Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  9. As Melinda Alliker Rabb suggests in “Postmodernizing Swift,” in Reading Swift, 5:29–43.

  10. James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade (London, 1758), 22.

  11. Tale of a Tub, “Conclusion,” 133.

  12. Ibid., “Preface,” 27.

  13. Ibid., section 2, p. 44.

  14. Ibid., section 6, p. 87.

  15. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 60.

  16. Tale of a Tub, section 2, p. 45.

  17. Ibid., section 8, pp. 96, 99; the biblical quotation is 2 Timothy 2:21.

  18. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, PW, 1:189. See Philip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of “A Tale of a Tub” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 66. There were precedents for the sexual innuendo in seventeenth-century writers and in the early church fathers; see the notes in Cambridge Works, 1:417, 424.

  19. Tale of a Tub, section 11, pp. 123–24 (the original version is recorded in the textual notes, 298).

  20. Ibid., section 2, pp. 46–47.

  21. Critical Heritage, 74 (I have altered the translation of the French pretend from “pretends” to the more accurate “claims”).

  22. Tale of a Tub, section 4, p. 73.

  23. This point is made by William J. Roscelli, “A Tale of a Tub and the ‘Cavils of the Sour,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 47.

  24. Tale of a Tub, “A Digression concerning Madness,” 104; Horace Satire 1.3.107–8.

  25. Tale of a Tub, “A Digression concerning Madness,” 110.

  26. Orrery, 125–26.

  27. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1971), 135; Rochester, “A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country” (1679), lines 114–15, in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 107.

  28. Tale of a Tub, “A Digression concerning Madness,” 109.

  29. John Dunton, Some Account of My Conversation in Ireland (1699), in The Dublin Scuffle, ed. Andrew Carpenter (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 242–43. On public flogging, see Olsen, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, 219.

  30. Denis Donoghue, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 7. Robert Mahony has an acute discussion of “I saw a woman flayed” in “Certainty and Irony in Swift: Faith and the Indeterminate,” in Swift as Priest and Satirist, ed. Todd C. Parker (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 46–47.

  31. Tale of a Tub, “Introduction,” 40.

  32. Ibid., “A Digression concerning Madness,” 108.

  33. Claude Rawson, “The Character of Swift’s Satire: Reflections on Swift, Johnson, and Human Restlessness,” in The Character of Swift’s Satire: A Revised Focus, ed. Rawson (London: Associated University Presses, 1983), 71.

  34. Tale of a Tub, section 6, p. 87; I borrow the term psychopathology from John Traugott, “A Tale of a Tub,” in Rawson, The Character of Swift’s Satire, 100.

  35. Tale of a Tub, “A Digression concerning Madness,” 111. See Michael DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974), ch. 1.

  36. Journal, 1:122 (Dec. 13, 1710).

  37. Tale of a Tub, section 10, p. 118.

  38. Examiner 29, PW, 3:92; see Phillip Harth, “Recent Religious History and A Tale of a Tub,” Swift Studies 14 (1999): 34–36.

  39. Defoe, The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (London, 1705), p. 62. On the ministry, Defoe said, “It was my disaster first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart from, the honour of that sacred employ” (Review, Oct. 22, 1709).

  40. 2 Corinthians 12:7; Tale of a Tub, “A Digression concerning Madness,” 102; William Wotton, A Defense of the Reflections . . . with Observations upon “The Tale of a Tub” (1705), Critical Heritage, 45.

  41. Francis Atterbury to John Trelawney, bishop of Exeter, July 1, 1704, Critical Heritage, 36.

  42. An Apology, PW, 1:2; The Author upon Himself, lines 11–12, Poems, 1:194. The attacks on the Tale are surveyed by Roger D. Lund, “A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s Apology, and the Trammels of Christian Wit,” in Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 87–109.

  43. Swift to Benjamin Tooke, June 29, 1710, Corr., 1:282; the question is thoroughly surveyed by Marcus Walsh in Cambridge Works 1:xli–xlvi, concluding that it’s unlikely that much by Thomas Swift survived in the final version.

  44. Thoughts on Various Subjects, 4:249.

  CHAPTER 9. SWIFT AND GOD

  1. [Jonathan Smedley], An Hue and Cry after the Examiner. Dr. S——t (1727), 15; anonymous, A Letter to Dean Swift (1719), quoted in PW, 9:xiii.

  2. Delany, 30–31.

  3. George Monck-Berkeley, Literary Relics (London, 1789), xxvii; Lyon, 31.

  4. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1:444 (July 21, 1763); Further Thoughts on Religion, PW, 9:264; C. S. Lewis, “Addison,” in Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. James L. Clifford (New York: Oxford Galaxy Books, 1959), 148.

  5. Thoughts on Religion, PW, 9:261–62. Rawson has some penetrating comments on this question in Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), 5–10.

  6. Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (New York: Anchor, 1973), 101; Dirk F. Passmann and Heinz J. Vienken, The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift: A Bio-Bibliographical Handbook, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), 2:1382; Blaise Pascal, Pensées, no. 197 (Brunschvicg numeration). Émile Pons was unable to find definite echoes of Pascal in Swift’s writings, and thought that occasional similarities of thinking were due to both of them having read the same authors: “Swift et Pascal,” Les langues modernes 45 (1951): 135–52.

  7. W. E. H. Lecky, The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland (London: Longmans Green, 1871), 21; The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 1:180; Voltaire, Candide, trans. John Butt (London: Penguin, 1947), ch. 30, p. 141.

  8. A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders, PW, 9:70, 66.

  9. Ibid., 9:77; Boswell, Life of Johnson, 5:88 (the Hebrides tour).

  10. Gulliver’s Travels, book 4, ch. 5, p. 246.

  11. Quoted in T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History (Lanham, Md.: Roberts Rinehart, 2001), 177.

  12. Concerning That Universal Hatred Which Prevails against the Clergy, PW, 13:123; marginalia to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Life and Reign of Henry VIII (1649), PW, 5:248–51.

  13. Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1:241; Some Arguments against Enlarging the Power of Bishops, 9:56; Thoughts on Religion, 9:263.

  14. Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 6, p. 131; book 1, ch. 4, pp. 49–50. Swift’s practice with eggs is mentioned by Arnold in “Those Who Seek to Obtain My Estate,” 26.

  15. Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, lines 293–96 (targeting Thomas Woolston), 2:564; Pat Rogers explains “God’s in Gloucester” in “Swift and the Reanimation of Cliché,” in Rawson, The Character of Swift’s Satire, 220.

  16. The context is fully explained by Frank Ellis, “An Argument against Abolishing Christianity as an Argument against Abolishing the Test Act,” in Reading Swift, 2:127–39; and by Ian Higgins, “An Argument against Abolishing Christianity and Its Contexts,” in Reading Swift, 5:203–23.

  17. An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 2:35, 27, 37–38.

  18. Orrery, 146; Sir Walter Scott, ed., The Works of Jonathan Swift (Edinburgh, 1814), 8:183.

  CHAPTER 10. FIRST FRUITS

  1. Proverbs 3:9.

  2. See Trevelyan, 1:47–48; Landa, 53.

  3. Quoted by Landa, 58; on the negotiations, too complicated to describe here, see Landa, 58–66; and Ehrenpreis, 2:323–26.

  4. J. H. Plumb, in The Growth of Political Stability in
England, 1675–1725 (London: Penguin, 1967), 112, says that Queen Anne attended cabinet meetings more frequently than any other British monarch.

  5. Quoted by Holmes, Marlborough, 7.

  6. Sir John Clerk of Penicuick, quoted by ibid., 353.

  7. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 55.

  8. Gulliver’s Travels, book 4, ch. 6, p. 257.

  9. Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature,” 131; Plumb, 1:55–56, 59; Trevelyan, 3:71.

  10. History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne’s Reign, PW, 7:5–6.

  11. Macaulay, 1:197; Johnson, Life of Dryden, in Lives, 1:359, 399.

  12. Tale of a Tub, Dedication, 15.

  13. Ibid., “An Apology,” 1; see Robert Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 168–70, 199–200.

  14. Intelligencer 5, PW, 12:40; on the incompatibility of Somers’s principles with Swift’s, see Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 122–28.

  15. On Swift’s financial straits, see Ehrenpreis, 2:142.

  16. On ecclesiastical jockeying during this period, see ibid., 2:152–65.

  17. Quoted by ibid., 2:178.

  18. Delany, 144; Virgil Eclogue 9.28.

  19. Lyon, 10.

  20. Thoughts on Various Subjects, quoting Ovid Metamorphoses 6.136, 1:244.

  21. Verses Said to be Written on the Union, lines 1–4, Poems, 1:96; Trevelyan, 1:175.

  22. The Story of the Injured Lady, PW, 9:3–4.

  23. See Rick G. Canning, “‘Ignorant, Illiterate Creatures’: Gender and Colonial Justification in Swift’s Injured Lady and The Answer to the Injured Lady,” ELH 64 (1997): 77–97.

  24. A Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test, 2:116.

  CHAPTER 11. THE WAR AND THE WHIGS

  1. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuarts (London: Fontana/Collins, 1970), 146.

  2. Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 29.

  3. Macaulay, 1:453.

  4. History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne’s Reign, 7:8.

  5. Correlli Barnett, The First Churchill: Marlborough, Soldier and Statesman (New York: Putnam, 1974), 168; Holmes, Marlborough, 343.

  6. Trevelyan, 1:363–64.

  7. Ibid., 1:391.

  8. Ibiid., 1:395–96.

  9. Winton, Captain Steele, 73.

  10. The Campaign, in The Works of Joseph Addison, ed. Richard Hurd (London: Bohn, 1854), 1:42, 48, 49–50 (this edition gives no line numbers); casualty figures from Holmes, Marlborough, 296–97.

  11. Holmes, Marlborough, 433–34.

  12. John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (London: Longman, 1999), 334.

  13. Brewer, The Sinews of Power, xi; and Holmes, Marlborough, 441. See also P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967).

  14. Spectator 69.

  15. The Conduct of the Allies, PW, 6:5, 61; and The Public Spirit of the Whigs, PW, 8:47. My attempts to find another origin for “blood and treasure” have consistently turned up sources later than these. On Tory opposition, see Trevelyan, 1:292–93.

  16. Examiner 13, PW, 3:5.

  17. Swift to Pope, Jan. 10, 1721, Corr., 2:360; A Short View of the State of Ireland, PW, 12:11.

  18. Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (New York: Scribner, 1938), 6:652.

  19. King to Swift, Nov. 20, 1708; Swift to King, Apr. 15, 1708; King to Swift, Sept. 7, 1708, Corr., 1:221, 187, 205.

  20. Journal, 1:85 (Nov. 8, 1710); A Description of a City Shower, lines 39–42, 1:138.

  21. Trevelyan, 1:184.

  22. Swift to Halifax, June 13, 1709, Corr., 1:256; Halifax to Swift, Oct. 6, 1709, Corr., 1:265; Scott, 112; Swift’s marginalia to John Macky, Characters of the Court of Britain (1733), PW, 5:258. Craik (1:235n) traced the identity of the “sinecure” of Islip.

  23. Quoted by Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 156.

  24. Details from Backscheider’s Daniel Defoe.

  25. A Letter concerning the Sacramental Test, 2:113; John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874), 3:135n.

  26. Swift to Ambrose Philips, Oct. 20, 1708, Corr., 1:210.

  27. See Michael Treadwell, “Swift, Richard Coleire, and the Origins of Gulliver’s Travels,” Review of English Studies 34, no. 135 (1983): 304–11.

  CHAPTER 12. SWIFT THE LONDONER

  1. Journal, 1:142–43n; and Downie, 166.

  2. Journal, 1:48–49 (Oct. 8–9, 1710).

  3. Olsen, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, 126–27. Ehrenpreis, 2:300–301, gives examples of outlays from Swift’s account books.

  4. Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 3.117–18.

  5. Waller, 1700, 196, 201; Trevelyan, 1:84.

  6. The Conduct of the Allies, 6:53; The Author upon Himself, line 22, 1:194; Hints towards an Essay on Conversation, PW, 4:90. See J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 92, 151–52, and Downie’s critique of the “public sphere” thesis of Jürgen Habermas in “Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere,” in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (London: Blackwell, 2005), 58–79.

  7. T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 169. White’s book imagines the Lilliputians whom Gulliver brought to England living secretly in the grounds of a great estate.

  8. Journal, 2:382 (Oct. 12, 1711); To Mrs. Biddy Floyd, lines 3–12, Poems, 1:118; Ehrenpreis, 2:309.

  9. Swift to Dean Stearne, Apr. 15, 1708, Corr., 1:184; On the Collar of Mrs. Dingley’s Lapdog and Bec’s Birthday, 1726, lines 39–40, Poems, 2:763, 761.

  10. See Le Brocquy, Swift’s Most Valuable Friend, 64–65.

  11. Pilkington, 1:31.

  12. Englishman, no. 46, Jan. 19, 1714, quoted by Winton, Captain Steele, 2. My account of Steele is largely based on Winton’s two volumes; the sequel is Sir Richard Steele, M.P. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).

  13. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Rowland (London: Folio Society, 1980), 37 (Macaulay did not live to write his projected history of this period, but touched on it in many of his essays, from which Rowland assembled this volume); John Dennis, The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar (1720), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939–43), 2:213.

  14. Addison, Tatler 108; Swift to Pope, Nov. 26, 1725, Corr., 2:623; Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, lines 1–4, 2:553; Steele, Spectator 157; Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 4:251.

  15. Swift to Ambrose Philips, July 10, 1708, Corr., 1:198; Delany, 23; Scott, 83, citing a communication from Theophilus Swift; Tale of a Tub, Dedication, 14. Ehrenpreis (2:320) notes the echo of the Tale of a Tub dedication.

  16. Dryden, Baucis and Philemon, Out of the Eighth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), lines 161–62.

  17. The Story of Baucis and Philemon (manuscript version), lines 152, 93–108, Poems, 1:92–94.

  18. Delany, 13–14. In the passage from the poem quoted here, however, the revisions from Swift’s draft are minimal.

  19. Swift to King, Mar. 12, 1708; to Ambrose Philips, Mar. 8, 1709, Corr., 1:245, 239. On Swift’s indifference to the arts, see Ehrenpreis, 2:301; and Joseph McMinn, “Swift and Theatre,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 16 (2001): 35–46; McMinn offers a more comprehensive view in Jonathan Swift and the Arts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010). Swift owned plays by Plautus, Terence, Corneille, Racine, Molière, and Jonson, and probably Shakespeare as well.

  20. Steele, Tatler 249; Sheridan, Intelligencer 13, p. 161.

  21. Hints towards an Essay on Conversation, 4:91.

 
; 22. Addison, Spectator 381; Ford to Swift, July 8, 1736, Corr., 4:329.

  23. Swift, To Mr. Delany, lines 23–24, Poems, 1:215; Tale of a Tub, “Preface,” 26. Arno Löffler discusses the concept of humor in “The Dean and Lady Anne: Humour in Swift’s Market-Hill Poems,” in Reading Swift, 2:113–24; more largely, see Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

  24. Johnson, Life of Swift, 55–56; Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:262 (May 1773); Addison, Spectator 35.

  25. Sheridan, 341.

  26. Ibid., 40–41. Sheridan believed that this happened at Button’s coffeehouse, but Craik (1:172) notes that Button’s wasn’t yet established at that time.

  27. Sheridan, 41.

  28. PW, 4:267.

  29. Journal, 1:219, 240, 242 (Mar. 19, Apr. 11, Apr. 13, 1711).

  30. Predictions for the Year 1708, PW, 2:145.

  31. See George Mayhew, “Swift’s Bickerstaff Hoax as an April Fool’s Joke, Modern Philology 61 (1964): 270–80. On political and religious contexts, see Valerie Rumbold, “Burying the Fanatic Partridge: Swift’s Holy Week Hoax,” in Rawson, Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift, 81–115; also John McTague, “‘There Is No Such Man as Isaack Bickerstaff’: Partridge, Pittis, and Jonathan Swift,” Eighteenth-Century Life 35 (2011): 83–101.

  32. The Accomplishment of the First of Mr. Bickerstaff’s Predictions, Being an Account of the Death of Mr. Partridge, the Almanac Maker, upon the 29th Inst., PW, 2:154–55.

  33. A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, PW, 2:162.

  34. Tatler 1 (Swift himself may possibly have written this passage). On implications of Bickerstaff and Partridge as authors, see Phiddian, Swift’s Parody, ch. 5.

  35. Ehrenpreis, 2:202. The Answer to Bickerstaff is included without explanation by Davis among “Bickerstaff papers not written by Swift” (PW, 2:195–99). I agree with Ehrenpreis that Swift did indeed write it.