The prime focus of Alexander Pope’s labors between 1713 and 1720 had been his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer's Iliad, followed in the mid-1720s by the Odyssey.

His view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole's England by economic individualism and opportunism grow increasingly embittered and despairing from this decade onward.

In this he is following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke.