London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good evening to you, London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Friday, May 30th, 2025.
And I’m afraid it’s happened again. The early death of a great poet.
How great a poet was he? And who was he? Well, let’s get you guessing. Like one of those quiz shows. Let’s pretend we’re walking through the pantheon of the greatest English poets. We meet them in turn. There’s a bust of each of them in a series of display case. Beginning with Chaucer. His time is the 14th century. And then just a little bit further on – the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century – there’s Shakespeare. Then toward of the 17th century, John Milton. And then the next display case is under wraps. We can’t see whose bust is in the case. It’s for us to guess. In the case after the shrouded case we we meet Blake and Wordsworth, their time is the 1790s.
So who is it in the case that’s under wraps – the greatest English poet after Milton and before the Romantics?
Would it be Thomas Grey? Or Dr Johnson? Or Christopher Smart? Or Thomas Chatterton? Or Mary Robinson? Or the Poet Laureate William Whitehead? Good guesses all of them, but no cigar.
No, the greatest English poet for over a century – from Milton’s death in 1674 to the 1790s advent of Blake and Wordsworth – was Alexander Pope. That’s whose bust is in the curtained off display case. Black curtains because today is the anniversary of his death – May 30th, 1744. Only nine days previously he’d celebrated his 56th birthday.
And because this is all about London, let’s get that side of it down and dusted. Alexander Pope was a Londoner through and through. He was the son of a Plough Court, Lombard Street linen merchant.
He was schooled in Bloomsbury and Marylebone. From Lombard Street the family moved to Hammersmith. Then there was an interlude in Binfield, in Windsor Forest. And then Chiswick. And then finally, Twickenham, where Pope sent the rest of his life. Now how well do we know him – even if we don’t much read his poems these days? Well, how many of William Whitehead’s lines do you know? I thought so. How about Chatterton? Or Christopher Smart or Mary Robinson? Or even Thomas Grey? That’s right, you’re drawing a blank, aren’t you. But how about “Hope springs eternal”? Or “a little learning is a dangerous thing”? Or “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”? Or “to err is human, to forgive, divine”? That’s right, all of those are Alexander Pope. Your mind – my mind – all of our minds are furnished with great, unforgettable lines from Alexander Pope’s oeuvre.
What else needs to be noted? And marvelled at. And celebrated. Pope’s output was tremendous for someone who died so young. And even more so when you factor in the ill health that dogged him all his life. Alexander Pope suffered from Pott’s disease. Tuberculosis of the bone. We think he contracted it as an infant from the milk of his nurse, Mary Beach. It inhibited his growth, deformed his spine, gave him fevers, inflammation of the eye, severe problems of the lung and heart, and turned him into ‘a dwarf and cripple.’ Pope described his life as “a long disease.”
Then there was the social opprobrium. Religious persecution, really. His family were Catholics. That made you feared, mistrusted, even hated. That was the main reason for the move to Hammersmith when Pope was a child. Being a Catholic in Lombard Street in London in the 1690s was asking for trouble.
Nor was that the full extent of the patch of briars that was the life path of this small, deformed cripple. Alexander Pope’s lethally sharp, waspish pen made him a lot of enemies. Serious enemies. His satirical poem The Dunciad outraged any number of powerful men. Alexander Pope felt like a marked man. Pope kept – for protection as much as for companionship – a series of large dogs, each of them named Bounce. When The Dunciad was published and the hate poured in he wouldn’t venture out alone without his Great Dane Bounce and pistols in his pocket.
And a little sword at his side. We learn from Dr Johnson that Alexander Pope’s “dress of ceremony was black, with a tye-wig, and a little sword.” A tye-wig was a wig that had the curls tied up.
Johnson’s biographical details are exquisite. We also learn from the great lexicographer that Alexander Pope ‘once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry’.
A couple of more biographical details and then we’ll have a sip of what Pope could do with words. Pope taught himself languages by the act of translating poetry out of them into English. In addition to Greek and Latin – Pope of course produced important translations of Homer – he mastered French and Italian.
His early masterpiece was The Rape of the Lock. He wrote it when he was 23-years-old. At this point, it’s incumbent upon to me to remind you that the human brain isn’t fully developed until we’re 25 or 26 years old. Alexander Pope wrote one of the greatest poems in the English language while he was a youngster. He wrote it while he was in possession of an only partially developed brain. A partially developed brain located at the top of a deformed spinal column. How can you know that and not be lost in admiration.
Here are a few lines from The Rape of the Lock.
For starters, these six lines from the end of Canto IV. They’re wonderfully naughty. You know the story. The poem is a mock epic. An upper-class British beauty has a show-stopping head of hair. A head of hair the chief ornaments of which are two ravishingly beautiful curls that hang down and rubricate as it were the back of her exquisite ivory neck. And a beau takes a pair of scissors and clippety snip, he’s got himself a trophy, one of the curls. Ergo the title, The Rape of the Lock.
Anyway, the six very naughty, ever so suggestive lines in question are as follows:
The sister-lock now sits uncouth, alone
And in its fellow’s fate foresees its own;
Uncurled it hangs, the fatal shears demands,
And tempts once more thy sacrilegious hands.
Oh hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize
Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!
Hairs less in sight. Oh my goodness. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But we all know what he’s on about.
Or try these lines from the beginning of Canto III.
[The first 28 lines of Canto III follow]
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.