Rape of the Lock and a Key to the Lock

When Lord Petre had the effrontery of cutting off a lock of Lady Arabella Fermor's hair, a veritable war erupted between the two noble families.

A mutual friend, saddened by their estrangement, asked Alexander Pope, then a young poet, to write a poem about it, in order to make a joke of it and 'laugh them together again'.

But the result - which in its ingenuity and poetical brilliance reaches peaks of epic sublime - concealed darker and more dangerous undertones that unleashed an even greater storm between the parties involved - and among the whole literary world of the time.

As Belinda glides along the Thames admired for her beauty and the crafty Baron schemes to take his prize, a host of supernatural beings - elfs, sylphs, gnomes - dance around them to avoid the impending doom, in what is Pope's crowning poetical achievement and perhaps the greatest satirical poem ever written.