English gold verge with Alexander Pope portrait Circa 1779

Gold and consular cased verge watch with portrait
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An English gold and consular cased verge watch with an enamel portrait of Alexander Pope, circa 1779, full plate gilded movement, verge escapement, decoratively pierced and floral engraved balance cock, plain flat balance, fusee and chain, baluster pillars, movement signed Geo.Goodman London.
White enamel dial, Roman numerals, outer Arabic minute ring, filigree hands, winding aperture between 3 and 4 o’clock.
Gold case, the back centered with a portrait of Alexander Pope en grisaille against a blue ground in imitation of a cameo, surrounded by pastes, the bezels decoratively engraved with leaf-forms and geometric motifs, case maker’s mark RP incuse for Richard Palmer.
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Diameter: 44 mm
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Signed: Geo.Goodman London
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Another watch by George Goodman in a red agate case that was in the Pierpont Morgan collection now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The portrait to the case back depicts Alexander Pope 1688-1744, who made a name for himself for his satirical poetry and his translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Pope wrote satire to comment on social and political issues contemporary to his time, with subjects ranging from religion, criticism of political parties, to criticism of other literary critics.

Pope was a central member of The Scriberlus Club, 1714-1745 a group of 18th-century authors whose specialty was satire. The group often published works satirizing abuses of scholarship and learning. Pope, along with another famous fellow Scribellus writer, Jonathan Swift were suspected of writing the verse called, Ode, for Musick. On the Longitude in 1727. The verse parodied the unusual and bizarre ideas proposed by William Whiston 1667-1752 and Humphrey Ditton 1675-1715 of solving the Longitude problem in the early 18th century. The two published their ideas in a book.