by Leo Damrosch
Vanessa could never stop trying to bind the joy, even while her heart was breaking and her health was giving out.
THE END
The reason Vanessa was thin was that susceptibility to tuberculosis ran in her family. Ginkel, the youngest sibling, had died in 1710, and in 1721 it was Molly’s turn. Swift was fond of Molly, and dashed off a note to Vanessa on a small scrap of paper: “I am surprised and grieved beyond what I can express. I read your letter twice before I knew what it meant, nor can I yet well believe my eyes. Is that poor good creature dead. . . . I was wholly unprepared against so sudden an event, and pity you most of all creatures at present.”32
Two years later Vanessa herself was about to die of the same disease, and if the younger Sheridan is right, there was a bitter confrontation with Swift at that time. Sheridan had heard, presumably from his father, that Vanessa was tortured by suspicions that Swift had married Stella, and decided to put an end to the suspense by writing directly to Stella to ask if it was true. According to Sheridan, Stella replied that it was indeed true, and sent Vanessa’s letter on to Swift, “after which [Stella] immediately went out of town without seeing him or coming to any explanation, and retired in great resentment to Mr. Ford’s country seat at Wood Park.” Infuriated, Swift rode straight to Celbridge. “He entered the apartment where the unhappy lady was, mute, but with a countenance that spoke the highest resentment. She trembling asked him, would he not sit down? No—he then flung a paper on the table, and immediately returned to his horse. When, on the abatement of her consternation, she had strength to open the paper, she found it contained nothing but her own note to Mrs. Johnson. Despair at once seized her, as if it she had seen her death warrant; and such indeed it proved to be.”33 On June 2, 1723, Vanessa was dead.
Sheridan was reporting all of this fully sixty years after the event, and without saying exactly when it supposedly occurred. As for Stella’s side of the story, that could well have been passed on by Charles Ford. But if the confrontation at Celbridge did happen, presumably no one was present except Vanessa and Swift, and if either of them ever described it, we don’t know how or to whom.
Swift left immediately—maybe even the very next day—on a four-month journey into the west of Ireland, while Stella did indeed make a stay of several months with Ford. Strikingly, Ford was the only member of their circle who was close to Vanessa as well as Stella, since he had been a frequent visitor to the Vanhomrighs in London. What he thought about the whole affair, nobody knows. As for Swift’s departure, it’s usual to say that he just wanted to escape gossip, but a stronger motive must have been reluctance to face Stella. And if Molly’s death had grieved him more than he could express, what did he feel at Vanessa’s?
As executors of her will, Vanessa chose George Berkeley, the philosopher and future bishop, and a young lawyer named Robert Marshall. Each of them got a generous bequest of ₤500, and Vanessa clearly expected them to publish her entire correspondence with Swift. As soon as his friends became aware of this possibility, however, they mobilized energetically to block it. The younger Sheridan heard that his father “applied so effectively to the executors that the printed copy was canceled, but the originals still remained in their hands.”34 As we have seen, many of the originals were almost certainly destroyed by them.
Rumors were nevertheless current. Six weeks after Vanessa’s death, when Swift was far away, Bishop Evans of Meath, his superior at Laracor, wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury:
I think it not improper for me to acquaint your Grace with a passage lately happened here wherein Jonathan Swift is concerned. A young woman, Mrs. Van Omrig (a pretended vain wit) and the Dean had great friendship, many letters and papers passed betwixt them (the subject I know nothing of); they give out there was a marriage promise between them, but this I can’t affirm. . . . In April last, she discovered the Dean was married to Mrs. Johnson (a natural daughter of Sir W. Temple, a very good woman) upon which she expressed great indignation, making a new will and leaving all to Dr. Berkeley . . . and to one Mr. Marshall, who was charged by her (on her deathbed) to print all the letters and papers which had passed between the Dean and herself. . . . The Archbishop of Dublin and the whole Irish posse have (I fear) prevailed with Mr. Marshall (the lady’s executor) not to print the papers, etc., as she desired, lest one of their own dear joys [an Irish term for “darlings”] should be trampled on by the Philistines.
The bishop also commented that Vanessa apparently died without religious belief, and that when the local minister offered to attend her at the end, she not only declined, but quoted “a scrap out of the Tale of a Tub.”35
Evans hated Swift, who sent a rude reply when the bishop demanded that he be present at the annual “visitation” of his parish: “Your Lordship will please to remember in the midst of your resentments that you are to speak to a clergyman, and not to a footman.” A couple of years later Swift was still firing off insults: “I am only sorry that you, who are of a country [Wales] famed for good nature, have found a way to unite the hasty passion of your own countrymen with the long, sedate resentment of a Spaniard.” Soon after that, a slanderous fake obituary of Evans appeared in a London paper. It may well have been by Swift, and Evans was certain that it was.36
But however much Evans may have enjoyed Swift’s predicament, his proper concern was to alert the head of the Church to an incipient scandal. In the process, interestingly, he confirmed Stella’s blameless reputation in Ireland. It’s remarkable how much Evans knew. Presumably the executors had been talking to him.
At this point Berkeley probably had no appetite for a confrontation with his Dublin colleagues, and as for young Marshall, he was in no position to jeopardize his career by alienating powerful enemies. The Swift-Vanessa letters remained unpublished for nearly half a century. In 1767, a selection was included in a multivolume edition of Swift’s works, but they were not published in full until 1921. Meanwhile, many of them had vanished, as we know because Vanessa scrupulously numbered the whole sequence, which now has many gaps. Under pressure from Swift’s friends, the executors clearly removed the letters they thought most damaging to him, though they left enough to confirm that Vanessa was an honorable and sincere person and that she spent an entire decade trapped in an agonizing situation. Berkeley did tell Delany that the letters contained “nothing which would either do honour to her character or bring the least reflection upon Cadenus,” but he might well say that to divert suspicion. At that time he had no reason to believe that the letters would ever see the light of day.37
So despite Vanessa’s wishes, the letters were not made public—but Cadenus and Vanessa was, in 1726. Marshall probably allowed people to read the manuscript, some of them made copies, and those were given to several printers. Soon after the poem appeared in Dublin there were London editions too, with variations that suggest that more than one transcript was being used. Naturally, the poem created a sensation, and fifteen separate editions came out within a year. Swift unquestionably didn’t want the poem to be published, did his best to ignore it, and published it himself much later only when it was irretrievably in the public domain.38
By this time Stella seems to have been reconciled with Swift, and Delany heard her make a crisp retort when a tactless visitor said that Vanessa must have been “an extraordinary woman, that could inspire the Dean to write to finely upon her.” Stella smiled and replied that she thought that wasn’t quite clear, “for it was well known the Dean could write finely upon a broomstick.”39
Even if we had all the missing letters between Vanessa and Swift, they would give only a limited perspective on a relationship that was conducted not just on paper but in person. And even so far as documents go, what others may have been lost or destroyed? Among the papers in Vanessa’s desk was a poem entitled To Love that begins like this:
In all I wish, how happy should I be,
Thou grand deluder, were it not for thee.
So weak thou art, that fools thy pow’r despise,
<
br /> And yet so strong, thou triumph’st o’er the wise.
Thy traps are laid with such peculiar art
They catch the cautious, let the rash depart.
Most nets are filled by want of thought and care,
But too much thinking brings us to thy snare;
Where held by thee, in slavery we stay,
And throw the pleasing part of life away.
The poem goes on to blame “discretion”—which Swift was constantly urging—as doing more damage than impulsiveness ever could.
But the poor nymph who feels her vitals burn,
And from her shepherd can find no return,
Laments and rages at the pow’rs divine,
When, curs’d Discretion, all the fault was thine.
Whether Vanessa or someone else wrote these lines, she certainly preserved them. And amazingly—unmentioned by all of Swift’s biographers—the copy in her desk was in Swift’s handwriting.40 The poetic style is not his, but it could be Vanessa’s, or this may have been a poem by someone else that struck her as expressing her own feelings. We will never know what she and Swift said to each other about it, but it does provide another glimpse into a woundingly troubled relationship.
CHAPTER 23
National Hero
SOUTH SE A BUBBLE
Swift and Vanessa both arrived in Dublin in 1714, and at that time he wrote to Charles Ford, “I hope I shall keep my resolution of never meddling with Irish politics.” For six years he did keep clear of politics, motivated mainly by the surveillance he was under from the authorities. In 1719 he wrote bleakly to Bolingbroke,
If you will recollect that I am towards six years older than when I saw you last, and twenty years duller, you will not wonder to find me abound in empty speculations; I can now express in a hundred words what would formerly have cost me ten. . . . I have gone the round of all my stories three or four times with the younger people, and begin them again. I give hints how significant a person I have been, and nobody believes me; I pretend to pity them, but am inwardly angry. . . . Nothing has convinced me so much that I am of a little subaltern spirit, inopis atque pusilli animi [of weak and insignificant spirit], as to reflect how I am forced into the most trifling amusements, to divert the vexation of former thoughts and present objects.”1
The event that finally stimulated Swift to resume publication was a financial catastrophe in 1720, known as the South Sea Bubble. Nine years previously the Oxford-Bolingbroke ministry, with excellent intentions, had established the South Sea Company to attract investment in Latin American trade. The goal was to try to reduce the huge national debt caused by the war, by persuading investors who had purchased safe government annuities to exchange them for stock in the company.
In the beginning this seemed like a safe and potentially lucrative option, backed as it was by the sponsorship of the government. Swift promoted it wholeheartedly in the Examiner, praising Oxford as a “great person whose thoughts are perpetually employed, and ever with success, on the good of his country.” He invested in South Sea stock himself, in partnership with Stella and Rebecca, putting in £400 of his own and borrowing another £100 to invest.2
For a number of years the value of South Sea shares appreciated re spectably, though not at the spectacular rate that had been promised. In 1720, however, the company’s directors made a fatal gamble. They bought outright half of the national debt, intending to remain profitable by encouraging increased speculation in their stock. For a few months the scheme worked. Between January and August the price of a share rocketed from ₤100 to nearly ₤1,000, and canny investors who got out at that point realized enormous gains. The chancellor of the exchequer doubled his investment in two months, and the Duchess of Marlborough sold out after making ₤100,000, with what her descendant Winston Churchill calls “her almost repellent common sense.”3
The frenzy couldn’t last, and in September the crash came. Within weeks the stock’s value was back down to ₤100, and families all over Britain were ruined (Swift and Pope had both fortunately gotten out in time). There was a storm of outrage, and Edward Harley, the government auditor and brother of the Earl of Oxford, said that investors had been victimized by “a machine of paper credit supported by imagination.” In Parliament it was suggested that the directors should be treated the way parricides were in ancient Rome—tied up in sacks and thrown into the Thames. To limit the damage, Walpole came up with a government bailout. The Bank of England bought part of the now-shattered South Sea Company, paying its investors interest that had to be funded by current taxation.4
This disaster, one of the first to reveal that paper wealth could simply vanish, inspired Swift to mordant verse. According to the book of Proverbs, reputedly written by King Solomon, “riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle to heaven,” and Swift gleefully extended the metaphor:
Riches, the wisest monarch sings,
Make pinions for themselves to fly;
They fly like bats on parchment wings,
And geese their silver plumes supply.
Swift always enjoyed giving abstractions literal embodiment; the plumes were the quill pens used for contracts recorded on parchment. Similarly, he turned wax seals on documents into witches’ effigies:
Conceive the works of midnight hags,
Tormenting fools behind their backs:
Thus bankers o’er their bills and bags
Sit squeezing images of wax.5
A couple of months later Swift followed up with a long poem called The Bubble, in which he derided the gullible investors as well as the cynical financiers who exploited them.
As fishes on each other prey
The great ones swallowing up the small,
So fares it in the Southern Sea,
But whale directors eat up all.6
Years later Swift would still be suggesting that the stockbrokers who promoted the South Sea Company were no better than thieves:
A public, or a private robber;
A statesman, or a South Sea jobber.
Even apologists for the stock market despised middlemen for preying on investors. Defoe was a warm admirer of the market, but he said that if stockjobbers ever told the truth, they would have to admit that “’tis a complete system of knavery; that ’tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick, cheat, wheedle, forgeries, falsehoods, and all sorts of delusions.” He said that a year before the bubble. By 1755 Johnson was defining “stock-jobber” in his Dictionary as “a low wretch who gets money buying and selling shares in the funds.”7
The Tory opposition saw the bubble not just as a passing episode, but as the inevitable consequence of financial speculation. Britain was becoming a world power, however, on the strength of its financial revolution—the wealth that provided “the sinews of power,” in a historian’s phrase—and there was no turning back. Some years later, Pope wrote bitterly,
Alike in nothing but one lust of gold,
Just half the land would buy, and half be sold. . . .
While with the silent growth of ten per cent
In dirt and darkness hundreds stink content.8
Neither Pope nor Swift thought that investment was immoral, but they did believe, with good reason, that a promised return of 10 percent was too good to be true.
“BURN EVERYTHING ENGLISH BUT THEIR COAL”
Swift took a keen interest in economics, and he was convinced that Ireland’s position was almost uniquely vulnerable. According to the standard economic theory, known as mercantilism, nations got rich by importing cheap raw materials and selling expensive manufactured goods. The function of a colony, whether Jamaica or Massachusetts, was therefore to provide raw materials but not to compete in manufacturing. In fact if not in name, Ireland was just such a colony.
The British Parliament passed a protectionist Woolen Act in 1699, requiring Ireland to sell its wool exclusively to England, and forbidding the export of cloth to England or anywhere else. The resul
ting British monopoly of Irish wool brought down its price. Irish landowners, needing to rebuild their fallen income, then began to replace food crops with grass on which sheep could graze. “The politic gentlemen of Ireland,” Swift lamented, “have depopulated vast tracts of the best land for the feeding of sheep.” The domino effect continued to raise the cost of food in Ireland, leading to a “prodigious dearness of corn” (as all kinds of grain were called). Meanwhile, the Irish gentry spent freely on English manufactured goods, which caused a further wealth transfer from Ireland to England.9
In 1712 Archbishop King talked to a landlord who had trouble collecting rent from his hundred tenants, got rid of them all, and made more money from a single man who used the land for grazing. King told a colleague, Bishop William Nicolson, “I asked [the landlord] what came of the hundred families he turned off it. He answered that he did not know.” That was damaging enough, but worse was to follow, for the entire decade of the 1720s brought a continuous economic depression. During 1720–21, seven thousand people were thrown out of work in Dublin, and in the countryside laborers were beginning to starve. Bishop Nicolson gave a striking example of rural desperation. While he was traveling in Ulster—a relatively prosperous region—one of his coach horses died in an accident. “My servants were surrounded with fifty or sixty of the neighbouring cottagers, who brought axes and cleavers and immediately divided the carcass, every man carrying home his proper dividend for food to their respective families.”10
It was in this context that Swift broke his long silence as a writer, in a 1720 pamphlet entitled A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, in Clothes and Furniture of Houses, etc., Utterly Renouncing Everything Wearable That Comes from England. The pamphlet was anonymous. The title page identifies it as “printed and sold by E. Waters, in Essex Street, at the corner of Sycamore Alley.” Edward Waters, not one of Dublin’s more distinguished printers, had to know he was sticking his neck out by taking responsibility for this piece, and events would show how true that was.