Any mention of Swift as prose writer is likely to call to mind a small handful of canonical works that confirm his status as one of the greatest satirists in the English language. But these texts constitute only a tiny portion of Swift’s total prose output, which was voluminous, generically and thematically varied and reflective of both learned and popular traditions. This edition is designed to display the full range of these writings. The deliberate omission of Gulliver’s Travels and A Tale of a Tub— two pieces readily available elsewhere—has allowed for the inclusion of many of Swift’s less familiar works, along with several texts that have not appeared before in popular editions. The selections in this edition are intended to reveal both the towering figure who lent his name to an age, becoming one of the most eminent authors in the Great Literary Tradition, and the gadfly who flitted along the margins of respectable literary (and political) society, engaged in activities that alternated between falling under the radar screen and falling foul of established canonical institutions. Swift may be numbered among a group of great thinkers and writers—Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, George Orwell—who, while quite capable of producing lengthy, even magisterial works that have become anointed as ‘classics’, spent much of their careers in the trenches (as it were), writing political pamphlets and journalistic essays in crisis situations that demanded quick-witted responses (often laced with satire) rather than lengthy artistic contemplation. It is therefore not coincidental that Swift was as much associated with printers of cheap ephemera (John Waters, Sarah Harding) as with publishers of artful editions designed for posterity (George Faulkner).
For Swift, prose writing was not simply an exercise in creative expression, nor was it only an activity periodically indulged in for purposes of instruction, amusement or profit. It was one of his most important ways of being and acting in the world, of positioning himself in relation to the people, events and material conditions of his life. This intimate bond between author and work was tacitly acknowledged by Swift himself in his statement in A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately entered into Holy Orders that reading a book is largely meaningless ‘without entering into the Genius and Spirit of the Author’ (p. 122) and in his promise made in the Journal to Stella, ‘I’ll come again to-night in a fine clean sheet of paper’ ( JS 1: 154). At the same time, one should avoid a simplistic equation of the author and his work that ignores the mediating effects of language and the ways in which even explicitly autobiographical pieces rely on rhetorical and fictional techniques to convey their picture of ‘truth’. Swift’s regular use of complex irony, intricate wordplay and fictive speakers undermines any simple, clear-cut interpretation of his writings and helps explain the often widely divergent meanings that readers have derived from them.
Swift’s prose works exemplify all the different ways in which written texts can intersect with the world. History functions in these works, not as an inert background or external set of references, but as an integral part of both their form and content. With few exceptions, Swift’s texts dramatize the social and public function of writing. Even an ostensibly private work such as the Journal to Stella, filled with verbal intimacies meant to be unintelligible to an outside reader, insists upon its status as an important chronicle of events. Thus Swift assures his correspondent, Esther Johnson, that a particular letter of his will be ‘a good history’ to show her the significant political changes occurring in England at the time ( JS 2: 436). Swift’s often-cited advocacy of ‘Proper Words in proper Places’ in Letter to a Young Gentleman has less to do with a narrowly defined stylistic or generic decorum than with his acute sense of language’s social context, and of the need to use words in a manner appropriate to the specific setting and occasion at hand. The ‘Places’ he refers to include all those social spaces—the marketplace, the coffee house, the church, for example—where words are publicly exchanged and communal meanings are produced. In writing separate letters to distinct groups in Irish society as the Drapier, Swift conveyed his awareness that the propriety of his own words was to be measured, not against some abstract norm of stylistic or rhetorical correctness, but according to their effectiveness in reaching real-life audiences made up of particular classes and economic interests.
As writings that tend to call attention to their status as occasional works tied to specific contemporary events, Swift’s prose pieces encourage us to rethink the nature and meaning of a ‘literary classic’, which has traditionally been associated with ideas of aesthetic transcendence and universality. The reason his works have endured for almost three centuries and remain relevant to us today is not because they make sweepingly general statements about ‘the nature of man’ but because, in their very concern for showing individual men (and women) acting within concretely defined sets of circumstances, they are able to present situations that everyone living in a world of power and privation must in some way contend with. The society of Swift’s day was, after all, hardly the last or the only one to be faced with the recalcitrant fact that, in Gulliver’s words, ‘Poor Nations are Hungry, and rich Nations are proud; and Pride and Hunger will ever be at Variance’ (PW 11: 246). It is stark realities such as these that inhabit much of Swift’s (especially later) prose, presented not as eternal truths but in all the blood and guts of their particularity. Edward Said has commented that ‘too many claims are made for Swift as a moralist and thinker who peddled one or another final view of human nature’ and suggests instead the idea of Swift as ‘a kind of local activist, a columnist, a pamphleteer, a caricaturist’.1 Though wrong to deny the clear evidence of larger ideological commitments and coherencies in Swift, Said offers a useful corrective to conventional views of Swift as a producer of thoughts and writings that lend themselves to general labels (‘Christian humanist’, ‘Augustan’, etc.). His view allows us to understand Swift as an organic as well as a traditional intellectual—as someone who helped formulate the new ideas of an emerging class as well as someone who defended the status quo—and to appreciate his role as a fighter against what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘the terrorist practice’ of ‘liquidating the particularity’.2 Sartre’s comment that ‘At one time this intellectual terror corresponded to “the physical liquidation” of particular people’ brings to mind Swift’s graphic examples of such ‘liquidation’: the Modest Proposer in his scheme to cannibalize Irish Catholic infants, the Houyhnhnms debating ‘Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth’, and the colonialist-butchers depicted at the end of Gulliver’s Travels, who give ‘free Licence… to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust’, leaving ‘the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants’ (PW 11: 271; 294).
Swift’s resistance to the ‘terrorism’ of abstraction resulted in writings distinctive for their concreteness and immediacy. Their contributions to Irish nationalist, anti-colonialist and anti-war ideologies are universal in scope while at all times remaining firmly tied to the specific conditions in which Swift lived and worked. In contrast to Pope, who regularly wrote, revised and published his works governed by the idea that ‘We who are Writers ought to love Posterity, that Posterity may love us’, Swift produced the majority of his prose works for immediate impact rather than for artistic immortality.3 He was generally more concerned about their influence on the thoughts and actions of his present readers than about their place in some future pantheon of Great Literature. As he remarked in Thoughts on Various Subjects: ‘It is pleasant to observe, how free the present Age is in laying Taxes on the next. Future Ages shall talk of this: This shall be famous to all Posterity. Whereas, their Time and Thoughts will be taken up about present Things, as ours are now’ (PW 1: 243). Not that Swift was indifferent to fame, or content to let his works pass out of existence along with the occasions that produced them. The persona of A Tale of a Tub dramatizes the plight not only of the Grub Street Hack but of all occasional writers when he complains to Prince Posterity of the disappearance of the Moderns’ productions without a trace after being mercilessly devoured by Father Time. Along with its obvious function as a satire on ephemeral scribblers, this lament surely reflects something of Swift’s own anxiety and dread when faced with the threat of historical extinction. In the Drapier’s wish that readers of his First Letter keep it ‘carefully by them to refresh their Memories’ in times to come (p. 164), we can see evidence of the occasional writer’s paradoxical desire to preserve the ephemeral; to speak to the immediate moment while creating a more lasting memorial for future ages. Swift’s reluctance to let the Drapier ‘die’ even after his political raison d’être had ceased to exist (he continued invoking the latter’s presence and authority long after The Drapier’s Letters had accomplished their goal), and his concern with creating an enduring image of himself as an Irish Patriot in works such as the Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, point to an interest in the perpetuation of his memory which invites comparison with Pope’s desire for immortality. Where they differ is in Swift’s insistence upon situating his fame in the very heart of the mundane, transient circumstances of his life rather than in an aesthetic transformation of them. Swift entertained little notion of the transcendence of his work to some otherworldly status, in the way (for example) that the apotheosis of Belinda’s lock into the heavens, at the end of The Rape of the Lock, suggests the elevation of Pope’s poetry itself to a kind of divine status—or at least to the airy realms of high culture. Swift’s version of this apotheosis—his poetic depiction of the astrologer Partridge’s ascent into the spheres, where he appears as a ‘Triumphant Star’ (‘An Elegy on Mr Partrige’)—functions as pure mockery, ridiculing all claims to supposedly prophetic vision and underscoring the absurdity of attempts to soar beyond earthly bounds.
Swift’s particular understanding of worldly realities, especially those growing out of the inequalities of power and wealth, was derived from his concrete situation in the world as an Anglo-Irishman whose life and career, shaped (and fissured) by the political and ethnic conflicts between England and Ireland, as well as those within Ireland itself, serve to magnify the problematic nature of colonial identity in eighteenth-century Ireland. Swift was born on 30 November 1667 in Hoey’s Court in Dublin, to a father who had emigrated from England to Ireland some half-dozen years earlier and to an Irish-born mother from an old English family from Leicestershire. He was in many ways fated by historical circumstances to a life of social dislocations and uncertainties. The Dublin in which Swift grew up was an expanding colonial city, the fortified centre of the English settlement in Ireland known as ‘the Pale’ and the site of the main institutions of Anglican power. At the same time the city functioned as a bilingual community of English- and Gaelic-speaking inhabitants which included a growing number of Catholic merchants, artisans and servants as well as a significant Dissenting element, such as the Huguenot weavers whose dire plight was later to have a galvanizing effect on Swift’s exertions on behalf of Ireland’s economic independence. Since his father died before he was born and his mother was left with few resources, Swift was exposed from an early age to the ignominies of financial dependency—an experience whose indelible mark could later be discerned in his often scathing view of the patronage system, his resentment towards those in whose service he toiled and his passionate rejection of the idea of Ireland as a ‘depending Kingdom’ in the Fourth Drapier’s Letter (p. 174). With the help of his well-to-do uncle, Godwin, Swift was able to attend Kilkenny School and Trinity College, Dublin, elite institutions committed to inculcating the religious and cultural values of Ireland’s governing class. At the same time his tenure at Trinity College exposed him to modes of parody, wit and wordplay that were uniquely Irish in form and cadence.
An indifferent student, Swift scraped by in his studies to obtain his Bachelor of Arts degree at Trinity, but his academic career was dramatically interrupted by the upheavals following upon the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when the Catholic monarch James II was forced to flee England, making way for the joint rule of his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange (William III). This event had a profound effect on the course of English history, but its most immediate and destructive consequences were felt in Ireland, which served as the battleground for the forces of James and William. Forty years later, Swift would say that this contention was decided ‘with such ravages and ruin executed on both sides, as to leave the kingdom a desert’ (PW 12: 132). Along with many others of his class Swift fled to England, where he began his lengthy tenure working for the son of a family friend, the noted Whig diplomat and man of letters Sir William Temple, at his country seat, Moor Park, in Surrey. It was here that Swift first met the then eight-year-old Esther Johnson, who was to play so significant a role in his life and become immortalized in his writings as ‘Stella’. Through his contact with Temple (and with Temple’s essays on history and literature, which he had frequent occasion to read, transcribe and later edit), Swift was ushered into the world of the scholar-dilettante, at once connected with and detached from affairs of state. Moreover, Temple’s involvement in what came to be known as the Ancients–Moderns controversy through his essays championing the superiority of Ancient learning fuelled Swift’s great satires on the Moderns, A Tale of a Tub and The Battel of the Books.
Temple, despite (or perhaps because of) his own Anglo-Irish lineage, projected the very model of an English country gentleman, Whig in outlook, epicurean in mode of living, expressing a casual contempt for the Irish that was endemic to his class. It was a model that must have held no small appeal for Swift, then eager for entrée into English society, but it proved to be as ill-fitting for him as the ‘embroidered coat’ worn by the man ‘begging out of Newgate [Prison] in an old shoe’ described in A Proposal to the Ladies of Ireland (PW 12: 127), and in later years he would construct a life—as a Dubliner, a fierce critic of English policies in Ireland, a Tory and an Anglican churchman—which rejected most aspects of the Temple model of existence. Moreover, Temple tended to be haughty and patronizing in his behaviour towards Swift, who a dozen years later warned that he ‘would not be treated like a school-boy’ by Lord Bolingbroke since he had ‘felt too much of that in [his] life already (meaning from sir William Temple)’ (JS 1: 230). This treatment, combined with Temple’s failure to help him obtain suitable preferment, resulted in Swift’s departure from Moor Park and return to Ireland after taking holy orders in 1693. Swift’s first church living was in remote Kilroot near Belfast, an inhospitable area dominated by the Presbyterian kirk. This experience proved bitterly disappointing to Swift, reinforcing his aversion to religious Dissent and prompting his return to Moor Park, where he resumed his former duties until Temple’s death in 1699. Immediately thereafter he accompanied the Earl of Berkeley to Ireland as his chaplain, and in the following year he was named vicar of Laracor, a village in County Meath near Dublin.
The ensuing decade was crucial to Swift’s development as a churchman, a political activist and a writer. As the chosen representative of the Church of Ireland in its solicitation for remission of certain taxes (known as the ‘First Fruits and Twentieth Parts’) then being paid to the Crown, he was given the opportunity to live for lengthy periods of time in London. His indefatigable efforts on behalf of the Church were ultimately successful, but not before his disillusionment with those he initially viewed as allies—the Whig politicians who were willing to aid his cause only if he agreed to support a repeal of the Test Act, which made the taking of the sacrament according to Anglican ritual a prerequisite for holding public office— prompted his switch in allegiance to the Tory Party.
Swift’s embrace of the Tory ministry at the moment of its ascendancy was no doubt motivated at least in part by political self-interest, as well as by personal factors such as vanity and resentment. Robert Harley, Lord Treasurer of the Tory ministry, showered him with attention and treated him as an important personage, while the leader of the Whig Junto, Sidney Godolphin, was barely civil to him in their one meeting about the ‘First Fruits’ matter. But mixed together with these personal and narrowly political motives were more general beliefs— about the necessary role of an Established Church, the destructiveness of a new economic system based on speculation and credit, and the need to subordinate the military to civilian authority and severely curtail the power of a standing army— which made Swift’s embrace of the Tory position at this moment in history consistent with larger and long-standing ideological allegiances. Indeed, it is as well to keep in mind that Swift in later life did not explicitly identify himself as a Tory, despite the fact that he was regularly branded and ostracized as one. Instead he insisted, not without justification, that it was the Whig Party, not his own political beliefs, that had changed. As late as 1733 he could write to a friend, ‘I am of the old Whig principles, without the modern articles and refinements’ (C 4: 100).
The years 1710–14 were among the most active and productive in Swift’s life, marking his highly visible emergence into public life and into the vibrant literary world centred in London. Swift pursued a busy schedule as chief political writer for the Tory ministry, which included penning essays for the government periodical he edited, The Examiner, and weighing in on the side of a peace treaty with France to end the War of the Spanish Succession—most notably through his highly influential tract, The Conduct of the Allies (1711). He simultaneously enjoyed the life of a London wit, developing friendships with noted writers of all political persuasions, including Alexander Pope, John Gay, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Nicholas Rowe and Matthew Prior. During this period, his authorship of The Bickerstaff Papers, a brilliantly effective parody of astrological almanacs, along with poems such as ‘A Description of the Morning’, ‘A Description of a City Shower’ and ‘The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician’s Rod’ (a political lampoon on Sidney Godolphin) readily demonstrated Swift’s unique imaginative powers and his particular genius for satire—one already amply displayed in his earlier, anonymously published A Tale of a Tub. It was also during this period that Swift, through his participation in the Scriblerus Club, a literary group whose members included Pope, Gay, John Arbuthnot and Thomas Parnell, collaborated on pieces satirizing perceived abuses in modern learning.
Yet for all the heady excitement and rich promise of these years in London, the period was marked by often profound frustrations for Swift, some of which were bitterly reminiscent of earlier disappointments with patrons and modes of employment. Growing conflicts between the two leaders of the Tory ministry, Henry St John (by this time Viscount Bolingbroke) and Harley (now Earl of Oxford), and their continual delays in finding suitable preferment for him, made Swift increasingly cynical about both political and personal prospects. As he wryly observed to Esther Johnson, ‘They call me nothing but Jonathan; and I said, I believed they would leave me Jonathan as they found me’ ( JS 1: 193–4). Moreover, even as he expressed a fondness for many aspects of London life and fantasized about obtaining a church living somewhere nearby, his Journal to Stella is filled with recurring nostalgic recollections of his gardens at Laracor and with eager anticipations of his return to Ireland: ‘Oh, that we were at Laracor this fine day! the willows begin to peep, and the quicks to bud’ ( JS 1: 220). When the Tory government began disintegrating as a result of warring factions within it, Swift realized the futility of his continued stay in England and, shortly after Queen Anne’s death in the summer of 1714, sailed for Ireland to take up the post of Dean of St Patrick’s cathedral, Dublin, which he had earlier obtained, not through his employers’ English connections, but through the Irish-born Duke of Ormonde, in whose gift the Deanship resided.
The first years of Swift’s return to Ireland were difficult ones for him, marked by jurisdictional struggles within the cathedral hierarchy (highlighted by tensions with his ‘boss’, William King, Archbishop of Dublin) and by various forms of harassment and persecution, including interception of his mail, because of his Tory associations in London and the consequent unfounded suspicions that he was a Jacobite sympathizer (that is, a supporter of the exiled Stuarts). Forced to keep a low profile, he professed indifference to all public affairs, assuring one correspondent (albeit somewhat disingenuously), ‘I am the only man in this kingdom who is not a politician, and therefore I only keep such company as will suffer me to suspend their politics’ (C 2: 294). By late 1719, however, there was the more candid admission to his friend Charles Ford, ‘But as the World is now turned, no Cloyster is retired enough to keep Politicks out, and I will own they raise my Passions whenever they come in my way’ (C 2: 330). And indeed, it was only a matter of months after this observation that Swift acted on his political ‘passions’ by publishing the first of his Irish political tracts, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, which attacked England’s legislative restrictions on Ireland’s trade and urged a national boycott of English clothing goods. Almost immediately the target of a high-profile government prosecution that landed its printer in jail, the Proposal was deemed by the English authorities and the so-called ‘English interest’ in Ireland as an incendiary call to arms—literally as well as figuratively, since it cited the ‘pleasant Observation of some Body’s; that Ireland wou’d never be happy ’till a Law were made for burning every Thing that came from England, except their People and their Coals’, adding the wryly ominous comment (omitted in later printings), ‘Nor am I even yet for lessening the Number of those Exceptions’ (p. 132). Although published anonymously, the Proposal marked Swift’s dramatic entrance onto the Irish political stage, initiating a decade of polemical and creative outpourings far more prolific even than his years in London.
During the next ten years Swift wrote over sixty tracts dealing with Irish affairs, including his mercilessly demystifying account, A Short View of the State of Ireland (1728), and his most brilliant short satire, A Modest Proposal (1729). This was also the period in which he achieved his two greatest successes. The first of these took place on the political level, with the appearance of The Drapier’s Letters (1724), which helped defeat an English-sponsored coinage scheme that was threatening to flood Ireland with worthless half-pence and which transformed Swift into the ‘Hibernian Patriot’, a kind of folk hero widely celebrated in print and song for his defiance of the highest authorities in the land and their futile offer of a large (but unclaimed) reward for his discovery. On the literary level, his success came with the publication in 1726 of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, better known as Gulliver’s Travels, an instant best-seller appealing to all segments of the reading public and reflecting the influence of both Swift’s earlier satiric experiments as a member of the Scriblerus Club and his subsequent role as wry observer of the Irish as well as the English political scene. (A passage in Part III, depicting the victory over England in the Drapier’s affair through the figure of the Lindalinians’ revolt, was suppressed for fear of government reprisals and did not appear in print until a century and a half later.) Swift’s literary fame, already widespread, was secured in 1735 with the appearance of a four-volume edition of his Works published by George Faulkner—the ‘Prince of Dublin printers’, as Swift characterized him (C 4: 222).
Throughout this period Swift, writing to friends in England, periodically bemoaned his situation as ‘a stranger in a strange land’ or used black humour to portray himself as ‘a poisoned rat in a hole’ (C 3: 341; 383). More often, however, he referred affectionately to the Irish under-class as ‘my old friends the rabble’ and assured Ford that, though he lacked sufficient funds to travel abroad, ‘there is one comfort here [in Dublin], that I am at home’ (C 4: 537; 212). It is only fitting, then, that he chose as his final resting place St Patrick’s cathedral, where (as he self-mockingly put it) he had reigned as ‘absolute Lord’ for over thirty years (C 4: 171). In the will drawn up in 1740, five years prior to his death, he not only specified the exact spot in the cathedral where he wished his body placed but also provided the epitaph to be inscribed on a tablet above his remains—one subsequently made famous in W. B. Yeats’ poetic rendering: ‘Swift has sailed into his rest;/Savage indignation there/Cannot lacerate his breast./Imitate him if you dare,/World-besotted traveller; he/Served human liberty.’4 On the one hand, the ‘savage indignation’ referred to here suggests a Juvenalian satirist who, in the face of intolerable provocation, cannot refrain from venting his outrage at what he sees around him, and thereby links him to an important classical satiric tradition. On the other hand, it evokes no less pronounced associations with the old Irish poet, or fili, whose purported ability to rhyme enemies to death points to the power and the deadly precision of Swift’s satiric weaponry.
This brief sketch of Swift’s life underscores the importance of certain watershed dates in it—perhaps none more so than 1714, when he departed England for permanent resettlement in Ireland. (Except for two lengthy visits to London in 1726 and 1727, he remained in his native land for the rest of his long life.) It is tempting to draw a clear-cut distinction between the pre- and post-1714 Swift, separating his life into an ‘English’ and an ‘Irish’, a conservative and a progressive period; and no doubt this division has some validity, as well as a certain usefulness in interpreting his works. The strong defence of the British Crown and its policies which runs throughout the essays in The Examiner could only have appeared in Swift’s pre-1714 writings, just as the proto-nationalist and anti-colonialist sentiments we find in his Irish tracts were most overtly and consistently expressed in works written after Swift had left England behind and came to realize that his future lay in Ireland. Nevertheless, one must keep in mind that there was also considerable overlap between the two periods. Thus a work such as The Story of the Injured Lady (1707) reflects Swift’s fairly early preoccupation with the question of what it meant to be an Irishman trapped in an abusive relationship with England, while his renewed involvement in revising The Four Last Years of the Queen in the 1730s—many years after his emergence as the Hibernian Patriot—reveals his ongoing interest in commemorating the period when he came closest to being accepted as a member of English society. And although Swift’s agitational style and his pronouncements against established authority are most obvious in his Irish tracts of the 1720s, it is A Tale of a Tub, published in 1704 but written much earlier, that best embodies his anarchic energies and his refusal to be contained within conventional structures. (It is hardly coincidental that many of England’s highest authorities, including Queen Anne, viewed this work as blasphemous and subversive despite its ostensibly conservative norms.)
The same holds true for Swift’s attitude towards and use of language. While his most conservative pronouncements were written during his London period whereas his most explicit deviations from standard linguistic norms appear in his later works (compare A Proposal for Correcting… the English Tongue (1712), which urges the establishment of a committee ‘for Ascertaining and Fixing our Language for ever’ (PW 4: 14), with poems and prose pieces from the 1720s that incorporate Gaelic words, Irish rhymes and dialectal expressions, and use forms of Hiberno-English speech), his writings in fact reveal more of an alternation between these different linguistic practices than a linear development from one to the other. Swift’s belief in the need to stabilize and standardize language (mainly to ensure understandable communication between different social groups and generations) was sincere, but it coexisted with a delight in exploiting the vagaries and eccentricities of language, and it never prevented him from bending language to his own idiosyncratic ends, as we can see from his creation of a private language of seeming nonsense words in the Journal to Stella, his invention of several different ‘foreign’ languages in Gulliver’s Travels and his gleeful indulgence in word games—in playful deformations of language—with the London wits and the circle of punsters he befriended in Ireland. In all phases of his life, Swift demonstrated an unmistakable pleasure in exploring the very non-standardized forms of English he attacked in pieces like The Tatler, No. CCXXX. No doubt Swift’s linguistic attitudes and practices were shaped to a significant degree by his years at Trinity College, Dublin, which introduced him to the multi-lingual wit play of the university scholars and the dexterous verbal exercises that were a required part of the curriculum.5
The seemingly contradictory mix of public and private languages in Swift’s writings points to a broader (apparent) conflict informing his works, between the public and private spheres more generally. Although we tend to associate these writings with strikingly individualistic forms of thought and expression, they most consistently emphasize the importance of the public sphere by arguing for the need to subordinate the self to a wider network of communal relationships. That Swift’s rebellious and highly idiosyncratic personality was ill-suited for quiet subordination to any larger social entity in no way undermined his communitarian vision; it merely rooted it in paradox. Over the course of his career the nature of this perceived community underwent significant changes, but what did not alter was his portrayal of it as an embodiment of positive values: as a symbol of the public good, perennially threatened by the forces of political faction, individual greed and private self-interest. As Swift remarked in Thoughts on Various Subjects, ‘In all well-instituted Commonwealths, Care hath been taken to limit Mens Possessions… Because when Bounds are set to Mens desires, after they have acquired as much as the Laws will permit them, their private Interest is at an End; and they have nothing to do, but to take care of the Publick’ (PW, 1: 243). In 1701, in A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions… in Athens and Rome, the community was represented by a group of Whig statesmen whose wrongful impeachment threatened to upset the political balance that ensured the harmonious coexistence of all segments of society. In the period from 1710 to 1714, as portrayed in The Examiner, the community was the Tory establishment supported by the full symbolism of the British monarchy, exposed to the snarling resentments of a disgruntled faction. A decade later, in 1724, the community was reenvisioned in Drapier’s Letter IV as ‘the whole People of Ireland’, threatened with ruin by the corrupt schemes of an insignificant but malevolent individual (William Wood) and his powerful backers in England. The community being defended was now Irish rather than English and had metamorphosed from being a cohesive social group originating from above to one developing from below, as a grass-roots movement that included all parts of Irish society, but the ideal of a public good opposed to the disintegrating forces of a private interest persisted. Moreover, similar images appear in the writings of both periods to dramatize this opposition. In Contests and Dissensions, for example, Swift urged the importance of ‘a Ballance of Power’ within the state, warning that ‘When the Ballance is broke, whether by the Negligence, Folly, or Weakness of the Hand that held it, or by mighty Weights fallen into either Scale’, the result will be tyranny (PW 1: 197). A decade later, in 1711, while arguing for peace in The Conduct of the Allies, he was once again holding up the scales of power to scrutiny in castigating the advocates of war: ‘And this is what we charge them with as answerable to God, their Country, and Posterity, that the bleeding Condition of their Fellow-Subjects, was a Feather in the Balance with their private Ends’ (PW 6: 59). And another dozen years later, the Drapier likewise weighed the public against the private interest, finding a similarly scandalous imbalance crying out for redress: ‘It would be very hard, if all Ireland should be put into One Scale, and this sorry Fellow WOOD into the other: That Mr. WOOD should weigh down this whole Kingdom, by which England gets above a Million of good Money every Year clear into their Pockets’ (p. 160).
To be sure, in the 1710–14 period, the collective body being put forward as a bulwark against the private machinations was a partisan group (the Tory Party) with a limited membership, which was soon to be defeated and marginalized. In the example cited from The Drapier’s Letters, the community Swift so passionately defended was a society governed by a small Anglican minority in a country predominantly Roman Catholic. How are we to reconcile Swift’s claim to be speaking for the collective interest or the ‘whole people’ with his complicity with groups that historically represented a relatively small and privileged segment of the society in which he lived? One way is to view this claim in purely polemical and rhetorical terms, as a particularly effective means of legitimizing a minority position by presenting it as congruent with the interests of the nation as a whole. Swift was, after all, a consummate political animal, and certainly knew how to advance his views in the most forceful and persuasive way possible. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to dismiss his notion of community as simply a polemical ploy. Its varied and recurring representations throughout the Swift canon point to the central role it played in his ideological imagination and underscore the importance he placed on its capacity to strike a sympathetic chord in his readers, whom he envisioned as a diverse body extending well beyond the privileged circle to which he belonged. Thus his espousal of a Tory ideology in works from the 1710–14 period not only expressed the views of an elite but also struck a populist chord with all those groups who felt exploited or disadvantaged by the new capitalist and professional military classes. In Swift’s later tracts, the protest against England’s subordination of Ireland to the status of a ‘depending Kingdom’ expressed not only the resentment of the country’s Protestant elite, who chafed at being treated as inferior to their English counterparts, but also the interests of other segments of Irish society which (as the persona of Intelligencer, No. 19 pointedly observes) were suffering in a far more immediate way from the ill effects of England’s colonialist policies, including ‘the Buyers and Sellers, at Fairs and Markets; the Shopkeepers in every Town; the Farmers in general’, as well as ‘common Labourers’ (PW 12: 54–5). This shared body of concerns allowed Swift to characterize Ireland in Drapier’s Letter IV—in terms calculated for rhetorical effect but going beyond mere rhetoric—as ‘a Country, where the People of all Ranks, Parties, and Denominations’ (p. 172) have come together to defeat a common enemy.
Swift’s active participation in multiple (political, social, cultural and linguistic) communities throughout his lifetime gives the lie to the monolithic and static labels regularly imposed on him. Even the portrayal of him as ‘Anglo-Irish’, while essential to understanding his identity and writings, suggests a binary character that unduly limits the range of his perspectives and allegiances. Like his many different satiric personae, Swift was able to penetrate and exist in varied worlds, moving in and out of the realms of classical and popular culture, of socially dominant and downtrodden classes, of the metropolis and the periphery. The writings he produced as a result point to ways of bridging the gap between these worlds but without erasing their distinctiveness and without imposing false notions of unity rooted in vapid generalizations. These writings suggest that our commonality as human beings resides, not in an abstractly conceived set of characteristics, but in the very features that differentiate us as individuals confined within a particular body and occupying a particular time and place in history. Swift’s oft-cited comment, ‘I hate and detest that animal called Man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth’ (pp. 189–90) should be understood not as an embrace of the individual to the exclusion of society or the human family, but as a recognition that such an embrace is the necessary first step towards affirming larger allegiances. As his compatriot Edmund Burke put it, ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is… the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.’6 For all his notoriously misanthropic tendencies, Swift’s prose writings show us that love of country and mankind can exist shorn of the usual cant and sentimentality, able to survive even the boiling cauldron of his corrosive satire.
1. Edward W. Said, ‘Swift as Intellectual’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 77.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Random House (Vintage Books), 1968), 28. For the distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the ‘Prison Notebooks’, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971; 1976), 5–14.
3. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3: 135.
4. ‘Swift’s Epitaph’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, revised 2nd edn. (New York: Scribner, 1996), 245–6.
5. See Andrew Carpenter, ‘A Tale of a Tub as an Irish Text’, in Swift Studies (2005), 30–40.
6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 135.