Whereas the fugitive dance of electrons on the computer
monitor, that I can wipe, or change, or endlessly duplicate, in a moment,
is not like that. The text, however, might be identical. And it is the electric
text that is a truer representation of how meaning is actually conveyed
in written text. Meaning, unlike the book and like the electrons, has no
weight and very little permanence: it dances in and out of existence, it
is fugitive and temporary. Tom Jones is not, as we think it
is, hundreds of pages, or thousands of words, solid, a monument, enduring;
it is every reader's imperfect and shifting recollection of the moment-by-moment
experience of reading most of those words; or the shifting mixture of recollection
and anticipation that surround the moment of reading itself. It is a lot
more like the Internet than it is like the book that we erroneously think
it is. Tom Jones is not a book.
Textual criticism belongs to the age of the book. Writing a poem on a word
processor is a joy: the poem shapes itself on the illusory page on the screen,
in a beautiful typeface that automatically lays itself out as one works
on it. It is like shaping clay with the hands: one can carve and pare and
pad and substitute until the thing crystallises into its own shape. And
all of the discarded parings and false starts vanish completely, like previous
shapes of the clay, now remoulded and forgotten: the false starts and preliminary
versions vanish for ever. Those textual critics who, like Theobald, "lost
blunders nicely seek" are obsolete. And, once shaped, the text can
flow from my computer from one to another temporary realisation with perfect
fidelity of reproduction.
Part of the power of the myth of print, and part of the motivating force
of textual criticism, is that since print freezes meaning, and appears to
last, it can draw on the energy of strong myths of permanence, of life after
death as a reward for greatness, or goodness: authors, like Beowulf, are
lofgeornost ., desirous of immortal praise. A piece of their
mind will last for ever, they think. Textual critics wish to fix the book,
to help create this immortality by restricting the natural tendency of text
to create meanings and resonances (the information wants to be free). The
solidity of the physical object that they create, the new edited text, suggests--almost
enforces--the illusion that the text that they should aim to embody in it
should be the real, only one. The definitive edition. This
is why they naturally turn to intentionalism, in asserting the possibility
of a real essence that can be captured, fixed, made permanent: made into
a book. In order to anchor the flow of meaning a transcendent, as usual,
is needed, and this is conveniently provided by the intentions of the (immortal)
author, who is so like a god of the book she creates as to make very little
difference. The illusion of intentionalist editing was pilloried for all
time by Borges (that famous bibliographer), who wrote the other great satire
on textual editing, the story of Pierre Menard, the 'author' of Quixote.
He, it will be remembered, achieved a scholarship so impeccable, an identification
with the author so complete, that he wholly and completely captured the
real intended text of Quixote, and wrote the entirety of Don Quixote
out from scratch without ever consulting the original.
The fact that textual criticism always runs up against the mess and evanescence
of real intentions and real human beings and their products, so that the
end-product is invariably a hotchpotch of compromises (most textual cruces,
remember, are not soluble: it is as simple as that)
seems for the most part to be simply an unrecognised contradiction. At least,
that is, to a majority of editors who work with printed books. Those who
work on manuscripts are very familiar with the kind of fluid situation that
I have described as characteristic of the post-book period. The most famous
example is the editorial work of George Kane and Talbot Donaldson on Piers
Plowman; the situation is very familiar too to anyone who has spent
much time tracing the main medium of publication of the majority of sixteenth
and seventeenth century lyric poems: the manuscript commonplace books of
the university and court wits. Editorial attempts to freeze these texts
into print intrude on the collaborative flow of meaning between a group
of equals who knew each other, and who, as George Kane remarked, cared deeply
about the text they interacted with. One becomes Pope's vision of the editor:
the pedant who gets in the way of the poetry and makes it dull.
Of course, there is a down-side to the post-book text. In Johnson's famous
phrase, in the age of the electronic text it is literally raining knowledge,
and all one needs to do is to hold out a hand. But to extract useful information
from this immense promiscuity is not easy, without the filtering effect
of the book. Pope's other enemy, nonsense, is also immensely liberated by
the vast democracy of the internet, where anyone, it seems, can publish
anything to everyone. Pope, who was not a democrat, would have been horrified.
And no-one knows where this will take us. It is worth pointing out, however,
that although there are arguments against democracy, this century has taught
us that it is unwise to listen to them.
Where does that leave us? At a cusp, I suggest, like Pope. Anticipating--perhaps,
like him, with dread, or perhaps with a certain amount of trembling hope--a
new way of being. Computers double their processing power every thirteen
months. This simple fact will change all our lives, unforeseeably. No-one
can predict what the technology of ten years time can bring. I suppose we
can say this: one problem predicted by Pope for the age of the book is unlikely
to be true for the age that succeeds it, since it is unlikely to be dull.
