Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Caryll, John (1666?-1736)
CARYLL, JOHN (1666?–1736), the friend of Pope, was the nephew and heir of Lord Caryll [q. v.], being the son of Richard Caryll of West Grinstead, Lord Caryll's younger brother. He was born about 1666, and, after composition with Lord Cutts, the grantee of Lord Caryll's forfeited estate at West Harting, he succeeded in 1697 to that property, which he had managed since his uncle's retirement abroad, and in 1701, on his father's death, to another estate at West Grinstead. He seems to have resembled his uncle in an amiable disposition and literary taste, and was intimate with the literary men of his day, and especially with Pope. ‘Half a line in the “Rape of the Lock” has made his name immortal’ were true words when Macaulay wrote them, and since then the recovery of Pope's correspondence with Caryll has inseparably associated the two names.
Pope may have first made Caryll's acquaintance at the Englefields of Whiteknights, to whom he was related (Elwin, Pope, vi. 136). At Lady Holt, his house at West Harting, built in his uncle's time, and at West Grinstead Caryll received frequent visits from Pope and some from Gay. It appears too that Pope owed his first acquaintance with Steele to Caryll's introduction. Steele was acting as Lord Cutts's secretary when the negotiations for the redemption of the Harting property were in progress, and probably then first came in contact with Caryll (ib. 144 n.) Caryll's suggestion of the ‘Rape of the Lock’ is acknowledged in the opening of the poem:
This verse to Caryll, Muse, is due.
The hero of the piece was his cousin and neighbour, Lord Petre.
The correspondence between Pope and Caryll, lately published, covers the period from 1710 to 1735. Some of Pope's letters are addressed to Caryll's son, another John, who married Lady Mary Mackenzie, daughter of Lord Seaforth, and died young in 1718. Pope asked Caryll more than once during 1726 and 1727 for the return of his letters, but his correspondent was loth to comply, and the delay appears to have caused a coolness between the friends in correspondence. It was not till 1729 that Pope at length regained possession of the letters, and published garbled versions of them in his ‘Correspondence with his Friends’ [see Pope, Alexander]. Caryll's reluctance to give them up is marked strongly enough by his delay. The value that he set upon them, and doubtless the feeling that he might never see them again, induced him to take copies of them before they passed out of his hands. The transcript was found with other family papers which came into the possession of Mr. C. W. Dilke and were presented to the British Museum by his grandson, Sir C. W. Dilke, in 1870 and 1871 (the volume containing Pope's letters is numbered Additional MS. 28618). The Sussex squire's copies were published for the first time in Mr. Elwin's ‘Pope.’
Caryll passed nearly the whole of his long life upon his estates, happy in his marriage of more than fifty years with Elizabeth, daughter of John Harrington of Ore Place, Sussex. He died in April 1736. His lands passed to his grandson of the same name, who sold the West Grinstead estate about 1745 and that at West Harting in 1767. Lady Holt House was pulled down before 1770.
[Dallaway's Sussex; Gordon's History of Harting (1877); Elwin's edition of Pope, vols. i. and vi.; Dilke's Papers of a Critic (1875), vol. i.; Caryll MSS. in the British Museum.]