The most revealing aspects of Swift’s relationship to Ireland are the contradictions at its very core, suggested by his own often conflicting statements about his place of birth and the antithetical attitudes he expressed about his native land, as well as by the widely divergent views about him put forward by readers over the years, their disagreements often hinging on whether they locate him in a primarily Irish or English context. This chapter, while recognizing the significance of the latter context, will explore the many reasons why Swift cannot be understood apart from his multi-varied ties to Ireland. There is room for disagreement about the precise nature and meaning of these ties, but there can be no disputing the fundamental connection itself – a kind of umbilical cord which, though sometimes perversely denied or concealed, was never severed and in fact greatly strengthened during the final quarter-century of his life. Ireland did not simply provide an inert background for Swift’s life; it was an integral part of his identity, an essential ingredient in the way he viewed the world, an indispensable thread in the recurring patterns and textures of his writings. A man exceptionally sensitive to his immediate surroundings in all their concrete detail and steadfastly refusing to turn a blind eye to the material conditions of his existence, Swift settled into Dublin life with the whole of his being, fully inhabiting the spaces of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the surrounding area, known as the Liberties, with a physical as well as intellectual presence that demanded not only acknowledgment but also active engagement.
Ireland has long been a land known for the emigration or self-exile of its greatest writers, and during Swift’s time, for the frequent and lengthy (often permanent) departures of its “absentees”: a term referring principally to the wealthy landlords reviled by Swift, but one also applicable to the literary figures – William Congreve, Richard Steele, George Farquhar – born and raised in Ireland, who left to seek their fortunes across the water. But in Swift, Ireland could boast of one of its least peripatetic native sons, one who wound up spending over fifty years on its soil and who could look upon those who came and went with alternating scorn and humor, portraying them as “Birds of Passage” and as “Soldiers who quarter among [the Irish] for a few Months” and then depart, like hit-and-run seducers of young women (C III: 77). To be sure, Swift might himself have become one of these “Birds of Passage” had he obtained the preferment in England he clearly hoped for during the lengthy periods he spent there from 1689 until the year 1714, when he returned to Ireland for good. But speculating now about how Swift’s life might have been different is pointless, for the fact remains that Swift (like the Fairfaxes in Andrew Marvell’s poem, “Upon Appleton House”) “made destiny his choice” and came to actively embrace the varied roles that Ireland offered him: as churchman, pamphleteer, political activist, and general thorn in the side of the very establishment upon which his own position as Anglican dean depended. In what follows I want to consider Swift in three interrelated contexts – the personal, the political, and the literary – each of which underscores the reasons why it is impossible to understand either his life or his writings apart from Ireland.
Details of his childhood are rather scant. What we do know, however, underscores the contradictions that were to shape the rest of his life. He grew up as part of a privileged Anglo-Irish Protestant community though with little means of his own and thus in a state of financial dependency, in a city deemed the center of the English Pale in Ireland, the site of the main institutions of Protestant power, but one also boasting a bicultural society marked by a substantial presence of native Irish scholars, merchants, and servants.1 With the financial assistance of his uncle, Swift attended the prestigious Kilkenny School, located about seventy miles southwest of Dublin, and in the spring of 1682 entered Trinity College, Dublin, a prominent Anglo-Irish establishment where his academic performance proved far from distinguished but nevertheless earned him a B.A. degree. Just at the time he was attaining adulthood (1688–89) and facing crucial decisions about his future, the widespread turmoil following upon the so-called Glorious Revolution – the bloody civil war in Ireland between the supporters of the Catholic James II, who had been forced to relinquish the throne, and his chosen successor, the Protestant William of Orange (King William III) – caused a large number of Protestants to flee to England, Swift among them.
The following dozen years were dominated by Swift’s complicated, often frustrating relationship with the noted Whig diplomat and man of letters Sir William Temple, who took him on as his personal secretary, and by Swift’s decision in 1694 to take holy orders, which resulted in his first church living in Kilroot, a bleak, Presbyterian-dominated area just north of Belfast.2 So disillusioning was this experience that Swift soon returned to Moor Park, Temple’s Surrey estate, continuing there until his patron’s death in 1699. However creatively productive this sojourn was for him – the composition of his early masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub, dates from this period – it proved barren in terms of the career preferment he hoped for, and he again returned to Ireland, where he was presented to the vicarage of Laracor, about thirty-five miles east of Dublin, which (unlike Kilroot) offered Swift enough room and fertile soil to cultivate a much-cherished garden and supplied him with a congenial Anglican community, centered in the nearby town of Trim.
In the decade between 1704 and 1714, Swift shuttled between Ireland and England as an emissary of the Church of Ireland and later, as chief propagandist for the Tory ministry. Entries from the Journal to Stella (1710–13) – written to Esther Johnson, whom Swift had met as a young girl at Moor Park and who later became his intimate companion after moving to Dublin – attest to the fact that this was indeed a heady time for Swift, when he was as close as he ever would be to the corridors of power. At the same time, the Journal reveals Swift’s continual frustration at the secret machinations of those in whose interests he labored, as well as a deepening mistrust of even his closest allies, who he wryly noted “call me nothing but Jonathan; and I said, I believed they would leave me Jonathan as they found me” (JS 193–94). The later entries in particular express his growing disillusionment with London politics and society, coupled with the desire to be back among his friends and willow trees in Ireland. Nostalgia is not a quality we normally associate with the staunchly anti-romantic and unsentimental Swift, but there are places in the Journal to Stella for which that word seems most appropriate: “Oh, that we were at Laracor this fine day! the willows begin to peep, and the quicks to bud . . . Faith that riding to Laracor gives me short sighs, as well as you. All the days I have passed here, have been dirt to those” (JS 220; 302). Passages like these remind us that if Swift’s stays in England rendered him susceptible to the enticements of a permanent settlement there, they also impressed upon him the sacrifices such a settlement would entail by making him acutely conscious of what he would be leaving behind in Ireland.
When Swift sailed back to Ireland in September 1714 after the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tory ministry, he returned to a country in which (except for two lengthy visits to England in 1726 and 1727) he would spend the rest of his long life. He now began his tenure as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, an office he would hold for the next three decades and which, though falling short of his earlier career ambitions, he succeeded in molding to his own specifications and transforming into a springboard for the many activities that would immortalize his name. It was here that Swift made his mark through his exertions on behalf of the area’s struggling middle and working class composed of shopkeepers, merchants, and weavers, whose economic welfare was being systematically undermined by English trade restrictions, and through his generous if harshly unsentimental acts of charity toward the poor who continually streamed through the neighborhood. It was here as well that Swift undertook to reshape his immediate environs to reflect more of his own personality, cultivating a two-acre orchard near the Deanery, sardonically named “Naboth’s Vineyard,” where he planted a variety of fruit trees and native elms. Increasingly, Swift came to recognize the Deanery and its larger urban setting as a place of comforting familiarity where he could find resources sufficient for his needs. As he explained to a London friend in 1734: “I have here a large convenient house; I live at two thirds cheaper than I could there, I drink a bottle of French wine my self every day . . . I ride every fair day a dozen miles, on a large Strand, or Turnpike roads; You in London have no such Advantages” (C IV: 268). So closely did Swift come to be associated with St. Patrick’s and its environs that he could playfully claim the status of “absolute Lord of the greatest Cathedral in the Kingdom” (C IV: 171) and dub himself “absolute monarch in the Liberties, and King of the Mob,” an epithet lent credence by the recognition accorded him by others in the neighborhood.3 For example, when in June 1734 he came upon a group of disgruntled weavers in search of imported goods to confiscate and exhorted them to disperse, they immediately did so, “crying out, Long live Dean Swift, and Prosperity to the Drapier [a famous persona he had adopted some years earlier]”(PW XIII: xxix).
Thus the popular view of Swift living out his years in Ireland as a disgruntled exile, filled with bitterness at his entrapment in a hateful land and constantly obsessing about his “glory days” in England, requires drastic modification. Although he maintained a lifelong correspondence with a handful of English friends and in various writings expressed a sense of loss and regret at the turn of events that necessitated his departure from England in 1714, once back in Ireland Swift set about improving rather than merely bemoaning the situation at hand, resuming old friendships and developing new ones. Within a short time his circle of acquaintance had expanded to include people from all walks of life. The majority of these were persons who, born and raised in Ireland, considered that country their home and were concerned to make a contribution to its well-being – people like the clergyman Robert Grattan, whose unabashed embrace of his Irish birthright Swift celebrated in his poem, “To Charles Ford Esq. On his Birth-day”: “Can you on Dublin look with scorn? / Yet here were you and Ormonde born. / Oh, were but you and I so wise / To look with Robin Grattan’s eyes: / Robin adores that spot of earth, / That literal spot which gave him birth” (Poems 255). The poem affectionately refers to Swift’s “favourite clan,” the Grattans and their cousins, the Revs. John and Daniel Jackson – all loyal, down-to-earth companions with whom Swift was able to share convivial dinners and humorous exchanges of verse. This varied circle of friends included individuals who afforded Swift important links to Irish culture, including Anthony Raymond, Rector of Trim, an antiquarian scholar fluent in the Irish language, who embarked on an English translation of Geoffrey Keating’s celebrated history of Ireland; Patrick Delany, Chancellor of Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedrals, who served as patron to the last of the great Irish bards, Turlough Carolan; and Thomas Sheridan, scholar and schoolmaster both in Dublin and in county Cavan, where he opened his humble residence, “Quilca,” to Swift for extended visits. From a native Irish family of Protestant converts with strong Gaelic roots, Sheridan in many ways typified the kind of friends Swift surrounded himself with: of modest birth and circumstances, intellectually gifted but missing out on career advancement due to a lack of political connections, identified with the country’s patriotic opposition to England’s colonial rule, and acutely conscious of the ambiguities of the (Hiberno-) English language, thus delighting in puns and other verbal jeux d’esprit. Among the most intimate of Swift’s companions despite a relationship marred by periodic misunderstandings and rifts, Sheridan became a collaborator of Swift’s on The Intelligencer (1728–29), a periodical that in part turned a spotlight on Ireland’s dire social and economic conditions, and was the patriarch of a famous family whose members never forgot their connections to Ireland.4
Swift’s life and activities in Ireland extended well beyond Dublin. While others among his acquaintance traveled to Europe, visiting sites identified with aesthetic refinement and cultural capital, Swift never set foot on the Continent but instead made Ireland his arena of travel, exploring large areas of a country he complained was as little known and alien-seeming as Mexico or Lapland to most Britons. Satisfying a passion for horseback-riding, he regularly rode the length of the Strand along the island’s eastern seacoast up to Howth Castle in the north and Dún Laoghaire in the south. He took delight in visiting friends both near and far from Dublin, such as Charles Ford at Woodpark, about fourteen miles outside of the city on the road to Trim; the Rochforts at Gaulstown, forty miles west of Dublin in county Westmeath; and the Achesons at their country estate, Market Hill, located in the northern county of Armagh. These and other habitations were sites of often protracted visits by Swift over the years, many figuring in his literary activities. Sheridan’s Quilca, for example, inspired a number of Swift’s jeux d’esprit, and served as his retreat in the spring and summer of 1725 when completing the manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels, while Market Hill became the subject of over a dozen semi-autobiographical poems.
Extended trips on horseback in 1722 and 1723 – the first, through the northern province of Ulster; the second, through southern and western parts of the country – provided additional materials for both prose and verse recreations of the Irish landscape. Swift was no scenic or picturesque traveler – his descriptions of what he saw (like his assessments of Ireland’s economic conditions) tended toward the harsh and bleak, as typified by his comments on Tipperary as “a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations; [with] filthy cabins, [and] miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape” (C IV: 34). Nevertheless, his descriptions served to underscore the importance of eye-witness accounts, tacitly making the case for Ireland’s worth as an object – even more, as a subject – of empirical examination and study. Swift’s own travels in Ireland no doubt fueled his insistence that the only way to truly know Ireland was to “ride round the Kingdom, and observe the Face of Nature, or the Faces of the Natives” (PW XII: 10), rather than having to depend upon hearsay or propaganda.
To be sure, Swift never entirely resolved his ambivalent feelings towards his native land. Even as he admitted to one correspondent that he was “a Teague, or an Irishman, or what people please” (C IV: 229), he was characterizing himself to another as “an obscure exile in a most obscure and enslaved country”(C IV: 468). And well after his emergence as Ireland’s model patriot during the Drapier controversy, he was still capable of painting Ireland as a land of “fools” and “knaves” (Poems 330) and expressing a desire to be buried in Wales instead (C V: 35). Yet, ultimately, Swift bequeathed virtually all of his money to Ireland – most notably, for the construction of St. Patrick’s Hospital – and gave very specific directions for his body’s interment in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, underneath a Latin epitaph he himself composed, which linked his name forever with Ireland.5 Swift’s ambivalence, then, is most meaningfully understood in light of his lifelong struggle to come to terms with his Irish birthright.
The question of Swift’s precise place in the Irish nationalist tradition has generated a good deal of debate. Addressing this question, we might begin by looking at a few of the more significant examples of Swift’s activism on Ireland’s behalf, which is usually dated from 1720, when the first of his anti-colonialist pamphlets appeared in print. Well before this, however, there were indications of Swift’s resentment of Ireland’s position vis-à-vis England. The Story of the Injured Lady, written in 1707 (though remaining unpublished in Swift’s lifetime), portrays the link between England and Ireland as an economically and sexually abusive relationship. The specific occasion, the Union of England and Scotland, provides the work with its central theme and metaphor but at various points becomes eclipsed by the more vivid account of the severe injuries sustained by the Lady at the hands of her oppressive lover over the years – a chain of abuse beginning at a time predating the Union, hence demanding attention in its own right: “I was undone by the common Arts practised upon all easy credulous Virgins, half by Force, half by Consent, after solemn Vows and Protestations of Marriage. When he had once got Possession, he soon began to play the usual Part of a too fortunate Lover, affecting on all Occasions to shew his Authority, and to act like a Conqueror” (PW IX: 5). One year later, in A Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test, written as though by a member of the Irish House of Commons addressing an English counterpart, Swift included a paragraph striking for the bitter sarcasm it directs at the lopsided power relationship between the two countries: “If your little Finger be sore, and you think a Poultice made of our Vitals will give it any Ease, speak the Word, and it shall be done; the Interest of our whole Kingdom is, at any Time, ready to strike to that of your poorest Fishing Town” (PW II: 114). Anticipating the cannibalistic relationship of the later Irish tracts, this depiction, like that of The Story of the Injured Lady, is consistent with the more general perception conveyed in Swift’s later writings of the yawning abyss that exists between the powerful and the powerless, exemplified by Gulliver’s recognition that “Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud; and Pride and Hunger will ever be at Variance” (PW XI: 246). That Swift, at the time he wrote these earlier pieces, was still hoping for a permanent settlement in England did not prevent his sense of identification with an exploited and oppressed Ireland, though it did create an ironic tension and a doubleness of perspective which we can now appreciate as among the most distinctive features of Swift’s writing.
In the years immediately following his return to Ireland in 1714, Swift fell afoul of the Whig authorities, who falsely suspected him of Jacobitism (that is, endorsing the claim to the throne made by the so-called “Old Pretender,” son of the ousted James II) and hence treated Swift as a potential traitor, opening his mail in search of incriminating evidence and generally keeping him under close surveillance. This treatment fueled Swift’s adversarial relationship with dominant elements of the Anglo-Irish establishment and contributed to his emergence as an eloquent spokesman for the “Irish interest,” which insisted upon Ireland’s equality with England under the British Crown, hence its possession of the same political and legal rights. Here as elsewhere, Swift’s personal resentment was transformed into a political position that went far beyond (though it never completely canceled out) the personal, contributing to an ideology of forward-looking activism as well as of disgruntled reaction. It is the former that characterizes A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), which boldly calls for an Irish boycott of English goods, urging the House of Commons to declare anyone who wears imported silks or other fashionable materials from abroad “an Enemy of the Nation” (PW IX: 16). As in other works, this tract is firmly rooted in the specifics of time and place – to the point of having had its publication orchestrated to coincide with the celebrations of King George I’s sixtieth birthday – even as it embodies a surplus of utterance that spills over the particular occasion to embrace other political issues. Starting with a particular instance of inequitable treatment – England’s restriction of Ireland’s trade as a result of the Woollen Act of 1699 – the tract almost immediately begins expanding its focus until its subject becomes nothing less than Ireland’s enslavement in all its many guises and manifestations: one that has “reduced the miserable People to a worse Condition than the Peasants in France, or the Vassals in Germany and Poland” (PW IX: 21). Continuing the imagery of sadistic exploitation and mutilation in earlier works, the Proposal analogizes Ireland’s plight to that of Ovid’s Arachne, a young virgin whose superior weaving skills provoked an envious Pallas to decree that she forever spin and weave out of her own bowels: “For the greatest Part of [Irishmen’s] Bowels and Vitals is extracted, without allowing [them] the Liberty of spinning and weaving them” (PW IX: 18).
Incorporating ideas from John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government (1690) and William Molyneux’s The Case of Ireland’s being Bound (1698), Swift’s Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture challenges the validity of any law “to bind Men without their own Consent,” invoking the “general Opinion of Civilians” and the model of limited government in support of its argument (PW IX: 19). Fueling this challenge was the Declaratory Act passed several months earlier for the explicit purpose of “better securing the Dependence of the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain” (PW IX: x). The principle laid down in the Proposal, of government by the consent of the governed, although technically being applied only to the right of the Anglo-Irish class to enact laws for Ireland, is the kind of universal axiom that by definition transcends sectarian boundaries, containing the seeds of a much more radical claim for self-determination by Irishmen of all classes and religious denominations. By invoking this principle, Swift was in effect helping to lay the groundwork for a much broader nationalist movement that would begin to emerge shortly after his death, albeit one very far from his thoughts when he was writing this tract. Even without this broader intention, however, Swift expands the idea of Irish victimization well beyond the parameters of the Protestant ruling class by depicting Ireland’s oppression through the figure of downtrodden rural tenants – many of them among the poorest of the country’s denizens and a large number of them (like the French peasants with whom they are compared) Catholic.
By the time Swift came to write The Drapier’s Letters three years later, he had had a good deal of experience as a local agitator and political pamphleteer, not to mention as a satirist whose adoption of different personae gave him access to perspectives and modes of speech that might not otherwise have been available to him. All these experiences stood him in good stead when he took on the role of “M. B. Drapier” in response to the developing crisis surrounding a patent obtained by an Englishman, William Wood, to mint halfpence for Ireland. Although the country was in fact suffering from a serious money shortage, the project provoked immediate and widespread opposition for several reasons: the large amount of coinage it authorized, far in excess of what the country needed; the absence of safeguards to ensure the intrinsic worth of the coins; the perception that the patent was obtained through political graft, having passed into Wood’s possession after a £10,000 payoff to George I’s mistress, the Duchess of Kendal; and smoldering resentment at Ireland’s inability to mint its own money. Although not among the first to protest, the Drapier soon became a focal point for the resistance against the coinage scheme. Reading the seven Letters that comprise this body of tracts, we can understand why.
Each Letter presents the issues in a lucid, forceful, and engaging manner, especially appropriate to the specific individual or group being addressed while also appealing to a broader readership. The First Letter, for example, which directs its polemic “To the Shop-Keepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and Common-People of Ireland,” sets forth the situation in simple language capable of being understood by those with little education, on whom complex legal or constitutional arguments would be lost: “I will therefore first tell you the plain Story of the Fact; and then I will lay before you, how you ought to act in common Prudence, and according to the Laws of your Country” (PW X: 4). Targeting an audience whose horizons are defined by the everyday struggle for survival, the Drapier represents the adverse effects of accepting Wood’s halfpence in terms of concrete deprivations in their daily lives, warning that they would have to pay at least two hundred of these debased coins for “a Yard of Ten-penny Stuff” and that “any Person may expect to get a Quart of Two-penny Ale for Thirty Six of them” (PW X: 11, 12). The Third Letter, addressed “To the Nobility and Gentry of the Kingdom of Ireland,” replaces these mundane details with an examination of the precise terms of Wood’s patent and a refutation of the Report of the Committee of the Privy Council in England which found in Wood’s favor. Obviously directed at a more literate group than the addressees of the First Letter, this epistle focuses on a world of documents in need of careful analysis, inhabited by those with the ability to understand textual and stylistic nuances. For this audience the Drapier can elaborate upon the complexities of the “Doctrine of Precedents” (PW X: 40), just as he can strategically play upon his readers’ sense of entitlement as members of a high social class who assume equality with their English brethren: “Were not the People of Ireland born as free as those of England? . . . Am I a Free-man in England, and do I become a Slave in six Hours, by crossing the Channel?” (PW X: 31).
The Fourth Letter, “To the Whole People of Ireland,” is the most radical and potentially subversive of the Drapier’s tracts. Indeed, its publication resulted in the offer of a reward of £300 for turning its author in to the authorities – an offer that went unclaimed despite the widespread knowledge of the Drapier’s real identity. Obviously addressing a much broader audience than previously, one defined as a unified national entity rather than as a particular class or trade, the Drapier combines the concrete detail of the First Letter with the more conceptual and analytic points of the third to deliver an incisive attack on Wood’s coinage scheme and a rousing call to defeat it. Throughout the piece he spotlights the firm consensus of opinion about the halfpence among Irishmen of all walks of life, depicting the opposition to Wood as “universal” (PW X: 61). The unanimity emphasized in this Letter was at once an actual historical phenomenon and a rhetorical construct, designed to call into being an autonomous nation that alone could give meaning to such a show of loyalty and solidarity. Here as elsewhere, Swift’s calls for unity are informed by the conception of patriotism that he increasingly urged as a model of conduct for his fellow countrymen. Thus he has the Drapier justify his involvement in the Wood’s halfpence affair by explaining why even “a Tradesman hid in Privacy and Silence should cry out when the Life and Being of his Political Mother are attempted before his Face” (PW X: 89).
The identification of Ireland rather than England as the Anglo-Irishman’s “political mother” demonstrates that Swift’s advocacy of Ireland’s interests cannot adequately be described by the term “colonial nationalism,” used to characterize the attitudes held by a small group of Anglo-Irish elite, whose patriotic exertions on behalf of Ireland extended only to affirming their own rights as Irish Protestants of English origin.6 To be sure, the Drapier rebuts the malicious rumor that the opposition to Wood’s halfpence was an Irish Catholic plot by asserting, “it is the True English People of Ireland, who refuse it” (PW X: 67). Nevertheless, Swift’s outlook extends beyond the boundaries of a narrowly defined “colonial nationalism” to embrace a more expansive vision, one that undoubtedly assumed the continued hegemony of the Anglo-Irish elite but that also makes room for a range of other groups in Irish society – the “People of all Ranks, Parties, and Denominations” who are “convinced to a Man” of the fraudulence of Wood’s coinage scheme (PW X: 60), the “great Numbers of Farmers, Cottagers, and Labourers” with whom the Drapier converses in his travels around the country (PW X: 16), and those whom the Drapier extols as “my faithful Friends the common People”(PW X: 88). While the Drapier’s legal and constitutional arguments for Ireland’s parity with England tend to promote the interests of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, his diatribes against the disastrous consequences of Wood’s halfpence on the Irish economy speak to the interests of a much broader segment of the population, showing particular sensitivity to the hardships of those in the middle and lower ranks of society, and to a rural as well as an urban populace. A similar sensitivity is expressed in The Intelligencer, No. 19 by the Swiftian persona “A. North,” described as “a Country Gentleman, and a Member of Parliament,” who laments his own growing economic problems but goes on to note, “But the Sufferings of me, and those of my Rank, are Trifles in Comparison of what the meaner Sort undergo”(PW XII: 54).
Swift puts even further distance between himself and “colonial nationalism,” predicated as it was on the identification of the Anglo-Irish with their English peers, by ending the Fourth Drapier’s Letter with an insistence upon the linguistic and experiential gulf separating the English on the one hand, and the Irish conceived as an undifferentiated national group on the other. Thus, referring to reports that the English Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, has given the Irish an ultimatum, “either [to] take [Wood’s] Half-pence or [to] eat our Brogues” – the latter term signifying rude shoes made of untanned hide, commonly worn by the rural and lower classes in Ireland (though no doubt also punning on “brogue” as the distinctive dialect of the Irish) – the Drapier assures his readers these reports must be false since “I am confident Mr. Walpole never heard of a Brogue in his whole Life” (PW X: 67, 68). Like James Joyce’s Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist, reflecting on the word “tundish” and its incomprehension by the college dean, “a countryman of Ben Jonson’s,” the Drapier focuses on “brogue” as a term that clearly separates the English from the Irish, constituting a distinctive marker both of Irish existence, and of English ignorance about that existence.7 Though in actuality the Anglo-Irish elite would have had little use for “brogues” – whether on their feet or their lips – Swift deftly appropriates the commonest objects of the lowliest inhabitants of the kingdom as symbols of the Irish nation as a whole, assuring his readers, “we are perfectly safe from [Walpole]; and shall . . . be left to possess our Brogues and Potatoes in Peace” (PW X: 68). The image of the Irish patriot as brogue wearer and potato eater is perhaps Swift’s boldest contribution to the struggle against Wood’s halfpence, underscoring the extent of his identification with a larger, more inclusive Ireland than the one embraced by others of his class.
Swift never again achieved the dramatic success and tumultuous acclaim attendant on his role as the Drapier, but in the years following the defeat of Wood’s patent (officially revoked in August 1725) he continued to produce large numbers of political tracts dealing with every aspect of Ireland’s affairs, including A Short View of the State of Ireland (1728) and his brilliantly sardonic satire, A Modest Proposal (1729). It was during this period that the image of Swift as “Hibernian Patriot” began to be actively fostered by many within the Anglo-Irish (as well as native Irish) community. Sheridan, for example, reprinted the Short View in The Intelligencer, No.15 with an introduction proposing that statues honoring the Drapier be erected throughout the country; and the Dublin printer George Faulkner put out an edition of The Drapier’s Letters in 1725 under the title, Fraud Detected: or The Hibernian Patriot.8 Such examples point to the way that Swift’s association with Ireland became transformed into myth even in his own lifetime.
The problem with this myth-making is that it tends to gloss over both the ambivalence of Swift’s relationship to Ireland, evident even in his final years, and the contradictions inherent in his simultaneous roles as Irish patriot and as member of a ruling-class institution complicit in England’s colonialist oppression of Ireland. At the same time, the figure of “the Hibernian Patriot,” firmly rooted as it is in the specific writings and actions of the Drapier-Dean, provides insight into a crucial aspect of Swift’s identity – one that he himself came to embrace (however reluctantly) as his chief hope of immortality. Thus the Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, while describing his post-1714 life in Ireland as an “exile,” also reveals his awareness that to future generations his name would be inseparable from the nation he spent so much energy and ink defending: “‘The Dean did by his pen defeat / An infamous destructive cheat. / Taught fools their interest to know; / And gave them arms to ward the blow. / Envy hath owned it was his doing, / To save that helpless land from ruin’” (Poems 496). If this passage perpetuates Swift’s mythic status as “Hibernian Patriot,” it simultaneously affirms the reality of a life capable on many levels of sustaining it.
Some would deny Swift a place in the Irish nationalist tradition because of his religion and class affiliation. Such a position is based on an oversimplified, monolithic model of nationalism that posits the existence of a single group who alone can speak for the nation in a “pure” way. Nationalism, however, has a nasty habit of manifesting itself in a messy, contradictory body of attitudes having little to do with purity of identity or sentiment, as often as not constituting a distorted mirror image of the very colonialism it opposes. Joyce, acutely conscious of this irony, had no hesitancy about including a number of Protestants in his list of Irish patriots from the eighteenth century onward.9 It would thus be more accurate to say that Swift did indeed express an early form of Irish nationalism, though one mediated through his own implication in certain levels of what we might call the “internal colonialism” of the Protestant Ascendancy, and made ironic by the fact that the very idea of Ireland as an independent nation completely separate from England was not historically available to Anglo-Irishmen at the time. What was available was the idea of Ireland as an autonomous kingdom, enjoying full equality with England under the British crown, and this Swift urged with all the rhetorical power at his disposal. Moreover, he stretched this idea to its outermost limits, locating the victims of England’s oppression not only within but also outside of the Pale: in those western and rural regions inhabited by “Tenants; who live worse than English Beggars,” and “Families of Farmers, who pay great Rents, living in Filth and Nastiness upon Butter-milk and Potatoes, without a Shoe or Stocking to their Feet” (PW XII: 11, 10). The Drapier’s invocations of a “liberty” defined in the broadest terms, as “a Blessing, to which the whole Race of Mankind hath an Original Title” (PW X: 86), point towards a conclusion they were not yet able to articulate: that the rights and privileges of nationhood cannot be reserved for a small segment of society while being denied to the rest.
There are some authors – Jorge Luis Borges and T. S. Eliot come to mind – whose writings derive their distinctive style and coloration from factors other than specificity of place. Then there are others whose writings cannot be separated from the shapes, textures, and political struggles of a particular land and landscape. Swift unquestionably belongs in this latter category, with both the form and the content of his works reflecting the historical accident of his Irish birth as well as the later personal and political commitments of his life in Ireland. Not only do most of his occasional tracts deal directly with Irish affairs, but so also do many works we now think of as “literary.” Take, for example, A Modest Proposal, the brilliant satire now often read exclusively for its formal or rhetorical qualities, but originally one of a number of political tracts Swift wrote in 1729 in response to Ireland’s worsening economic conditions, highlighted by a severe famine. As a parody of the many fatuous proposals for dealing with the problem put forward by writers who had little understanding of the situation, A Modest Proposal must be understood as a profoundly occasional work in form as well as content, mocking – and through that mockery exemplifying – a specific, temporally defined sub-genre while simultaneously translating into comically surreal terms the tragically real situation of Ireland as a country being “eaten up” by the colonialist policies of England and forced, in the extremity of its condition, to adopt its own form of cannibalism for its very survival. The very “literariness” of the work functions as a scathing critique of any stance of detachment, aesthetic or otherwise, in the face of prevailing horrors, necessarily implicating the aloof, analytic eye of the literary critic along with the cold mathematical calculations of the Modest Proposer. Other prose satires now apt to be classified as ‘literature’ also operate as commentaries on the contemporary Irish scene. “The Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezer Elliston” (1722) – like A Modest Proposal a parody of a popular sub-genre of the day, the published “Last Words” of criminals sold on the day of their execution – makes use of general satiric conventions and devices while announcing on the title page its inextricable ties to a particular historical moment: the actual punishment of Ebenezer Elliston, “Executed the Second Day of May, 1722” (PW IX: 37). The occasionality of this piece, as a response to the growing problem of urban crime, is underscored in a note to the 1735 edition of Swift’s Collected Works (“About the Time that this Speech was written, the Town [Dublin] was much pestered with Street-Robbers . . .” [PW IX: 37n.]). Another prose satire, An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities, in the City of Dublin (1732), while incorporating many of the generic conventions found in Swift’s earliest satiric pieces, shares much in common with the later tracts through its mocking commentary on aspects of post-1714 Ireland – in this case, the political paranoia of the Whig administration in its exaggerated fear of the danger posed by Tories and suspected Jacobites. As its title suggests, the Examination offers a close (not to mention wildly comic) look at the contemporary scene, interspersing mock-allegorical devices and a running satire on the problem of false interpretation with the distinctive sights, sounds, and (not least) smells of Dublin street life in the 1720s and 1730s.
Swift’s poetry likewise often takes the concrete conditions and surroundings of his life as its subject. It is filled with descriptions of his Dublin environs as well as references both to specific events and to the everyday miseries and absurdities of Irish life. In shifting our attention from his prose works and polemical pieces to his poetry, we do not therefore move from the political to the aesthetic sphere, but rather from one mode of response to the immediate circumstances of his existence to another. Some verses explicitly serve as companion pieces to his prose tracts, such as the more than a dozen poems relating directly to Wood’s halfpence. A number of prominent public figures in Ireland, epitomized by the despised Chief Justice William Whitshed, condemner of the Drapier’s printer, inhabit Swift’s verse, turning it into a recurring reflection on the institutions of authority and quality of governance in Ireland. “On the Irish Bishops” (1732), for example, gives voice to the more general resentment of the lower clergy at the privileged position of those in the upper echelons of the church hierarchy, most of them Englishmen who had obtained their posts through influential connections in London: “Our bishops puffed up with wealth and with pride, / To hell on the backs of the clergy would ride” (Poems 499). In “Aye and No: A Tale from Dublin” (1737), Swift takes satiric aim at the highest churchman in the land – Hugh Boulter, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland – for his stand on monetary issues and for his cosy relationship with the Whig establishment in England. The poem ends with Swift conveying a none-too-subtle threat against Boulter in his capacity as “king of the mob”: “‘It’s a pity a prelate should die without law; / But if I say the word – take care of Armagh’” (Poems 560). Nor were the clergy of Swift’s own rank (especially if they were English-born) immune to his subversive wit: in “An Excellent New Ballad: or The True English Dean to be hanged for a Rape” (1730), the satiric target is Thomas Sawbridge, Dean of Ferns, who was prosecuted for raping a young woman but acquitted – according to Swift, only because he succeeded in buying her off (C III: 405). This single instance of physical rape is made to function as an implicit metaphor of England’s all-encompassing “rape” of Ireland, perpetuated through its control of Irish employments whereby “Our church and our state dear England maintains” (Poems 447). Swift turns his scathing mockery from religious to political institutions in A Character, Panegyric, and Description of the Legion Club (1736), which transforms Dublin’s grand new Parliament House on the north side of Trinity College Green into a madhouse inhabited by an assortment of traitors, idiots, and fools: “Let them, when they once get in / Sell the nation for a pin; / While they sit a-picking straws / Let them rave of making laws; / While they never hold their tongue, / Let them dabble in their dung” (Poems 551).
Perhaps even more interesting than their thematic links to Ireland are his verse’s formal and linguistic connections to it. “An Excellent New Ballad” is only one of a number of broadsides and ballads, making use of popular tunes such as “Packington’s Pound,” which demonstrate Swift’s ties to a popular satiric tradition: one that includes the seventeenth-century English anti-Puritan Rump Songs and Poems on Affairs of State but that also reflects the more specific influence of Irish culture, with its emphasis on oral and musical expression, and its dependence on cheap print technology as a means of literary production and distribution. As a writer involved in a wide network of both friendly and adversarial relationships to the many balladeers, poetasters, and printers who plied their trade in the capital city, Swift developed his poetic craft amidst the raucous energies and colorful babble of Dublin’s Grub Street. It is thus not surprising that his verse is informal and down-to-earth, appealing more to common readers than to the literati, and often featuring the humblest members of society, such as the street hawkers who inspired his “Verses Made for the Women Who Cry Apples” and the half-deranged beggar Molyneux, who became the wily “Mullinex” of several satirical poems of the 1720s. “An Excellent New Song upon His Grace Our Good Lord Archbishop of Dublin” (Poems 278–80) specifies the “singer” as “Honest Jo, one of His Grace’s Farmers in Fingal” (that is, Finglas, a parish north of Dublin) and employs dialect words – “yoke,” a Kentish word for both a measurement of land and a manor, and “bailie,” a Scottish term for a bailiff or sheriff – which call attention to non-standard English practices and, by implication, those geographical areas, like Ireland, which retained their own distinctive mode of expression. By the same token, “An Epilogue to a Play for the Benefit of the Weavers in Ireland” (1721) contains lines rhyming “savers” and “weavers” (Poems 228): a specifically “Irish” rhyme based on a pronunciation of “weavers” then no longer used in England, though it continued to prevail in Ireland. What Pat Rogers terms “a certain pervasive ‘Irishness’ of diction” in the verse (Poems 37) is even more apparent in “The Yahoo’s Overthrow; Or, The Kevin Bail’s New Ballad” (1734), set to the popular tune of “Derry Down.” A comic attack on Richard (“Booby”) Bettesworth, a sergeant-at-law who made bodily threats against Swift, this ballad figuratively (and, so concrete and vivid is its detail, almost literally) drags Bettesworth through the streets of Dublin by a neighborhood gang – the “Jolly boys of St. Kevin’s, St. Patrick’s, Donore, / And Smithfield” (Poems 539) – led by the same subversive Swift glimpsed in “Aye and No: A Tale from Dublin.” Emphasizing the sheer force of street justice as opposed to the empty rhetoric and illusory justice of the legal system, “The Yahoo’s Overthrow” combines colorful proverbial sayings (“leap of a louse”) and colloquial terms having precise local associations (“skip,” short for “skip-kennel,” signifying a footman or lackey but also, more specifically, a college-servant or scout at Trinity College, Dublin) with lively street slang: “We’ll colt him through Kevin, St. Patrick’s, Donore, / And Smithfield, as Rap was ne’er colted before; / We’ll oil him with kennel, and powder him with grains, / A modus right fit for insulters of deans” – the last two lines offering another example of a specifically Irish rhyme.
Swift’s Irishness as a writer is most obviously exemplified by “The Description of an Irish Feast” (1720), which was adapted by Swift after having been translated out of the original Irish, presumably by the author himself, Hugh MacGauran, at Swift’s behest. Under its Irish title “Pléaráca na Ruarcach,” the poem was set to music by the famous Gaelic harpist Turlough Carolan, who, according to oral tradition, personally regaled Swift with his rendition of the “Pléaráca” at the Deanery. Swift’s poem brilliantly conveys a sense of the anarchic energy and mayhem of the feast hosted by “O’Rourk” (the Irish chieftain Brian O’Rourke, who rebelled against the English in 1580) through its clipped five-syllable line, its vividly animated detail, and its onomatopoeic effects: “They dance in a round, / Cutting capers and ramping, / A mercy the ground / Did not burst with their stamping, / The floor is all wet / With leaps and with jumps, / While the water and sweat, / Splishsplash in their pumps” (Poems 222). The poem makes liberal use of dialect words (such as “ramping” for “romping”), Irish words (“Usquebaugh,” literally “water of life,” for “whiskey”), and Anglo-Irish terms (“madder,” for a wooden drinking vessel) to produce a kind of babble which linguistically mirrors the physical pandemonium described in the verse. The acts of translation running through the poem constitute, not a process of conversion from one single, unified linguistic system to another, but an opening up to the heteroglossic features of both spoken and written language in a multi-lingual culture in which “many forms of English and many forms of Irish . . . rubbed against and influenced each other.”10
Swift’s lifelong indulgence in all forms of word-play, including puns, riddles, and invented languages, needs to be understood within the context of this kind of culture, where words could have dual (or more) meanings and often functioned on several different levels at once, creating the possibilities for both linguistic plenitude and semantic confusion. His punning contests with Sheridan in particular resulted in polylingual concoctions that played upon Latin, Greek, French, English, Irish, and Hiberno-English verbal constructions, producing also an invented language, “Latino-Anglicus,” used in a series of humorous verses. It is not surprising, then, that a number of Swift’s prose pieces take language as their main subject: for example, A Discourse to Prove the Antiquity of the English Tongue, which is not (as the title might lead one to believe) a serious attempt to vindicate the superiority or purity of the English language but on the contrary, a satiric subversion of such an attempt, featuring a ludicrously ethnocentric and chauvinistic persona who concludes that “the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews, spoke the language we now do in England; which is an honour to our country that I thought proper to set in a true light” (PW IV: 239). In essence an extended punning joke, the Discourse parodies philological scholarship through a series of mock-etymologies according to which the Greek warrior Achilles got his name from “A Kill-Ease, or destroyer of ease” and Abraham had that name bestowed on him because “he was a man (in the Scotch phrase, which comes nearest to the old Saxon) of a bra ham; that is, of a brave strong ham” (PW IV: 233, 239). Similar kinds of word-play occur in A Modest Defence of Punning, a work that not only supports the use of puns but is itself an ingenious embodiment of such usage, incorporating Anglo-Latin, Greek, Spanish, and French terms into a series of English word games that continually remind its readers of the multiple interpretative possibilities of words.
Perhaps the most interesting of these prose works are A Dialogue in [the] Hibernian Style between A and B and Irish Eloquence (PW IV: 277–79), two short pieces that demonstrate Swift’s familiarity with the language spoken by the Irish planter class: those English or Scottish settlers who took over forfeited lands in the seventeenth century and cultivated the soil while they “planted,” or founded, a colony. These texts’ wide linguistic range includes colloquialisms, dialecticisms, and vulgarisms of English usage, as well a variety of words and idioms (“sowins,” “garrawns,” “spawlpeen,” “lend me a loan,” “how does he get his Health?”) taken from Irish usage.11 Although the main purpose of these pieces seems to be to ridicule the planters’ language, it is possible to view them in a less judgmental light, as evidence of Swift’s fascination with non-standard English and with regional variations in expression. This fascination belies the common misconception of Swift as a maligner of the Irish language and as one who advocated its eradication, which is based largely on a partial statement taken out of context from the following passage: “It would be a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in this kingdom, so far at least as to oblige all the natives to speak only English on every occasion of business, in shops, markets, fairs, and other places of dealing” (PW XII: 89). The point of this passage is not that the Irish language should be wiped out but that English should be promoted in the carrying on of all business transactions – a proposal consistent with the interests of the emerging Catholic middle class, whose success in the marketplace depended on a knowledge of English. Tellingly, the idea of abolishing the Irish language is also advocated in a satiric piece, On Barbarous Denominations in Ireland, which notes the existence of “an odd provincial cant . . . sometimes not very pleasing to the ear” in England rather than in Ireland, and which locates the main problem with the Irish brogue not in its inherent qualities but in the prejudiced reception it invariably elicits, regardless of “whether the censure be reasonable or not” (PW IV: 281). The proposal to translate Ireland’s “barbarous denominations” into supposedly civilized English undergoes further satiric subversion by being presented as a project “for the sake of the English lawyers,” who cause confusion in parliament by butchering the pronunciation of Irish names.
The works discussed above provide additional context and meaning to the more well-known instances of Swift’s word games and invented languages, such as the “little language” he uses when writing to Esther Johnson in The Journal to Stella: “and zoo must cly Lele and Hele, and Hele aden. Must loo mimitate pdfr, pay? Iss, and so la shall. And so leles fol ee rettle” (translated by the Journal’s first editor as, “And you must cry There, and Here, and Here again. Must you imitate Presto [Swift], pray? Yes, and so you shall. And so there’s for your letter”) (JS 210). Swift’s identification of this private language with oral communication (“when I am writing in our language I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking to you” [JS 210]) emphasizes its contrast with the world of print and writing that characterized Swift’s life in London as editor and pamphleteer for the Tory ministry. It is a contrast that operates on several levels, differentiating private expression from public statement, eccentric language usage from formal, officially sanctioned rhetoric – as well as, in a number of important ways, Ireland from England.
We might think of Swift’s complex, often inconsistent attitudes towards language in terms of the “Tory anarchism” (the contradictory combination of authoritarian and libertarian tendencies) that George Orwell ascribed to him, the “Tory” side reflected in his efforts, best exemplified by his Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue (1712), to “fix” the English language and purge it of all eccentric or non-standard vocabulary, the “anarchist” side delighting in colloquial and dialectal forms of speech, in made-up vocabularies, and in all those aspects of language most susceptible to variation and change.12 These antithetical strains can be understood in light of the contradictions of Swift’s identity as an Anglo-Irishman, with his “anarchistic” attitude toward language embodying the Irish side of his linguistic views and practices – that part which was by definition a divergence from the (Anglo-centric, imperial) norm, hence automatically perceived as aberrant.
Invented languages play a large role in Gulliver’s Travels, where the protagonist repeatedly finds himself shipwrecked on strange lands whose inhabitants speak in unfamiliar tongues he must learn for purposes of basic survival. Fortunately, Gulliver turns out to be quite a cunning linguist, quickly mastering the fundamentals of these alien languages and even becoming an expert translator. The “Tory” Swift appears here in those passages, especially in Part III, that satirize modern language experiments as well as in the recurring protests against a continually changing language, underscored by Gulliver’s discovery, upon each of his returns to England, that his countrymen’s “old Dialect was so altered, that I could hardly understand the new” (PW XI: 7). At the same time, Swift’s “anarchistic” proclivities imbue Gulliver’s world with a linguistic as well as geographic expansiveness – with a delight in word-play and verbal experimentation, whether in the “Master Bates” trap set for the reader at the outset (PW XI: 19–20) or in the foreign yet sometimes teasingly familiar or onomatopoeically inflected words spoken by Gulliver’s various hosts. Terms like “Hekinah Degul,” “Tolgo Phonac,” and “Quinbus Flestrin” flow lovingly off Gulliver’s tongue, tying him to his creator as an aficionado of non-standard-English modes of expression. This avoidance of monologism occurs in the generic as well as the linguistic sphere, with the work resisting clear-cut classification by incorporating a variety of literary forms, including the picaresque, travel narrative, spiritual autobiography, utopian fiction, and satire.
Given that the composition of Gulliver’s Travels dates from the same period as The Drapier’s Letters, it is not surprising that the satire shares a number of themes with Swift’s Irish tracts, and even includes a fictive version of the successful resistance to Wood’s patent in its account in Part III of the Lindalinians’ revolt (PW XI: 309–10). The most pertinent example is Gulliver’s contradictory role as an often enthusiastic participant in the British colonial enterprise – he is a ship’s surgeon on various trading expeditions to the East and West Indies – who ultimately rejects colonialism with a scathing denunciation that substitutes Britain’s brutal conquest of overseas territories for its harsh oppressions in Ireland:
Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.
(PW XI: 294)
The colonial’s brutal encounter with the (racial and cultural) other, which lies at the heart of this passage, is imaginatively transformed into the black humor of Gulliver’s encounter with the species of Yahoo, whom he initially reviles as an “ugly Monster” (PW XI: 224) but in whom he shortly thereafter, to his indescribable “Horror and Astonishment,” discerns “a perfect human Figure” (PW XI: 229–30). Similar such moments of loathing and self-recognition recur elsewhere in Swift’s writings, enacting his own conflicted feelings about the native Irish and his relationship to them. His tracts periodically echo Gulliver’s revulsion of the “monstrous” Yahoos through their depictions of the native Irish – “those animals” that outwardly resemble their two-legged counterparts in England, though “differing in their notions, natures, and intellectualls more than any two kinds of Brutes in a forest” (PW XII: 65). At the same time, the tracts contain examples in which Swift, like Gulliver, acknowledges his resemblance to the Yahoo and thus, in effect, recognizes his own “monstrosity” – even more to the point, his own “savagery” reflected through colonial eyes. As Swift notes in the Fourth Drapier’s Letter, the English “look upon us as a Sort of Savage Irish, whom our Ancestors conquered several Hundred Years ago: And if I should describe the Britons to you, as they were in Cæsar’s Time, when they painted their Bodies, or cloathed themselves with the Skins of Beasts, I should act full as reasonably as they do” (PW X: 64). When Gulliver is placed in a box and “carried about for a Monster” by the Brobdingnagian farmer (PW XI: 97), or when he is examined as a weird specimen by the three eminent scholars at the Brobdingnagian court and proclaimed to be a “Lusus Naturæ” or jest of nature (PW XI: 104), he undergoes a process of objectification that may be seen to “hibernicize” him, turning him into an alien creature upon whom others can project their own biased, ethnocentric assumptions. In this sense Gulliver embodies the conflicted identity of an Anglo-Irishman, lost in a world where the familiar has become strange and where he is caught between the roles of master and slave, civilized being and savage.
In one other important way does Gulliver’s Travels reveal its links to an Irish author and context. Its episodic, fragmented structure, composed of voyages that differ from one another formally as well as thematically, exemplifies a stylistic trait characteristic of Swift’s writings, reflective of a textual preoccupation with unruly particulars or disjunctive elements rather than with their harmonious resolution – an insistence on the primacy of the part over the whole. Throughout his career, Swift produced texts made of up fragments and calling attention to their incompleteness, starting with his earliest satire, A Tale of a Tub (1704), and illustrated by his partiality for certain kinds of literary forms such as the journal, the picaresque, and works made up primarily or wholly of dialogue and snippets of conversation. Swift’s oeuvre also includes literal fragments – the few short sections of a projected History of Britain that was never finished, for example, and his autobiographical piece The Family of Swift, a fragmentary account of his lineage and early life which ends abruptly at age thirty, with no prospects (or closure) in sight. The fifty-six lines of Swift’s “Allusion to the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace” (“A Dialogue between an Eminent Lawyer and Dr. Swift”) represent only one-third of the length of Pope’s Imitation of the same poem. That Swift looked to Horace as a literary model indicates an aspiration he shared with the English Augustan poets to situate himself as a writer in the learned, classical tradition. At the same time, his imitations of only portions of Horatian texts suggest his marginality to this tradition, and have the effect of casting an ironic perspective on contemporary neoclassical assumptions about the importance of artistic unity. If Pope in effect fashioned himself as “the English Horace,” Swift might be thought of as an “Irish Horace,” one who specifically inscribed his paraphrase of “Horace, Book I, Ode XIV” to Ireland – “Poor floating isle, tossed on ill fortune’s waves” (Poems 291) – and used the Horatian ode as a vehicle for rallying Irish patriotism in its resistance to British colonialist oppression.
These distinctive aspects of Swift’s style can be understood in part as manifestations of what we might call an “Irish aesthetic”: a decentralized, anti-organic mode of writing that implicitly challenged eighteenth-century British aesthetic hegemony, especially its insistence on the integrated wholeness of a work of art and its promotion of concordia discors, the overriding unity of discordant elements – precepts well-suited to a nation that was increasingly becoming the imperial center around which a constellation of ethnically and culturally diverse colonies revolved.13 Such a sense of nationhood and imperial inclusiveness would find its consummate aesthetic expression in Pope’s description of Windsor-Forest (lines 13–16), where potentially warring elements converge, “Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d, / But as the World, harmoniously confus’d: / Where Order in Variety we see, / And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.”14 In Pope’s aesthetic as well as ideological formulations, particulars are given their due but ultimately subordinated to a single, all-encompassing structure of truth, beauty, and (not least) power. Hence Pope’s assertion that “’Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call, / But the joint Force and full Result of all” (Essay on Criticism, lines 245–46); and hence also his paean to the British empire at the end of the Epistle to Burlington, where the Earl of Burlington’s invincible command over the realms of both art and nature is hailed for producing “Imperial Works . . . worthy [of] Kings” (line 204). Swift’s rejection of the consolidation and closure implicit in Pope’s “Order in Variety” is registered in writings that foreground the anarchic autonomy of rambunctious elements and free-floating fragments. Although the latter can at times have a negative valuation, pointing up Ireland’s lack of internal coherence and sectarian strife, they can also – as “The Description of an Irish Feast” vividly shows – represent a sensuous concreteness and individualistic spirit impervious to the homogenizing technologies of Britain’s global domination.
By the early 1730s, Swift’s reputation as a writer had grown to the point where there was interest in making his entire body of work available in print. Given Swift’s ties to Dublin’s literary circles, epitomized by his friendship and patronage of the gifted young Dublin-born poet William Dunkin, there were compelling arguments for an Irish edition, despite the fact that most of his previous work had been published in London. Among those eager to put out such an edition, and thereby displace the Englishman Benjamin Motte as Swift’s main publisher, was the young Irishman George Faulkner, whom Swift called “the Prince of Dublin Printers” (C IV: 222). Periodic disavowals notwithstanding, Swift became an active collaborator in Faulkner’s 1735 edition, providing materials to be included and helping to ensure the accuracy of its content. The importance of this edition is that it presented Swift’s works as part of a consciously and thoroughly Irish production, in effect making him into a writer inseparable from Dublin life and letters. Swift recognized and quietly embraced this fact even as he continued to express the desire to have such an edition published instead in England – not least because the copyright protections available to English authors and printers did not extend to their Irish counterparts. No doubt another reason was his never entirely suppressed wish to be a writer speaking from the center of civilization rather than from its margins, which created a deep ambivalence towards “being published in so obscure and wretched a country” as Ireland (C IV: 322). Swift’s acute awareness of the power of cultural hegemony must on some level have intensified this aspiration even as it simultaneously made him realize its unworthiness. Just as he had earlier longed to become England’s official Historiographer Royal but wound up becoming instead an unofficial historian of Irish affairs, so in later years he was moved by the temptation to situate himself in the pantheon of great British writers immortalized in definitive London editions, but ultimately welcomed his status as the author of works to be forever associated with a Dublin printer and a distinctively Irish edition. Defending the latter edition in a letter to Motte, Swift underscored its political significance as an anti-colonialist gesture, doing in the cultural arena what The Drapier’s Letters had done in the political one. Declaring himself “incensed against the Oppressions from England” and with “little Regard to the Laws they make,” Swift defiantly defends acts of civil disobedience in both the political and literary spheres, asserting that just as he has encouraged Irish merchants to ignore England’s trade restrictions and export their wool to whatever countries they wish, so too he would encourage Irish booksellers “to sell your Authors Books printed here, and send them to all the Towns in England, if I could do it with Safety and Profit” (C IV: 494). Deane Swift, writing to thank his cousin for the gift made him of the edition, foregrounded its political dimension by identifying its contents with the fostering of a patriotic spirit and a commitment to resist tyranny. As he promised his benefactor, “I shall from this moment enlist myself under the conduct of Liberty’s General; and whenever I desert her ensigns, to fight under those of Tyranny and Oppression, then, and not till then, will I part with those books which you have so highly honoured me with . . . that I may never afterwards be reproached either by the sight of them, or the remembrance of the donor” (C V: 134).
In the years that followed, a long line of readers would similarly associate Swift’s writings with Irish patriotic and pro-liberty sentiments. Even those who declined to interpret them as a clarion call to arms in defense of the mother country often saw them as part of a literary tradition rooted in the Irish soil, expressive of a quintessentially Irish wit and word-play. It is no coincidence that Swift appears as a tantalizing presence throughout Joyce’s fiction and as the ghost who continually haunts Yeats, revealing himself to the poet alternately as a perversely mocking specter and as the noble embodiment of Protestant Ireland.15 The contradictions inherent in Swift’s Anglo-Irish identity remind us that we cannot characterize either the man or his work in any simple fashion, but they also allow us to appreciate the many ways in which Swift was an Irish writer, speaking in a variety of tongues while simultaneously delighting in and striving to tame the instabilities of language, and uttering denunciations with a verbal ferocity which, like the invective of the old Irish file, the poet purportedly capable of rhyming rats to death, became a fearsome weapon against the seemingly endless supply of fools and knaves who got trapped in his crosshairs.16
1. A useful overview, “Gaelic Dublin in the Eighteenth Century,” is provided in Alan Harrison, The Dean’s Friend: Anthony Raymond 1675–1726, Jonathan Swift and the Irish Language (Dublin: Edmund Burke Publisher, 1999), chapter 2.
2. For Swift’s relationship to Temple and his life at Moor Park, see E I: 91–149; 169–82. For Swift’s unhappy experience in Kilroot, see Louis A. Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 15–24.
3. Swift’s self-characterization appears in Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, ed. A. C. Elias, Jr., 2 vols. (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. I, p. 35. Despite Elias’s conjecture (vol. II, p. 411) that Pilkington was “putting words into Swift’s mouth” here, the epithet is entirely consistent with others of Swift’s semi-ironic portrayals of himself vis-à-vis Ireland, both in letters and in poetry.
4. Sheridan’s grandson was the celebrated playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. For a discussion of the Sheridan family within a specifically Irish context, see Fintan O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).
5. See The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 241; and J. Paul Hunter, p. 236 below.
6. In this connection, see D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 3rd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 94–122.
7. See Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 205.
8. See Swift and Sheridan, in The Intelligencer, ed. James Woolley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 174.
9. See, for example, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” (1907), in Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (eds.) The Critical Writings of James Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), pp. 161–62.
10. See Andrew Carpenter’s Introduction to Carpenter (ed.) Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), p. 3.
11. See Introduction to A Dialogue in Hybernian Stile Between A & B & Irish Eloquence, ed. Alan Bliss (Dublin: The Cadenus Press, 1977), pp. 42–49; the quoted terms are from this edition.
12. See George Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels,” in Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950), pp. 53–76.
13. I mean to apply this characterization of an “Irish aesthetic” specifically to prose writing and poetry. Drama raises a different set of aesthetic and stylistic (as well as ideological) issues.
14. Quotations from Pope are from The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, et al. 3rd edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
15. Swift is evoked at the very outset of Finnegans Wake and pervades the rest of the novel (as he does, somewhat less overtly, in Ulysses). For Yeats’ obsessive fascination with Swift, see his play, The Words upon the Window-pane, where Swift appears to the participants in a séance as both a madman and “the chief representative of the intellect of his epoch.” In Richard J. Finneran (ed.) The Yeats Reader (New York: Scribner, 1997), pp. 225–40, especially 239.
16. For a discussion of the savage satire of the early Irish poets and their reputed ability to rhyme rats (or human enemies) to death, see Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966 [1960]), pp. 18–48; and Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 105–16.