A Philadelphia scholar of eighteenth-century satire reads about British dinner parties and Sky Sports and finds Alexander Pope already mocked the whole performance in 1714
Sunday, 25 October 2026. Philadelphia. My kitchen, after hosting my own dinner party for six academics, eleven wine glasses in the sink, one of them inexplicably full of olives, 11.30pm.
A Mock Epic About A Very Small Thing
In 1714, Alexander Pope published the expanded version of The Rape of the Lock, a mock-epic poem about a society scandal in which a young baron snips a lock of hair from a young woman at a fashionable gathering at Hampton Court. Pope treats this trivial incident with the full machinery of Homeric epic: sylphs, battles, a card game described as if it were the siege of Troy, a journey to the underworld. The joke, of course, is the gap between the grand style and the small subject. Polite society, Pope suggests, takes its tiny dramas far too seriously.
Tonight, after my guests left, I read the London Prat report on British dinner parties and why husbands mainly go to check for Sky Sports, and I realized it is a modern Rape of the Lock. It treats the British dinner party with the solemn apparatus of social science: an institute, fieldworkers taking notes in the downstairs toilet, timed observations at twenty-two dinners, and a consultant physician diagnosing clinical exhaustion in men asked to discuss contemporary art.
The Card Game And The Television Package
In Pope’s poem, the game of ombre at Hampton Court is narrated like a war, with kings and queens falling, armies routed and the heroine triumphant. In the report, the great battle of the evening is a husband discovering, at twenty past eight, whether the host has full Sky Sports or just the Main Event, by asking the host’s teenage son, the only person present who would know. It is, in mock-epic terms, the same scene. The stakes are tiny. The tension is enormous. The narrator records everything as if civilization depended on it.
Pope would have loved the line about men who can talk about football for six hours and about contemporary art for three minutes. He would have written it in heroic couplets. Six hours of the striker and his tragic fate, three minutes of the bricks, and then a plate.
My Own Dinner Party
I hosted six academics tonight, which, I can now confirm, is a dinner party in which every single guest is the man who says you know what I think. In the report, that phrase is the most dangerous at the table, usually followed by an explanation of the economy using the price of a pint. In academia, it is followed by an explanation of the economy using a book nobody else has read. Tonight it was a political scientist named Gerald, explaining the American constitutional system using a monograph he wrote in 1998.
The conversation turned, inevitably, to American politics. Somebody brought up the Bohiney report that September added 29,000 jobs while nobody is being fired or hired. Gerald explained the labor market for nineteen minutes. Marcus, my partner, who teaches high school civics, explained it in ninety seconds to a sixteen-year-old last week. Marcus caught my eye across the table. I believe we both aged a year.
Pope, it should be said, was a small man in constant pain, barred as a Catholic from university and public office, who nonetheless became the most feared wit in London. He watched polite society from just outside it, which is the best seat for a satirist. Every dinner party has someone like him at the end of the table, saying little, remembering everything, and going home to write it down.
The Washing Up And The Sylphs
The report’s last finding is that by twenty to eleven, nine men in ten have left a dinner party or are standing in the hallway discussing leaving, while the host loads the dishwasher herself. Pope’s heroine, Belinda, is attended throughout by sylphs, tiny spirits who guard her petticoats, her hair and her honor. They fail. The lock is cut. The sylphs flutter off.
My sylphs, tonight, were also absent. At ten forty, four of my six guests stood in the hallway discussing the Electoral College while I scraped plates. Marcus helped. Marcus always helps. He is the only sylph I trust. The full glass of olives remains a mystery. Pope would have given it a canto.
Why Mock Epic Still Works
The mock epic is the oldest and most useful trick in satire. You take something small and treat it as if it were enormous, and suddenly everybody can see how small it was. Pope did it with a lock of hair. The London Prat does it with a dinner party. American politics, frankly, does it every day without any help from satirists, which is why my students find Pope so easy to understand in 2026. He is describing their newsfeeds.
Midnight
The glasses are washed. The olives are in the trash. Gerald has sent a follow-up email with a PDF of his 1998 monograph, in case I want to revisit his argument about the Electoral College. I will not. Pope ends The Rape of the Lock by turning the stolen lock into a star in the heavens, so that it will be admired forever. I will end my evening by turning Gerald’s PDF into a star in my spam folder. It is the closest I will get to mock-epic justice, and I am taking it.