Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Swift did comment on the dirt and garbage. His other London poem is called A Description of a City Shower, a takeoff on Virgil’s Georgics in which farmers read nature’s warning signs to know when a storm is brewing. In Swift’s version,

  Careful observers may foretell the hour

  (By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:

  While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o’er

  Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

  Returning home at night, you’ll find the sink

  Strike your offended sense with double stink.

  Citing Swift’s line as an illustration, Johnson defines “sink” as “a drain; a jakes.” Swift wrote to Stella when he was working on this poem, “I’ll give ten shillings a week for my lodging, for I am almost stunk out of this [one] with the sink, and it helps me to verses in my Shower.”24

  The poem ends with a revolting glimpse of Fleet Ditch:

  Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell

  What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. . . .

  Sweepings from butcher’s stalls, dung, guts, and blood,

  Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,

  Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.

  Swift wasn’t making this up: there were prosecutions for creating a “nuisance” by throwing animal viscera, blood, and excrement into the street.25 The sights and smells are horrible, but the poem is fresh. Readers were bored with rural idealization, and Swift’s two Descriptions were hugely popular.

  Over the years from 1702 to 1714, Swift would spend about a third of his time in London, with repeated trips back and forth to Ireland.26 He longed to live in London permanently, and for a time, as he became an important player in public affairs, he had good reason to believe that this dream would be realized. But it was not to be, and it isn’t Swift the Londoner that posterity remembers, but Swift the Dubliner.

  CHAPTER 7

  “A Very Positive Young Man”

  In 1701 Swift was thirty-four years old, stalled in his career, and utterly unknown to the public. That was about to change.

  Working for the new lord lieutenant, the Earl of Rochester, Swift repeatedly accompanied his employer from Ireland to England and back again. He also spent time with the Berkeley family in London and with other friends. But we know next to nothing about his life at this time; no letters have survived from the middle of 1700 to the end of 1703. What we do know is that he became deeply interested in English politics. This was by no means unusual for a churchman, since the established Church was intimately bound up with the political system, and since all bishops sat in the House of Lords.

  The details of political infighting in these years are bewilderingly complex, but the basic issues are clear. One was the problem of royal succession, for in 1700 the only child of Princess Anne died at the age of eleven, which meant a possible opening for the exiled Stuarts to reclaim the throne. To forestall that possibility, an Act of Settlement was passed in 1701, affirming that no Catholic could ever reign. Anne duly became queen in 1702, when King William died at the age of fifty-one after falling from his horse. The Act of Settlement specified that next in line after Anne would be the aged Electress Sophia of Hanover, a granddaughter of James I, “and the heirs of her body being Protestants.”1 As it happened, the electress would die in 1714, two months before Anne, and the lucky heir of her body would become King George I. His descendants later adopted the name Windsor and are still on the British throne.

  The succession was thus settled, but controversy was not. The exiled James II died in 1701, and there were still a large number of Jacobites (from Jacobus, the Latin form of James) who insisted that his son, known as the Pretender, was rightfully James III. In addition to drinking enthusiastic toasts to “the king over the water,” they added a toast to “the little gentleman in the velvet coat,” the mole whose hole had tripped up King William’s horse.2 Not until 1745 would attempts at a Jacobite rebellion come to an end. Theirs was a lost cause, but in 1702 no one could be sure of that. Flirtation with the Pretender would one day wreck the careers of some of Swift’s closest associates, and he himself would fall under grave suspicion.

  Beyond the dynastic question, the political system itself was far from stable. The Revolution of 1688 was a recent memory, and with the Pretender hoping to return, a new civil war seemed all too possible. Meanwhile the modern party system was coming into being, together with the names Whig and Tory. Like so many terms that describe groups—Quaker and Methodist, for example—they were originally derogatory. The Whig name came from Scottish Presbyterian rebels in 1648 (a “whiggamore” was a Scottish horse driver), and the Tory name from Irish Catholics whose rebellion was put down in 1641.

  In many ways the two parties did have their roots back in the civil wars. Whigs were heirs of the roundheads who deposed Charles I. They didn’t want a Puritan theocracy ever again, but they did want Parliament to be clearly superior to the monarchy. They drew their strength from the Dissenters—non-Anglican Protestants—and from London merchants and financiers, many of whom were Dissenters themselves.

  Tories were heirs of the cavaliers who fought for Charles I, and who welcomed his son joyously at the Restoration. Most of them no longer believed that kings had a divine right to do anything they pleased, but they did fervently support the monarchy. Their strength came from the country gentry who dominated provincial society, and from the clergy whose status and incomes were dependent on the established Church.

  Many thoughtful individuals had opinions that overlapped with both parties. As a firm supporter of the “revolution principles” that had ejected James II, Swift agreed with the Whigs. As a firm supporter of the Church of En gland, he agreed with the Tories.

  It would be a mistake to imagine that Whigs were progressive and Tories conservative. In important ways they were all conservative, although the term conservatism didn’t yet exist. It was born in the reaction against the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, as was the distinction between left wing and right wing. That was the seating arrangement of the French Chamber of Deputies, with the more radical members on the left.

  Swift entered the political debate in 1701 with a sixty-page pamphlet written in excitement and haste. It was called A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, with the Consequences They Had upon Both Those States. Today, it would strike any casual reader as a dry and detailed historical survey. What made it brilliant was that although England was barely mentioned in it, every ancient personality and controversy had a direct parallel in modern English history. Decoding the analogies was an enjoyable game, and more than that. For people brought up to admire the Greeks and Romans, it was like seeing ancient history come alive.3

  The device of pretending to talk about the distant past had another advantage: it was an effective way to avoid prosecution. You could describe an outrageous tyrant in ancient Rome and count on readers to figure out which modern politician you had in mind; conversely, you could praise a noble figure from antiquity as a contrast to some despised contemporary. In 1695 the Licensing Act that required censorship before publication had been abolished, but that only meant that the authorities could no longer block a work from being published at all. Once it did come out, they could still prosecute the author and printer for blasphemy, libel, or sedition. This they frequently did, and throughout Swift’s life he had to take great care to steer a course beyond the reach of the law.

  The profound implications of the 1688 revolution were still being worked out. What kind of government was England going to have, and where did ultimate authority lie? Whigs and Tories were beginning to close ranks, and the Tories, who were currently in the minority in Parliament, saw their chance to exploit tectonic shifts taking place at the time in the geopolitics of Europe.

  The all but insoluble problem was Spain. When the sickly and practically imbecilic Carlos II, with no son
of his own, finally got around to dying, who would succeed him? That person would rule not only Spain and its empire, but far-flung regions of Europe as well. Large parts of Italy were under Spanish rule, as was a section of the Low Countries known as the Spanish Netherlands. At this critical moment, due to interlocking dynastic marriages, the apparent heir to the Spanish throne had a plausible claim to both the kingdom of France and the Habsburg Empire. It was to block Louis XIV’s plan to rule the world that William III negotiated, behind the scenes, a Partition Treaty that would make sure the Bourbons of France would never occupy the throne of Spain.

  In 1700 Carlos finally did die, after thirty-five hapless years on the throne, and a full-blown crisis was at hand. Louis XIV prepared to make his bid to control Spain. The result would be the War of the Spanish Succession, which would dominate English politics for the next decade, and ultimately make England a world power. But at this moment no one had any idea what the future would hold.

  A governing alliance of five Whig peers, known as the Junto from the Spanish junta, had negotiated the Partition Treaty in secret. That was perfectly legal, but the Tories argued that it was against the best interests of a nation that was sick of fighting on the Continent. In 1701 they managed to impeach the Whig peers, and they asked the king to dismiss them from his cabinet. Thus the crucial question of 1688 came to the foreground: was the House of Commons now the supreme power in the land?

  In the long run Swift would be more Tory than Whig, but in this crisis he was on the Whig side. Many Tories were Jacobite sympathizers, and no Irish Protestant, in a land with a huge Catholic majority, was likely to risk the return of the Stuart monarchy. Swift even had a chance to explain this to King William himself: “I told the King that the highest Tories we had with us [in Ireland] would make tolerable Whigs there.”4 It was Swift’s firm belief that a nation should preserve an equal balance among the three forces of monarch, nobles, and commons, and it appeared that the House of Commons was determined to upset the balance.

  The theme in Swift’s Contests and Dissensions, therefore, was the disasters that ensued in ancient times when political leaders were imprisoned or ostracized—an obvious parallel to the current impeachment of the king’s ministers. A tyranny by the people, he thought, was even worse than a tyranny by oligarchy or monarchy, because someone would be sure to seize executive power and become a dictator. It happened with Julius Caesar, it happened with Oliver Cromwell, and it could well happen again.

  In those days hardly anyone argued for total democracy, and Swift believed as others did that the people were all too easily led. They were like sheep, he said in the Contests and Dissensions, so that “whoever is so bold [as] to give the first great leap over the heads of those about him (although he be the worst of the flock) shall be quickly followed by the rest.” In an even more contemptuous analogy, they were mindless silkworms, exploited by “some single tyrant, whose state and power they advance to their own ruin, with as blind an instinct as those worms that die with weaving magnificent habits for beings of a superior nature to their own.”5

  Like most of what Swift would go on to write, this pamphlet was a direct response to current events, and was intended to influence them. After the Contests and Dissensions came out, he boasted that it was “greedily bought and read,” and he believed that it was partly due to his arguments that the House of Lords threw out the impeachment. And he had the satisfaction of hearing it praised by people who had no idea who wrote it. According to Johnson, a bishop declared in Swift’s presence that the author could only be Gilbert Burnet, the distinguished bishop of Salisbury. “When he seemed to doubt Burnet’s right to the work,” Johnson says, “he was told by the bishop that he was ‘a young man,’ and still persisting to doubt, that he was ‘a very positive young man.’”6

  Deane Swift had a different and more elaborate version of the story, in which Swift had to listen to a pompous old man tell him that he knew nothing about style. Bishop William Sheridan (not related to Swift’s friend of that name) encountered Swift at the Dublin house of his favorite uncle, William Swift. This version is plausible, since Swift never forgot insults and put-downs:

  “I can assure your Lordship,” replied the Doctor [Swift], “Bishop Burnet was not the author of it.” “Not the author of it?” said the bishop. “Pray, sir, give me your reason for thinking so.” “Because, my Lord, that discourse is not written in the bishop’s style.” “Not in the bishop’s style!” replied old Sheridan, with some degree of contempt. “No, my Lord, the style of that pamphlet is, I think, wholly different from the style of the bishop.” “Oh, Mr. Swift,” replied Sheridan, “I have had a long acquaintance with your uncles, and an old friendship for all your family, and really I have a great regard for you in particular. However, let me assure you notwithstanding that you are still a great deal too young to pronounce your judgment on the style of authors. If Bishop Burnet was not the author if it, pray, sir, let me know who it was that did write it.” “Why, really, my Lord, I writ it myself.”7

  In Swift’s later account, “the vanity of a young man prevailed with me to let myself be known for the author.” It was more than vanity. This was his bid for recognition by the magnates who ruled England, and the gamble succeeded. “My Lords Somers and Halifax, as well as the bishop above mentioned [Bishop Burnet himself], desired my acquaintance, with great marks of esteem and professions of kindness; not to mention the Earl of Sunderland, who had been of my old acquaintance.”8

  Bishop Sheridan would have been even more surprised if he could have known this positive young man would be remembered as one of the greatest writers in the English language. Swift himself would probably have been surprised. His few attempts at poetry had fallen flat, and his energies now were dedicated to making a career in public life, with writing a useful tool to that end. But he did have one major work in preparation for the press, and it would change his life in more ways than one. Its brilliance was immediately recognized, but so was its potential subversion of the very religion he claimed to defend. In the long run it would prove to be an insuperable obstacle to the advancement he longed for.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Scandalous Tub

  “LEFT-HANDED GENIUS”

  In May of 1704 a peculiar book was offered for sale. It was called A Tale of a Tub, a proverbial expression for a pointless cock-and-bull story, and it was a hodgepodge of religious allegory, learned parodies, and rambling digressions explicitly labeled “Digressions.” The whole thing was a wild medley of sources and allusions, piled on with irreverent glee. The title page carried no author’s name, and it wouldn’t have meant much if it had. The only thing of any note that Swift had yet published was the Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions in Athens and Greece, and that was anonymous too.

  Swift had been working on this book for years. The idea may have originated during his undergraduate days. A good deal of it was probably written at Kilroot, which would explain why it treats Dissenting Protestants with great rancor, and it was more or less finished at Moor Park in 1696. Why he waited so long to publish is unknown. It would undoubtedly have offended Sir William Temple, but he had been dead for five years when it finally appeared.

  Actually, A Tale of a Tub is two different books scrambled together. One is a story about three brothers quarreling over their father’s will, which represents the New Testament, with the brothers as three rival branches of Christendom. But the narrative is interrupted repeatedly by anarchic digressions that finally take over completely.

  29. Frontispiece of A Tale of a Tub.

  The frontispiece is a visual image of the metaphor that inspired the book’s title. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the grim might-makes-right treatise from the civil war period, was anathema in Swift’s day, and he begins by recalling it.

  Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship. This parable was immediately mythologized: the whale was int
erpreted to be Hobbes’s Leviathan, which tosses and plays with all other schemes of religion and government, whereof a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden, and given to rotation. . . . It was decreed that in order to prevent these Leviathans from tossing and sporting with the Commonwealth (which of itself is too apt to fluctuate), they should be diverted from that game by a Tale of a Tub.1

  Swift loved to spin out analogies like these: schemes of religion and government are hollow, and wooden, and given to rotation. And he liked to make familiar clichés absurd. People lay violent hands, whales don’t.

  No one knew what to make of the Tale of a Tub, but everyone read it, and three more editions came out within a year. Seventy years later Samuel Johnson, whose opinion of Swift was unfavorable on the whole, said that the book was so good, someone else must have written it—“There is in it such a vigour of mind, such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and art, and life.” The political journalist William Cobbett, born in Farnham half a century after Swift left nearby Moor Park, related how as an eleven-year-old, the son of a gardener, he found his curiosity aroused by seeing the odd title A Tale of a Tub in a shop window. He gave his last 3 pence for a copy and sat down by a haystack to read it. “Though I could not understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on until it was dark, without any thought of supper or bed.” Recently Harold Bloom, even though admitting that “I dislike this great book as much as I admire it,” has called it “the most powerful prose work in the language.”2