Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  This is what Freud calls the uncanny, familiar things turning disconcertingly strange. “Things not as they should be” is a recurring theme, and as Michael DePorte observes, this dissolving world has much in common with the disorienting changes of perspective in A Tale of a Tub or Gulliver’s Travels.22 By “shifting” Swift means that Stella was changing her clothes, presumably in the shop. Why does he wait until then to go inside? Does he watch her?

  Another dream is self-explanatory. “Morrow, little dears. O, faith, I have been dreaming; I was to be put in prison. I don’t know why, and I was so afraid of a black dungeon; and then all I had been inquiring yesterday of Sir Andrew Fountaine’s sickness I thought was of poor Ppt. The worst of dreams is that one wakes just in the humour they leave one.”23 Entangled in risky political maneuvering, Swift might well dream about prison, and Stella’s health was a constant concern.

  Whatever was wrong with Sir Andrew, it was bad, because his doctors expected him to die and he sent for Swift to say prayers, “which you know is the last thing.” Ten days later he was still “extremely ill” and paying his doctors ₤10 a day.24 He got better, however, and lived another forty years.

  One other dream got recorded during these years, not in the Journal but in a note that Swift jotted down. He woke at two in the morning with two lines of verse in his head, “which I had made in my sleep”:

  I walk before no man, a hawk in his fist,

  Nor am I a brilliant, wherever I list.

  He added that he wrote them down immediately so that “two such precious lines may not be lost to posterity,” but admitted that he had no idea what they meant. Strange and even haunting, they would never have gone into a Swift poem during waking hours.25

  FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES

  The Journal to Stella swarms with people, some of them close friends, others casual acquaintances. It occurred to Swift that he might be supplying more details than his Dublin correspondents wanted. “I fancy my talking of persons and things here must be very tedious to you, because you know nothing of them, and I talk as if you did.”26

  Closest at hand was Swift’s servant Patrick, who made a fire in the morning, carried messages, and answered the door. That last duty was important, for a servant needed to know when to deny that his employer was at home. After Patrick was replaced by someone else, Swift complained, “My man is not such an artist as Patrick at denying me.”27

  In other respects, though, Patrick was exasperating. Londoners lived in fear of burglary, and they controlled access to a house by having a single key for each door. That meant that when Swift went out, Patrick was supposed to stay at home. One evening Swift was locked out until ten. When Patrick finally showed up, “I went up, shut the chamber door, and gave him two or three swingeing cuffs on the ear, and I have strained the thumb of my left hand with pulling him, which I did not feel until he was gone. He was plaguily afraid and humbled.”28 The strained thumb may have been some consolation for Patrick.

  The biggest problem was that Patrick regularly got drunk, making implausible excuses afterward. In his ironic “directions to servants” Swift gave tongue-in-cheek suggestions for what a servant might say: “You were taking leave of a dear cousin who is to be hanged next Saturday. . . . Some nastiness was thrown on you out of a garret window, and you were ashamed to come home before you were cleaned and the smell went off. . . . You were told your master had gone to a tavern and come to some mischief, and your grief was so great that you inquired for his honour in a hundred taverns between Pall Mall and Temple Bar.”29

  Others who turn up in the Journal are Stella’s mother and sister. “This morning Ppt’s sister came to me with a letter from her mother, who is at Sheen, but will soon be in town and will call to see me. She gave me a bottle of palsy water, a small one, and desired I would send it you by the first convenience, as I will, and she promises a quart bottle of the same. Your sister looked very well, and seems a good modest sort of girl.”30 This was Anne Johnson, married at some point, but perhaps not yet, to a baker named Filby for whom Swift later tried to find a government position. She was a “girl” of twenty-seven in 1710.

  Stella’s mother was at Sheen because she was still in the employ of Lady Giffard, Temple’s sister. Since Swift had quarreled with Lady Giffard over his publication of the Temple papers, he had no wish to go to Sheen; he had already written to Bridget Johnson to say that he wanted to see her “without hazarding seeing Lady Giffard, which I will not do until she begs my pardon.”31 That was never going to happen.

  Bridget’s employer limited her freedom severely. Swift wrote indignantly to Stella, “I will desire her to let Lady Giffard know that she hears I am in town, and she would go to see me to inquire after you. I wonder she will confine herself so much to that old beast’s humour.” Finally Bridget did come to see him, and they talked for an hour, mostly about Stella’s finances. Swift was able to report, “She looks extremely well.” They stayed in touch after that, as occasional mentions confirm: “Your mother’s cakes are very good, and one of them serves me for a breakfast.” There were further consignments of “palsy water” for Stella, too, brewed from cowslip, also known as palsy-wort. If she actually had palsy, that meant temporary paralysis of a facial nerve, but the concoction was used for other ailments as well.32

  Someone else who appears is Swift’s sister, Jane, about whom he was as unenthusiastic as ever. When the Moor Park household broke up she had married a tanner named Fenton, whom Swift detested. The marriage was not a success, and Jane was now working for Lady Giffard again. If Denis Johnston is right and Jane knew Temple family secrets, Lady Giffard may have thought it advisable to employ her.33

  In the public world, Swift was constantly in contact with members of the nobility, and always on guard to make sure they didn’t condescend to him. “The Duchess of Shrewsbury came up and reproached me for not dining with her. I said that was not so soon done, for I expected more advances from ladies, especially duchesses. She promised to comply with any demands I pleased.” This might seem arrogant, but she got the point: he refused to be classed with the sycophants who swarmed around the court. And they knew he had power. As Virginia Woolf says, “Nobody could buy his services; everybody feared his pen.”34

  Often these people became good friends, the formidable Duke of Ormonde, for instance: “I have been five times with the Duke of Ormonde about a perfect trifle, and he forgets it; I used him like a dog this morning for it.” In the same vein, “I lost my handkerchief in the Mall tonight with Lord Radnor, but I made him walk with me to find it, and find it I did not.”35

  Swift was especially pleased when friends would join in his favorite game of punning. Lord Carteret was in London, as happy to do it as he had been in Dublin, and others were too. As usual, the puns Swift reports make discouraging reading:

  We all pun here sometimes. Lord Carteret set down Prior t’other day in his chariot, and Prior thanked him for his charity. That was fit for Dilly [Dillon Ashe]. . . .

  Henley told me that the Tories were insupportable people, because they are for bringing in French claret, and will not sup-port. . . .

  I made a good pun on Saturday to my Lord Keeper. After dinner we had coarse doily napkins, fringed at each end, upon the table to drink with. My Lord Keeper spread one of them between him and Mr. Prior; I told him I was glad to see there was such a fringeship between Mr. Prior and his Lordship.

  Perhaps the whole point was to think up groaners. Swift went on to say, “Prior swore it was the worst he ever heard; I said I thought so too.” That was certainly the expectation for an especially labored attempt: “If there was a hackney coach at Mr. Pooley’s door, what town in Egypt would it be? Why, it would be Hecatompolis, Hack at Tom Poley’s. Silly, says Ppt.”36

  There were agreeable friendships with several noblewomen, who appreciated Swift’s combination of witty banter and frank esteem. At Windsor, where the court migrated during the summer and Swift was working with Oxford and Bolingbroke, he got to kn
ow Lady Orkney, now in her midfifties, who had been one of William III’s mistresses and lived at the Cliveden estate nearby. “She is the wisest woman I ever saw,” Swift told Stella, “and the Lord Treasurer [Oxford] made great use of her advice in the late change of affairs.” On another occasion, “I dined yesterday with Lady Orkney, and we sat alone from 2 till 11 at night.” Soon he was able to report, “Lady Orkney is making me a writing table of her own contrivance, and a bed nightgown.” (She didn’t make the table with her own hands, of course, but gave instructions to a “joiner.”) Swift especially relished an aphorism of hers: “In men, desire begets love, and in women, love begets desire.”37

  Great ladies were fond of giving Swift presents, and the Duchess of Hamilton seems to have personally constructed a belt with pockets, “for you know I wear no waistcoat in summer, and there are several divisions, and one on purpose for my box, oh ho.” The box was for snuff, and the Duke of Hamilton, who had just been named ambassador to France, gave him a pound of snuff that was “admirable good.” But just two weeks later Swift had a dreadful story to tell:

  This morning at 8 my man brought me word that Duke Hamilton had fought with Lord Mohun, and killed him, and was brought home wounded. I immediately sent him to the Duke’s house in St. James’s Square, but the porter could hardly answer for tears, and a great rabble was about the house. In short, they fought at 7 this morning. The dog Mohun was killed on the spot; and while the Duke was over him, Mohun, shortening his sword, stabbed him in at the shoulder to the heart. The Duke was helped towards the cake house by the Ring in Hyde Park (where they fought), and died on the grass before he could reach the house, and was brought home in his coach by 8, while the poor Duchess was asleep. Maccartney and one Hamilton were the seconds, who fought likewise, and are both fled. I am told that a footman of Lord Mohun’s stabbed Duke Hamilton, and some say Maccartney did so too. Mohun gave the affront, and yet sent the challenge. I am infinitely concerned for the poor Duke, who was a frank, honest, good-natured man. I loved him very well, and I think he loved me better.

  The incident has been called “the most celebrated duel of the age,” all the more shocking because Mohun not only provoked the quarrel, but had been twice tried for murder by the House of Lords. Swift hurried to do what he could to comfort the duchess, who was in despair—“She has moved my very soul.”38

  Deaths provoked Swift’s most emotional entries in the Journal, especially when those who died were young and he knew them well.

  I am just now told that poor dear Lady Ashburnham, the Duke of Ormonde’s daughter, died yesterday at her country house. The poor creature was with child. She was my greatest favorite, and I am in excessive concern for her loss. I hardly knew a more valuable person on all accounts; you must have heard me tell of her. I am afraid to see the Duke and Duchess. She was naturally very healthy; I am afraid she has been thrown away for want of care. Pray condole with me; ’tis extremely moving. . . . I hate life, when I think it exposed to such accidents; and to see so many thousand wretches burthening the earth, while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing.

  When Swift went to see the duke and duchess two days later, the duke “bore up as well as he could, but something accidentally falling in discourse, the tears were just falling out of his eyes, and I looked off to give him an opportunity (which he took) of wiping them with his handkerchief. I never saw anything so moving, nor such a mixture of greatness of mind and tenderness and discretion.”39

  THE LITTLE LANGUAGE

  In addition to putting in the names “Presto” and “Stella,” Deane Swift took out every instance of writing that sounds like this: “I go on with such courage to prate upon nothing to deerichar Md, oo would wonder”; “Meetinks I begin to want a rettle flom Md”; and “I assure oo it im vely rate now.” This is a style of baby talk that Swift, Stella, and Rebecca called “ourrichar gangridge,” which means “our little language.” Over the years most of it has been deciphered on the basis of some fairly consistent rules: here, r takes the place of l and ch of t (“gangridge” seems to be a unique instance of g for l). “Deerichar” is therefore “dear little,” “a rettle” is “a letter,” and “vely rate” is “very late.”40

  Occasionally the gangridge is almost Joycean—“O Rold hot a cruttle” for “O Lord what a clutter”—but mostly it just seems like a private game. Forster conjectured that it began when Stella was a child, and gloomily acknowledged, “It does not admit of doubt that Swift and Esther Johnson really talked, as well as wrote, such particular silliness.” That is clearly true, because Swift says at one point, “Do you know what? when I am writing in our language I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking it. I caught myself at it just now.”41 This last comes from the transcription by Deane Swift, who must have replaced “ourrichar gangridge” with “our language.”

  What was it for? It can’t have been for secrecy, since the prattle is never about anything scandalous (attempts to detect clues to passion have never gotten any traction). Woolf suggests that in a sophisticated society in which artificial politeness was obligatory, “to throw off the ceremonies and conventions and talk a ‘little language’ for one or two to understand is as much a necessity as a breath of air in a hot room.”42

  Swift liked to toss out teasing epithets, careful to call both ladies and not just Stella “naughty girls,” “saucy rogues,” “sauce boxes,” “nauti nauti dear girls,” and so on. Sometimes he addressed them as “sirrahs” (“sollahs” in the little language), not normally a female term, often as “young women” (“ung oomens”), and occasionally even as “boys.” Rebecca was in her midforties and two years older than Swift. But he can be a boy too. Sometimes he sounds not like Joyce but like Leopold Bloom: “Now I am writing to saucy MD; no wonder, indeed, good boys must write to naughty girls.” Occasionally he would forget to use the little language and have to correct himself: “Be good gals, dood dallars I mean.”43

  The Journal is written in a small, crabbed hand, hard to read and filling every inch of the paper. If an entry ended with blank space to spare it would often be filled it up with the little language: “Farewell deelest hearts & souls Md. Farewell Md Md Md FW FW FW FW Me Me Lele Lele Lele Sollahs lele.” “FW” might stand for “farewell”; nobody knows what “lele” is supposed to mean. Sometimes it may be “there,” but sometimes it clearly isn’t. Anyway, that was the point. The private meanings were well known to the participants but not to anyone else.44

  The conclusion to the entry for May 10, 1712 (in larger script than usual), begins with one of Swift’s made-up rhyming proverbs and ends with the mysterious “lele.”

  This is a pitiful Letter for want of a better, but plagud with a Tetter, my Fancy does fetter—Ah my poor willows & Quicksets.—Well, but you must read John Bull. Do you understand it all? Did I tell you that young Parson Geree is going to be marryed, and asked my Advice—when it was too late to break off. He tells me Elwick has purchased 40ll a year in Land adjoyning to his Living—Ppt does not say one word of her own little Health. I’m angry almost; but I won’t tause see im a dood dallar in odle sings, iss [’cause she is a good girl in other things, yes] and so im DD too. God bless Md & FW & Me, ay & Pdfr too. farewell Md Md Md FW FW FW Me

  Lele I can say lele it ung oomens

  iss I tan, well as oo

  [Lele, I can say lele yet, young women, yes I can, as well as you].45

  44. A page from the Journal to Stella.

  The History of John Bull was a satire by Swift’s friend Dr. Arbuthnot. John Geree was the friend from Moor Park days who would describe, forty-five years after this letter, his memories of Stella and suspicions about her parentage.

  It appears that Stella did a good deal of teasing herself. “Faith, your letters would make a dog silly, if I had a dog to be silly, but it must be a little dog.” And again, “I’ll break your head in good earnest, young woman, for your nasty jest about Mrs. Barton. Unlucky sluttikin, what a word is there!” But we’l
l never know what word that was, and as Herbert Davis says, in passages like this one Stella is really a character in a play by Swift.46

  Sometimes Swift imagines Stella interfering at the very moment he’s writing. “Let me go, will you? and I’ll come again tonight in a fine clean sheet of paper; but I can nor will stay longer now; no, I won’t, for all your wheedling; no, no, look off, don’t smile at me and say ‘Pray, pray, Pdfr, write a little more.’ Ah! you’re a wheedling slut, you be so.” Swift also enjoys pretending to overhear his friends. “Pray, love one another, and kiss one another just now, as DD is reading this; for you quarreled this morning just after Mrs. Marg’et [the maid] had poured water on Ppt’s head. I heard the little bird say so.” The bird was real enough. Patrick kept a pet linnet in a closet, which it disgustingly befouled.47

  Often Swift imagines what Stella is doing. Usually it’s playing cards, but sometimes it’s taking walks or riding, as he constantly urges for the sake of her health.

  Ppt can’t stay writing and writing; she must write and go a cock-horse, pray now. Well, but the horses are not come to the door; the fellow can’t find the bridle; your stirrup is broken; where did you put the whips, DD? Marg’et, where have you laid Mrs. Johnson’s ribband to tie about her? Reach me my mask: sup up this before you go. So, so, a gallop, a gallop: sit fast, sirrah, and don’t ride hard upon the stones.—Well, now Ppt is gone, tell me, DD, is she a good girl?