The rape of the Lock was first published anonymously in two cantos in 1712. Alexander Pope was twenty-four at the time and already enjoyed a promising career as a poet which, as Samuel Johnson said, had become the busines of his life. He had published some early verses and had completed An Essay on Criticism, a work that marked his claim to authority in literary matters. Yet he was in a very real sense an outsider. He suffered from tuberculosis of the bone that left him hunched and deformed, leading him once to lament this long disease, my life. He was also a Roman Catholic and, in the circumstances of the day, considered to be a subversive. He was, for example, denied access to the great universities.