Briefly allegorising, Pope goes on to contrast cautious "sense" and impetuous "nonsense", again evoking the rowdy traffic of 18th-century London with the onomatopoeic "rattling".

But whereas both of those novels clearly – if not straightforwardly – allegorised apartheid South Africa, The Childhood of Jesus is much harder to decode.

In fact, the Anglo-Israelite, by another and more mischievous method, is doing exactly what the allegorising, or so-called spiritualising, school of interpreters did.