Jonathan Swift had a lifelong interest in the English language. The extent of this interest is extraordinary. It includes language history and theories; dialect, jargon, and slang; vocabulary, orthography, and punctuation; etymology; rhetoric and dialectic; code and private languages; puns and language games; the social and political function of language and its abuse in propaganda. A received view in the extensive modern scholarship on Swift and the English language is that Swift is a linguistic conservative. He deplores the impurity, instability, and impermanence of English and aspires to arrest its obsolescence and purge it of corrupt words. He prescribes standardization in spelling and punctuation. He insists on simplicity and stylistic propriety, which he polices in his satiric invective against offending authors. Yet, paradoxically, Swift’s stylistic practice is characterized by unconstrained linguistic freedom. Swift was certainly called to account by contemporary critics for his impropriety. In the “Apology” for his brilliant early satire A Tale of a Tub the “Author” acknowledges that “he gave a Liberty to his Pen, which might not suit with maturer Years, or graver Characters” (PW I: 1–2).
Swift’s discursive works on language and style include an essay in The Tatler No. 230 (September 28, 1710); Hints towards an Essay on Conversation (written c. 1710–12); A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue In a Letter to the Most Honourable Robert Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain (1712); and A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately enter’d into Holy Orders (1721). This chapter will examine what Swift writes about language and style in these works and will consider aspects of his actual practice in his writings. The focus in this chapter will be on Swift’s politics of language. Importantly, Swift’s discursive writings on language were part of a larger political project: an aspect of his activism against post-1688 Whig regimes. His account of linguistic and literary history and proposals for correcting and settling the English language drew contemporary attention precisely because they were a political confrontation to cultural views being propounded by Whig writers. Swift’s linguistic challenge was also delivered, with extra menaces, in his great prose satires A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, in several poems, in his punning treatises and practice, and in his copious satiric compilation A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, According to the Most Polite Mode and Method Now Used at Court, and in the Best Companies of England (1738).
The exhortations on language and style in the didactic A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately enter’d into Holy Orders (PW IX: 61–81) express Swift’s characteristic general linguistic positions. Swift recommends to the gentleman entering the Church of Ireland “the Study of the English Language” and the avoidance of “barbarous Terms and Expressions, peculiar to” Ireland (PW IX: 65). Swift’s stark comments elsewhere in his work on English linguistic imperialism in Ireland testify to his understanding of language as an index of cultural identity and instrument of hegemony (see PW IV: 280–84; IX: 202; 12: 89). The surviving traces of Swift’s contact with the bardic culture of Catholic Jacobite Gaelic Ireland (C II: 440–41) and of an interest in Irish poetry as reflected in his poem “The Description of an Irish Feast” (Poems 221–23) might suggest counter-hegemonic sympathies in Swift. In A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Swift declares that “Proper Words in proper Places, makes the true Definition of a Stile” and he proscribes the use of “obscure Terms” (PW IX: 65). The prescription of plain language, expressed in A Letter to a Young Gentleman, is the positive behind the parody of obscure and esoteric authors in A Tale of a Tub and of specialist language as obscurantist jargon in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift admonishes the young gentleman to avoid the affectation of politeness and to use “that Simplicity, without which no human Performance can arrive to any great Perfection” (PW IX: 68; see also PW II: 177; IV: 15). He counsels against “that Part of Oratory, which relates to the moving of the Passions.” For such oratory is the stylistic symptom of “Enthusiastick” preachers, whose belief in personal spiritual revelation and inspiration Swift satirizes in A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit as a subversive sexual pathology (PW IX: 68; PW I: 171–90).
Swift’s prescriptivist model of linguistic simplicity and propriety seems exemplified in the conversation of those equine Ancients the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver reports that in Houyhnhnm “Conversations,” “nothing passed but what was useful, expressed in the fewest and most significant Words: Where (as I have already said) the greatest Decency was observed, without the least Degree of Ceremony; where no Person spoke without being pleased himself, and pleasing his Companions: Where there was no Interruption, Tediousness, Heat, or Difference of Sentiments” (PW XI: 277). Amusingly, Gulliver is unable to emulate the perfection he reports, straying into an unnecessary parenthesis. The Houyhnhnms illustrate what Swift said in Hints towards an Essay on Conversation were the “two chief Ends of Conversation . . . to entertain and improve those we are among, or to receive those Benefits ourselves.” In the Hints Swift condemned as unfit for conversation those who possess “the Itch of Dispute and Contradiction.” Human nature “is most debased, by the Abuse of that Faculty which is held the great Distinction between Men and Brutes” (PW IV: 92, 94). In Gulliver’s Travels the Swiftian ideal of conversation is practiced by a mythic animal species, not by humankind. The subjects of Houyhnhnm discourse are ethically serious (PW XI: 277–78). Swift’s principal exhibit of contemporary language abuse and conversational anility was the polite conversation “at Court, and in the Best Companies of England.” Swift was its satiric anthologist. A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (PW IV: 97–201) is a compendium of clichés, platitudes, proverbial commonplaces, and a numbing display of systemic word abuse.
Swift’s advocacy of a plain style in his didactic and satiric writings reflects a dominant cultural attitude to language and literary style. Swift’s exhortations can be paralleled in works from the mid-seventeenth century onward recommending a simple, straightforward plain style. In a famous passage of one such work, Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), Sprat reports that the Royal Society has made “a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words.”1 Although the Houyhnhnms might be seen to exemplify this “primitive purity, and shortness,” the Royal Society’s prescription of a plain style, and particularly the materialism in its emphasis on “words” giving a grasp of “things,” does not escape Swift’s satiric ridicule. In Book III of Gulliver’s Travels the plain communication of things has become a project “to shorten Discourse” and “a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever.” The professors of language in the Academy of Lagado propose “that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on” (PW XI: 185). In this burlesque of the theory that words and things are in one-to-one connection, the “word” has become the “thing” itself. In a characteristic Swiftian satiric literalization, the Lagadian sages sink under the weight of the bundle of things that they carry on their backs for conversation.
The lumbering linguists in Lagado are also a reductio ad absurdum of universal language schemes associated with the Royal Society. According to John Wilkins (1614–72), one of the founders of the Royal Society and a universal language theorist, the great advantage of a universal language scheme was that it would “mightily conduce to the spreading of all arts and sciences: because that great part of our time which is now required to the learning of words, might then be employed in the study of things.”2 For the absurd linguists in Lagado dispensing with words in favor of carrying “Things” would “serve as an universal Language to be understood in all civilized Nations . . . And thus, Embassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign Princes or Ministers of State, to whose Tongues they were utter Strangers” (PW XI: 186). Yet the idea of a universal language returns with a satiric charge in Gulliver’s Travels. The Houyhnhnms may “have no more Existence than the Inhabitants of Utopia”(PW XI: 8), but their plain-style simplicity and propriety in conversation represent a Swiftian ideal and are offered as a contrast to European corruption. Their language, which is oral not written, and so presumed to have escaped the corruption of textuality, is wryly implied at one point to be an appropriate model for a universal language. Gulliver observes of the Houyhnhnm language that “the Words might with little Pains be resolved into an Alphabet more easily than the Chinese” (PW XI: 226). Chinese was thought suitable as a universal language model.3 It is admired for its permanence in Swift’s Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue (PW IV: 9). The Houyhnhnm language is ideal in Swift’s satire because of its simplicity and brevity and because it is free from the fate of human language, which is to degenerate. Swift’s linguistic didacticism coexists with a love of verbal play. The invented names and language given to the peoples Gulliver meets on his voyages display Swift’s love of word games and mock languages, a playfulness evidenced also in the “little language” employed in his correspondence with Esther Johnson (“Stella”) and Rebecca Dingley and in the punning language games he enjoyed in his correspondence and collaborations with his friend Thomas Sheridan.
An advocate of a plain style, Swift rejected stylistic amplification in his verse and prose. He typically eschewed what he called the “lofty style” (Poems 518, 520). But although he preferred a plain style, he hardly practiced plain statement. Beneath the seeming simplicity of his concise plain style is a challenging complexity. Swift is not reader-friendly. He deploys putative speakers and prefers impersonation to speaking in propria persona. Readers have to negotiate writing that is radically parodic, ironic, and oblique. When Gulliver says he chose “to relate plain Matter of Fact in the simplest Manner and Style” the passage in fact parodies the claims made by contemporary voyagers and the linguistic prescriptions of the Royal Society (PW XI: 291). Gulliver’s plain style is the vehicle for a bewildering array of ironies, parodies, and attacking purposes. The ubiquity of parody in Swift’s writings has been explained in psychological terms as a personal defensiveness. Claude Rawson comments that it “springs from a certain temperamental reluctance to expose himself too openly in his own person, just as his frequent resort to the obliquities of irony protected him from the vulnerabilities and the simplifying commitments of plain statement.”4 Certainly, much of Swift’s political work is guarded, as Murray Pittock says, “into irretrievable ambivalence.”5 In Swift’s Opposition political writing, particularly on the dangerous dynastic issue of the time (that is, whether to support the Hanoverian succession to the throne or to restore the exiled Stuarts in the person of James II’s son, “James III”or the “Pretender”), the use of putative speakers, parody, ironic indirection, and ambiguity afforded considerable advantages. In a culture where there were “two communities of allegiance,”6 Jacobite and Hanoverian, and conditions of censorship in which a Whig government was willing and able to prosecute disaffection that favored the exiled House of Stuart, such figurative resources enabled Swift to say politically unspeakable things. Expressions of his anti-Hanoverianism are often punctuated as an aside, delivered indirectly or in undertone. The pun and the parenthesis (disliked by Whig cultural ideologues such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, John Dennis, and Daniel Defoe because of their indirection and dubiety) are favorite Swiftian figures. A few simple examples of Swift’s stylistic strategy on the most dangerous political topic of the day must suffice here.
In “On Poetry: a Rhapsody” virulent anti-Hanoverianism pretends not to be:
But now go search all Europe round,Among the savage monsters crowned,With vice polluting every throne(I mean all kings except our own).(Poems 533)
In this case the self-protective parenthesis also functions as ironic intensification of the satire. The inhumanity of the Hanoverian monarch is imputed in Swift’s most famous satire, but indirectly, through fictional characters. In Book I of Gulliver’s Travels Gulliver in Lilliput is arbitrarily convicted of high treason. The Emperor of Lilliput’s “great Lenity” to Gulliver manifests itself in commuting immediate capital punishment to blinding and starvation. Gulliver reports the propagandist abuse of language which is the Lilliputian court style:
It was a Custom introduced by this Prince and his Ministry, (very different, as I have been assured, from the Practices of former Times) that after the Court had decreed any cruel Execution, either to gratify the Monarch’s Resentment, or the Malice of a Favourite; the Emperor always made a Speech to his whole Council, expressing his great Lenity and Tenderness, as Qualities known and confessed by all the World. This Speech was immediately published through the Kingdom; nor did any thing terrify the People so much as those Encomiums on his Majesty’s Mercy; because it was observed, that the more these Praises were enlarged and insisted on, the more inhuman was the Punishment, and the Sufferer more innocent.
(PW XI: 72)
After the Jacobite rising of 1715 and the execution of the Jacobite leaders and transportation of many others, King George in speeches to his parliament in 1716 and 1717 referred to “the numerous instances of mercy which I have shown” and his “clemency” in the treatment of the Jacobite rebels.7 Swift’s satire of the Emperor of Lilliput’s mercy (and the parenthesis indicating that such abuses did not happen in former reigns) is an attack on the Hanoverian regime in fictional disguise. The Jacobite Matthias Earbery was outlawed in 1717 for an outspoken attack on King George called The History of the Clemency of Our English Monarchs. The elaborate eulogy of the Emperor of Lilliput’s mercy juxtaposed with the articles of impeachment by which Gulliver “shall be liable to the Pains and Penalties of High Treason” (PW XI: 68–72) satirizes Whig propaganda. Thomas Burnet’s The British Bulwark (1715), for example, eulogized King George as “exemplary for the Mildness of his Government” then listed all the clauses in the draconian treason statutes by which supporters of the exiled Stuarts could incur imprisonment, forfeitures, torture, and death.8 In a brilliant passage in Book III of the Travels, the King of Luggnagg’s “great Clemency, and the Care he hath of his Subjects Lives, (wherein it were much to be wished that the Monarchs of Europe would imitate him)” is so elaborated as to accentuate his actual arbitrary homicide of his subjects (PW XI: 205).
As Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and an Opposition figure often accused of Jacobitism, Swift felt constrained to make public declarations of his allegiance to the Hanoverian monarchy. Whatever secret irony might be lurking in his sometimes hyperbolic public professions of loyalty – apparently at odds with the violent hostility toward the Hanoverian kings expressed in his satire and correspondence – they are nevertheless plain declarative statements. When Swift, exceptionally, does seem to express solidarity with the Jacobite community of allegiance, it is marked as in strictest confidence, delivered as an oblique hint with a punning proverbial phrase and a parenthesis. The following couplet appears in his “Epilogue” to a performance of Hamlet for the benefit of the poor Irish weavers. It expresses cross-class sympathy and perhaps something else:
Under the rose, since here are none but friends(To own the truth) we have some private ends.(Poems 228)
In popular Jacobite verse the white rose was the symbol of the House of Stuart (King George was symbolized as a turnip) and the proverbial “under the rose” (meaning in strictest confidence) was used in this period as a Jacobite motto.9 Swift’s allusive political writing artfully operates in danger zones and depends on context for full effect. The scabrous contemporary Jacobite slander of King George as the “Turnip” is ingenuously insinuated in Swift’s punning pamphlet of 1732, An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities in the City of Dublin. Jacobites are said to use “a Cant-way of talking in their Clubs, after this Manner: We hope to see the Cards shuffled once more, and another King TURNUP Trump” (PW XII: 231). Swift’s obituary for himself, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (written c. 1731–32), registers the ambiguity about Swift’s allegiance in the Hanoverian period, by a pun within a parenthesis, as an aside about cards, during a ladies’ card game: “(I wish I knew which king to call)” (Poems 491).
Writing on the English language and English literary history in Swift’s lifetime was a profoundly politicized activity. For Stuart loyalists and Tories such as John Dryden and Francis Atterbury, the English language approached perfection and literary culture its greatest politeness after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. For Whig writers on language and literature such as Joseph Addison, Daniel Defoe, John Dennis, John Oldmixon, Richard Steele, and Leonard Welsted, the Revolution of 1688 and William III’s reign were foundational for liberty and the perfection of the language and the polite arts.10 Whig cultural ideologists such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, envision the Revolution of 1688 as inaugurating a “culture of politeness.”11 Swift’s contribution to the Tatler No. 230 (September 28, 1710) is a hostile linguistic critique of the new “Affectation of Politeness” (PW II: 173). The Revolution and beginning of William III’s reign are identified with the decline of the English language; the Stuart era with its improvement. Swift complains of “the continual Corruption of our English Tongue; which, without some timely Remedy, will suffer more by the false Refinements of Twenty Years past, than it hath been improved in the foregoing Hundred.” He recommends “an annual Index Expurgatorious” to expunge corrupt words and sentences by authority (PW II: 174, 176). The Stuart loyalist, Tory version of the literary past is presented in epitome in Swift’s punning work A History of Poetry (1726). The reigns of Charles I and Charles II are the apogee of poetic achievement. Under Cromwell and the Commonwealth ‘we fell into Burlesque’ and upon the Revolution of 1688 “Poetry seem’d to decline” (PW IV: 273–75).
As the author of The Examiner and such celebrated works of propaganda as The Conduct of the Allies, Swift was a high-profile Tory writer. By the end of Queen Anne’s reign he was being placed by contemporaries “in the first list of Rank Tories” (CW I: 605). A public indication of his Tory party-political alignment was the publication of his major pamphlet on the English language, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, to which he affixed his name, something which he very rarely did. Swift’s proposal for a society or academy to fix the language is emphatically Tory and ambiguously Jacobite in character. Contemporary Whig critics were quick to recognize its political character, even though Swift adduces in support of his proposal the authority of his Whig friend Joseph Addison who had advocated, in The Spectator, “something like an Academy” to settle language controversies.12 Proposals for a language academy were not new and had been advanced several times since the Restoration. The political provenance of such proposals was various: royalist and Church of England Tory as well as Presbyterian Whig. The politics of Swift’s language academy becomes apparent when it is compared with these earlier proposals. The loyalist Tory Thomas Sprat, for example, had proposed an academy for perfecting the English language based on the model of the French Academy founded by “the Great Cardinal de Richelieu” and Royal Charter in 1635. Sprat complained of the “many fantastical terms, which were introduc’d by our Religious Sects” during the English Civil Wars. An English academy would correct words and emend accent and grammar so that the language would achieve “the greatest smoothness, which its derivation from the rough German will allow it.”13 Daniel Defoe’s more recent proposal for an academy was consonant with his Presbyterian Whig conception of the role of the Godly Protestant prince. The foundation of the academy is proper only for King William III, who will thereby eclipse the French monarchy. For Defoe the English language is “capable of a much greater Perfection” than the French. Its “Comprehensiveness of Expression” excels that of its neighbors. Defoe’s academy would exclude the clergy and other impolite professions. For Defoe “Custom” is “now our best Authority for Words.” King William III’s academy would be an original source of customary usage and a judicature.14
Significantly, Swift’s “Society” is to look to the “Example of the French” academy (PW IV: 14, 20). For Swift the English language is “less refined than those of Italy, Spain, or France” (PW IV: 6), but it “received most Improvement” during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King Charles I. The apogee of English politeness is the period of King Charles I’s personal rule. The language was corrupted during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth period (PW IV: 9–10). Contemporary Whigs such as Defoe and Oldmixon accept the authority of custom and admit that language inevitably changes. They follow John Locke in understanding language as a human creation. In contrast, Swift does not accept customary authority. He wants to correct, improve, and fix the language for ever. He implicitly appeals to the idea of a universal grammar and divine authority. English “offends against every Part of Grammar” (PW IV: 6). A defective language made familiar and customary by usage over time is still to be corrected. The standard for the language is God’s Word as mediated by the Church of England. The King James Authorized Version of the Bible, the Common Prayer Book, and Liturgy, perpetually read in English churches, are the proven standard for language and stylistic eloquence and simplicity (PW IV: 15). Swift says elsewhere that it is the Divines of the Church of England who have brought the language to its highest standard (PW II: 97). Obviously, the clergy have a central role in Swift’s project for the language.
Swift wishes to resist language change, which he equates with violent conquest and revolution, and approves of languages supposed to have resisted change (PW IV: 9). Swift’s satire reflects ideas on language expressed in the Proposal. In Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, the language of the kingdom of Luggnagg is “always upon the Flux” and the immortal “Struldbruggs of one Age do not understand those of another” (PW XI: 213). However, the utopian Houyhnhnm culture in Book IV seems immemorial. Their poetry is Homeric in character. The speech of these horses “approaches nearest to the High Dutch or German,” one of the languages Swift listed in the Proposal as admitting little change, “but is much more graceful and significant” (PW XI: 234; PW IV: 9).
Swift’s Proposal expresses intense animus against the Saxon language. Swift objects to the number of monosyllables in English, which is due to the fact “that the Latin Tongue in its Purity was never in this Island” and that Britain was occupied by the Saxons, who imposed their imperfect language (PW IV: 6–7). Swift laments that “we are naturally not very polite” and seems to conceive his linguistic task as fencing against the “Barbarity” of Saxon influence (PW IV: 12). The Whig press decoded Jacobitism in Swift’s hostility to the Saxon language and approval of the romance languages. Excluding the Hanoverian dynasty and restoring the exiled Stuart Pretender would ensure “no new Addition of Saxon Words.”15 In this context, Swift’s later virulently anti-Hanoverian poem “Directions for a Birthday Song” shows that Swift’s Whig critics were not too far off the mark. The poem’s putative Whig panegyric poet must confront the offence to British patriotism and the English language which the German royal family represents:
A skilful critic justly blamesHard, tough, cramp, guttural, harsh, stiff names.The sense can never be too jejune,But smooth your words to fit the tune,Hanover may do well enough,But George, and Brunswick are too rough.Hesse Darmstadt makes too rough a sound,And Guelph the strongest ear will wound.In vain are all attempts from GermanyTo find out proper words for harmony.(Poems 393)
John Oldmixon’s Whig Reflections on the Proposal delights in discrediting Swift’s authoritarian prescriptiveness by quoting Swift’s transgressions of propriety in works such as A Tale of a Tub, and even in this very Proposal (Swift’s fulsome panegyric of Robert Harley, the Lord Treasurer, contradicts his own strictures about stylistic propriety). Swift’s Proposal was considered to be an impolite and Jacobite project by his Whig critics. But it was answered also by a Jacobite Anglo-Saxon scholar, Elizabeth Elstob. She exposed Swift’s ignorance about Saxon and defended antiquarian Anglo-Saxon scholars from Swift’s casual belle-lettrist scorn (see PW IV: 18). Unlike Whig answerers, Elstob expresses no objection to the political implications of Swift’s Proposal but counters his censure of monosyllables, for example, by quoting from Swift’s monosyllabic verse.16
The view of language and style in the Proposal and elsewhere in Swift’s writings raises the question of his response to John Locke’s influential philosophical work on language in Book Three of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). For Locke words are signs of ideas in the mind rather than things in the world and the relation between those signs and ideas is arbitrary rather than natural. Tacit consent and social convention about the ideas signified by words enable communication. Locke is concerned about the “Abuse of Words” where the word is made to signify different ideas, thereby frustrating serious intention and destabilizing consensual meaning. Swift parodied “the refined Way of Speaking . . . introduced by Mr. Locke” and believed there were “some dangerous Tenets” in Locke’s “Human Understanding” (PW II: 80, 97). Nevertheless, Swift shared Locke’s concern about the abuse of words. A memorable passage from Locke’s Essay, about scholastic learning destroying the instruments of communication, is refunctioned in the moral satire of Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver explains the legal profession’s systemic language abuse in the service of injustice. Locke had written: “But though unlearned Men well enough understood the Words White and Black, etc. and had constant Notions of the Ideas signified by those Words; yet there were Philosophers found, who had learning and subtlety enough to prove . . . that White was Black”.17 Gulliver reports that “there was a Society of Men among us, bred up from their Youth in the Art of proving by Words multiplied for the Purpose, that White is Black, and Black is White, according as they are paid” (PW XI: 248). Like Locke here, Swift typically trusts in the common sense of ordinary unlearned people in linguistic matters rather than in learned professionals (see PW IV: 13; PW IX: 65–66; PW XI: 185).
However, Locke is hostile to rhetorical tropes and ambiguous word-play which disrupt the plain communication of human understanding. Lockean theory in this area was appropriated by Addison and others in what amounted to a Whig cultural proscription of figures such as the pun and the parenthesis as crimes against common discourse. The pun introduced an unsettling homonymic ambiguity disrupting the serious connection between word and intended idea. It represented a threat to the linguistic order of plain communication. For Whigs, the pun was associated with impoliteness; the corruption identified with the Stuart dynasty.18 The parenthesis was a licentious abuse associated with dubiety and disruptive indirection.19 However, the pun and the parenthesis are very much part of Swift’s satiric arsenal against individual and group targets. Swift mocked the Whig cultural project against the pun (PW II: 92; PW 12: 231). One of Swift’s first explicitly Tory party-political works is a punning ballad entitled A Dialogue between Captain Tom and Sir Henry Dutton Colt (1710; Poems 112–13). One of his first works in the Hanoverian period is A Modest Defence of Punning (1716; PW IV: 205–10). His intervention on the side of Bishop Atterbury in the paper war concerning the Bishop’s arrest and conviction for Jacobite conspiracy is a venomously adroit display of punning, titled Upon the Horrid Plot Discovered by Harlequin the Bishop of Rochester’s French Dog (Poems 247–49).
Swift exploited the opprobrium with which the parenthesis was held in the Whig culture of politeness. In “Verses wrote in a Lady’s Ivory Table-Book,” as published in Swift’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse of 1711, the fashionable clichés, corrupt orthography, and grammar of the lady and her beau – the linguistic signs of their inanity – are placed within the despised marks of parenthesis, as if quarantined within the poem. As John Lennard observes in a delightful study of parentheses, a “Table-Book” appears to mean in Swift’s poem a memoranda book composed of tablets rather than paper pages. Pencilled entries on the tablets could be wiped away by, as the poem puts it, the “power of Spittle” and a cloth. The “Table-Book” thus images the fate of ephemeral and defective modern writing. In Swift’s printed poem the offensive linguistic abuses fated to be erased are put in parentheses.20 In Swift’s satiric pamphlet A Letter of Thanks from My Lord Wharton To the Lord Bishop of S. Asaph, In the Name of the Kit-Cat-Club (1712), a reference to language change is wittily arrested in a parenthesis. Swift is attacking the oratorical style of the Whig Bishop, William Fleetwood: “whatever Changes our Language may undergo (and every thing that is English is given to change) this happy Word [‘SUCH’] is sure to live in your immortal Preface” (PW VI: 153). Swift mocks the Bishop’s use of a “moving Parenthesis,” but his own parentheses in this pamphlet are explosive devices of satiric exposure (PW VI: 154).
A signature of Swift’s style for his contemporaries was its extremism. His polemic and satire direct considerable and often literal violence against its targets. For all the uncertainty of its indeterminate irony and indirection, Swift’s polemic and satire implied off-the-page menaces for his contemporaries. There are oblique and explicit calls to massacre throughout Swift’s writings. A short way with dissenting preachers is imagined in Section I of A Tale of a Tub (PW I: 34–36). The wish is expressed in his Irish tracts for an annual hanging of half a dozen bankers, or indeed the hanging of all bankers, as a way of delaying the ruin of the Irish economy (PW XII: 11, 177). The majority of Irish beggars, like the Yahoos, deserve “to be rooted out off the Face of the Earth” (PW xiii: 139; PW XI: 271). As Claude Rawson has said of this exterminatory rhetorical extremism in Swift, it “is assumed not to be quite literal but flirts actively with its literal potential.” There is a radical uncertainty about the ironic status of such utterances, “Swift doesn’t ‘mean it,’ though he doesn’t not mean it either.”21 In To a Lady, Swift describes his Opposition political poetry. He says he just laughs at Walpolean politicians:
Like the ever-laughing sage,In a jest I spend my rage.(Though it must be understood,I would hang them if I could:)(Poems 519)
The parenthesis is disturbing because it cannot be discounted as irony. The simulated joking is over and the aside registers an undertone of menace. In “The Revolution at Market Hill,” Swift imagines himself and his Jacobite friend Henry Leslie plotting a revolution, after which they would act as Whig politicians have done and dispossess and “hang” the “rogues” (Poems 396–98). Certainly we know that when Swift did have access to state power during the Tory administration of 1710–14 he did not just rely on the lash of satire to castigate his political enemies. For instance, he instigated the arrest of the Whig journalist Abel Boyer for attacking him in print: “One Boyer, a French dog, has abused me in a pamphlet, and I have got him up in a messenger’s hands: the secretary [of state] promises me to swinge him . . . I must make that rogue an example for warning to others” (PW XVI: 384–85). (The “rogue” was arrested but escaped punishment.) Swift went on to pursue other Whig writers such as Richard Steele and Gilbert Burnet in his polemical satire. Swift pillories them for what “the Poverty of our Language forceth me to call their Stile” (PW IV: 57).
Swift’s project to fix the English language sought plainness and permanence. Yet his polemic and satire characteristically exploit the ambiguity and instability of language, but for precise effects in specific historical situations. Swift’s use of language is at its most unstable when his political satire enters the discursive space covered by the English statute defining High Treason. That statute (25 Edward III, Stat. 5, Cap. 2) declares in part that it is High Treason to “compass or imagine the Death of our Lord the King” or to “levy War against our Lord the King in his Realm, or be adherent to the Kings Enemies.”22 In private letters to his friends in the political Opposition in 1735 Swift reveals an extremist political imaginary. He wishes “princes had capacity to read the history of the Roman emperors; how many of them were murdered by their own army, and the same may be said of the Ottomans by their janissaries” (C IV: 337). The intention of such rhetoric is ambiguous, but that the target is the Hanoverian king is unmistakable, if not explicitly stated. As Swift said in another letter: “if I were younger, I should probably outlive the Liberty of England, which, without some unexpected assistance from Heaven, many thousand now alive will see governed by an absolute Monarch” (C IV: 381). Swift’s manuscripts also reveal the extremism of his political imaginary. In the manuscript of An Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen’s Last Ministry (1715–19) there is a passage imagining a civil war against King George and the Whig regime. It is crossed out (PW VIII: 218). Also left in manuscript and not printed in Swift’s lifetime is a passage in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels that encodes a threat of successful Irish resistance to King George’s government. Gulliver is assured that “the Citizens were determined . . . to kill the King and all his Servants, and entirely change the Government” (PW XI: 310). Aspects of Swift’s rhetorical violence were unspeakable and could not be safely printed even within parentheses.
1. Thomas Sprat, in Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (eds.) The History of the Royal Society (London: Routledge, 1959), Part 2, Section XX, p. 113.
2. The Mathematical and Philosophical Works of John Wilkins, 2 vols. (London, 1802), vol. II, p. 54, quoted in Clive T. Probyn, “Swift and Linguistics: The Context behind Lagado and around the Fourth Voyage,” Neophilologus 58 (1974), 425–39, especially 428.
3. Probyn, “Swift and Linguistics,” 437, 439 n. 35.
4. C. J. Rawson, “‘I the Lofty Stile Decline’: Self-apology and the ‘Heroick Strain’ in Some of Swift’s Poems,” in Robert Folkenflik (ed.) The English Hero, 1660–1800 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982), pp. 79–115, especially p. 94.
5. Murray G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 127.
6. Howard Erskine-Hill, “Twofold Vision in Eighteenth-Century Writing,” English Literary History 64 (1997), 903–24, especially 910.
7. William Cobbett (ed.) The Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols. (London, 1806–20), vol. VII, cols. 386, 448.
8. Thomas Burnet, The British Bulwark (London, 1715), p. 12; Joan Pittock, “Thomas Hearne and the Narratives of Englishness,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1999), 1–14, especially 7–9.
9. Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 57–58 (turnip), pp. 64–66, 210–20 (rose), p. 289 (“under the rose”); Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics, pp. 119–28.
10. David Womersley (ed.) Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. xii, xiv–xix.
11. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
12. PW IV: 16; No. 135, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 5 vols., vol. II, p. 35; John Oldmixon, Reflections on Dr. Swift’s Letter to the Earl of Oxford, about the English Tongue (London, 1712) and Arthur Mainwaring, in Louis A. Landa (ed.) The British Academy (London, 1712), The Augustan Reprint Society, No. 15 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1948).
13. Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, Part I, Sections XIX–XX, pp. 39, 42.
14. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (London, 1697; reprinted Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), “Of Academies,” pp. 227–51.
15. The Medley May 23–26, 1712, quoted by Louis A. Landa in PW IV: xiii.
16. Elizabeth Elstob, An Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities (1715), ed. Charles Peake, The Augustan Reprint Society, No. 61 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1956).
17. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book III, chapter X, section 10, p. 495.
18. The Whig campaign against the pun can be followed in The Tatler No. 32 (June 23, 1709 by Steele), The Spectator No. 61 (May 10, 1711 by Addison) and The Guardian No. 36 (April 22, 1713 by Steele). See Klein, Shaftesbury, pp. 209–10; Simon J. Alderson, “The Augustan Attack on the Pun,” Eighteenth-Century Life 20 (1996), 1–19 and his “Swift and the Pun,” Swift Studies 11 (1996), 47–57.
19. Defoe, An Essay upon Projects, p. 245; John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 90.
20. P I: 60–61; Lennard, But I Digress, p. 109.
21. Claude Rawson, “Killing the Poor: An Anglo-Irish Theme?” Essays in Criticism 49 (1999), 101–31, especially 102, 124; and his Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 195.
22. Collection of the several Statutes, and Parts of Statutes, Now in Force, relating to High Treason, and Misprision of High Treason (London, 1709), p. 5.