Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Swift’s other friends were deeply resentful of Orrery’s presumptuousness and aristocratic snobbery. They would doubtless have appreciated Johnson’s devastating assessment: “Respect him you could not, for he had no mind of his own.” Swift evidently came around to that view, and Orrery was shocked, going through some of Swift’s papers after his death, to come upon an unopened letter from himself marked “This will keep cold.” Lyon saw another letter that was dismissed even more decisively: “Sad this—very wretched!—Oh! sick—worse!—dead!—stone dead.”8 These discoveries no doubt help to explain why Orrery was often ungenerous in his memoir of Swift.

  “A CONSTANT SERAGLIO”

  The friends Swift enjoyed the most were all female. “A constant seraglio of very virtuous women,” Orrery called them, adding that they “attended him from morning till night, with an obedience, an awe, and an assiduity that are seldom paid to the richest or the most powerful lovers; no, not even to the Grand Seignor [the Turkish sultan].” According to the younger Sheridan, Orrery himself “was during his lifetime Swift’s greatest flatterer.” To be sure, Swift didn’t mind being flattered now and then. As he acknowledged in Cadenus and Vanessa,

  ’Tis an old maxim in the schools

  That flattery’s the food of fools;

  Yet now and then your men of wit

  Will condescend to take a bit.9

  These women clearly found it satisfying to have a brilliant friend who responded not only to their charm—which he did—but to their intelligence and wit as well. Besides, he loved to flirt, and they could flirt in return without compromising themselves; he was thirty or forty years older than most of them, and they saw him in company rather than alone. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu picked up on Orrery’s analogy and called Swift “a master eunuch in a seraglio,” but that was missing the point of these friendships.10

  In A Letter to a Young Lady on Her Marriage, written in 1723 when tension in the Vanessa and Stella relationships was at its height, Swift’s message was that a bride needs to develop qualities that will earn “true rational love and esteem” after her youthful attractions have faded. As for romantic love, it is dismissed: “I hope you do not still dream of charms and raptures, which marriage ever did and ever will put a sudden end to. Besides, yours was a match of prudence and common good liking, without any mixture of that ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.”11

  Samuel Richardson made his heroine Pamela say that “this piece looks more like the advice of an enemy to the sex, and a bitter one too, than a friend to the particular lady.” But it helps to know who the particular lady was. She was a teenager named Deborah Staunton, recently married to John Rochfort, whom Swift knew by the nickname Nim (for Nimrod, because he loved to hunt). She was naïve, unworldly, poorly educated, and rather spoiled, and she was fourteen years younger than her headstrong and tight-fisted husband. The marriage was indeed arranged between the two families, and unlikely to have been a love match. So when Swift gave advice about books and behavior that can “in time make yourself worthy of him,” he may well have believed that was Deborah’s only hope for happiness.12

  Far from being a misogynist, as is sometimes charged, Swift was ahead of his time in his attitude toward gender. In an unfinished essay, Of the Education of Ladies, he criticized “the modern way of training up both sexes in ignorance, idleness, and vice.” He wanted to refute the assumption, then held by most women and nearly all men, that the last things to look for in a wife were “good natural sense, some taste of wit and humour, sufficiently versed in her own natural language, able to read and relish history, books of travels, moral or entertaining discourses, and be a tolerable judge of the beauties in poetry.” The pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft said similar things seventy years later: “Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for at least twenty years of their lives.”13

  Several members of the seraglio—Laetitia Pilkington, Constantia Grierson, Mary Barber—were aspiring writers, and Swift gave them generous encouragement. Writing to Pope, he referred to them affectionately as his “triumfeminate.” Unfortunately, Mary Barber caused him serious embarrassment. He had enlisted Pope’s help to get her poems published, and a forged letter reached Queen Caroline, ostensibly from Swift himself, that called her “the best female poet of this or perhaps of any age.” Swift’s own contribution to her book was a much more measured recommendation:

  She seemeth to have a true poetical genius, better cultivated than could well be expected, either from her sex or the scene she hath acted in, as the wife of a citizen [her husband was a woolen draper]. Yet I am assured that no woman was ever more useful to her husband in the way of his business. Poetry hath only been her favorite amusement; for which she hath one qualification that I wish all good poets possessed a share of, I mean that she is ready to take advice, and submit to have her verses corrected by those who are generally allowed to be the best judges.14

  In truth Mary Barber’s poems weren’t much good, and Swift may have been making excuses for them. As for the forged letter, he was extremely upset about it, but for some reason he never suspected Barber herself of writing it.

  In Dr. Delany’s hospitable circle, Swift encountered Frances Kelly, a young admirer who knew how to respond to being teased. On one occasion he threatened to fine her a shilling for some transgression, and she responded with a saucy note (commenting, “I am half asleep, so don’t be angry at these blots”): “I acknowledge to be indebted to the Reverend Doctor Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, the sum of 0l. 1s. 1-1/2 d. per value received, this 2nd day of Feb. 1733.” The extra penny and a half was the difference between the Irish shilling and the English. Three months later, however, Frances’s impertinence was less excusable, for she wrote abjectly, “I am sure if you knew what I have suffered for having offended you, your anger would be changed into pity; for indeed, Sir, my uneasiness cannot be expressed. . . . . I spent so bad a night from the thoughts of my misfortune that could you have had an idea of it, you would have been sorry for me.”15

  88. Mary Pendarves.

  A friend whom Swift especially valued was the spirited and artistic Mary Pendarves, in her early thirties when she arrived in Dublin. She wrote to a relative, “Swift is a very odd companion (if that expression is not too familiar for so extraordinary a genius); he talks a great deal and does not require many answers; he has infinite spirits, and says abundance of good things in his common way of discourse.” Frances Kelly was the favorite just then, and Mary Pendarves added with some asperity, “Miss Kelly’s beauty and good humour have gained an entire conquest over him, and I come in only a little by the by.”16 Soon afterward Frances fell seriously ill, and within a few months she was dead.

  Mary Pendarves’s story is a striking illustration of the predicament of women in eighteenth-century society. Born to a distinguished family as Mary Granville, she was forced at seventeen to marry a sixty-year-old family friend for financial reasons. “I thought him ugly and disagreeable; he was fat, much afflicted with gout, and often sat in a sullen mood, which I concluded was from the gloominess of his temper. . . . I was married with great pomp. Never was woe dressed out in gayer colours, and when I was led to the altar, I wished from my soul I had been led, as Iphigenia was, to be sacrificed. I was sacrificed. I lost, not life indeed, but I lost all that makes life desirable.”17 To her great relief, the unpleasant Mr. Pendarves died in 1724, after six years of marriage. But he had neglected to alter his will, and she inherited nothing.

  Swift sent Mary some pleasantly witty compliments some years later, when she had moved back to England:

  A pernicious heresy prevails here among the men, that it is the duty of your sex to be fools in every article excep
t what is merely domestic. . . . If you will come over [to Ireland] to my assistance, I will carry you about among our adversaries, and dare them to produce one instance where your want of ignorance makes you affected, pretending, conceited, disdainful, endeavouring to speak like a scholar, with twenty more faults objected by themselves, their lovers, or their husbands. But I fear your case is desperate, for I know you never laugh at a jest before you understand it, and I much question whether you understand a fan or have so good a fancy at silks as others.

  “Want of ignorance” is a deft way of indicating the empty-headed state that most men wanted to find in women. As for not attempting to speak like a scholar, Swift despised pedantry and never talked that way himself. He added that the people he liked would eventually offend him with a boutade, “a sudden yerk from a horse’s hinder feet which you did not expect,” but that Mary had never once done so.18

  In another letter Swift paid an even more striking compliment. “I believe, Madam . . . I think myself to be in your company, where I could never be weary; no, it is otherwise, for in such a case I would rather choose to be your silent hearer and looker-on.” She was able to volley back witty compliments in his own vein: “You call yourself by a great many ugly names, which I take ill, for I never could bear to hear a person I value abused.”19

  89. Laetitia Pilkington.

  Mary Pendarves was good friends with the Delanys as well as with Swift, and when Delany’s wife died she married him. But that happened not long before Swift’s death, when he was no longer capable of grasping it. Edmund Burke knew her in later life, and told a friend, “I wish you had known Mrs. Delany! She was a perfect pattern of a perfect fine lady; a real fine lady of other days. Her manners were faultless; her deportment was of marked elegance; her speech was all sweetness; and her air and address were all dignity. I always looked up to Mrs. Delany as the model of an accomplished gentlewoman of former times.”20

  The friend about whom we know the most, because she left a sprightly memoir, was Laetitia Pilkington. She was married to a young clergyman named Matthew Pilkington whom Swift took up for a while, and she was unusually good at witty conversation in the style Swift enjoyed. Her account of her very first evening with him is brilliantly described. He immediately launched a disconcerting challenge:

  “Pray, madam,” says he, “do you smoke?” “No indeed, Sir,” says I. “Nor your husband?” “Neither, sir.” “’Tis a sign,” said he, “you were neither of you bred in the University of Oxford, for drinking and smoking are the first rudiments of learning taught there, and in those two arts no university in Europe can outdo them. Pray, Mrs. Pilkington, tell me your faults.” “Indeed, Sir, I must beg to be excused, for if I can help it you shall never find them out.” “No,” says he, “then Mr. Pilkington shall tell me.” “I will, Sir,” says he, “when I have discovered them.” “Pray, Mr. Dean,” says Dr. Delany, “why will you be so unpolite as to suppose Mrs. Pilkington has any faults?” “Why, I’ll tell you,” replied the Dean; “whenever I see a number of agreeable qualities in any person, I am always sure they must have bad ones sufficient to poise the scale.” I bowed, and told the Dean, “He did me great honour.”21

  As Swift knew perfectly well, no women smoked in those days, or were admitted to universities.

  Next there was some impromptu acting. Scorched by the fire when he started to make coffee, Swift told Laetitia to put a glove on his free hand, and then pretended to be shocked. “Taking up part of his gown to fan himself with, and acting in character of a prudish lady, he said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to think! Women may be honest that do such things, but for my part, I never could bear to touch any man’s flesh—except my husband’s; whom perhaps,’ says he, ‘she wished at the Devil.’”

  The performance concluded with another insulting compliment in “his peculiarly ironical strain.”

  “Mr. Pilkington,” says he, “you would not tell me your wife’s faults, but I have found her out to be a damned insolent, proud, unmannerly slut.” I looked confounded, not knowing what offense I had committed. Says Mr. Pilkington, “Aye, sir, I must confess she is a little saucy to me sometimes, but—what has she done now?” “Done! Why nothing, but sat there quietly, and never once offered to interrupt me in making the coffee; whereas had I had a lady of modern good breeding here, she would have struggled with me for the coffee pot till she had made me scald myself and her, and made me throw the coffee in the fire, or perhaps at her head, rather than permit me to take so much trouble for her.”

  Johnson defines “slut” as “a word of slight contempt to a woman.”

  This aggressive style of Swift’s was entirely in keeping with his ideal of “raillery,” as he described it in the unpublished Hints towards an Essay on Conversation: “to say something that at first appeared a reproach, or reflection; but, by some turn of wit unexpected and surprising, ended always in a compliment, and to the advantage of the person it was addressed to.”22 It was a game, seeing how far he could go, and it was also a test. To become his friend, you had to understand the game and enjoy it.

  Matthew Pilkington came in for his share. Finding some dregs in a glass when he was pouring out wine, Swift commanded Pilkington to drink it, “‘for,’ says he, ‘I always keep some poor parson to drink the foul wine for me.’” Pilkington cheerfully agreed, which delighted Swift. “‘Why then,’ says the Dean, ‘you shan’t, for I’ll drink it myself. Why pox take you, you are wiser than a paltry curate whom I asked to dine with me a few days ago; for upon my making the same speech to him, he told me he did not understand such usage, and so walked off without his dinner. By the same token, I told the gentleman who recommended him to me that the fellow was a blockhead, and I had done with him.’” As Louise Barnett says, the Pilkingtons were being auditioned. Unlike the paltry curate, they passed muster and were welcomed into the cast.23

  Rather later than he might have, Swift finally saw through the ingratiating but self-serving Reverend Mr. Pilkington—“the rubberend Mr. Polkingtone,” Joyce called him. By then the couple had left for England, where Matthew treated Laetitia badly and then left her. Eventually she became notorious for affairs with a series of men, and the chief reason she wrote her autobiography was to prove that she had been more sinned against than sinning. Swift didn’t live to see her book, but long before then he had bitterly repudiated both Pilkingtons: “He proved the falsest rogue, and she the most profligate whore, in either kingdom.”24 Johnson defines “whore,” in this sort of context, as “a fornicatress; an adultress.” Like Johnson, Swift was unforgiving of female sexual transgression.

  One friend Swift saw very little of was Rebecca Dingley, whom he had never much cared for, and whom he described in these years as “quite sunk with years and unwieldiness.” She was apparently living alone, and a kindly note of his did survive: “If you are disposed to be easy and cheerful, I will send something for dinner to your lodgings, and eat it with you and Mrs. Ridgeway, with a bottle of wine and bread. Speak freely and send me word. But Mrs. Ridgeway shall take all the care upon her.” Ann Ridgeway was the daughter of Swift’s housekeeper, Mrs. Brent, whose position she would eventually fill herself. Does “speak freely” suggest a sense that there was awkwardness about the suggestion? He also sent Rebecca an annual “Christmas box,” along with a golden half guinea and a couple of bottles of wine.25 There is no evidence of real friendship.

  In 1731 Swift wrote his finest poem, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift. He had no illusions about what his friends were saying behind his back:

  Yet thus, methinks, I hear ’em speak:

  “See, how the Dean begins to break!

  Poor gentleman, he droops apace,

  You plainly find it in his face;

  That old vertigo in his head

  Will never leave him till he’s dead.

  Besides, his memory decays,

  He recollects not what he says;

  He cannot call his friends to mind;

  Forgets the place where last he d
ined;

  Plies you with stories o’er and o’er,

  He told them fifty times before.

  How does he fancy we can sit

  To hear his out-of-fashioned wit?

  But he takes up with younger folks,

  Who for his wine will bear his jokes.”

  As for the coterie of women, they may be better at lip service, but their card-table chatter (the “vole” was winning all the tricks) belies their words:

  My female friends, whose tender hearts

  Have better learned to act their parts,

  Receive the news in doleful dumps:

  “The Dean is dead (and what is trumps?)”

  “Then Lord have mercy on his soul.

  (Ladies, I’ll venture for the vole.)”

  “Six deans, they say, must bear the pall.

  (I wish I knew what king to call.)”

  “Madam, your husband will attend

  The funeral of so good a friend?”

  “No, madam, ’tis a shocking sight,

  And he’s engaged tomorrow night;

  My Lady Club would take it ill

  If he should fail her at quadrille.

  He loved the Dean (I lead a heart),

  But dearest friends, they say, must part.

  His time was come, he ran his race;

  We hope he’s in a better place.”26

  “I lead a heart”! They may hope that the dean has gone to “a better place,” but they obviously have their doubts, and anyway they’re content to bandy tired clichés. But he has the last laugh, putting words in their mouths from the grave.

  LADY ACHESON OF MARKET HILL