Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Here in beau spelling (tru tel deth)

  There in her own (far an el breth);

  Here (lovely nymph pronounce my doom),

  There (a safe way to use perfume);

  Here, a page filled with billets-doux,

  On t’ other side (laid out for shoes);

  (Madam, I die without your Grace),

  (Item, for half a yard of lace).22

  The fourth line must refer to a sweetener “for an ill breath.”

  It was probably at this time, too, that Swift began making entries in a collection of “polite conversation” whose triteness fascinated and exasperated him; he went on adding to it for the rest of his life. Its purported author is one Simon Wagstaff, who boasts “that there is not one single witty phrase in this whole collection which hath not received the stamp and approbation of at least one hundred years.” In other words, these are stalest of clichés, prefabricated phrases that might have been clever once but no longer are. A few are still around today:

  LADY SMART. Madam, do you love bohea tea?

  LADY ANSWERALL. Why really, madam, I must confess I do love it, but it does not love me.

  LADY ANSWERALL. Pray, how old do you take her to be?

  COLONEL ATWIT. Why, about five or six and twenty.

  LADY ANSWERALL. I swear she’s no chicken; she’s on the wrong side of thirty if she be a day.

  The complacent exchanges plod on for sixty pages.23

  Swift’s friends testified that he was a brilliant mimic, and he loved to ventriloquize voices from different social strata. Lady Berkeley had a garrulous servant named Frances Harris, who was horrified one day to realize that she had lost her purse, containing the large sum of £7, 4 shillings, and sixpence. Swift impersonated her in an inspired piece of verse, The Humble Petition of Frances Harris, Who Must Starve, and Die a Maid, if It Miscarries:

  So next morning we told Whittle, and he fell a-swearing;

  Then my dame Wadgar came, and she, you know, is thick of hearing.

  “Dame,” said I, as loud as I could bawl, “do you know what a loss I have had?”

  “Nay,” said she, “my Lord Collway’s folks are all very sad,

  For my Lord Dromedary comes a-Tuesday without fail.”

  “Pugh!” said I, “but that’s not the business that I ail.”

  Says Cary, says he, “I have been a servant this five and twenty years, come spring,

  And in all the places I lived I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Yes,” says the steward, “I remember when I was at my Lady Shrewsbury’s,

  Such a thing as this happened, just about the time of gooseberries.”24

  “Lord Collway” was Galway, and “Lord Dromedary” was Drogheda. The implication is that Frances Harris hopes to present her petition to the lords justices of Ireland, but is too obtuse to realize that two of the three justices are these very guests.

  There is another twist in the poem as well. It seems that Frances has aspirations to marry the castle chaplain, which is to say, Jonathan Swift. She offends him, however, by asking him to cast an astrological “nativity,” and he stalks off, since a priest would have no business dabbling in astrology.

  Well, I thought I should have swooned. “Lord,” said I, “what shall I do?

  I have lost my money, and shall lose my true love too.”

  What Swift thought of servants who fantasized about marrying chaplains is apparent in his instructions to the waiting maid in his collection of ironic advice called Directions to Servants. She is advised to yield sexual favors to her master, but only sparingly, in order to squeeze money out of him—“five guineas for handling your breast is a cheap pennyworth, although you seem to resist with all your might.” In the unlucky event that she gets pregnant, however, “you must take up with the chaplain,” who might perhaps be lured into marriage.25

  This ability to ventriloquize would provide the basis for some of Swift’s greatest satires. “Swift seems,” Scott said admiringly, “like the Persian dervish, to have possessed the faculty of transfusing his own soul into the body of anyone whom he selected—of seeing with his eyes, employing every organ of his sense, and even becoming master of the powers of his judgment.”26

  In London a couple of years later, Swift used this ability to play a practical joke on Lady Berkeley. She often asked him to read aloud from Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, a compendium of trite moralizing. Craik calls the Occasional Reflections a “pious sedative” for Lady Berkeley, and Swift quickly got sick of them. Boyle is known today as the great chemist for whom Boyle’s Law is named, but in this work his theme was that ordinary sights could inspire “pious reflections, devout soliloquies, ardent ejaculations, and other mental entertainments of a religious soul.” A typical homily is based on “killing a crow (out of a window) in a hog’s trough, and immediately tracing the ensuing reflection with a pen made of one of his quills.” Boyle solemnly explains, “This method is not unusual to divine justice towards brawny and incorrigible sinners, whose souls, no less black than this inauspicious bird’s feathers, do wear already the livery of the Prince of Darkness, and with greediness do the works of it, whose delights are furnished (as the feasts of crows are by carrion) by their own filthy lusts.”27

  When Lady Berkeley called for the Occasional Reflections one day, Swift was ready. He solemnly announced that the next piece was called A Meditation on a Broomstick. “Bless me!” Lady Berkeley exclaimed, “what a strange subject! But there is no knowing what useful lessons of instruction this wonderful man may draw from things apparently the most trivial. Pray let us hear what he says upon it.” Swift then read a parody he had hidden in the volume, in which human beings are compared to brooms in absurdly inventive ways. The prank was exposed only when Lady Berkeley mentioned to some visitors that it was an especially fine piece, and when they opened the book the paper in Swift’s handwriting fell out. “A general burst of laughter ensued,” Sheridan says, “and my Lady, when the first surprise was over, enjoyed the joke as much as any of them, saying, ‘What a vile trick has that rogue played me! But it is his way, he never balks his humor in anything.’”28

  Swift’s parody is doubly interesting, because characteristically he could be mocking and serious at the same time. “Surely mortal man is a broomstick,” his fake meditation proposes. The once-clean twigs of a tree are “handled by every dirty wench, condemned to do her drudgery, and by a capricious kind of fate, destined to make other things clean and be nasty itself.” But as the comparison proceeds, Swift virtually describes the kind of satirist he would soon become: “A broomstick, perhaps you will say, is an emblem of a tree standing on its head; and pray what is a man but a topsy-turvy creature? his animal faculties perpetually mounted on his rational, his head where his heels should be, groveling on the earth. And yet, with all his faults, he sets up to be a universal reformer and corrector of abuses; a remover of grievances; rakes into every slut’s corner of Nature, bringing hidden corruptions to the light, and raiseth a mighty dust where there was none before; sharing deeply all the while in the very same pollutions he pretends to sweep away.”29 There is much self-knowledge, and even wisdom, in that practical joke.

  THE RETURN OF STELLA

  After less than a year King William became disenchanted with Lord Berkeley, who may indeed have been as lazy as Swift said he was, and recalled him to England in April 1701. Swift traveled there in the Berkeley party, stopped off at Leicester to visit his mother, and then proceeded to London. And now something of great personal significance happened: he was reunited with Stella. She may have been living at the Temples’ house in Sheen, since her mother continued to work there for Lady Giffard, or she may have been with Rebecca Dingley in Farnham.30 At any rate, she and Swift evidently reached an understanding. In September he returned to Dublin, working now for a new lord lieutenant, the Earl of Rochester. By then, Stella and Rebecca were already living there.

  The sole information we have about this
remarkable development is in the account that Swift wrote down on the evening of Stella’s death:

  She lived generally in the country, with a family, where she contracted an intimate friendship with another lady of more advanced years [Rebecca]. I was then (to my mortification) settled in Ireland; and about a year after, going to visit my friends in England, I found she was a little uneasy upon the death of a person on whom she had some dependence. Her fortune, at that time, was in all not above fifteen hundred pounds, the interest of which was but a scanty maintenance, in so dear a country, for one of her spirit. Upon this consideration, and indeed very much for my own satisfaction, who had few friends or acquaintance in Ireland, I prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other lady, to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part of their fortune being in annuities upon funds. Money was then at ten per cent in Ireland, besides the advantage of turning it and all necessaries of life at half the price. They complied with my advice, and soon after came over.31

  Why is Sir William Temple mentioned only vaguely as “a person on whom she had some dependence”? Why was she still uneasy about his death after two years had gone by? Why is the “intimate friendship” with Rebecca Dingley given such emphasis? Perplexingly, Rebecca remains an altogether shadowy figure, even though she and Stella were together from this moment on.

  Most significant of all, why does Swift place such stress on finances, and mention only casually that Stella’s presence in Dublin was “very much for my own satisfaction”? She had just turned twenty that March, and he was thirty-three. He goes on to say that in Dublin “her person was soon distinguished,” which must refer to her good looks. And then he acknowledges, though only to dismiss them, the obvious suspicions that arose: “The adventure looked so like a frolic, the censure held for some time as if there were a secret history in such a removal; which, however, soon blew off by her excellent conduct.”32

  It was indeed true that the cost of living was higher in England than in Ireland, where, as Swift told English friends much later, you could still get a sedan chair for sixpence instead of 12, and a chicken for 7 pence instead of 18.33 But Stella had never seen Ireland in her life; was this really sufficient inducement to go and settle there? Whatever Swift might say, suspicions about a romantic relationship by no means “soon blew off.” But it remains true, as a leading specialist says, that we know “next to nothing” about Hester Johnson—her parentage, her move to Ireland, and above all, the hidden aspects of her relationship with Swift.34

  One thing we do know. During the next few years, many people took it for granted that Swift and Stella were planning to marry. In 1707 his cousin Thomas Swift asked their uncle Deane “whether Jonathan be married? or whether he has been able to resist the charms of both those gentlewomen that marched quite from Moor Park to Dublin (as they would have marched to the north or anywhere else) with full resolution to engage him?”35

  And what of the shadowy Rebecca, joined with Stella in Thomas Swift’s jocular remark about “the charms of both those gentlewomen”? She was related to the Temple family, her grandmother having been a sister of Temple’s mother, and no doubt that is why she was taken in at Moor Park. The only descriptions we have of her come from people who knew her much later, and they say nothing about charm; the younger Deane Swift heard that she was “by all accounts a very insipid companion.” Some later poems by Swift suggest a fussy scatterbrain, but if he showed them to Rebecca herself, he may have been only teasing her. At the time of the move she was at least thirty-five, perhaps forty, and thus roughly twice Stella’s age. Supposedly, but unprovably, Stella and Swift were never alone together, and Rebecca served as a convenient chaperone.36

  We know also that Swift gave Stella and Rebecca an annual allowance of ₤50 each as well as advising them on investing their modest holdings. Tactfully, he pretended that Rebecca’s allowance likewise came from investments that he was managing on her behalf. For Rebecca the move to Ireland must have been a welcome solution to her predicament. She didn’t have enough money to live on by herself, and in that world, as a historian notes, “independence was a pipe dream for most spinsters.”37

  One incident from these first Dublin years left a paper trail, though its implications are ambiguous. In 1703, when Swift was in London and Stella was still in Dublin, he had been corresponding with a clergyman friend of theirs, William Tisdall. Perhaps Tisdall was sometimes a victim of Stella’s sharp tongue, for Swift offered this suggestion: “I’ll teach you a new way to outwit Mrs. Johnson. It is a new-fashioned way of being witty, and they call it a bite. You must ask a bantering question, or tell some damned lie in a serious manner, and then she will answer or speak as if you were in earnest; then cry you, ‘Madam, there’s a bite.’ I would not have you undervalue this, for it is the constant amusement in Court, and everywhere else among the great people.”38

  In his next letter Swift acknowledged Tisdall’s intimacy with Stella and Rebecca, hinted that he might be jealous, and made an uncharacteristic obscene innuendo: “You seem to be mighty proud (as you have reason, if it be true) of the part you have in the ladies’ good graces, especially of her you call the Party. I am very much concerned to know it; but since it is an evil I cannot remedy, I will tell you a story. A cast [cast-off] mistress went to her rival, and expostulated with her for robbing her of her lover. After a long quarrel, finding no good to be done, ‘Well,’ says the abdicated lady, ‘keep him, and stop him in your ar[se].’ ‘No,’ says t’other, ‘that won’t be altogether so convenient; however, to oblige you, I’ll do something that’s very near it.’” There was also some condescending advice concerning Tisdall’s thoughts of becoming a writer: “I look upon you as under a terrible mistake, if you imagine you cannot be enough distinguished without writing for the public. Preach, preach, preach, preach, preach, preach—that is certainly your talent.”39

  A month or so after receiving this last advice, Tisdall made a remarkable request. His letter has not been preserved, but Swift’s reply makes clear what it said. Tisdall demanded to know what Swift’s own intentions were toward Stella. If he did not plan to marry her himself, then Tisdall hoped that he would act as a go-between in asking her mother for her hand on Tisdall’s behalf. What we do have is Swift’s reply, which seems both reasonable and generous. As with Varina, he lays emphasis on having enough money for marriage, which Tisdall does have. But he also indicates that his “humour,” defined by Johnson as “general turn or temper of mind,” does not incline him to marry.

  I think I have said to you before that if my fortunes and humour served me to think of that state, I should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice, because I never saw that person whose conversation I entirely valued but hers. This was the utmost I ever gave way to. And secondly, I must assure you sincerely that this regard of mine never once entered into my head to be an impediment to you; but I judged it would, perhaps, be a clog to your rising in the world, and I did not conceive you were then rich enough to make yourself and her happy and easy. . . . I told the mother immediately, and spoke with all the advantages you deserve. But the objection of your fortune being removed, I declare I have no other; nor shall any consideration of my own misfortune in losing so good a friend and companion as her prevail on me against her interest and settlement in the world. . . . I have always described her to you in a manner different from those who would be discouraging; and must add that though it hath come in my way to converse with persons of the first rank, and of that sex, more than is usual to men of my level and of our function [that is, clergymen], yet I have nowhere met with a humour, a wit, or conversation so agreeable, a better portion of good sense, or a truer judgment of men and things.”40

  Stella turned Tisdall down, and there is no way to know why. Deane Swift and Sheridan suspected that she had encouraged him only as a way of provoking a commitment from Swift. But they were writing fifty and eighty years later, respectively, and that can only be guesswork. Maybe she just wasn’
t attracted to Tisdall. As for Swift’s position, it is hard to agree with Ehrenpreis that he felt “elementary panic” at the thought of losing “a dependent, compliant confidant, part daughter, part pupil, part mistress.” The most we can say for certain is that Swift acknowledged it would be painful for him to see less of Stella. It is sometimes claimed that from then on he nursed cold contempt for Tisdall, but that is based on a single offhand remark he made nine years later: “Do his feet stink still?”41 Swift was always hypersensitive to smells.

  Some biographers have imagined Stella as a fragile, dependent creature, but a story Swift told about these early Dublin years suggests a very different character. In the memoir written immediately after her death, he described her remarkable behavior in a crisis:

  With all the softness of temper that became a lady, she had the personal courage of a hero. She and her friend having removed their lodgings to a new house which stood solitary, a parcel of rogues, armed, attempted the house, where there was only one boy. She was then about four and twenty. And having been warned to apprehend some such attempt, she learned the management of a pistol; and the other women and servants being half dead with fear, she stole softly to her dining room window, put on a black hood to avoid being seen, primed the pistol fresh, gently lifted up the sash, and taking aim with the utmost presence of mind, discharged the pistol loaden with the bullets into the body of one villain, who stood the fairest mark. The fellow, mortally wounded, was carried off by the rest and died the next morning, but his companions could not be found. The Duke of Ormonde hath often drank her health to me upon that account, and had always an high esteem of her.42

  John Geree, the English clergyman friend who had known Stella at Moor Park, added a few details that he must have heard from Swift himself. The gang’s interest had been aroused by Stella’s elegant lifestyle, which gave rise to rumors that she must have a lot of money and jewels. She stayed up unusually late that night reading, and therefore wasn’t asleep as the thieves expected. And the thief she shot was on a ladder at the time, from which he fell to the ground.43