by Leo Damrosch
6. On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, 5:229; Johnson, Life of Swift, 42; Bon Mots de Stella, 5:238.
7. Nokes, 165; On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, 5:228–29; To Stella, Who Collected and Transcribed His Poems, lines 87–94, 131–34, Poems, 2:730–31.
8. Ehrenpreis, 2:419.
9. Ibid., 2:661
10. Orrery, 168.
11. On Stella’s Birthday, Written A.D. 1719, Poems, 2:721–22.
12. To Stella, Visiting Me in My Sickness, lines 97–102, 109–16, 2:726–27.
13. Stella’s Birthday, Written A.D. 1721, lines 15–22, Poems, 2:734–35.
14. To Dr. Swift on His Birthday, November 30, 1721, lines 1–4, 9–14, Poems, 2:737. Deane Swift (81) said that Swift gave the original to “a lady of his acquaintance,” presumably his cousin Martha Whiteway, with an assurance that it was “entirely genuine from the hands of Stella, without any sort of correction whatsoever.”
15. Swift to Rev. Thomas Wallis, Feb. 12, 1723, Corr., 2:450. Wallis was vicar of Athboy, seven miles from Laracor.
16. Stella’s Birthday (1725), lines 19–30, 53–54, Poems, 2:757–58 and footnote.
17. Swift to James Stopford, July 20, 1726, Corr., 2:660; To Stella, Who Collected and Transcribed His Poems, lines 9–14, 2:728.
18. On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, 5:228.
19. King to Swift, Aug. 5, 1713, Corr., 1:524; Harold Williams makes the suggestion about the hint, Williams, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 5:238.
20. Thoughts on Various Subjects, PW, 4:247, 252.
21. Thoughts on Various Subjects [a different collection], PW, 1:245; William Blake, The Golden Net.
22. Johnson, Life of Swift, 30, quoting Dr. Samuel Madden; Delany, 36; Deane Swift, 92; Sheridan, 279.
23. Lyon, 19.
24. John Hawkesworth, The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London, 1766), 1:46.
25. Scott, 219–22. Names in brackets clarify Scott’s meaning in a long sequence of “he” and “him.”
26. As told by Lady Suffolk to Horace Walpole: Reminiscences Written by Mr. Horace Walpole, 144.
27. Monck-Berkeley, Literary Relics, xxxvi; Johnston, 80; Mackie L. Jarrell, “‘Jack and the Dane’: Swift Traditions in Ireland,” in Jeffares, Fair Liberty Was All His Cry, 318.
CHAPTER 22. VANESSA IN IRELAND
1. Swift to Vanessa, Aug. 12, 1714, Corr., 2:71–72; Ehrenpreis, 3:92.
2. In Sickness, lines 1–6, 19–22, Poems, 1:203–4.
3. Vanessa, A Rebus, Written by a Lady, lines 1–7, Poems, 2:715–16.
4. Ibid., lines 8–11, and (by Swift) The Answer, lines 21–228, Poems, 2:716–17; Faulkner and others identified the lady as Vanessa. Rogers (706–7) thinks that some allusions at the end of Swift’s poem place it around 1721 or later, but I believe—as does Williams in his edition of the Poems—that the discouraged tone puts it closer to 1714.
5. Swift to Vanessa, Nov. 5, 1714, Corr., 2:93; Ehrenpreis, 3:96; Barnett, Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women, 67; Swift to Knightley Chetwode, May 8, 1731, Corr., 3:391.
6. Both letters, Swift to Vanessa, December 1714, Corr., 2:99–100 (correcting “possibly” to “possible”).
7. Vanessa to Swift, December 1714, Corr., 2:101.
8. Swift to Vanessa, December 1714, Corr., 2:102.
9. Vanessa to Swift, December 1714, Corr., 2:103.
10. Orrery, 158.
11. Ehrenpreis, 3:94, 1056–57; Nokes, 215.
12. Orrery, 159; Deane Swift, 264.
13. Scott, 230–31 (citing “a most obliging correspondent” who knew the gardener when he was an old man).
14. Swift to Vanessa, Dec. 2, 1716, Corr., 2:194; Michael DePorte makes this point in “Riddles, Mysteries, and Lies: Swift and Secrecy,” in Reading Swift, 4:130.
15. Swift to Vanessa, May 12, 1719, Corr., 2:304–5.
16. Sheridan, 291–92.
17. Swift to Vanessa, July 5, 1721, Oct. 15, 1720, Corr., 2:385, 348.
18. A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II: The Letters of Monsieur César de Saussure to His Family, trans. Madame Van Muyden (London: John Murray, 1902), 164; Thomas Brown, Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (London, 1700), 115.
19. Swift to Vanessa, July 5, 1721, Corr., 2:386 (with minor errors in French corrected).
20. Sheridan, 283–84. The suggestion that Swift may be hoping to return to England is made by Sybil Le Brocquy, Cadenus (Dublin: Dolmen, 1962), 86.
21. Swift to Vanessa, July 13, 1720, Corr., 2:337–38; Vanessa to Swift, July 28, 1720, Corr., 2:339.
22. Swift to Vanessa, June 1, 1722, Corr., 2:421. Swift was at Clogher for the installation of his friend Stearne as bishop.
23. Swift to Vanessa, July 13, 1722, Corr., 2:425.
24. Swift to Vanessa, Aug. 4, 1720, Corr., 2:340; Woolley notes that in common speech, “skinage” could mean “skinny,” with examples going back to 1605.
25. Vanessa to Swift, Aug. 1720, Corr., 2:341–42.
26. Vanessa to Swift and Swift to Vanessa, January 1720 [date not certain], Corr., 2:319–20.
27. Swift to Vanessa, Aug. 12, 1720, Corr., 2:343.
28. In identifying these references I have been helped by Le Brocquy, Cadenus, 74–75, as well as by Woolley’s notes. “The strain by the box of books at London” is mentioned in a letter of June 1, 1722, Corr., 2:421.
29. Vanessa to Swift, both letters November or December 1720, Corr., 2:351–52.
30. Ehrenpreis, 3:395.
31. Vanessa to Swift, July 1722, Corr., 2:426.
32. Swift to Vanessa, Feb. 27, 1721, Corr., 2:367; the original little note is in the British Library, Add. 39839.
33. Sheridan, 285.
34. Ibid., 286.
35. Bishop Evans to the archbishop of Canterbury, July 27, 1723. Evans’s phrase about the Tale of a Tub is quoted by Ehrenpreis, 3:390; the rest of the long quotation (not mentioned by Ehrenpreis) comes from Le Brocquy, Cadenus, 43–44. The elisions are Le Brocquy’s.
36. Swift to Bishop Evans, May 22, 1719, June 5, 1721, Corr., 2:306, 381. On the fake obituary, see Ehrenpreis, 3:57.
37. Delany, 84.
38. The complicated evidence is carefully analyzed by Fischer, who emphasizes that no certainties are possible, in “‘Love and Books.’”
39. Delany, 40.
40. To Love, lines 1–10, 21–24, Poems, 2:717–18; Williams quotes Sheridan as confirming that the handwriting was Swift’s.
CHAPTER 23. NATIONAL HERO
1. Swift to Ford, Aug. 29, 1714, Corr., 2:76; Swift to Bolingbroke, Dec. 19, 1719, Corr., 2:316–17 (adapting a phrase from Horace’s Satire 1.4.17–18).
2. Examiner 44, June 7, 1711, PW, 3:170; Ehrenpreis, 2:556–57.
3. These events are lucidly summarized by Holmes in The Making of a Great Power, 274–76; see also Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2011).
4. Plumb, 1:301, 335.
5. Proverbs 23:5; The Run upon the Bankers, lines 21–24, 29–33, Poems, 1:239–40.
6. The Bubble (titled Upon the South Sea Project in Rogers), lines 65–68, Poems, 1:253.
7. On Poetry: A Rapsody, lines 161–62, Poems, 2:645; Defoe, The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (1719), in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), 4:130.
8. Brewer, The Sinews of Power; Pope, imitation of Horace Epistle 1.1.124–25, 132–33.
9. A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, PW, 9:15; see Louis A. Landa, “Swift’s Economic Views and Mercantilism,” in Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature, 13–38.
10. King to Nicolson, Dec. 20, 1712; Nicolson to Archbishop Wake, June 2, 1721; both quoted by Ehrenpreis, 3:115–18; unemployment figure from Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 284.
11. A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, 9:16; Psalm 106:48, 42.
&nb
sp; 12. A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, 9:17, 21; Swift’s original language quoted from the textual notes, PW, 9:369.
13. Ibid., 16; see Downie, 229-30.
14. Orrery, 221; Ehrenpreis, 3:126n.
15. Connolly, Divided Kingdom, 220.
16. Quoted by Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power, 105.
17. Connolly, Divided Kingdom, 210, 224–25.
18. S. J. Connolly, “Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Colony or Ancient Régime?” in The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, ed. D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (London: Routledge, 1996), 26.
19. A Letter from Dr. Swift to Mr. Pope, 9:27. (This long manifesto was probably not actually sent to Pope.)
20. Swift to Robert Cope, June 1, 1723, Corr., 2:459; Delany, 94; Poems, 1:315–19. The details of the journey are traced by McMinn, Jonathan’s Travels, 76–84.
21. Lecky, History of Ireland, 1:149.
22. McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 236; Burke, Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in The Works of Edmund Burke (London: Bohn, 1896), 3:343.
23. See Toby Barnard, The Kingdom of Ireland, 1641–1760 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 51–52; Lecky, History of Ireland, 1:160–69; and Robert Kee, Ireland: A History (London: Abacus, 2003), 54–55.
24. Swift to Dean Brandreth, June 30, 1732, Corr., 3:493–94 (recalling the 1723 trip).
25. Gulliver’s Travels, book 3, ch. 4, pp. 175–76.
26. Swift to Ford, July 22, 1722, Corr., 2:427.
27. Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1941), 14.
28. Sir Richard Cox, quoted by McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 167; Joshua 9:23; Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland, 9:200.
29. Gulliver’s Travels, book 3, ch. 7, p. 196; see Ehrenpreis, 3:207–8. Swift sometimes wrote “draper” rather than “drapier,” for instance, in a letter to Ford, Apr. 2, 1724, Corr., 2:494.
30. King to Col. Flower, Apr. 8, 1721, quoted by Ferguson, 64; John 6:9.
31. Bishop Goodwin to Archbishop Wake, quoted by Landa, 172; Swift to King, Jan. 6, 1709, Corr., 1:226.
32. See A. Goodwin, “Wood’s Halfpence,” English Historical Review 51 (1936): 653.
33. Ehrenpreis, 3:214; To the Whole People of Ireland, PW, 10:67–68; To the Shopkeepers, 7.
34. To the Shopkeepers, 11; Wood’s patent is quoted by Ferguson, 99.
35. Swift to Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, Aug. 28, 1731, Corr., 3:428; see McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 114.
36. To the Whole People of Ireland, 10:54; see Ferguson, 107.
37. To the Whole People of Ireland, 10:62–63.
38. Swift, marginalia to Characters of the Court of Britain (1733), PW, 5:258 (he wrote “slobber,” but undoubtedly meant “slobberer”); Ferguson, 115.
39. Sheridan, 211–13.
40. Ibid. Deane Swift (190–91) has a somewhat different version of the story, which according to Sheridan is full of errors.
41. Ehrenpreis, 3:280.
42. See Ferguson, 124; and Ehrenpreis, 3:275–76.
43. Swift to Worrall, Aug. 31, 1725, Corr., 2:593.
44. Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, lines 347–54, 2:566–67.
45. It is possible that Grattan didn’t actually speak those words in 1782, but added them later in an edition of his speeches that was published after his death: Gerard O’Brien, “The Grattan Mystique,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1 (1986): 191–94. “Swift was on the wrong side”: Samuel Rogers, Recollections, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1859), 95.
46. Thomas Tickell, quoted in PW, 10:xx; the text is 1 Samuel 14:45.
47. King to Edward Southwell, June 9, 1724, quoted by Goodwin, “Wood’s Halfpence,” 674; Boulter to the Duke of Newcastle, Jan. 19, 1925, quoted by Ehrenpreis, 3:259; To the Whole People of Ireland, 10:61; on the birthday celebrations, see Clive T. Probyn, “Jonathan Swift at the Sign of the Drapier,” in Reading Swift, 3:226.
48. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power, 119; McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 38.
49. Ferguson, 138.
50. John Browne to Swift, Apr. 4, 1728, Corr., 3:175–76; see PW, 10:210; and Probyn, “Jonathan Swift at the Sign of the Drapier,” 236.
51. Delany, 17; Carteret to Swift, Mar. 6, 1735; John Barber to Swift, Aug. 6, 1733, Corr., 4:64, 3:686.
52. To Viscount Molesworth, PW, 10:89; William Butler Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962), 348.
CHAPTER 24. THE ASTONISHING TRAVELS
1. Swift to Ford, Apr. 15, 1721, Corr., 2:372.
2. Sir Thomas Herbert, A Relation of Some Years Travaille, through Divers Parts of Asia and Africke (London, 1634), 181, 204. Swift’s inscription is in the Harvard University copy, f HEW 6.11.2. On Hakluyt and Purchas, see Real, Securing Swift, 114–15.
3. “Character of Jonathan Swift,” European Magazine (1790), in Critical Heritage, 253; Mar. 4, 1737, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 4:59; Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York: Heritage, 1941), “How This Book Came to Be,” xiii.
4. Tatler 178.
5. Gulliver’s Travels, book 4, ch. 12, p. 291; see Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).
6. Gulliver’s Travels, book 1, ch. 1, p. 19.
7. Orrery, 127, and letter to Orrery from his wife, 391. Brean Hammond assembles these biographical clues in Jonathan Swift, 155.
8. Scott, 306; Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 1, pp. 94, 90; book 2, ch. 6, p. 127; book 3, ch. 2, p. 162; Arbuthnot to Swift, Nov. 5, 1726, Corr., 3:44.
9. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:319 (Mar. 24, 1775).
10. Gulliver’s Travels, book 1, ch. 1, p. 21.
11. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1; “Robinson Crusoe’s Preface,” in Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in Romances and Narratives of Daniel Defoe, ed. George A. Aitken (London: Dent, 1895), 3:xi.
12. “The Publisher to the Reader,” PW, 11:9; Arbuthnot to Swift, Nov. 15, 1726; Swift to Pope, Nov. 17, 1726, Corr., 3:45, 56.
13. See John Robert Moore, “The Geography of Gulliver’s Travels,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 40 (1941): 214–28; and Frederick Bracher, “The Maps in Gulliver’s Travels,” Huntington Library Quarterly 8 (1944): 59–74.
14. Gulliver’s Travels, book 1, ch. 2, pp. 34–35.
15. See J. Paul Hunter, Gulliver’s Travels and the Novel,” in The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Frederik N. Smith (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 67–68.
16. Gulliver’s Travels, book 1, ch. 2, 6, pp. 35, 57.
17. Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung, 170.
18. Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 5, p. 120.
19. Ibid., book 1, ch. 2, p. 29.
20. Ibid., book 1, ch. 1, pp. 27–28; Tale of a Tub, “Introduction,” 42; Stephen, Swift, 38.
21. Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 5, p. 119; Mary Gulliver to Captain Lemuel Gulliver, lines 87–88, Minor Poems, vol. 6 in the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Poems, 278–79; Nora F. Crow, “Swift in Love,” in Reading Swift, 4:62.
22. Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 1, pp. 91–92.
23. Ibid., book 2, ch. 1, p. 92.
24. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), 213; Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 4, p. 113.
25. Gulliver’s Travels, book 2, ch. 2, p. 95.
26. Ibid., book 3, ch. 10, p. 208; John Hawkesworth, Notes on Gulliver’s Travels (1755), in Critical Heritage, 153.
27. M. Sarah Smedman describes expurgated editions in “Like Me, Like Me Not: Gulliver’s Travels as Children’s Book,” in Smith, The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels, 83–89; Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Padraic Colum, illus. Willy Pogany (London: Harrap, 1919), unpaginated introduction.
28. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Li
fe and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Holt, 1992), 83.
29. Swift to Pope, Sept. 29, 1725, Corr., 2:606; Pope, Dunciad, 2.147.
30. Gulliver’s Travels, book 1, ch. 3, p. 39, and textual note, p. 303.
31. The analogy with the South Sea Bubble has been largely accepted ever since Arthur E. Case proposed it in Four Essays on Gulliver’s Travels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 88–89. There is a possible association as well with Wood’s halfpence: J. A. Downie, “Political Characterization in Gulliver’s Travels,” Yearbook of English Studies 7 (1977): 116–17.
32. Gulliver’s Travels, book 3, ch. 3, p. 172, and textual notes, pp. 309–10.
33. This interpretation, which has won general acceptance, was likewise proposed by Case, Four Essays, 83–84.
34. Gulliver’s Travels, book 3, ch. 5, pp. 180, 182.
35. Gay and Pope to Swift, Nov. 7, 1726; Pope to Swift, Nov. 16, 1726, Corr., 3:47, 52.
36. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose, 209.
37. J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1928), 154.
38. Gulliver’s Travels, book 4, ch. 10, pp. 276–77.
39. Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1:244 (published 1711, written 1706). A. D. Nuttall has valuable remarks on Stoicism in “Gulliver among the Horses,” Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988): 51–67.
40. Gulliver’s Travels, book 4, ch. 11, p. 283.
41. Ibid., book 4, ch. 8, pp. 266–67; On the Death of Mrs. Johnson, 5:227; Journal, 2:407 (Nov. 8, 1711).
42. Gulliver’s Travels, book 4, ch. 7, pp. 260–62; Terence Brown, notes to James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Brown (London: Penguin, 1967), 298n.
43. Orrery, 216; Thackeray, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, 406.
44. Wesley, The Doctrine of Original Sin, 5:512; see Roland M. Frye, “Swift’s Yahoo and the Christian Symbols for Sin,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954): 201–17.
45. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), ch. 2, p. 33.
46. Gulliver’s Travels, book 4, ch. 10, p. 282. Interpretations in which Gulliver is mad go back to Samuel H. Monk’s article “The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver,” Sewanee Review (1955): 48–71, dubbed the “soft school” by James L. Clifford in “Gulliver’s Fourth Voyage: ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Schools of Interpretation,” in Swift Springs of Sense: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Larry S. Champion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), 33–49. Later variations run to the dozens if not hundreds.