Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  40. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, book 3, ch. 3; Ode to the King, lines 82–83, 88, 1:8–9; annotations to Burnet, PW, 5:276, 296, 302, 311; A Letter concerning the Sacramental Test, PW, 2:116.

  41. Landa, 13.

  42. Sheridan, 17; Desmond Clarke, Arthur Dobbs, Esquire (London: Bodley Head, 1958), 13–14, 17.

  43. Toby Barnard, “What Became of Waring? The Making of an Ulster Squire,” in Barnard, Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 235–65; Deane Swift, 93; Sheridan, 255; Ehrenpreis, 1:164–66.

  44. Swift to Rev. John Kendall, Feb. 11, 1692, Corr., 1:105; 1 Corinthians 7:9.

  45. Nokes, 15.

  46. Swift to Jane Waring, Apr. 29, 1696, Corr., 1:126–27, with minor emendations from the recently discovered original manuscript, printed by Herman Real in Securing Swift: Selected Essays (Dublin: Maunsel, 2001), 100–104.

  47. Swift to Jane Waring, May 4, 1700, Corr., 1:142.

  48. Ehrenpreis, 2:22; Johnston, 124.

  49. George Rutherford, Gravestone Inscriptions: County Antrim (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1981), 1:47, 60.

  CHAPTER 4. MOOR PARK ONCE MORE

  1. Swift to Rev. John Winder, Apr. 1, 1698, Corr., 1:131; Craik, 1:76n.

  2. Landa, 26.

  3. William Flower to Swift, Mar. 18, 1729, Corr., 3:217; Swift to Lord Castle-Durrow, Mar. 22, 1734, Corr., 3:729. Flower turned ten in 1696, which confirms that the incident happened during this period in Swift’s life.

  4. For example, he can be shown to have read Thucydides in Hobbes’s English translation and Theophrastus in the French translation of Jean de la Bruyère: see Heinz J. Vienken and Hermann J. Real, “‘Ex Libris’ J.S.: Annotating Swift,” in Reading Swift, 1:310. Lyon (19) mentions the dual texts in Latin and Greek. Swift’s list was reproduced by Lyon; also Craik, 72–73.

  5. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier, 1990), 2:810; this work was published ten years after Swift’s death. Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 7, p. 132.

  6. Delany, 34–35.

  7. Thoughts on Various Subjects, PW, 4:253; Tale of a Tub, “An Apology,” 1.

  8. Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 61.

  9. David Hume, The History of England, final 1778 version (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), 6:544; Boswell, Life of Johnson, 3:257 (Apr. 9, 1778) and 1:218–19.

  10. Sheridan, 25.

  11. Johnson, Lives 1:48; Dryden, preface to Ovid’s Epistles, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 1:117; Cowley, The Praise of Pindar, lines 12–15, in Works (London, 1674), 18; Swift to Thomas Swift, May 3, 1692, Corr., 1:110.

  12. Elias, 83; Ode to Sir William Temple, lines 135, 138, 157, Poems, 1:30–31.

  13. Ode to Temple, lines 59–61, 178–79, 1:28, 32; Swift to Bolingbroke, Oct. 13, 1729, Corr., 3:261.

  14. Ehrenpreis, 1:112.

  15. The first quotation is from Ann Cline Kelly, Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 14; the final three questions and answers are taken from Athenian Mercury 1, no. 21 (question 13); 1, no. 18 (question 6); and 7, no. 30 (question 7) (1691–95).

  16. Line 62, Poems, 1:18.

  17. Ode to Temple, line 191, 1:32; To Mr. Congreve, lines 39–40, Poems, 1:44.

  18. John Dryden, To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, on His Comedy, Called The Double Dealer, lines 1–2, 66–67, 76–77.

  19. Johnson, Life of Swift, 7; Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1782), 2:250 (the source was a friend of Warton’s father, the minor poet Elijah Fenton).

  20. On Poetry: A Rapsody, lines 265–66, Poems, 2:649; Tale of a Tub, section 5, pp. 81–82. The “Nature has never formed you” version comes from Theophilus Cibber, relating a story told him by Laetitia Pilkington (see Robert M. Philmus, “Dryden’s ‘Cousin Swift’ Re-examined,” Swift Studies 18 [2003]: 99–103).

  21. Thoughts on Various Subjects, 4:243; To Mr. Congreve, lines 133–34, 1:47; Ode to Dr. William Sancroft, line 91, Poems, 1:37.

  22. Ode to Temple, line 205; Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery, lines 151–55, Poems, 1:33, 55.

  23. Charles Perrault, Parallel between the Ancients and the Moderns. The other important voice was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s in A Digression on the Ancients and Moderns.

  24. Temple, An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning, 56–57.

  25. Ibid., 64.

  26. This point is made by James Henry Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D. (London: Rivington, 1830), 70.

  27. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Francis Atterbury,” in Miscellaneous Writings (London: Longman, Green, and Roberts, 1860), 2:211; Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 61.

  28. The Battle of the Books, PW, 1:163, 157.

  29. Ibid., 1:140, 150–51. The contrast between Bentley’s and Temple’s values is explored by John F. Tinkler in “The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift, and the English Battle of the Books,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 453–72.

  30. Index Expurgatorius, in The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Sheffield (London: John Murray, 1814), 5:564.

  31. “These were Swift’s own words in a conversation with the author about three or four and twenty years ago, upon the merits of Homer” (Deane Swift, 237; the date would have been around 1730). Temple’s attitude toward burlesque is mentioned by Courtenay, Memoirs of the Life . . . of Sir William Temple, 2:191.

  32. Lyon, preliminary page in his copy of Hawkesworth’s Life; Elias, 97–98.

  33. Scott, 38. What little is known about this text is reconstructed by George Mayhew, “Jonathan Swift’s ‘On the Burning of Whitehall in 1697’ Re-examined,” Harvard Library Bulletin 19 (1971): 404. Ehrenpreis, 1:257, 259; Elias, 100–101.

  34. Details from Elias, 149–50.

  35. Courtenay, Memoirs of the Life . . . of Sir William Temple, 2:485, 229.

  36. Elias, 262.

  37. Swift to Lady Giffard, Nov. 10, 1709, Corr., 1:270.

  38. Journal, 1:9, 113 (Sept. 9, Dec. 5, 1711).

  39. Swift to Viscount Palmerston, Jan. 1 and Jan. 29, 1726; Palmerston to Swift, Jan. 15, 1726, Corr., 2:629–32.

  40. Jane Swift to Deane Swift (senior), May 26, 1699, Corr., 1:139.

  41. Swift to Sir John Temple, February 1737, Corr., 4:388.

  42. The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 838–39.

  CHAPTER 5. THE VILLAGE AND THE CASTLE

  1. Quoted in Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, ed. F. H. A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan, and Matthew Stout (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 19.

  2. Eachard, An Exact Description of Ireland, 79; J. G. Simms, “The Establishment of Protestant Ascendancy, 1691–1714,” in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, ed. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 22; J. L. McCracken, “The Social Structure and Social Life, 1714–60,” in Moody and Vaughan, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 44.

  3. Details from Simms, “The Establishment of Protestant Ascendancy, 1691–1714,” 22; McCracken, “The Social Structure and Social Life, 1714–60,” 44; Barnard, Making the Grand Figure, 22.

  4. Landa, 37; Joseph McMinn, Jonathan’s Travels: Swift and Ireland (Belfast: Appletree, 1994), 39; Forster, 135, 197; Swift to Vanessa, July 8, 1713, Corr., 1:513.

  5. Swift to Dean Stearne, Apr. 17, 1710, Corr., 1:279; Orrery, 95; Sheridan, 390.

  6. Swift to Pope, Feb. 26, 1729, Corr., 3:285.

  7. Considerations upon Two Bills, PW, 12:200; Archbishop Hugh Boulter, quoted by J. L. McCracken, “The Ecclesiastical Structure, 1714–60,” in Moody and Vaughan, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 88.

  8. Richard Haworth, “Jonathan Swift and the Geography of Laracor,” Swift Studies 24 (2009): 25;
Landa, 43; Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power, 180, 183.

  9. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 62; Macaulay, 1:161.

  10. Some Arguments against Enlarging the Power of Bishops, PW, 9:58.

  11. To John Winder, Apr. 1, 1698, Corr., 1:132; Landa, 36; Ehrenpreis, 2:97–98.

  12. Haworth, “Jonathan Swift and the Geography of Laracor,” 9. My account of Laracor is greatly indebted to this article. “Bumford” (Lawrence Bomford) is mentioned in a letter from Swift to Vanessa, July 8, 1713, Corr., 1:514.

  13. A Character of Primate Marsh, PW, 5:211.

  14. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. Graham Petrie (London: Penguin, 1967), 46 (“The Remise Door, Calais”).

  15. Edward Lloyd, A Description of the City of Dublin (1732), quoted by Fagan, The Second City, 37. On the powers of the office, see Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2009), 283.

  16. Swift’s note in his copy of Macky’s Characters, PW, 5:249.

  17. Journal, 1:280 (May 25, 1711).

  18. Deane Swift, 112.

  19. Family of Swift, PW, 5:195.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Landa, 29–34.

  22. Verses Wrote in a Lady’s Ivory Table Book, lines 7–16, Poems, 1:60. This poem may have been first drafted in 1698, but it seems to have been revised later, and it reflects a milieu much more like that of the castle than of Moor Park.

  23. A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conservation (usually referred to as Polite Conversation), PW, 4:102, 139, 145; see Ann Cline Kelly, “Polite Conversation: An Eschatological Vision,” Studies in Philology 73 (1976): 204–24.

  24. The Humble Petition, lines 24–33, Poems, 1:70–71.

  25. Ibid., lines 64–65, 1:73; Directions to Servants, PW, 13:57.

  26. The Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Walter Scott (1814), in Critical Heritage, 300.

  27. Craik, 1:173; Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects (Oxford: Masson, 1848), 66, 88, 304.

  28. Sheridan, 38–39.

  29. A Meditation upon a Broomstick, PW, 1:239–40.

  30. Ehrenpreis (2:66) says Sheen, Craik (139) says Farnham. Both seem to be guesses, with no evidence one way or the other.

  31. On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, 5:227–28.

  32. Ibid, 5:228.

  33. Swift to Martha Blount, Feb. 29, 1728, Corr., 3:164; Swift to Gay and Pope, Nov. 23, 1727, Corr., 3:142.

  34. Swift to Martha Blount, Feb. 29, 1728, Corr., 3:164; Swift to Gay and Pope, Nov. 23, 1727, Corr., 3:142; Real, Securing Swift, 109.

  35. Thomas Swift to Deane Swift, senior, Corr., 1:163.

  36. Deane Swift, 90; Ehrenpreis (2:69) gives reasons for placing Rebecca’s age between thirty-five and forty.

  37. On the annual allowance, see Journal, 1:137n, and Rebecca’s receipt to Swift for a quarterly payment of ₤13, in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 6 vols., ed. F. Elrington Ball (London: G. Bell, 1910–14), 6:40; Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 24.

  38. Swift to Rev. William Tisdall, Dec. 16, 1703, Corr., 1:148.

  39. Swift to Tisdall, Feb. 3, 1704, Corr., 1:150–51.

  40. Swift to Tisdall, Apr. 20, 1704, Corr., 1:153–54.

  41. Ehrenpreis, 2:138; Journal, 2:671 (June 6, 1713).

  42. On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, 5:229–30.

  43. John Geree’s 1757 Gentleman’s Magazine letter, reprinted by Le Brocquy, Swift’s Most Valuable Friend, 16–17.

  44. A Letter to a Young Lady, on Her Marriage, PW, 9:93; To Stella, Visiting Me in My Sickness, lines 71–74, Poems, 2:725.

  45. Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, quoted by Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 30–31.

  CHAPTER 6. LONDON

  1. Jeremy Boulton, “London 1540–1700,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2:316; The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon), 1955), 3:454.

  2. Simon Ford, The Conflagration of London Poetically Delineated (1667), quoted by Cynthia Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24. Wall gives a richly detailed account of the rebuilding and reimagining of London.

  3. See Lawrence E. Klein, “The Polite Town: Shifting Possibilities of Urbanness, 1660–1715,” in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram, 2003), 27–39.

  4. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London, 1724–26), 1:317; Macaulay, 1:175.

  5. Cynthia Wall, “‘At Shakespeare’s-Head, Over-Against Catharine Street in the Strand,” in Hitchcock and Shore, The Streets of London, 10.

  6. Maureen Waller, 1700: Scenes from London Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000), 3–4.

  7. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:337, 3:178 (Apr. 2, 1775, and Sept. 20, 1777); Hell upon Earth (1729), quoted by Roy Porter, introduction to Hitchcock and Shore, The Streets of London, xv.

  8. J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1950), 95; Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

  9. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1:110 (1737).

  10. A Character . . . of the Legion Club, lines 219–20, Poems, 3:839.

  11. Henry Fielding, An Inquiry into the Late Encrease of Robbers (1751), 142–43; Kirstin Olsen, Daily Life in 18th-Century England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999), 203.

  12. Part of the Seventh Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated, lines 58–60, Poems, 1:172; Tale of a Tub, “Preface,” 28. The OED doesn’t define “fit” as used here, but Johnson gives “any short return after intermission; interval” (as in the expression “fits and starts”).

  13. Journal, 2:647 (Mar. 27, 1713); Account Books, 77; Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 3, p. 103. See Dennis Todd, “The Hairy Maid at the Harpsichord: Some Speculations on the Meaning of Gulliver’s Travels,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 239–83.

  14. John Gay, Trivia (1716), 2:247–53.

  15. Ibid.; Pepys, Diary, 1:269 (Oct. 19, 1660); Daniel Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague (1722), in Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), 5:48.

  16. Richard Steele, Tatler 9; A Description of the Morning, lines 1–8, Poems, 1:124–25; John Dryden, translation of Aeneid IX, lines 459–60.

  17. London in 1710: From the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, trans. W. H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 16; Pepys, Diary, 3:301 (Dec. 31, 1662); on hackneys: Susan E. Whyman, “Sharing Public Spaces,” in Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London, ed. Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 45.

  18. A Description of the Morning, lines 11–14, 1:124; Cockayne, Hubbub, 107.

  19. Von Uffenbach in 1709, quoted by Real, Securing Swift, 200–201. Addison, Spectator 251.

  20. Verses Made for Women Who Cry Apples, etc., Poems, 3:952–53.

  21. Von Uffenbach, London in 1710, 35; John Evelyn, Fumifigium; or, The Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke of London Dissipated (1661), 6.

  22. A Description of the Morning, lines 15–18, 1:125.

  23. Ned Ward, The London Spy (1709), ed. Paul Hyland (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues, 1993), 39–40, 336–58 (dictionary of street lingo).

  24. A Description of a City Shower, lines 1–6, Poems, 1:136; Journal, 1:87 (Nov. 8, 1710).

  25. A Description of a City Shower, lines 55–56, 61–63, 1:139; Cockayne, Hubbub, 189.

  26. There are various estimates of the number of voyages, and a 1704 notation in one of Swift’s account books refers surprisingly to “my 16th voyage.” See Irvin Ehrenpreis, “Swift’s Voyages,” Modern Language Notes 65 (1950): 256–57; and Account Books, 41.

  CHAPTER 7. “A VERY POSITIVE YOUNG MAN”

&nb
sp; 1. Holmes, The Making of a Great Power, 339.

  2. Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed, 315.

  3. As Frank H. Ellis observes in his edition of the Contests and Dissensions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 156–57. The political context is very fully explained by Ellis (1–79), and by Mark Goldie, “Situating Swift’s Politics in 1701,” in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 31–51.

  4. A Letter concerning the Sacramental Test, 2:283 (in Herbert Davis’s endnotes, from a variant edition of this work).

  5. Contests and Dissensions, PW, 1:232–33, 227.

  6. Memoirs Relating to That Change Which Happened in the Queen’s Ministry in the Year 1710, PW, 8:119; Johnson, Life of Swift, 10.

  7. Deane Swift, 122–23 (with some repetitions silently deleted).

  8. Memoirs Relating to That Change Which Happened in the Queen’s Ministry in the Year 1710, 8:119.

  CHAPTER 8. THE SCANDALOUS TUB

  1. Tale of a Tub, “Preface,” 24–25.

  2. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:319 (Mar. 24, 1775); William Cobbett, Autobiography, ed. William Reitzel (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 13–14; Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Jonathan Swift (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1986), 1.

  3. Orrery, 34: handwritten note in a copy of Orrery’s book, quoting a letter to Orrery from Deane Swift. The relative was Martha Whiteway.

  4. Tale of a Tub, 4.

  5. Jean le Clerc (1721), in Critical Heritage, 59; note by Lyon in the University of Pennsylvania version of his annotations to Hawkesworth’s biography: Elias, “Swift’s Don Quixote, Dunkin’s Virgil Travesty, and Other New Intelligence,” 72.

  6. Tale of a Tub, “A Digression concerning Madness,” 113; Claude Rawson, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and Our Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 12.

  7. Swift complained to Pope about bad writing full of “abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms” (June 23, 1737, Corr., 4:446; the OED follows a 1741 edition of the letters that mistakenly gave the date July 23); Tale of a Tub, “A Digression in the Modern Kind,” 80–81.

  8. Henry Fielding, Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Gerard Edward Jensen (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 2:48 (no. 52, June 30, 1752); Pope is quoted by Spence, Observations, 1:55; The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland (London: Methuen, 1963), 1:19–20; Coleridge, Table Talk, quoted in Critical Heritage, 333. Coleridge was remembering the actual words of Rabelais: “The soul, says St. Augustine, cannot dwell in a dry place” (Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Jacques Le Clerq [New York: Modern Library, 1944], book 1, ch. 5, p. 17).