Swift’s relationships with women have been subject to comment since his own day, and have evoked speculation and (sometimes) derision among his critics since the days of Lord Orrery. Swift’s connections with women are sufficiently complex, and women were his associates in some of the most important ventures of his career.
Swift’s incomplete autobiography, attempted relatively late in life, indicates what Swift thought of the women in his family. The autobiography is obviously a special sort of document, revealing Swift attempting to create a satisfactory paternal and male line. Swift, who (like David Copperfield) was what we strangely call a “posthumous child,” had not known his father, so there is a particular poignancy in this endeavor to create a paternal line and a “Family,” beginning with the first sentence “the Family of the Swifts was antient in Yorkshire.” Any money often seems to have come – and remained – with the women whom the Swift males married. The man whom Swift terms “The Founder” of the Irish branch of the Swifts married a rich woman “by whom he got a very considerable estate, which however she kept in her own power, I know not by what artifice, and it hath been a continuall tradition in the family that she absolutely disinherited her onely Son Thomas for no greater cause than that of robbing an orchard when he was a boy.”1 To this account, Swift adds one of his odd marginal notes, amplifying the unpleasantness of this heiress: “She was a capricious ill-natured and passionate woman, of which I have been told severall instances.” This story begins to sound like Castle Rackrent. Later, Thomas Swift married another heiress as Swift recounts; recollecting this lady’s portrait in another of his telling side-margin comments, he says she “seems to have a good deal of the Shrew in her Countenance.”2
The picture of the Swift males that arises from this autobiographical fragment’s view is a representation of rather Shandean misfits, powerless against the formidable control exerted by their disagreeable females. The worst marriage of all would seem to be that of Swift’s father and his mother Abigail, née Erick:
The marriage was in both sides very indiscreet, for his Wife brought her husband little or no fortune, and his death happening so suddenly before he could make a Sufficient establishment for his family: – And his Son (not then born) hath often been heard to say that he felt the consequences of that marriage not onely through the whole course of his education but during the greatest part of his life.3
This account, which indirectly leads us to believe that Jonathan was an only child, begotten shortly before his father took hasty leave of this world, completely ignores Swift’s older sister, Jane. (Possibly Swift was jealous of Jane, if only for the simple reason that the sister had been acquainted with her paternal parent.) In so finely resenting his parents’ marriage, and the ill effects of it on his own life, Swift seems to find an admissible way of wishing that he had never been born. His mother would seem (by implication) to be one of the succession of controlling women – plain-featured and shrewish – who married into the Swift family. Abigail Swift also took control of Swift’s life, primarily by making it happen. One wonders if he ever quite forgave his mother her original sin of bringing him into the world.
The statement regarding his parents’ marriage is immediately followed by Swift’s compressed account of his birth, an account which immediately runs into the strangest episode in Swift’s childhood:
He was born in Dublin on St. Andrews day, and when he was a year old, an event happened to him that seems very unusuall; for his Nurse, who was a woman of Whitehaven being under an absolute necessity of seeing one of her relations, who was then extremely sick, and from whom she expected a Legacy, and being at the same time extremely fond of the infant she stole him on Shipboard unknown to his Mother and Uncle, and carryed him with her to Whitehaven, where he continued for almost three [‘two’ crossed out] years. For when the matter was discoverd, His Mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a Second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it. The Nurse was so carefull of him that before he returnd he had learnt to spell, and by the time that he was three year old he could read any chapter in the Bible.4
The paragraph is even odder in the manuscript than it looks in print (PW V: 192). One can see that Swift forgot to write “born,” and had to stick the word in above the line, so the sentence first began “he was in Dublin on St. Andrews day” – as if Swift could omit the messy business of being born altogether and concentrate on Dublin and the male saint whose “day” it was. Swift also makes a shot at putting down a birth year, but scratches it out, in unusual indecisiveness. The episode of the Nurse of Whitehaven introduces us briefly to the only woman spoken of with any affection in this whole truncated autobiographical document; this is also the first time in this document that any of the male–female relationships mentioned have entailed any affectionate feeling, and, aside from the friendship of Dr. South to Thomas Swift’s second son (of whom he was an “intimate friend”), it is the sole example of any strong positive emotional connection. The woman of Whitehaven is defended on pragmatic grounds for her decision to go home to Yorkshire – that she was expecting a legacy from the sick man displays her prudence, not a venal nature. Swift is involved in explaining and defending her action, and her action leads to success – the nurture of the Nurse leads to the child learning his letters and being able to read the Bible. This passage is antipathetic to the Freudian reading of the relationship of the male child to civilization. According to Freud, the male child is consoled for his inability to possess the mother by being offered male culture and civilization, abstraction, religion, and literacy. Swift’s version of his acculturation links it to the absence of the mother – but to the presence of the mother-substitute, the “nurse” who nurtures civilization and spelling.
When on the other hand Swift enters into his masculine heritage, the patrimony of learning, he represents himself as doing abominably badly, both at the school at Kilkenny where his uncle sent him and a little later at the “University of Dublin” (Trinity College). He claims he was unhappy (even, he implies, cripplingly unhappy) because of his relations’ ill treatment of him:
he was so discouragd and Sunk in his Spirits, that he too much neglected his Academick Studyes, for which he had not great relish by Nature . . . So that when the time came for taking his degree of Batchelor . . . he was stopped of his Degree, for Dullnesse and Insufficiency, and at last hardly admitted in a manner little to his Credit, which is called in that College Speciali gratia, And this discreditable mark, as I am told, stands upon record in their College Registry.5
This dismal account is, as Irvin Ehrenpreis has shown us, highly exaggerated as far as external facts are concerned.6 But this account of depression rings true to subjective experience. Swift always had too low an opinion of his innate abilities; some part of him never felt quite worthy of the great masculine heritage of culture and Latinate literacy.
In his mature years, Swift could be furiously antagonistic to anyone whom he judged guilty of betrayal, especially within familial relations. This probably explains the amazingly vituperative tone taken towards the daughter of his distant relative Mrs. Swanton when that widow turned to the Dean for advice as to what to do with her daughter who had fled the parental home, taking her clothes with her. Swift, believing the girl has been enticed by “some beggarly rascal, who would pass for a Gentleman of fortune,” advises the mother to cast her off entirely, if the daughter still refuses to come home.
Let her know, in plain terms, that you will never have the least correspondence with her, and when she is ruined, as will certainly be the case, that you will never see her . . . and if she will run into destruction with her eyes open, against common sense, and the opinion of all rational people, she hath none to blame but her self; And that she must not expect to move your compassion some years hence with the cryes of half a dozen children at your door for want of bread.
(C IV: 178–79)
This letter of 1733 shows Swift’s more “savage” aspects. The advice to the mother to repeat her entreaties to the girl to come home is sound, but the fantasia of the future starving children is revengeful, novelistic in its style of realism (one wonders if Swift had recently been reading Defoe’s Roxana, in which the guilty heroine’s five children come crying for bread to the door of their relatives when their mother gets rid of them). Here Swift reacts to the motif of betrayal by taking – and even overtaking – the mother’s part. He reacts with a certain fear to the dauntless exhibition of sexuality on the part of the disobedient girl who, in going off with her false “Gentleman,” shows how easily duty and gratitude can be cast aside. It is strange that Dean Swift as Christian counselor should urge a mother to be the kind of disinheriting shrew he seems to detest among his ancestresses. What is even more surprising is that Swift by 1733 had acted the part of the “beggarly rascal” of a Gentleman more than once. He had enticed three young women to leave their respective mothers and come with him, and in two of these cases he was successful.
The story that Swift told himself about his relationship to the first women in his life is fraught with disappointment, anger, need, and rejection. His mother is in one of the lines of the self-sufficient shrews, a distant and rejecting woman with too much control who did not need him. She never tried to live near him or seemed greatly concerned for his welfare. The adult Swift knew about his mother’s poverty, but emotionally she seemed self-sufficient, apparently finding her son superfluous. The unnamed Nurse of Whitehaven offers care and concern. These two female “Characters” emerge in different corners of Swift’s writing. In Gulliver’s Travels, to take probably the most sustained and overt instance, the Empress of Lilliput who objects to the vulgarly physical Gulliver’s copious and inappropriate urination is one of Swift’s negative “mothers.” The Queen of Brobdingnag is a nicer version of a negative mother, large and controlling but not cold – as long as she is entertained by a creature she considers a harmless unimportant toy. The old female horse who arrives late to tea because her husband has happened to pass away – but who is otherwise undisturbed – may be on one hand a Stoic ideal, but on the other she represents a satiric reproach to women who seem to survive their husbands’ deaths quite nicely, as Swift’s own mother had done, and Temple’s sister Lady Giffard, and Mrs Vanhomrigh, among other acquaintances. Gulliver’s little nurse Glumdalclitch, on the other hand, seems a meditation, wholly or partly unconscious, upon the Nurse of Whitehaven. There was always an ideal nurse somewhere in the back of Swift’s mind. Sometimes he himself takes that role.
Swift’s own unusual family situation, his want of money, and his persistent misery in regard to all of his relations make it the more natural that he would regard marriage with extreme caution. In his service as secretary to Sir William Temple, he encountered a substitute father who met some emotional needs while adding to anxieties. In Temple, too, Swift saw as a model a man who was surrounded by bright and interesting women, including his wife Dorothy and his sister Martha, the vivacious widow Lady Giffard. Temple’s household included a housekeeper, Mrs. Johnson, and her daughters Ann and Hester (“Hetty”). Hetty was a child of eight years when Swift first arrived; Swift served as her tutor. His later life may have been an effort to recreate to some extent the emotional life of Moor Park, with himself acting the part of the middle-aged man of letters and man of the world as Temple had first seemed to him. Unlike Temple, who still used the language of libertine gallantry and whose own life had not been peculiarly marked by chastity, Swift boasted of his own cold temper, indicating to male friends that he found it relatively easy to master sexual inclination. But these boasts (if one can call them that) or defensive professions of coldness and chastity are inspired by charges of flirtation, and he does seem to have engaged in what looked like flirting (or worse) with two young ladies of Leicester. One of these girls, Elizabeth Jones, was a relative of his mother’s. Whenever Jonathan visited his mother in Leicester he seems to have got into trouble by paying too particular or too gallant attentions to a girl. Relatives feared he might throw himself away in a poor marriage, disregarding the opportunities offered by his connection with Temple. Swift in a letter to a friend in early 1692, in reaction to certain rumors about him, is contemptuous of those who have “Ruind their selves” in bad marriages, including those young men who “are too literal in rather marrying than burning & entail misery on themselves & posterity by an over acting modesty.” The young Swift boasts of his own restraint:
I confess I have known one or two men of sence enough, who inclined to frolicks have marryed & Ruind themselves, out of a maggot; But a thousand Household thoughts, w[hi]ch always drive matrimony out of my mind, whenever it chances to come there, will I am sure fright me from that, Besides that I am naturaly [sic] temperate, and never engaged in the contrary, which usually produces those effects.
While denying carnal connection he registers contempt for the gossips:
I shoud not have behavd my self after the manner I did in Leicester if I had not valued my own entertainment beyond the obloquy of a parcel of very wretched fools which I solemnly pronounce the inhabitants of Leicester to be.
(Letter to Revd. John Kendall, February 11, 1691/1692, CW I: 4–5)7
Swift is consistent in entertaining a dislike of marriage, of associating it – even among his own ancestry – with “ruin” and unhappiness. Yet he could never do without women’s society. As a young man Swift may well have seemed to “wretched fools” the accomplished flirt or designing scapegrace that he thought he was not. His relationships with women in his mature years (relationships which have puzzled many observers of his life) are always and even primarily variations on friendship – whatever else they may be. That Swift actually could consider women as friends, however, marks him as unusual for his time (and even, to some extent, for ours). Although there are a number of digs at women’s physicality and sexuality in his work, there are fewer than we would expect from a major satirist. He rarely tackles the easier targets of the anti-feminist satiric tradition. Not woman’s physical nature but her capacity to be heartless and unsympathetic is what arouses his rage. Yet, at times at least, he is also willing to estimate the extent to which women’s conduct is the result of masculine cultural prescription. He is capable of odd sympathies.
All his life, Swift was to make friends with women, and he valued the social pleasure afforded by the company of women. This value shows itself early, in his friendship with Lady Elisabeth, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Berkeley, in whose household Swift served as chaplain. The jocular Lady Betty (fifteen years old when she knew him) exchanged puns and jokes with Swift, and remained fond of him. They renewed acquaintance later in London, when she was Lady Betty Germain, and Swift wrote a brilliant light poem in praise of Lady Betty’s companion Biddy Floyd. Female friendships tend to win his support. Swift had evidently helped young Lady Betty at a difficult time, when her young sister Penelope died in 1699. Later, in 1733, Lady Betty paid for a monument to this deceased sister, which Swift installed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral with an inscription written by himself. Swift also knew Anne Finch (Lady Winchilsea); his poem “Apollo Outwitted” (Poems 100–02) is in comic praise of her.
Perhaps Swift appreciated female society all the more because it dispensed him from the usual heavy drinking associated with male bonhomie, a masculine activity for which Swift seems to have had no taste at any time in his life. His addiction was to coffee. Not only do we modern readers associate Swift with women and coffee taken together, we can see that he does so too. He bought his cousin Patty Rolt a coffee roaster costing three shillings in May 1709, as noted in his accounts (E I: 303). Laetitia Pilkington gives us a comic view of Dean Swift making coffee for her:
the Dean set about making the Coffee; but the Fire scorching his Hand, he called to me to reach him his Glove, and changing the Coffee-pot to his Left-hand, held out the Right one, ordered me to put the Glove on it, which accordingly I did; when taking up part of his Gown to fan himself with, and acting the character of a prudish Lady, he said, “Well, I do not know what to think; women may be honest that do such Things, but, for my part, I never could bear to touch any Man’s Flesh – except my Husband’s, whom perhaps, says he, she wished at the Devil.”.8
Swift associates sexual jest with the coffee, at the same time enjoying and playing with his travesty role as the coffee-maker and, as it were, hostess of the moment, developing that role into the “prudish Lady” in a transitory but surprising riff.
Since the eighteenth century, references to drinking coffee in Swift’s letters to “Vanessa” have been seen (rightly, in my view) as a code phrase for having sexual intercourse, but such interpretation can be repudiated, as it has been by some editors and biographers, precisely because Swift obviously did so often enjoy coffee and conversation with an attractive or interesting woman. Such moments may have allowed him to bring out the “feminine” side of himself.
The big and by now unavoidable questions regarding Swift and women have all had to do with his sexual life – or lack of it. He proposed marriage early in life, perhaps in a desperate half-effort to establish a home for himself and some security. The courtship (if it can be called that) of Jane Waring took place when Swift was isolated and unhappy in Kilroot, looking after what was really a set of badly-off parishes in a bleak country, largely populated by Dissenters, on the shore of Belfast Lough. Jane and her recently widowed mother seem to have been living in Belfast at the time. Jane was refreshingly Anglican, the daughter of a clergyman, the former Archdeacon of Dromore. With Jane, Swift could enjoy a style of conversation at a far remove from the boorishness and hostility that seemed to surround him in Presbyterian Kilroot. Jane was an attractive young woman in delicate health. Ehrenpreis acutely notes that Jane “became the first of the three frail, fatherless, first-born young women to whom he successively attached himself” (E I: 165). Swift, who had a habit of altering language and presenting nicknames, called Jane “Varina” in a twist on “Waring”; the new nickname also puns with “Verena”meaning “truth.” Swift’s proposal to Varina was contingent on the demand that she agree to forsake her mother, of whom Swift disapproved morally – or perhaps socially.
Swift himself never seems to have gone wife-hunting in higher or at least wealthier classes, although this course was open to many an ambitious young man. Varina had attracted him during his dismal time in the north of Ireland, but that was before his return to England and his renewed and mature friendship with Esther Johnson. When in 1700 Varina tried to revive the relationship and get him to come to the point of marrying, he was able to evade her. Varina had after all pleaded earlier against marriage, citing her poor health and his low income. Neither of these factors had altered, as Swift reminded her in a forceful and somewhat cruel letter. He also challenged her with her fitness to be the ideal wife, of a meek sort as defined by the conduct books:
Have you such an inclination to my person and humour, as to comply with my desires and way of living, and endeavour to make us both as happy as you can? Will you be ready to engage in those methods I shall direct for the improvement of your mind, so as to make us entertaining company for each other, without being miserable when we are neither visiting nor visited? Can you bend your love and esteem and indifference to others the same way as I do mine? . . . Have you so much good-nature as to endeavor by soft words to smooth any rugged humour occasioned by the cross accidents of life? . . . These are the questions I have always resolved to propose to her with whom I meant to pass my life; and whenever you can heartily answer them in the affirmative, I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful, or your fortune large. Cleanliness in the first, and competency in the other, is all I look for.
(Letter to Miss Jane Waring, May 4, 1700, CW I: 35–36)9
The demands he places on Varina as a wife are not unreasonable according the standards of the day, but to put them so baldly, so briskly, and in such an uncompromising, rapid-fire manner seems like a deliberate attempt to elicit the answer “No.” The ending is even more directly insulting. If she is good enough to be meek and docile and keep clean, he will overlook the fact that she not only brings no dowry but also lacks beauty. Swift could rightly calculate that no woman of any wit or wisdom could accept such a proposal; at the same time, he is virtuously free of the charge of jilting her. We can believe his other statement to Varina, “neither had I ever thoughts of being married to any other person but yourself” (CW I: 33). The thought of marriage seems to have given Swift severe qualms. It is not sexuality that disgusts him so much, but, rather, marriage in itself, coupledom, the designed production of children, mechanical and enforced and inescapable intimacy. Swift always associates marriage with loss – including his own parents’ marriage, which had better not have happened. Apparently, marriage is in Swift’s eyes a sort of vampirish exchange, as heterosexual liaisons are in Henry James’ The Sacred Fount. Marriage diminishes and exhausts one or the other member of the dismal partnership. His father died of it. Either he will kill the delicate Varina or she will stifle him. Beneath the cruelty of this letter to Varina one can sense a rising panic, an effort to ward off disaster. The disaster that Swift obscurely feared could not be averted by choosing to marry a beautiful woman with money. It could be averted by engaging in a close association with a woman that did not entail marriage.
When Swift undertook the post of secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park, he had met young Esther (or Hester) “Hetty” Johnson, whose widowed mother was a protégée of Temple. In 1699 Temple died. In 1701 Swift was again in England, and again met with Miss Johnson, who was now in the service of Lady Giffard, though still in company with her mother and her old friend, the unmarried Rebecca Dingley. Ehrenpreis thinks that Swift schemed to get Hester Johnson to go back to Dublin to live (in effect though not overtly) with him, and that he came to England with this idea in mind, though he admits Swift represents matters otherwise (E II: 66). Swift himself stresses that he advised Hester Johnson to make the move for financial reasons – he rationally pointed out that Hester’s meager inheritance would not go far in England and would allow a much higher standard of living in Ireland, where rents were low and interest rates high. Sir William Temple had left Hester Johnson a lease of lands in Morristown, in County Wicklow, so in making the move she could be closer to the Irish source of income (JS I: 74). It is evident from his own account books that Swift himself contributed fifty pounds a year towards Hester’s support – no small matter in those early years when his own income was not large. To assume, as Ehrenpreis does, a sexual relationship already consummated, and deep-laid plans made as early as 1699, is to assume too much. Ehrenpreis is on more solid ground when he points out that in the cases of all three of the young women with whom he was to be closely connected (Jane Waring, or “Varina”; Hester Johnson, or “Stella”; and Esther Vanhomrigh, or “Vanessa”), Swift made it a condition of receiving their affection that the woman separate herself from her mother (E II: 66–67). The deficiencies Swift suspected, perhaps unjustly, in Mrs. Waring seem to have been moral. Hester Johnson’s mother Bridget was thoroughly respectable, but her origins were low, and her status (as a housekeeper) not high. (Her name also sounds suspiciously Roman Catholic.) Hester – witty, good-looking, conversible, and intelligent – would seem of higher rank if her mother were absent. So Swift at age thirty-four was able to persuade Hester Johnson, who was only twenty, to come to Dublin. Or perhaps she persuaded him that she and Rebecca should go to be with him. Swift and Hester were never to live together, and the convenances were preserved by the constant presence of Rebecca Dingley, who appears in history as Hester Johnson’s dependent, and served as her “humble companion,” as that age termed such a role. Rebecca was a relative of Sir William Temple but had no means of her own; her only inheritance from her father amounted to fourteen pounds a year. Rebecca was not good-looking and not particularly gifted; Deane Swift said she was about fifteen years older than Hester (around Swift’s age, in fact) (JS I: xxvii). To be getting on in years, plain, respectable, and poor – these are not splendid qualities in a woman but they are very good in a companion for a young woman, what Thackeray’s Becky Sharp calls “a sheep-dog.”10 But Rebecca Dingley has been seen largely from a conventional masculine view according to which the real and only “love affair” (of whatever sort) is between Stella and Swift, with Rebecca serving only as a docile veiling. It may be that the three-cornered relationship was considerably more complicated than that. Jonathan Swift himself does not describe the relationship of Rebecca and Hester as one of servitude or necessity but as a matter of choice on Stella’s part. She contracted an intimate friendship with another lady of more advanced years. Hester Johnson may well have found real pleasures and solid satisfactions in her “intimate friendship” with the devoted Rebecca that were just as important to her as (though different from) the pleasures and satisfactions of her relationship with Swift.
Certainly, without the presence of Rebecca Dingley, who supplied respectability and reputation to the ménage in Ireland, the new arrangement would not have been possible. Swift may still have thought, as he did in Leicester, that he “valued his own entertainment beyond the obloquy of a parcel of very wretched fools” (CW I: 4–5), but prudence demanded care for his own reputation and Hester’s. This time he outfaced the gossips with unusual care. Swift was anxious to have it believed that he never saw Hester without a third party being present, and that he never saw Hester in the early morning “except once or twice in a journey.” He was also very open about the fact that there was a constant friendship between himself and Hester Johnson, and in the main his stratagems for making Dublin swallow this unusual arrangement was largely – not entirely – effective. (There was, however, more gossip than Swift himself realized and even he had to recognize that one report was circulating according to which a particular little boy was the offspring of himself and Hester. After Vanessa’s death there were anonymous printed scurrilous reports of the relations between Dean Swift and both Hester Vanhomrigh and Esther Johnson.)11 Esther Johnson was received by Dublin society, including Anglican clerical society, and was often invited to parties and visits. In writing his letters to Esther, Swift communicated officially with both herself and Rebecca alike. Even the “little language,” the baby-talk he invented for their informal conversation, included the oft-used term for both, “MD” [my dears], and he addresses the two women alike in terms such as “little dears,” “young women,” “sirrahs.” Swift kept in constant touch when he was absent from Dublin, and the Journal to Stella, letters from the period of his longest absence from Hester since she had come to Ireland, is the result. This work is invaluable to us as a picture of Swift’s life and personality, as well as of English and Irish politics in the heyday of the Tories under Queen Anne during 1711–12.
The letters in the Journal to Stella show how much of Swift’s serious and playful thought was elicited by Esther, and how much her presence meant to his mind. It is transparent to the reader (who was never meant to come into the picture as a fourth party, although Rebecca was always to make a third) that – despite the official double addressee – the letters are truly addressed to Esther. Swift has given her the magical and romantic name of Stella, arising out of the resemblance of the words Hester or Esther to the Greek aster (star) and the English “star.” A star is beautiful and distant, unavailable, as inaccessible to love as a “bright particular star” in the firmament, as Shakespeare’s Helena says of Bertram in All’s Well.12 “Stella,” the Latin word for “star,” is also the name under which Sir Philip Sidney disguises the identity of his beloved in the famous sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella – “Star-Lover” and “Star.” Swift (who comically names himself “Presto”) is both comic clown and romantic lover, fated poet and dreamer, like his romantic Elizabethan predecessor. Some elements of Elizabethan poetry are to be found in Swift’s poems, transmogrified by context but not ruined. The phrase “the Angel-Inn” which supplies the central image and the central conceit of one of the very best of Swift’s poems, “Stella’s Birth-Day 1721,” has an Elizabethan ring which helps to convince us of the possible idea of sustainable and enduring richness and beauty, even though Stella’s face, like a real inn sign, is growing more worn with age:
Now, this is Stella’s Case in Fact;An Angel’s Face, a little crack’t;(Could Poets or could Painters fixHow Angels look at thirty six)This drew us in at first to findIn such a Form an Angel’s Mind.(P 734–35, lines 15–20)
The clichéd comparison of a beloved woman with an angel is transformed by the intermediate and material image of the hospitable inn and its very physical sign. The inn itself is active, not passive, it gives energetically in its hospitality, and is not a silent lodestone for praise.
In Swift’s poems to Stella, the elements of the love language and its own comic awareness of its own absurdity – already found in Philip Sidney – are shrewdly mixed with Swift’s own humor, mock-self-idolizing pseudo-flippancy – an art partly borrowed from the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease, the Cavalier poets of Charles II’s time. This apparently artless art accompanies and even enables a personalized plain language that can convey the material reality and day-to-nature of a deep affection. Swift’s poems to Stella deserve credit as original love poems, a literary kind in which the eighteenth century is hardly rich. They are new inventions in the poetic language of love.
The letters that we know as the Journal to Stella show us that the conversation between Swift-Presto and Esther-Stella is an intimate conversation, despite the constant official presence of Rebecca as a third party. Swift expresses to Hester some of his deeper and less categorizable feelings, his unconscious or subconscious self, with an intimacy in which self-consciousness is not really an issue:
Morning. Morrow, little dears. O, faith, I have been dreaming; I was to be put in prison, I don’t know why, and I was so afraid of a black dungeon; and then all I had been enquiring yesterday of Sir Andrew Fountain’s sickness I thought was of poor Stella. The worst of dreams is, that one wakes just in the humour they leave one.
(JS I: 152)
In this 1711 entry his own anxiety about himself, his feelings of loss and entrapment, can be alluded to by his giving an account of his dream (a very feminine thing to do), and he himself catches his own anxiety and decodes it as focusing not on Sir Andrew, nor even on both of the two women he officially addresses, but on Stella herself. That he has a friend dying makes him fear to lose her. So he works more visibly and energetically at the game of turning absence into presence:
[Anthony Henley] desired lord Herbert to tell me, I was a Beast for ever after the order of Melchisedec. Did you ever read the Scripture? It is only changing the word Priest to Beast. – I think I am bewitched to write so much in a morning to you, little MD. Let me go, will you? And I’ll come again to night in a fine clean sheet of paper; but I can nor will stay no longer now; no, I won’t, for all your wheedling: no, no, look off, don’t smile at me and say, pray, pray, Presto, write a little more. Ah! you’re a wheedling slut, you be so.
(JS I: 152)
Here the addressee is obviously singular, and “MD” becomes singular also, matching “wheedling slut.” There are two levels of play here, one the simple conjuration of absence into presence, and the other creating a present scene of sexual suggestiveness. A promise to come again in the evening “in a fine clean sheet” is usually a promise of something more carnal than an epistle, and Swift has just been talking about the way the London people are using puns these days. Is he going to be less of a Priest and more of a Beast? There is no need for definition in these epistles, both deliberately and unconsciously (so it would seem) playful and multiplex. Does such suggestive intimacy denote a foregone conclusion? Even in his playful suggestive moments, however, Swift is playing games of infinite deferral. Intimacy means that nothing precise has to happen, or happen precisely on schedule. He could probably relax with Stella because he knew that no further demands on him would be forthcoming – and knew that the other intimacy between the addressee and second party of “MD” would take care of any feelings that might otherwise turn in his direction and entrap him.
Whether it is necessary to fathom the exact nature of relationships between other people, or inspect the sheets to see if there are signs of intercourse, is arguably both rude and unnecessary. Yet so much ink has been spilt on Swift’s relations with women that anyone tackling the subject is really required to come down on some side of the question. It is my belief that the relationship between Stella and Swift was deep and included strong sexual feelings but that it was never physically consummated. Letters, puns, etc. were safety-valves for Swift’s sexuality which was to be directed to this odd version of a neo-Platonic relationship that would give each of them the autonomy that he or she so craved. The plot of marriage is for Swift a story of loss and entrapment. He was so fond of Stella that it may well have seemed unthinkable to put both her reputation and her health into the danger of pregnancy – and in the eighteenth century, practically bereft of contraception, pregnancy would have been a likely outcome with a female partner as young as Stella was at the outset of her life in Dublin. Stella’s pregnancy would have blown up Swift’s reputation and allowed scandalized enemies to get him removed from the cathedral and possibly even from the clergy (as he had no powerful backers). This does not mean, however, that the relationship in intensity, complexity, and emotional satisfactions did not seem to both parties as strong as what we usually mean by “an affair” – and a good deal more lasting than most. Swift supplied the masculine element in Stella’s life and she supplied the feminine in his, but they were both free to adopt other elements, Stella being more “masculine” in wit and judgment and her own desire for autonomy, Swift allowed to be more “feminine” in confession of fears and dreams and absurdity.
Swift also is permitted in such a relationship to indulge what might be called the “motherly” part of himself. He not only flirts with Stella, he fathers her (in offering her good advice, masculine reading, etc.). And he mothers her too – in care for her health, in offering nurture. Swift often saw himself as a kind of mother; in a letter to his cousin he compares his fondness for his own writings to the Aesopic baboon who gloats over the beauty of her children.
I have a sort of vanity, or Foibles, I do not know what to call it . . . that I am overfond of my own writings . . . I find when I writt what pleases me I am Cowley to my self and can read it a hundred times over . . . I know farther, that I am wholly in the wrong, but have the same pretence the Baboon had to praise her Children, and indeed I think the love in both is much alike, and their being our own offspring is what makes me such a blokhead [sic].
(Letter to Thomas Swift, May 3, 1692, CW I: 110)
This allusive self-image links up interestingly with the portrait of the monkey in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels, the pet beast who picks Gulliver up and tries to feed him. That story in turn seems related to a legend that Swift knew:
John Fitz-Thomas, afterwards Earl of Kildare, then an infant, was in the Castle . . . when there was an alarm of fire. In the confusion . . . the child was forgotten, and when the servants returned to search for him, the room in which he lay was found in ruins. Soon after a strange noise was heard on one of the towers, and on looking up they saw an ape which was usually kept chained, carefully holding the child in his arms. The Earl afterwards, in gratitude for his preservation, adopted a monkey for his crest, and supporters, and some of his descendants, in memory of it, have the additional motto of “Non immemor beneficii.”13
The author, Charles William Fitzgerald, Duke of Leinster, includes a variant version of this story, now related to the ancestors of the Earls of Desmond, in which the ape is more mischievous, though this “tame baboon or ape” responds to the loneliness of the newly orphaned infant, after its father is killed in battle, by carrying it around the battlements and bringing it back in safety.14 The author firmly substantiates the Kildare legend as Swift’s source: “When Dean Swift was writing ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, he had quarrelled with the Earl of Kildare, and in order to vex him, introduced into his story the part in which his hero is carried off and fed by the Brobdinagian [sic] ape.”15 In both these monkey stories, the baboon or ape is replacing an absent parent, and seems to act chiefly the mother’s part, in compensation for loss of attendants or paternal parent. In the first story, which includes the alarm of fire (how like Lilliput!), the monkey as adoptive parent acts the kind of rescuing role that was congenial to Swift’s own notion of his relation to other people – more especially people of the opposite sex.
There is a monkey-mother in Swift – parodied by himself later in Gulliver’s Travels, Book II, when the gigantic monkey tries to adopt Gulliver and feed him. Stella, like Swift’s writings, is his monkey-daughter – or son. She can be daughter, son, parent, friend, even princesse lointaine, and yet again almost part of his flesh – but never mistress or wife. Swift took some sort of vow to himself never to marry, and obviously kept it, though that caused him some difficulty. He had no mental model for himself married, just as he had literally no visible model of a parental marriage, not even a bad marriage. The story that Swift and Stella married on her deathbed may be true, but it has never been perfectly authenticated. It has been suggested that Swift and Stella could not consummate their love because of the bar against incest – as Swift believed both he and Stella were really the progeny of Sir William Temple – but that seems mere romancing on the part of Prince Posterity.
In the winter of 1707 Swift went to England. Hester Johnson and Rebecca Dingley came to London as well (it was to be their last expedition to their native land), but they returned sometime in 1708. At this time Swift evidently either made or confirmed the friendship with the Vanhomrigh family, whom he probably had known in Dublin. That family consisted of Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her four children. Mrs Vanhomrigh was a widow. Her husband, a Dutch immigrant who had died in 1703, had been a commissary for the Williamite army in Ireland, and a rich man; he had become Lord Mayor of Dublin. The Vanhomrigh widow had money and spent it; in London Mrs. Vanhomrigh took an attractive lodging near St. James’ Square. The family had many attractions, not least the beauty and taste of their eldest daughter Hester, whom Swift first called by the babyish name of “Mishessy.” Swift in his letters frequently speaks of going to play cards at “Mrs. Van’s.” In 1709, when he was back in Ireland, Mishessy wrote to him. Swift represents his first interest in the girl as paternal and tutorial; he advised her what to read, talked to her, and told her to take care of her health. To the half-orphaned young woman he was – perhaps – a substitute parent. But it is more likely that “Mishessy,” however young, did not think of him that way; twenty-year-old Hester Vanhomrigh and forty-one-year-old Swift seemed to be forming a friendship and a connection not to be categorized by the common rules of packs of idiots. In Cadenus and Vanessa Swift makes Cadenus (or Decanus, the Dean) teach the girl that inner virtue makes one secure against all foes, that one can be good without conforming:
At first at least, Swift was doubtless pleased to have someone else on whom to exercise his monkey-mother talents, someone to eat an orange with, and scold gently for her lack of exercise. But something else was going on, which Swift could not ignore. He consciously began to drop out from his letters to Stella references to going to Mrs. Van’s, even though, as biographers note, the other evidence such as the diary notes in his account books show that he went to the Vanhomrighs very frequently. Swift has lost the upper hand in the relationship with Hessy Vanhomrigh – she writes him worrying about his health, turning the tables. On leaving England, Swift had tried to shake off thoughts of Vanessa, but on his return in 1710 they became much closer, even as the Vanhomrigh family fortunes were declining. Vanessa-Hessy (now twenty-three years old) was much more likely to be certain of what she wanted. On evidence provided by Swift himself, she would invite him alone into her bedroom. It seems safest to say that she wanted him and that he wanted her in the same way – but not at the outset. His own youthful determined abstention from full sexual activity may have given Swift an overabundance of confidence in his virtue, and thus in his ability to engage in questionable experiments with both himself and Vanessa.
But it may be more truly said that these were experiments that both parties wished to perpetrate, and their experiments, however crude, belong also in the history of our endeavor to create equal rights for women, our long and still incomplete experiment to see how and in what ways members of the two (there are supposedly only two) sexes may live and work together and appreciate each other without making the relationship gel into the old connection of man and wife or the official comic liaison of man and mistress. Both of these latter connections were decidedly unfavorable to the woman in Swift’s day – and not much better in our own. (The flood of ridicule and vituperation aimed at Monica Lewinsky in the late 1990s was equal to anything that eighteenth-century scurrility could produce.) How could Swift consummate a relationship with a young woman whom he admired? In (probably) 1713, Swift wrote Cadenus and Vanessa, a poem dealing with this question, a comic-serious work in praise of a woman – a new style of heroic epistle and mock-Ovidian narrative. Venus creates a perfectly intelligent, beautiful, and virtuous woman to answer the men’s complaints that women of their day are inferior. The fact that men – and their female peers – cannot appreciate Venus’ grand achievement turns the tables against the males, but leaves the beautiful heroine at a loss:
Both Sexes, arm’d with Guilt and Spite,Against Vanessa’s Pow’r unite;To copy her, few Nymphs aspir’d;Her Virtues fewer Swains admir’d:So Stars beyond a certain HeightGive Mortals neither Heat nor Light.(lines 438–43)
Vanessa, like Stella, is a Star, above the reach of mortals, and thus doomed to solitude unless like a goddess herself she take refreshment in an odd and unequal union. Vanessa, finding no kindred spirits among her male contemporaries, turns to Cadenus (anagram of Decanus or Dean), despite his age and awkwardness and general unfitness for the amatory role. She is the victim of Cupid who shoots her while she is reading Cadenus’ “Poetick Works.” The author has the success a poet of love-elegies might dream of, arousing a beautiful girl even though his own poems are not poems of passion, and her passion is unexpected and even unwelcome. He enjoys the role of tutor that she gives him and is slow to see the danger. She attributes, he believes, “Imaginary Charms” to the aging man of forty-four. His endeavors to undeceive her and to break off are argued down by the young woman herself, who becomes in turn “The Tutor; and the Pupil, he” (line 807). It is the lady who takes the lead in urging that their union become sexual. Cadenus pleads that Friendship is the highest type of love, and thus she should be content with that. But the ending is deliberately and tantalizingly unclear. Who won?
But what Success Vanessa met,Is to the World a Secret yet:Whether the Nymph, to please her Swain,Talks in a high Romantick Strain;Or whether he at last descendsTo like with less Seraphick Ends;Or, to compound the Business, whetherThey temper Love and Books together;Must never to Mankind be told,Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold.(lines 818–27)
The conscious Muse did eventually unfold the story, however, in releasing before the end of the century some of the letters between Swift and Hester Vanhomrigh. Mankind was curious to hear more about the business at the time, particularly once Hester Vanhomrigh with her sister Mary (Moll or “Molkin”) moved to Ireland. Hester ran away from her mother to be with Swift, a lot like the disobedient girl of whom Swift the Dean so heartily disapproved, the girl who ran away from her mother with a “rascal” in 1733. Hester took a house (perhaps inherited) at Celbridge, about eleven miles outside of Dublin. Swift warned her that if she came they could not often be in each other’s company:
If you are in Ireld while I am there I shall see you very seldom. It is not a Place for any Freedom, but where every thing is known in a Week, and magnifyed a hundred Degrees. These are rigorous Laws that must be passed through: but it is probable we may meet in London in Winter, or if not, leave all to Fate, that seldom cares to humor our Inclinations.
(Letter to Esther Vanhomrigh, August 12, 1714, C II: 123)
Swift conducted the relationship with a caution that makes him seem harsh and mean – probably did so to himself, even as it did to Hester, who had to struggle on largely alone through her sister’s decline and sudden death and her own worsening health. Yet the letters, however enigmatic in some respects, are undeniably the letters between lovers who have consummated their relationship. Hester had got under Swift’s skin, she had made him descend from the “Seraphick” and had moved through his defenses with her dedicated persistence – a little like Joy Davidman with C. S. Lewis. Horace Walpole was the first outside reader to crack the code of “drinking coffee”, upon reading Swift’s Letters in Hawkesworth’s edition: “I think it plain he lay with her . . . you will see very plainly what he means by coffee.”.17 Harold Williams, mid-twentieth-century editor of Swift’s letters, is as horrified as Elrington Ball, an earlier twentieth-century editor of Swift’s correspondence, and cries out against Walpole’s “sinister interpretation” (C II: 351, note 3) – but, however crude Walpole may seem, he was perfectly right. Swift and Hester Vanhomrigh did not, however, enjoy many meetings, even in the warmest heyday of their love, 1720–21 (interestingly, the very period which elicits one of Swift’s best birthday poems to Stella, the “Angel-Inn” piece). It seems likely that Swift and Esther Vanhomrigh combined pleasures by drinking coffee together at intervals during long afternoons in bed, making up for lost time with endearments and recreation. The couple had to be content with long intervals without this release and pleasure: “the best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it . . . thus much I sympathize with you that I am not chearfull [sic] enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that” (Swift to Hester Vanhomrigh, July 13, 1722, C II: 430). If all that Swift wanted in order to feel cheerful was a drink made of roasted Arabian beans, that had always been available more than once a week; it is something more important that will not be available even once a week.
To be on coffee-drinking terms with a woman was always to Swift a sign of relaxation, of restful and playful coming home. Reading these letters – which, unlike the Journal to Stella were never meant for a third party – one can even find oneself imagining what Swift was like in bed, a rude imagining at which moral consciousness may well revolt. Swift, like Abelard, can carry an erotic charge. Like Abelard he also has that gift of memory which means much to a woman: Swift offers a catalogues of topoi sacred to their love that he urges Vanessa to recall:
What would you give to have the History of Cad – and – exactly written through all its steps from the beginning to this time . . . It ought to be an exact Chronicle of 12 Years; from the time of spilling the Coffee to drinking of Coffee, from Dunstable to Dublin with every single passage since. There would be the chapter of the Blister, the Chaptr [sic] of Madm [sic] going to Kensington . . . the Chaptr [sic] of the Wedding with the Adventure of the lost Key. Of the Strain, of the joyfull Return two hundred Chapters of madness. The Chaptr of long walks. The Berkshire Surprise. Fifty Chapters of little Times: The Chaptr of Chelsea . . . The Chaptr of hide, and whisper.
(August 12, 1720, C II: 356)
No wonder this letter made Esther happy:
you make me happy beyond expression . . . it would be to [sic] much to once to hope for such a history if you had laid a thousand pound that I should not understand your letter you had lost it tell me sincerely did those curcumstances [sic] crowd on you or did you recolect [sic] them only to make me happy [?].
(C II: 357)
They understood each other’s codes too well for either to fear – or hope – that the other did not understand. Swift always lived a life of secrecy and codes where love was concerned. Hester Vanhomrigh died, in Ireland in 1723, young and alone. Swift’s sorrow goes unrecorded. But it is possible that the loss of one beloved gave Swift an extra impetus towards recklessness, which allowed him to dare the government in writing The Drapier’s Letters in 1724. Perhaps a certain despair gave him renewed personal courage, so that he did not care too much if he went to prison, or even if he were executed. Swift received new powers of audacity and even of vision which led him through The Drapier’s Letters to the world-vision of Gulliver’s Travels. And in his most famous book, Gulliver, the repressed and wilfully “virtuous,” is a parody of Swift’s virtuous persona.
Swift did not escape gossip about his liaisons, real or supposed, during his own lifetime. But neither did he escape censure for his friendships with women in general. The list of female friends and associates should include such talented aristocrats as Mary Pendarves (née Granville) an animated correspondent who was to marry Swift’s friend Patrick Delany; her friend Anne Donellan; and the unhappy Frances Kelly, whose interesting mixture of unhappy home life, beauty, and a fatal complaint may have aroused in Swift in 1733 some reminiscence of the feelings he had ten years earlier felt for Vanessa.18
John Boyle, Earl of Orrery in his Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (1752) remarks with fascinated hostility on Swift’s friendships with women:
You see the command which SWIFT had over all his females; and you would have smiled to have found his house a constant seraglio of very virtuous women, who attended him from morning to night, with an obedience, an awe, and an assiduity, that are seldom paid to the richest, or the most powerful lovers; no, not even to the grand Seignior himself.19
On this companionship, “these foolishly-trusted women,” Orrery chooses to blame Swift’s publication of “many pieces, which ought never to have been delivered to the press”: “He communicated every composition as soon as finished, to his female senate.”20 Swift was in effect too fond of women, not misogynistic enough. With something like envy, Orrery notes his attractiveness to women even when he is not offering them the inducement of sexual pleasure – though Orrery has to sexualize the Addisonian “little senate” into a sexual enclosure, a paradoxical “seraglio.”
Orrery does not refer to the parallel influence of Swift upon the women. The noble lord seems determined to ignore the fact that Swift’s “female senate” or seraglio was composed largely of writers. It is not the least surprising aspect of Swift that he actively encouraged a number of women to write. He not only encouraged Mary Barber (1690–1757) but introduced her to the public, when he wrote the dedicatory epistle prefixed to her Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1734). When she was hard up, Swift not only donated money directly but also offered the manuscript of Polite Conversation with full rights of publication for her own benefit. Mary Barber’s own poems show the influence of Swift, in their playfulness, their adoption of “low” circumstances and moments for important and teasing sayings, as when she ridicules male costume as tyrannical and damaging.21 Barber’s contempt for authority and custom, including public English and masculine custom, evidently appeals to Swift, as does her power to satirize:
They [Barber’s poems] generally contain something new and useful, tending to the Reproof of some Vice or Folly . . . She never writes on a Subject with general unconnected Topicks, but always with a Scheme and Method driving to some particular End; wherein many Writers in Verse, and of some Distinction, are so often known to fail. In short, she seemeth to have a true poetical Genius.22
Like other women writers of the period, Barber seems to have found in Swift’s own verse style a valuable model. Most English poets, including Pope, employed the large and serious iambic pentameter which was the standard English line for serious verse. Swift in the main prefers iambic tetrameter, the short impish line, which perfectly suits the adoption of a colloquial manner, and is itself a statement of lack of pretension. The rhymed iambic pentameter assumes a public ideal, a public language, and a public self. Women writers of this period cannot adopt that kind of public persona, because they really know that they do not have a public persona at all. They have to start with the private self and invent a public voice. Swift’s kind of quick, colloquial, impudent rhyming flies into our ears, as it were, as a kind of heckling of the grand tradition and the public male persona – we hear the sound of an interjection from an unexpected and unwelcome quarter. Women writers, especially poets, knew themselves to be always officially unexpected and unwelcome – they had to find a means of expression reflecting the impudence and “sass” that it took to speak at all. Swift offered all these usable qualities, and gave them a practical model for their own tough impishness.
At the same time, Swift himself is an artist in describing the commonplace domestic sphere – he can make much of making butter or going to the privy. And he presents himself as odd – even as comical, as he certainly does in Cadenus and Vanessa, in which the aging and ungraceful Decanus is also embarrassed, the comic object of desire rather than in the usual male position of the active desiring subject looking at an object. And Swift is most unusual in presenting in the figure of “Vanessa” a woman who is attractive because of her intellectual gifts, rather than in spite of them. That fact was not lost on other women writers, as indeed it has not been lost on women of our own time. Female critics have been perhaps surprisingly sympathetic to Swift. Ellen Pollak observes that he could find no ending to Cadenus and Vanessa because his culture allowed for no female types save for docile or shrewish wives, longing old maids, and frivolous or foolish whores – none of which seemed to have anything to do with Esther Vanhomrigh or his view of her. Pollak asks “how could he pay tribute to a woman within the confines of a language and a logic by whose terms she was either fallen or unloved?”23 That Swift’s portrait of an able and lively woman was sufficiently distressing in itself is visible in Orrery’s peevish comments. All Orrery wants to see in Vanessa is a frivolous and foolish female: “Vanity makes terrible devastation in a female breast. It batters down all restraints of modesty . . . VANESSA was excessively vain.”24
Swift, unlike Orrery, does not try to shut women up. It is then not so surprising that a little group of Irish women writers formed an important part of Swift’s personal circle. All the members of Swift’s seraglio of writing women, including Mary Davys, Laetitia Pilkington, Constantia Grierson, and Mary Barber, identified themselves as Irish, and felt a certain kind of Irish patriotism, for which Swift was a rallying point. Patriot women in times of crisis get more license to speak out, and Swift – especially the later Swift of The Drapier’s Letters and after – was an admirable representation of speaking up. All of these women might be described as “self-made.” Even if married, they usually had to work at some point in their lives to earn a living. They were “low” in birth and underbred and terrifically energetic and ambitious. They are an unusual group, energetic, self-reliant and witty. Swift’s influence can be seen in the writings of all of these, and in the works of other women.25 He fell out with both Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Laetitia Pilkington (for very different reasons), but in their skilled adventurous and comic verse they show what they have learned from him. Swift’s influence extended to writers best known for prose works. He is an influence on Hester Thrale, both in verse and prose. Frances Burney’s verse squibs show that she knows Swift’s verse, and a conversation with Samuel Crisp in 1774 about a mock book of etiquette shows how well she has absorbed Polite Conversation. “‘I intend to Dedicate it to Miss Notable,’ answered I.”26
Swift is one of the partners taken in by the women writers when they wish to censure the false idealization of women, the demand that a romantic life should exist apart from the physical; he shares their suspicion that women are being socially used. Swift attracts because he does not ignore dirt, even the dirt of the kitchen and the mop and the outhouse, and because there is the insistent, unmarmoreal, perishing physicality which alone (so Swift seems to think) engages and ensures the reality of affections.
An investigation of the facts dispels notions we might pick up from Lord Orrery or Middleton Murry that Swift is deeply offensive and must be abhorrent to women.27 Feminist women, and women writers of all sorts, have almost always found him helpful, and even likeable, as is seen in Erica Jong’s presentation of Swift in her novel Fanny.28 A writer like Orrery may disgust us, because he writes of women as if they were not quite real. It is that unreality that Swift dismisses so energetically. Women are not goddesses or angels, nor inferior beasts – they are human beings living in bodies in space and undergoing like the men the ravages and opportunities of time. We always catch Swift in the flow of time, reacting to a particular situation, day, or event.
Everything that Swift did in relation to women and nearly everything that he said to or of them can be used to make him appear a failure. He is always engaged in living, seldom heading for the dry uplands of abstraction. Jonathan Swift was evasive and prickly, perhaps cold and unreasonable in some ways, but he really was an adventurer in human relations, and a comic hero of love – in contrast to his comic Gulliver, who not only shows himself inexpert at human relations, as Swift often was, but also dodges human relations in a way that Swift finally does not. Swift is really on the side of the angels in whom he does not quite believe.
1. Trinity College Library MS 1050, 2–3. I am grateful to the Librarian of Trinity College manuscript collection for allowing me to look at this manuscript. A version of it with the title Family of Swift appears in PW V: 187–195.
2. Trinity College Library MS 1050, 2, 3.
6. For comments regarding Swift’s progress and grades at college, see E I: 57–62, 279–83, 284–85.
7. When complete, Woolley’s edition will be a source superior to Ball’s or Williams’. For one thing, he is more faithful to Swift’s actual orthography. Traditionally, editors of great men’s letters have cleaned up the writing of the male heroes, while leaving their female correspondents’ letters in their raw imperfection, thus often creating or endorsing a greater educational and cultural gap than was truly the case.
8. Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington . . . Written by Herself. Wherein are occasionally interspersed, All her Poems; with Anecdotes of several eminent Persons, 3 vols. (Dublin and London, 1749–54; Garland reprint, New York and London, 1975), vol. I, pp. 50–51.
9. All editors of this letter have to rely on the printed version of 1768. Woolley comments: “So far as it is possible to tell, Jane Waring’s moment of decision had come and gone in 1696” (CW I: 143, note 4).
10. “‘Rawdon,’ said Becky . . . ‘I must have a sheep-dog . . . I mean a moral shepherd’s dog . . . A dog to keep the wolves off me . . . A companion.’” See William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 444–45.
11. A pamphlet makes “Polidore” (Swift) an habitual lecher, a rake: “Polidore . . . was from his Youth amorously inclined; never with less than two Intrigues upon his Hands.” See Some Memoirs of the Amours and Intrigues of a Certain Irish Dean, 3rd edn. (London 1730), p. 2. In his self-exculpatory Preface to the Reader, the author of this squib takes a tone of chaste rebuke:
It’s true he was a Man of Gallantry, and so are some of our best _____. My Design is only to caution Ladies who may meet with Persons of the same Disposition as this gay Man, to take care how they proceed, tho’ the Person has a Black Garment for his Protection. But I shall enlarge further on this Subject in the following Sheets, and shall only leave them to guess at the person who bears the chief Part there, by bidding ’em think of V – in a celebrated Poem: Every Body who ever heard the Character of the Dean, will not be surpris’d to find him seldom with less than two or three Intrigues at a Time . . .
(A3v–A4r)
12. “’Twere all one/That I should love a bright particular star / And think to wed it, he is so above me./In his bright radiance and collateral light / Must I be comforted, not in his sphere”: see Helena’s soliloquy in All’s Well that Ends Well, I. i. 87–91 in Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 83.
13. Charles William Fitzgerald, Duke of Leinster, The Earls of Kildare and their Ancestors: From 1057 to 1773 (Dublin: Hodges, Smith & Co., 1857), p. 20.
14. “Thomas Fitz Maurice was only nine months old when his father and grandfather were slain at the battle of Culian, in 1261. The child was at Tralee, and on his attendants rushing out alarmed at the intelligence, he was left alone in his cradle, when a tame baboon or ape took him up in his arms and ran with him to the tops of the tower of the neighboring Abbey. After carrying him round the battlements and exhibiting him to the frightened spectators, he brought the infant back to its cradle in safety. Thomas was, in consequence, surnamed ‘An Apagh’ (in Irish) . . . or ‘The Ape.’ He, however, was ancestor to the Earls of Desmond.” See The Earls of Kikdare, p. 21.
16. Cadenus and Vanessa was first published in 1726, three years after Esther Vanhomrigh’s death, and then was more formally presented in Miscellanies. The Last Volume (1727). The date of 1713 is educated guesswork, if practically universally agreed upon. Swift did not publish the poem in Vanessa’s lifetime, and it could be asked if he showed good taste, kindness to the dead, or good judgment in publishing the poem in his own lifetime.
17. “There is one to his Miss Van Homrigh, from which I think it plain he lay with her, notwithstanding his supposed incapacity, yet not doing much honour to that capacity, for he says he can drink coffee but once a week, and I think you will see very clearly what he means by coffee.” See Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1941), vol. X, pp. 218–19. Walpole, the staunch Whig, dislikes Swift, the Tory who was so disrespectful of Sir Robert Walpole, and “Horry” does everything he can to diminish him; here he certainly misreads in asserting that Swift could only perform sexually once a week, whereas what Swift is saying is that sex at least once a week is necessary to sustain cheerfulness – and laments that he thus cannot be cheerful at present. One can see that Swift’s long attempt at sexual abstention had led to unfriendly rumors about his “capacity”; it was persistent madness on his part to suppose that there was any way of escaping scandal.
18. As Williams notes, Mary Pendarves thought Miss Kelly had outdistanced herself in winning Swift’s heart: “I have given up the trial with Kelly; her beauty and assiduity have distanced me . . . At present she is disabled, poor thing . . . but the Dean attends her bedside: his heart must be old and cold indeed, if that did not conquer” (C IV: 155–56).
19. John Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift. In a Series of Letters, 3rd edn. (London, 1752), p. 83.
21. See Mary Barber, “Written for my Son, and Spoken by him at his first putting on Breeches,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1734), pp. 13–16.
22. Barber, Poems on Several Occasions, pp. vi–vii.
23. Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 151.
24. Orrery, Remarks, p. 70.
25. I am here repeating an argument made in an earlier article, “Swift among the Women,” Yearbook of English Studies, 18 1988), 68–92.
26. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars Troide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), vol. II, p. 49. Also see The Early Diary of Fanny Burney, ed. Annie Raine Ellis (London, 1907), vol. I, pp. 324–26.
27. John Middleton Murry is especially disturbed by the excremental poems: “Nevertheless, it is not his direct obsession with ordure which is the chief cause of the nausea he arouses. It is the strange and disquieting combination of his horror at the fact of human evacuation with a peculiar physical loathing of women . . . [Swift’s] animus against women became more and more disproportioned, vituperative and shrill.” See Murry, Jonathan Swift, reprint (London, 1954), p. 439, p. 441.
28. “Just as I had rever’d Mr. Pope for his Poetical Works so ’twas the Reverse with Dean Swift: my Admiration grew, first from my knowing him, then from the Splendour of his works . . . he was a slighted Lover of Mankind, one who lov’d not wisely but too well.” See Fanny, being The True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (New York: Signet, 1981), pp. 228, 235.