Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  It’s not clear how much money Swift made from this book, and in any case, publishers paid up front for a manuscript and that was all the author would ever get, no matter what the sales turned out to be.

  Swift also published two pamphlets that are extremely puzzling because they make earnestly positive recommendations in a way that’s uncharacteristic of him. One of these, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue, calls upon Lord Oxford to sponsor a British academy that will police changes in language usage. Most unusually, Swift signed his real name.

  Swift did believe that too much slang was getting into print. Since slang changes constantly, he was afraid that future generations would be unable to read the works of his own time. In a Tatler paper he acknowledged wryly, “I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of mob and banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.” “Mob” sounds like a fine old Anglo-Saxon word, but it was a recent invention, a contraction of mobile vulgus, “the unstable common people.” Likewise “banter” originated in Swift’s lifetime.64

  Proposing an academy wasn’t an idiosyncratic notion; there were many similar suggestions. The Académie Française had been founded by Cardinal Richelieu back in 1635, and there was a widespread feeling that England should have an academy of its own. But Swift was normally contemptuous of visionary proposals. What other agenda might he have had?

  An obvious motive was to show how important he had become. He was known only as a party journalist, good at his job but working at a subliterary level, and of course he couldn’t acknowledge his writings publicly. Now he was making a bid to appear as a major player in culture. He was also making it known that he was an intimate of the lord treasurer, mentioning chats about language that the two of them had had. As Ehrenpreis says, “The style of the essay is pushingly personal.” Beyond that, the proposed academy would be a Tory fiefdom, and Swift would in effect be the British Richelieu. No wonder he signed his name.65

  The other piece is stranger by far. Called A Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners, it came out in 1709. This piece is interesting not for what it claims to say but for what it may imply. It may in fact be one of the booby traps that Swift was fond of setting, which explode beneath readers who take them at face value.

  Writing anonymously again, Swift declares that although immorality and irreligion are widespread, Queen Anne has the power to stop them. She controls appointments in government and the military, and she should let it be known that anyone who behaves immorally will be dismissed. Graft and corruption would then be nonexistent in a ministry in which “every single person was of distinguished piety,” and as their influence spread, “morality and religion would soon become fashionable court virtues.” In society in general, all that is needed is ruthless enforcement of existing laws, which will be ensured by establishing “something parallel to the office of censors anciently in Rome.” A team of commissioners should travel throughout the country to receive “complaints and informations” against offenders.66

  Not everyone, of course, would experience a genuine change of heart, but at least people would have to pretend to. “Hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity and vice. It wears the livery of religion, it acknowledgeth her authority, and is cautious of giving scandal. . . . And I believe it is with religion as it is with love, which by much dissembling at last grows real.”67

  Can Swift possibly have meant all this? Some distinguished Swiftians have thought he did. But it’s hard to believe that the author of the Argument to Abolish Christianity, with its mordant critique of “nominal Christianity,” could call for obligatory hypocrisy in a police state founded on censorship and spying. Throughout his life Swift regarded political informers with loathing. Years later he called them “the most accursed and prostitute and abandoned race that God ever permitted to plague mankind.” We know too that he despised “projects” of every kind, especially ones that claimed to reshape human behavior. Can he really have believed, as the Project claims, that faith and morality would return to a high standard “in a short time, and with no very great trouble”?68 And can he really have wanted ruthless censorship?

  This may well be yet another instance of Swiftian impersonation, and one in which he has covered his tracks so well that even experts have been misled. Sheridan provided a clue long ago: this pamphlet is “a very strong though covert attack upon the power of the Whigs.” By a brilliant stroke, Swift appropriated what the queen herself had recently declared, in a proclamation to be read in churches: “For the greater encouragement of religion and morality, we will, upon all occasions, distinguish persons of piety and virtue by marks of our royal favour.” A Society for the Reformation of Manners was digging up dirt on allegedly immoral persons and pressing to have them prosecuted. That was widely resented as a resurgence of Whiggish Puritanism, and it’s inconceivable that Swift was in sympathy with it. But if the Whigs did suspect that the Project was aimed at them, they were helpless to do anything about it, since it mirrored so closely the views of the queen herself.69

  CHAPTER 14

  The Journal to Stella

  AN INTIMATE VOICE

  It is easy to forget that the documents that happen to survive record only a tiny fraction of people’s lives. In 1708 Swift began saving his correspondence, including drafts of his letters to other people, and 97 percent of what we have comes after that. But by then he was forty-one years old and had lived more than half his life.1

  For an extended period of nearly three years, from September 1710 to June 1713, we finally see Swift’s life up close. During that time he kept a daily record, sent in sixty-five installments from London to Dublin and dubbed the Journal to Stella in 1779, six decades after it was written. Stella was twenty-nine when the journal began and had known Swift for twenty years.

  Unfortunately, we have only Swift’s side of the correspondence, though we know that Stella sent at least sixty replies (he kept a numbered list). Sometimes we can guess at their content from his replies, but we never hear Stella’s own voice. Herbert Davis thinks he destroyed her letters at some time after her death, as he did all other correspondence between them. Altogether, in fact, we have just three letters written by Stella at any time in her life, and none of them is significant.2

  The reason Swift sent the journal in installments was that postage was expensive—sixpence for a letter from London to Dublin, and a shocking 2 shillings per ounce for a package. When possible, a couple of weeks’ entries would be sent off in a single parcel with someone who was traveling to Dublin. Packages always went that way. Swift sent Stella “palsy water” for some sort of numbing facial condition, and “the finest piece of Brazil tobacco for Dingley that ever was born.”3 Women didn’t smoke, but they did use snuff, which was often prepared at home by grating dried tobacco.

  Rebecca Dingley not only received occasional presents from Swift, she was the co-recipient of the Journal to Stella. Since there were no street addresses, Swift had to identify their house by location, which he did in various ways. One parcel was sent “to Mrs. Dingley, at her lodgings over against St. Mary’s church near Capel Street, Dublin”; another was addressed “to Mrs. Dingley, at Mr. Curry’s house over against the Ram in Capel Street, Ireland, Dublin.”4

  To save expensive paper, all of which had to be handmade, Swift wrote in a minuscule script. Stella had weak eyes, and Rebecca read the letters aloud. It has been suggested that by addressing both women, Swift was protecting himself from too much intimacy, but there are plenty of intimate moments in the Journal. The tiny script may itself have implied a private bond. “Methinks when I write plain,” he commented, “I do not know how, but we are not alone—all the world can see us.”5

  The Journal to Stella has come down to us in two very different segments. Swift gave a bundle containing the first forty installments to his cousin, Martha Whiteway, who cared for him in his final yea
rs. From her they passed to Deane Swift, who made numerous minor alterations—impossible to identify today, since the originals have vanished—and in that form they found their way into print. The other twenty-five were discovered by Dr. John Lyon, one of Swift’s executors, when he went through his papers after his death. These too were first published in edited form, but fortunately the originals survived, and are now in the British Library.

  From the Lyon batch, it becomes apparent that there were curious shorthand nicknames for the three participants in the correspondence. Swift was “Pdfr,” Stella (and perhaps Dingley as well) “Ppt.” Both women together are “MD,” and Rebecca is “DD” when the context requires mentioning her individually. These nicknames are usually interpreted as standing for “Poor Dear Foolish Rogue,” “Poppet,” “My Dears,” and “Dear Dingley.” The first seems rather far-fetched, and is based on nothing but guesswork, but no one has suggested anything better. We do know that it was pronounced “Podefar,” because Rebecca wrote it out like that in a marginal note. As for “MD,” a rhyme at one point shows that it was pronounced “Em Dee”—“Letters from MDs Must not be answered in ten days; ’tis but bad rhyme.”6

  Supposedly “MD” always means Dingley as well as Stella, but that’s sometimes hard to believe. “Now I am in bed between eleven and twelve, just going to sleep, and dream of my own dear roguish impudent pretty MD.”7 Rebecca Dingley was not roguish, impudent, or pretty, but Stella was all of those things.

  Deane Swift must have found the nicknames embarrassing, so he got rid of them. If his segment of the Journal was all that we had, we would imagine that Swift called himself “Presto” and that Hester Johnson was always “Stella.” It’s true that in later poems he made the name “Stella” familiar, but he never used it in the Journal. As for “Presto,” Deane Swift picked that up from a single casual anecdote. Swift happened to repeat what St. John had laughingly told him: “The Duchess of Shrewsbury [who was Italian] asked him, was not that Doctor—Doctor—and she could not say my name in English, but said Dr. Presto, which is Italian for Swift.”8

  A motto Swift often invoked was vive la bagatelle. Years later, counseling Archbishop King on how to keep melancholy at bay, he said, “I have a receipt [recipe] to which you are a stranger; my Lord Oxford and Mr. Prior used to join with me in taking it, to whom I often said, when we were two hours diverting ourselves with trifles, vive la bagatelle.”9

  If we didn’t have the Journal to Stella, we could only guess at what the informal, playful Swift was like, but now we hear him everywhere in the letters.

  I dined today with Patty Rolt at my cousin Leach’s, with a pox, in the City. He is a printer, and prints the Postman, oh ho, and is my cousin, God knows how, and he married Mrs. Baby Aires of Leicester; and my cousin Thomson was with us; and my cousin Leach offers to bring me acquainted with the author of the Postman, and says he does not doubt but the gentleman will be glad of my acquaintance, and that he is a very ingenious man, and a great scholar, and has been beyond sea. But I was modest, and said maybe the gentleman was shy, and not fond of new acquaintance, and so put it off. And I wish you could hear me repeating all I have said of this in its proper tone, just as I am writing it. ’Tis all with the same cadence with “oh hoo,” or as when little girls say, “I have got an apple, miss, and I won’t give you some.”

  Patty Rolt was Swift’s age, a distant relative. As for Mrs. Baby Aires, Sir Harold Williams explains in his edition of the Journal that she “may be fictitious.”10 One can imagine what Swift would have said about Sir Harold.

  There are frequent glimpses of street life, from the night watchman’s call—“Paaaast twelvvve o’clock”—to treats for sale on the twelfth day of Christmas. “Silly, silly, silly, you are silly, both are silly, every kind of thing is silly. As I walked into the city I was stopped with clusters of boys and wenches buzzing about the cake-shops like flies. There had the fools let out their shops two yards forward into the streets, all spread with great cakes frothed with sugar, and stuck with streamers of tinsel.” The changing seasons are regularly noted. “The Canal and Rosamond’s Pond [in St. James’s Park] full of the rabble sliding, and with skates, if you know what those are.” Ice skates were a novelty, brought over quite recently from Holland.11

  Often Swift makes himself palpably present. He calls attention to the paper that his friends have in their hands, remarking on inkblots, tobacco smudges, and candle wax. And he dramatizes his moment-to-moment experience: “I have my mouth full of water, and was going to spit it out, because I reasoned with myself, how could I write when my mouth was full? Han’t you done things like that, reasoned wrong at first thinking?” He also emphasizes the difference between the familiar self and the public one: “Pdfr is going to be very busy; not Pdfr, but t’other I.” Or again, “Answer MD’s letter, Pdfr, d’ye hear? No, says Pdfr, I won’t yet, I’m busy: you’re a saucy rogue. Who talks?” Michael DePorte comments, “Even Swift seems confused by the inner play of voices.”12

  There are thoughts of home in Ireland. “Oh, that we were at Laracor this fine day! The willows begin to peep, and the quicks [hawthorn hedges] to bud. My dream’s out—I was a-dreamed last night that I ate ripe cherries. And now they begin to catch the pikes, and will shortly the trouts (pox on these ministers), and I would fain know whether the floods were ever so high as to get over the holly bank or the river walk. If so, then all my pikes are gone; but I hope not.”13 “Pox on these ministers” implies regret at being confined to London by politics. No doubt Swift wants the ladies to believe that he misses Laracor more than he actually does; yet he does miss it.

  Swift never forgot that at any moment he might be staggered by an attack of nausea and vertigo. Recurring comments show what a handicap Ménière’s syndrome was for him:

  April 18. I know not what’s the matter. It has never been thus before: two days together giddy from morning till night, but not with any violence or pain; and I totter a little, but can make shift to walk.

  Oct. 24. I had a little turn in my head this morning, which, though it did not last above a moment, yet being of the true sort [i.e., not an ordinary headache] has made me weak as a dog all this day.14

  Swift’s account books give a grimmer picture than he revealed to Stella and Rebecca. Thus, during a two-month period in 1708: [“Nov.] From 6 to 16 often giddy. God help me. So to 25th less. 16, brandy for giddiness, 2 shillings. [Dec.] 5, Horrible sick. 12th Much better, thank God and MD’s prayers. 16, Bad fit at Mrs. Barton’s. 24th. Better, but—dread a fit.”15

  As a sufferer from Ménière’s, Swift was the victim of a condition that was always unpleasant and at times overwhelming. It would be difficult to exaggerate the lifelong burden this became. In the words of a modern medical expert, “The sufferer feels as though he is being violently seasick in the middle of an earthquake. . . . A disease in which one can fall out of a chair, which may make it necessary to lie prostrate to avoid injury through falling, while a world whirling in giddy circles mingles with a background of violent nausea, will leave its mark on any man.”16

  At one point Swift also had to endure an agonizing attack of shingles, which he described vividly in the Journal:

  I was not able to go to church or court to-day, for my shoulder. The pain has left my shoulder and crept to my neck and collarbone. It makes me think of pooppt’s bladebone. Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing. . . . The pain increased with mighty violence in my left shoulder and collarbone and that side my neck. On Thursday morning appeared great red spots in all those places where my pain was, and the violence of the pain was confined to my neck behind, a little on the left side; which was so violent that I [had] not a minute’s ease nor hardly a minute’s sleep in three days and nights. The spots increased every day and had little pimples, which are now grown white and full of corruption, though small. The red still continues too, and most prodigious hot and inflamed. The disease is the shingles.

  This description provoked Swift’s Victorian biographer Craik to com
ment that “we are dealing with a man whose modes of thought were peculiar,” living in an age “whose modes of expression differed from our own.”17

  When Swift’s doctors decided it wasn’t actually shingles, but something more obscure, he commented wryly, “I can never be sick like other people, but always something out of the common way.” That was certainly true of the vertigo. He told Stella a bit later, “I think we both have that faculty never to part with a disorder forever; we are very constant. I have had my giddiness 23 years by fits.”18 It’s impossible to be sure what Stella’s chronic condition was, but she was never in very good health, and in her last years she was seriously ill.

  Whenever Swift’s health returned, he kept up his lifelong practice of walking. In the spring of 1711 he took lodging in Chelsea, which was then a rural village a couple of miles west of London, reached by a pleasant footpath through the fields. On a fine day in May he exclaimed, “About our town we are mowing already and making hay, and it smells so sweet as we walk through the flowery meads.” He added, though, “The hay-making nymphs are perfect drabs, nothing so clean and pretty as further in the country.”19

  Increasingly portly in spite of regular exercise, Swift detested hot weather, and took the opportunity to swim in the Thames while his servant guarded his clothes on the bank. “I have been swimming this half-hour and more; and when I was coming out I dived, to make my head and all through wet, like a cold bath.” The ability to swim, which he probably learned to do in the river at Kilkenny, was rare at the time. Several weeks later the heat wave broke, and Swift exclaimed with relief, “O this dear rain, I cannot forbear praising it; I never felt myself to be revived so in my life. It lasted from three till five, hard as a horn, and mixed with hail.”20

  Sometimes an element of strangeness enters the Journal, when Swift reports his dreams. Whenever he wrote about dreams in print, which wasn’t often, he said that they had no special meaning and were just recycling images already present in a person’s mind. That was the standard view of empiricist psychology at the time. Yet his dreams were clearly disturbing. “Lord, I dreamt of Ppt, etc., so confusedly last night, and that we saw Dean Bolton and Stearne go into a shop; and she bid me call them to her, and they proved to be two parsons I know not; and I walked without till she was shifting, and such stuff, mixed with much melancholy and uneasiness, and things not as they should be, and I know not how. And it is now an ugly gloomy morning.”21