Jonathan Swift: Our Dean

By Eugene Hammond

Jonathan Swift: Our Dean details the political climax of his remarkable career—his writing and publication of The Drapier’s Letters (1724), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729)—stressing the relentless political opposition he faced and the numerous ways, including through his sermons, that he worked from his political base as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, psychologically as well as physically just outside the Dublin city walls, to attempt to rouse the Irish people to awareness of the ways that England was abusing them.

This book faces squarely the likelihood that Swift had a physical affair with Esther Vanhomrigh between 1719 and 1723, and reassesses in the light of that likelihood his conflicting relations with Esther Vanhomrigh and Esther Johnson. It traces the many loving friendships with both men and women in Ireland that sustained Swift during the years when his health gradually failed him, enabling him to continue indefatiguably, both through his writings and his authority as Dean of St. Patrick’s, to contribute to the public welfare in the face of relentless British attempts to squeeze greater and greater profits out of their Irish colony. Finally, it traces how Swift’s political indignation led to his treating many people, friends and enemies, cruelly during the 1730s, even while his humor and his ability to make and attract new friends sustained themselves until his memory finally failed him in 1742.

This biography, in two books, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in and Jonathan Swift:Our Dean, comes closer than past biographies to capturing how it felt to Swift himself to live his life.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781644530382

Book preview

Jonathan Swift

Map of Ireland indicating the key places that Jonathan Swift visited.

Courtesy of Jilleen May.

Jonathan Swift

Our Dean

Eugene Hammond

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2016 by Eugene Hammond

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-037-5 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-038-2 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file under LC# 2016005500

Contents

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources

Part 1: 1714–1720: Teaching Knightley Chetwode How to Behave

1 Beached on the Liffey

2 Annéantissement, Then Resilience

3 Settling In

4 Hessy in Dublin

5 Truly Home

6 The Public Wind Full in My Teeth

7 Surveillance

8 Unalloyed Kindness

9 Jacobite?

10 From Mentee to Mentor

11 How Do You Combat Unlimited Power?

12 Swift as Chief Executive Officer

13 Clear, Practical Advice

14 Political Sermons of the 1720s

15 Trying, Despite the Political Odds, to Get the Right People into the Right Places

16 The Esther-Swift-Esther Triangle Tests All Three of Its Vertices

17 Forty-Seven-Year-Old Swift and Twenty-Six-Year-Old Pope

18 Swift’s Web of Sustaining Irish Friends

19 The Earl of Oxford Walks Out of the Tower

20 A New Generation of Friends

21 From Essentially Cheerful to Essentially Angry

22 Trying to Let Go of the Earl of Oxford

23 Coffee

24 Reaffirming Respect for Esther Johnson

25 Restoking the Publication Fires

Part 2: 1720–1726: I Attempted to Rise, but Was [at first] Not Able To Stir

26 Struggling with Illness

27 Free Again to Speak?

28 In the Shadow of Molly’s Decline, Hessy Living a Half-Life with Swift

29 True to Both?

30 Looking for a Course

31 The First European Microlender

32 Chief Justice Whitshed and Robinson Crusoe Beget Gulliver’s Travels

33 Keeping Hessy at a Distance to Concentrate on Gulliver’s Travels

34 Fair to Middling Poems, and an Elegy for the Duke of Marlborough

35 A Humbling Year: 1723

36 A Fourth Vanhomrigh Succumbs to Consumption

37 Getting Away

38 Reaffirming Commitment to and Respect for Esther Johnson, This Time Doing it Well

39 Christmas at Quilca, Steeped in the Mindset of Gulliver’s Travels

40 Standing Up to British Presumption

41 One [Deaf] Man in his Shirt Refusing to Be Intimidated

42 Against All Odds, Stymying Wood and Walpole

43 Wielding Pickaxes, Digging Peat, Re-Courting (and Sealing his Love for) Esther Johnson

44 David Fells Goliath

45 Preparing for England, 1726

Part 3: 1726–1728: Choosing Esther Johnson over Professional Opportunity in England

46 Tête-à-Tête with Sir Robert Walpole

47 Caring for Esther Johnson

48 A Voyage to Lilliput

49 A Voyage to Brobdingnag

50 A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan

51 A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms

52 Aftermath

53 What Did Swift Believe?

54 In Ireland while Gulliver’s Travels Began to Do Its Work

55 Last Visit to England

56 Swift’s Literary Career Capped with Accolades in Paris (Not)

57 Choosing Patty Rolt over Alexander Pope

58 King Lear with a Sense of Humoron the Heath at Holyhead

59 Returning to Esther Johnson, and in Consequence, to Ireland

60 Losing Esther Johnson in Her Prime

Part 4: 1728–1731: Premature Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift

61 Even Without Esther Johnson, Deciding to Stay in Ireland

62 Sarah Harding Redivivus

63 The Intelligencer—Full Talent and Vigor, But Unsustained

64 Eight Months with the Achesons

65 Without Esther Johnson and Archbishop King, Ungoverned

66 Rough Drafts for A Modest Proposal

67 Drapier’s Hill

68 A Modest Proposal and a Stunningly Modest Response

69 OK, if Nobody Will Listen . . .

70 The Triumfeminate and the Pilkingtons

71 Libels and Epistles

72 Swift’s First (But Not His Last) Freedom of the City Fiasco

73 Final Visit to a Couple about to Separate

74 Ghost Writing for Captain Creichton

75 Letters and Fun

76 Snow White (Laetitia Pilkington) and the Seven Dwarfs (Ten Clergymen)

77 Incendiary in Politics, Loving as a Friend, but Sometimes Confusing the Two

78 Let’s Try a Comic Poem about My Death

Part 5: 1732–1745: Internal Monitor Not Always Engaged

79 The Bishops Get Their Due

80 Be Wary of Presbyterians, But More Wary of Americans

81 Everybody Poops

82 Fully Home in the Deanery

83 Financial Security

84 Life with Laetitia Pilkington, 1732–1733

85 Fighting Robert Walpole through Local Elections

86 With No Parliament in Session, Life Is Good in Dublin

87 Parliament Returns

88 Swift’s Better Business Bureau

89 Capping an Otherwise Successful Year by Being Threatened by an MP

90 Stepping Aside for the Next Generation

91 Still Able to Rise to the Occasion

92 The Good Martha Whiteway

93 Disagreeable Quilca, Agreeable Martha Whiteway

94 One More Hopeful Young Man Taken

95 Jailed Printers Revive Swift’s Pen

96 Difficult, But Still with a Sense of Humor

97 Badges for Beggars

98 Publishing the History of Queen Anne’s Ministry (Not)

99 Humility Recommended and Practiced

100 Distorting the Record

101 Swift’s Guide to Domestic Guerilla Warfare

102 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

103 Swift’s Will

104 Last Glimpses of Swift

105 Loving Care: John Lyon, Martha Whiteway, Anne Ridgeway

106 Our Dean

Bibliography

About the Author

Preface

He was known over the whole kingdom by the title of The Dean, given to him by way of pre-eminence, as it were by common consent; and when The Dean was mentioned, it always carried with it the idea of the first and greatest man in the kingdom.

—Thomas Sheridan, Life, 272

The last thirty years of Jonathan Swift’s life should have been a mere coda to his successful first forty-seven years during which he became the most admired wit and humorist in London and the writer who made possible the most crucial success—the Peace of Utrecht ending the War of the Spanish Succession—of the 1710–1714 Tory ministry of the Earl of Oxford and Viscount Bolingbroke. But the bitter rivalry that evolved between Oxford and Bolingbroke while they were in power, and the death of Queen Anne that resulted in the pro-Whig Elector of Hanover becoming King George I of England, left Swift in 1714 stranded in Dublin, three hundred fifty miles (seventy-five of which crossed the Irish Sea) west of London, with a responsibility, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, that he had had for more than a year but that he hadn’t yet put his mind to. Within a few months the men whom he had worked with most closely in England—Oxford, Bolingbroke, the Duke of Ormonde, and Matthew Prior—had all, though there wasn’t any convincing evidence against them, been accused by the succeeding administration of treason. Swift was high on the list of those whom the Whigs might accuse next.

Under these more-than-challenging circumstances, Swift began to reassess and reshape his life. First he lay low to keep himself safe from arrest while patiently dissuading his several friends who hoped that an alternative king, the so-called Pretender (to the throne), James III, would be preferable to George I and the Whigs. He used his preaching responsibilities at St. Patrick’s to raise the ethical and political awareness of his parishioners. He used his authority within the surrounding neighborhood of St. Patrick’s (its liberties) to help that neighborhood thrive as much as it could with its limited economic opportunity. He began a bold pamphlet war to expose and resist British colonialism. And he summed up his lifetime of political and psychological experience in two literary masterpieces, Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and A Modest Proposal in 1729. Swift after fifty offers us a fascinating study of a person attempting to live an ethical and a politically engaged life under an imperial government intolerant of any expressed opposition. Everything Swift accomplished between 1714 and 1742 required ten times as much effort as it would have required in his early life because his mail was consistently opened, his writings persistently condemned, his printers frequently arrested, and his activities routinely reported to the Archbishop of Canterbury by Whig clergymen and bishops who were put in their places principally to work against him.

Swift’s domestic life in Ireland after 1714 was no less dramatic than his political life, as he somehow maintained a loving, trusting friendship with young Esther Johnson while even younger Esther Vanhomrigh, desperately in love with Swift, refused to allow him to ignore her. And as Swift became more indignant about the political exploitation of Ireland, though he maintained his many strong Irish and English friendships, he himself became more difficult to live with as his indignation at political wrongs often spilled into indignation, righteousness, and stubbornness in his personal life. During the 1730s Swift gradually became more and more debilitated—he suffered frequent vertigo, became increasingly deaf, and his memory was failing—but even as his power and his personality ebbed, he wrote more than twenty political pamphlets, kept his sense of humor, and continued to attract and to make new friends while he remained a political thorn in the side of the English-Whig establishment. For all this, he remained during his life, and even to this day, the Dean to whom every Irish citizen is thankful for having unequivocally stood up for their dignity and their humanity.

This book is a sequel to the biography of the first half of Swift’s life, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in.

Acknowledgments

For help of numerous kinds with this book I would like to thank particularly Ashley Marshall, Donald Mell, James Woolley, James May, Hermann Real, and Linda Merians, and also David Fairer, Douglas Gray, David Fleeman, Julia Ostreich, Zach Nycum, Martin Price, Maynard Mack senior and junior, Bart Giamatti, Calhoun Winton, Shirley Kenny, Eleanor (Nancy) Shevlin, Vin Carretta, Kate Miller, Thomas Jemielity, Donald Sniegowski, Donald Costello, Frank Myers, Tish Crawford, Cami Callirgus, Maurice Bennett, Jilleen May, Adam Schultheiss, Caroline Pegum, Rev. Simon Mondon (Vicar of Goodrich), Victor Stacey (Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin), the Writing Programs at the University of Maryland and at Stony Brook University, the English Departments at Maryland and Stony Brook, and the Humanities Department at Maret School, Washington, DC. I am also very grateful for the kindness and expertise of the librarians of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Dublin City Library and Archive, the National Archives of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, Narcissus Marsh’s Library, the Library of Trinity College Dublin, the Library of the King’s Inns, the British Library, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ehrenpreis Center for Swift Studies in Münster, the National Archives at Kew, the Herefordshire and Leicestershire Public Record Offices, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the New York Public Library, the Public Record Office in London (before it was subsumed), the Library of the University of Maryland at College Park, the Stony Brook University Library, and the Emma Clark Library of Setauket, NY. Maurice Ronan of the National Archives; Dolores Colon of the Beinecke Library; Mike Webb of the Bodleian Library; Maria O’Shea of Narcissus Marsh’s Library; Lorraine Grattan and Carol Conlin of the City of Armagh Public Library; Janet McMullen and Cristina Neagu of Christ Church Library, Oxford; Hanne Tracy, Jay Levinson, Lynn Toscano, and Kristen Nyitray of the Stony Brook University Library; and Eva Schaten, Kirsten Juhas, and Ulrich Elkmann of the Ehrenpreis Centre for Swift Studies; all gave particularly generously of their time and expertise.

List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources

Part 1

1714–1720: Teaching Knightley Chetwode How to Behave

For God’s sake think of me, write to me, advise me, assist me.

—Knightley Chetwode to Swift, September 10, 1729

[Chetwode] came to know me inspight of my Teeth, and writes to me inspight of my Teeth, and there’s an end.

—Swift to Charles Ford, December 20, 1718

After four years at the heart of English power, in his prime at the age of forty-six, at the end of August 1714 Jonathan Swift suddenly found himself in Ireland as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but, since he had never befriended many of the Irish gentry, without many friends. His love life was more complicated than it had been at any time since he had asked Jane Waring to marry him in 1696, since he now had two young Esthers—Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh—who loved him deeply, and from November 1714 until Esther Vanhomrigh’s death in 1723 these two Esthers were living in the same city, Dublin. Worst of all, as a Tory intimately linked with the 1710–1714 ministry of the Earl of Oxford and Viscount Bolingbroke, Swift was perceived as an enemy of the English state who would take any opportunity to help overthrow the Hanoverian King George and to place the Pretender James III on the throne. Under these circumstances, for six years, Swift had to learn how to survive as a rebel in a state almost as intolerant of criticism as were the twentieth-century satellites of the Soviet Union. His behavior during these years can only be characterized as heroic. Easily the most sensible of his circle of Tory friends, he skillfully advised Viscount Bolingbroke, Matthew Prior, Charles Ford, Knightley Chetwode, and Thomas Sheridan whenever they were open enough to let him do so. An entertaining illustration of Swift as such a mentor is his correspondence with the profoundly immature Knightley Chetwode. Swift’s letters to and from Chetwode between 1714 and 1732, regarded as a single production, comprise one of his most entertaining and fascinating works.

Chapter 1

Beached on the Liffey

I saw your hand at the bottom [of the letter], and then I recollected I was in Ireland, that the Queen was dead, the Ministry changed, and I was only the poor Dean of St. Patrick’s.

—Swift to Chetwode, September 27, 1714

Between 1714 and 1717, Swift was in the physical prime of his life, his late forties. He wrote two excellent memoirs during these three years, Memoirs, Relating to that Change, which Occurred in the Queen’s Ministry in the Year 1710 and An Enquiry into the Behavior of the Queen’s Last Ministry. But he could publish neither them nor his Four Last Years, Some Free Thoughts, A Discourse concerning the Fears from the Pretender, or Some Considerations that he had written in the previous year or two because his voice was welcome to neither the Tories nor the Whigs. Nonetheless, these three years were arguably the most dramatic, exciting, and challenging of his life. First, he was taking up the reins of the most satisfying responsibility he was to have in his life, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, at just the point when he, the Tory party he had given his allegiance to, and the Tory ministry he had recently served, were utterly discredited. Even well-meaning people, such as William King, Archbishop of Dublin, distrusted Swift, and he had to earn every ounce of authority he wanted to exert as dean. Second, Swift was trying to work out a way to live with the two women, Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, whose company he most enjoyed and depended upon, and who for the first time since he took an interest in Esther Vanhomrigh in 1711 were living in the same neighborhood. But those two challenges were dwarfed by a third: as a supposed Jacobite, one who would prefer James III as King of England to George I, he was vulnerable to being attainted, imprisoned, or even executed. In 1715, both Viscount Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormonde threw caution to the winds and acted on their Jacobite inclinations, joining forces with James III (the Pretender) in France. Less powerful friends like Charles Ford and Knightley Chetwode followed Bolingbroke as if he were an irresistible magnet. Swift was not drawn to the Pretender or his cause, but he remained loyal to his friends who were, and in doing so, put himself persistently at risk.

Swift faced the first and third of his three challenges brilliantly, developing talents and character traits that he had not previously shown: good administrative judgment, discretion in the face of irrational attack, loyalty to friends despite overwhelming personal risk, and courage under pressure. In dealing with the two Esthers, though, he stumbled along for almost ten years before he regained any moral footing. He did try to be a helpful friend to Esther Vanhomrigh, though to the day of her death at the age of thirty-five in 1723 she was never satisfied with the share he gave her of his time and attention. And he did keep the loyalty and affection of Esther Johnson, though partly by insisting on his terms for their friendship that had been damaged since 1712 by Swift’s preference for English politics over her companionship, and since 1714 by his attention to Esther Vanhomrigh.

The years of Swift’s prime, 1714–1720, from age forty-six to age fifty-two, were a time for him of serious redefinition and recommitment. At first he assumed, at least intermittently, that he was in premature old age. He sometimes wrote—Why should I repine / To see my life so fast decline? (In Sickness, ll. 1–2)—as if his career and his life were over. But by November 1714, only three months after arriving in Dublin at the end of August, he had begun to redirect his ambitions. He soon came to realize that in the office of Dean of St. Patrick’s he could act independently in a way that he had never been able to in the service of Oxford and Bolingbroke. As dean he could pursue his vision of the common welfare, or the public good, according to his own lights. And he could write without handing over drafts to Oxford or Bolingbroke for approval, though he did have to calculate as each of his works was ready for publication whether it was likely to land himself or his printer in prison. He used his position as dean to gain, for the first time in his life, genuine financial independence. He wanted the income of his deanery to give him what he called ease, but by ease he meant not indulgence but independence. His modest spending habits were already well set. Without a hint of hesitation, as soon as he began receiving income from his deanery, he arranged to share his newfound independence with the two women he had been supporting since 1701, Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, doubling the stipend he paid them from £52 to £100 per year.

Chapter 2

Annéantissement, Then Resilience

I am not very fond of the publick Scituation. I see nails that I thought might be pulled out, now more strongly riveted than ever.

—Swift to the Earl of Oxford, April 28, 1730

Swift spent his first three weeks after his August 24 arrival in Ireland in 1714 with his neighbor at Trim, Anthony Raymond, in all probability reuniting there with Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley as well.¹ Between 1710 and 1713, while Swift was in England, Thomas Warburton, his curate, and Isaiah Parvisol, his financial agent, had managed to keep Swift’s Laracor cabin and garden in good repair, but between 1713 and 1714 Swift lamented to Bolingbroke that his country seat (i.e., his cabin) had gone to ruin. The wall of my own apartment is fallen down, and I want mud to rebuild it, and straw to thatch it (C, II:79). Parvisol either had few talents, or was one of those people who cannot seem to provide for themselves: in 1714 Swift wrote Bolingbroke that by employing Parvisol he had kept him a dozen years from starving.² Besides, a spiteful neighbour [Sir John Percivall] has seized on six feet of ground, carried off my trees, and spoiled my grove (C, II:79). For the next three years, until his Laracor cabin was repaired in time for Christmas 1717, whenever Swift had business in Laracor, he stayed with Rev. Raymond in Trim, and walked or rode the mile or two to Laracor (AB, cxii). Swift’s letters of 1714–1717 show his great respect for and trust in Rev. Warburton, his curate, so Swift’s Laracor responsibilities rested lightly on his mind during the years that he spent reshaping the management of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Portrait of Esther Johnson, by Timothy Engleheart. Forster MS 583.

Courtesy of the National Art Library. Victoria and Albert Museum.

Upon arrival in Ireland in 1714, Swift was depressed almost into speechlessness. In his first letter from Ireland to England, to Charles Ford in the last few days of August, he wrote a series of disjointed sentences: "I have been hindred by perfect Lazyness, and Listlessness, and annéantissement [utter moral exhaustion] to write to You since I came here. . . . I cannot think nor write in this Country. . . . I have not added one Syllable to the Thing I was about [Some Considerations upon the Consequences hoped and feared from the Death of the Queen]. . . . I hope I shall keep my Resolution of never medling with Irish Politicks (C, II:76). He did keep some of his political wits about him, hoping that the English Parliament would maintain its rights vis-à-vis the new King: I wish the Honey moon [with respect to George I] may not make the Parlmt give up any thing they will repent of" (C, II:76).

When Swift wrote to Bolingbroke on September 14, 1714, he struggled to find an appropriate post-ministry voice. He tried first a voice of literary allusion: The poor dead Queen is used like the giant Lougarou in Rabelais. Pantagruel took Lougarou by the heels, and made him his weapon to kill twenty other giants; then flung him over a river into the town (C, II:78). Second, he tried a pleading voice: If you do not save us, I will not be at the pains of racking my invention to guess how we shall be saved (C, II:78). Third, he tried to joke with a facetiously selfish voice: "The [devil] take this country [England]; it has, in three weeks, spoiled two as good sixpenny pamphlets [Some Free Thoughts and Some Considerations], as ever a proclamation was issued out against (C, II:79). And finally, he wrote in a moving, despairing voice: Pray God forgive them, by whose indolence, neglect, or want of friendship, I am reduced to live with twenty leagues of salt water between your Lordship and me" (C, II:79). In this last voice Swift for the first time allowed himself to criticize openly the Earl of Oxford. For the rest of his life Swift only very occasionally allowed himself this liberty.

Swift returned to Dublin from Laracor in mid-September, and describing his Dublin life to Bolingbroke, he wrote, I live a country-life in town, see no body, and go every day once to prayers (C, II:79). Seeing no body meant meeting with the various clergymen of his chapter, seeing Hetty and Rebecca every day, who apparently returned to Dublin with him, and joining in evening card games with Hetty and her friends. But when Swift wrote from Ireland to Bolingbroke or to Alexander Pope in England, he often wrote from their perspective rather than from his own. Late in November Swift wrote to Archdeacon Walls taking for granted the daily Dublin card games that he was missing in late October when he set out again for Laracor and for a visit to Knightley Chetwode’s home at Woodbrooke: My Service to Gossip [Mrs. Walls], and the Ladyes of St Mary’s [Hetty and Rebecca]—what does Gossip [Mrs. Walls] do for want of a Gamester [Swift]? (C, II:97). The relationship between Swift and Esther Johnson almost certainly needed rebuilding when Swift returned to Ireland in August 1714. And rebuild it Swift did, perhaps even with Esther Johnson (reluctantly) accepting that Esther Vanhomrigh would have a role in Swift’s life, a fact that can hardly have been wholly confidential. Swift did not shirk from relationships of commitment (e.g., with Esther Johnson, and, to a lesser extent, Esther Vanhomrigh) but he was also determined to keep his freedom, which caused deep pain first to Jane Waring and later to Esther Vanhomrigh, but which Esther Johnson learned to accept.

While in Dublin in October, Swift sounded the depth of his post-Queen-Anne grief in a brief poem whose title is almost longer than its twenty-eight lines, In Sickness: Written Soon after the Author’s coming to live in Ireland, upon the Queen’s Death, October 1714. Like the self-reflective poems Swift wrote at Letcombe Basset before leaving for Ireland, this poem was not, because of its self-pity and of its critique of his Irish friends, fit to be printed when it was written, and it first appeared in George Faulkner’s collection of Swift’s works in 1735, by which time Swift’s standards concerning what he should publish and what not had become careless. Before he was forty, he often refrained from publishing excellent work; after he was sixty, he seemed to accept the public view that anything he wrote was worth publishing. In In Sickness Swift speaks as if his death were imminent, he accepts his physical decline, and he laments that he must suffer without kind [Dr. John] Arbuthnot, and where I am neither loved nor known. He portrays his Irish friends either as having let him down or simply as not having reconnected with him:

I meet perhaps from three or four,

From whom I once expected more. (15–16)

But, no obliging, tender Friend

To help at my approaching End. (19–20)

The second couplet above might suggest Swift’s sense of reduced intimacy with Esther Johnson, beginning in 1712 when she and he stopped writing to each other daily and instead wrote only occasionally. I think, though, that Swift is, perhaps less forgivably, ignoring a female friend simply because she was female. In Sickness reads, with preeminent concern for reputation and no hint of his rich life among women, as if it were written by a male for males. By 1714, Swift’s uncles were dead; his ally and correspondent Archbishop King was, though superficially friendly, suspicious by virtue of difference in party. His respected tutor St. George Ashe was living seventy-five miles to the north in Clogher. And most Irish Tories had been put out of office. Swift’s only close, respectful friendships in 1714, until he started making new Irish friends, were with the clergymen Thomas Walls and Jack and Robin Grattan in Dublin, and with Anthony Raymond in Trim. Esther Johnson was a much more intimate and trusted friend than any of these men, but in his self-pity of this period Swift was able to ignore that, at least as he publically projected his image. This poem—more a fragment than a poem, actually—is not bitter, but it is overwhelmingly sad. Swift matter-of-factly comments that since there will be no one to genuinely mourn him when he dies, he would like official mourners hired to be present at his internment. He describes himself as expired today, entombed tomorrow (27).

Within a month of his arrival in Ireland, though, Swift started to show signs of renewed energy. When threatened in September by a neighboring rector, Rev. John Jourdain of Dunshaughlin, Swift responded as firmly with £5 at stake as a year earlier he would have taken a stand in London about £100,000 of government debt: Jordan has been often telling my Agent of some idle Pretence he has to a bit of one of my Parishes worth usually about five pounds per annum, and now the Queen is dead [i.e., now that Tories have lost all their power] perhaps he may talk warmer of it. But we in possession always answer in those Cases, that we must not injure our Successors (Swift to Chetwode, September 27, 1714, C, II:83). Swift was serious about this issue, but that did not prevent him from mocking the clichéd language used to fight the power battles within the clerical system.

During this fall of 1714 Swift enjoyed setting up shop as Dean of St. Patrick’s. He pretended to complain, but was clearly energized by starting again from scratch: A man who is new in a House, or an office, has so many important Nothings to take up his time, that he cannot do what he would (C, II:85). Writing on October 6 he gave Knightley Chetwode various bits of news about his activities: My Stable is a very Hospitall for sick Horses (C, II:85);³ A Joiner who was to shelve a Room for my Library has employed a fortnight, and yet not finished what he promised in six days (C, II:85); I am plagued to death with turning away and taking Servants; I have got one [servant] as old and ugly as that the Bishop left, for the Ladys of my acquaintance would not allow me one with a tolerable Face, though I most earnestly interceded for it (C, II:88–89). Swift’s casual teasing of Hetty and Rebecca here, already by October 1714, implies that matters between Hetty and him were once again on an even keel. After Swift became Dean of St. Patrick’s, he increased his retinue of servants from one to five: a steward, a groom, a helper in the stables, a foot-man, and an old maid (C, II:133), all managed by the woman he so much trusted, Jane Brent (AB lxi), whom he made his housekeeper. Swift’s first political comment since arriving in Ireland, written to Knightley Chetwode in October 1714, reassures us that he was ready again to play his usual engaged role: Indeed I am as disquieted at the Turn of publick Affairs as you or any Man can be. It concerns us Spirituall men [i.e., clergymen] in a tender temporall Point. . . . I think if the Pretender ever comes over [which would result in Catholic clergy replacing Church of Ireland clergy], the present men in Power [i.e., the Whigs] have traced him the Way (C, II:85).

Within a month of Swift’s arrival in Dublin, he began an improbable eighteen-year correspondence with a country squire twelve years his junior, Knightley Chetwode (1679–1752), an uncritical admirer of Viscount Bolingbroke who owned two country residences, Martry in county Meath about twelve miles north of Laracor, and Woodbrooke, forty miles west of Laracor near Portarlington.⁴ In 1700 Chetwode had married an acquaintance of Swift’s, Esther Brooking.⁵ Almost every letter from Swift to Chetwode over the next eighteen years includes at least one attempt by Swift, sometimes subtle, sometimes nothing like subtle, to reshape Chetwode. From Chetwode’s letters to Swift that survive it is clear that Chetwode needed considerable reshaping. In a letter of September 27, 1714, Swift quietly let Chetwode know that he did not like his pretention: The Person who brought me your Letter delivered it in such a Manner that I thought I was at Court again (C, II:82). In an October 6 letter Swift responded to Chetwode’s offer to send a coach to pick him up for a visit to Woodbrooke, I scorn your Coach; for I find upon Tryall I can ride (C, II:85). Likewise, Swift did not like the manner in which Chetwode offered him a grand room at Woodbrooke while with false humility calling it a closet: Yr closet of 18 foot square is a perfect Gasconnade. I suppose it is the largest Room in yr House or rather two Rooms struck out into one.—I thank you for your present of it, but I have too many rooms already [he was not yet used to the expanse of his newly acquired deanery] (C, II:88–89). On April 6, 1715, Swift wrote to Chetwode, I am just going to Church (C, II:119), a hint that Chetwode should try the same.

On October 24, 1714, Chetwode with his characteristic tactlessness insinuated in his first months of acquaintance with Swift that he knew something about Swift’s love life: the world says you may command a very agreeable [face] and yet deferr it (C, II:90). Apparently Chetwode had learned a bit about Esther Vanhomrigh from Bolingbroke. Despite this presumptuous familiarity, Chetwode already in the early stages of their acquaintance understood that Swift was not as close a friend as he would have liked him to be: I’m afraid your inclinations [to visit] are not as good as your horse’s condition to Travell. . . . You great men never say a word of news to little ones [Swift hated to be talked to with such transparent flattery], otherwise you would have mentioned my Lord Bolingbrooke as I desired, for I am more attached to him than I believe you know of (C, II:91). Almost every sentence of Chetwode’s invites a satiric or ironic response, and often Swift could not resist the invitation.

When Swift was living in Ireland between 1700 and 1710, he spent most of his time either in Dublin or Laracor. But from 1714 on, he ventured frequently beyond his well-worn thirty-mile Dublin-to-Laracor path and began routinely to visit the country houses of his friends, usually during the summer or at Christmastime. These visits, lasting from a week to three months or more, became a characteristic aspect of Swift’s domestic life between 1714 and 1731, between the ages of forty-seven and sixty-four. Before 1710 Swift was not that well known and he did not have wealthy enough friends to be visiting for long periods. More important, before 1710, Swift wanted to be in Dublin as much as possible to embed himself in the power circles connected with Dublin Castle. After 1714, though, Dublin and that power, being not only Whig but intolerant of non-Whigs, were oppressive, and Swift would rather be at Laracor, or even farther afield, whenever he could. From 1714 to 1720 he was away from Dublin for roughly a month or two each year. From 1721 to 1723 he was away two or three months per year. In 1724 his Drapier’s letters campaign and his supervising the building of walls around his garden of fruit trees kept him at home, but from 1725 through 1730 he was away, either in England or in the north of Ireland, for at least three and as many as six months each year. Thereafter, as he aged, his visits again became shorter and less frequent, and he was more and more consistently home at the deanery. Despite all this traveling, though, except for the years 1725–1730, Swift was on the job more often than most of his superiors, the Irish bishops, whose health or inclinations often took them to Bath or to London.

John Arbuthnot, Swift’s colleague from the 1710–1714 Tory ministry, was the friend from England that Swift felt closest to as he began his exile in Ireland. Despite the near certainty that mail would be intercepted, Arbuthnot managed to get two letters to Swift in 1714 and another in 1715. He wrote on October 19, 1714, I can assure yow that yow are remember’d kindly by your freinds & I beleive not alltogether forgott by your enimys (C, II:95).⁶ He reported that the Earl of Peterborow, whose party affiliation was flexible, was behaving more sensibly than the Tories: The Condé [Peterborough] acts like a Man of spirit, makes up to the K[ing] & talks to him (C, II:86). Arbuthnot also added in his usual semi-literate prose an astute comment about a professional advantage that Swift had during these years of frustration and exile: I think ther is one thing in your Circumstance that might make any man happy which is a liberty to preach. . . . I can never imagine any man can be uneasy that has the opportunity of venting himself to a whole congregation once a week, & yow may pretend what yow will I am sure yow think so to, or yow don’t judge right (C, II:95–96). Though Swift never acknowledged the therapeutic value of preaching, he took full advantage of his turns preaching at St. Patrick’s to let people know his sentiments, and he often used his writings other than sermons to the same therapeutic effect.

While waiting during the fall of 1714 to move fully into the dean’s residence, waiting now because of workmen and no longer because Dean, now Bishop, Stearne was still living there, Swift spent a good deal of his time trying to make sense of his 1710–1714 years with the Tory ministry. His sense that he should be the one to convey the thinking of the Earl of Oxford to the public suffered a blow in October 1714 when Daniel Defoe published The Secret History of the White Staff, using material supplied by Oxford like that Swift had been begging him for.⁷ Defoe’s Secret History defended Oxford’s commitment to George I’s succession, but did so, as Swift probably would have, by realistically admitting that Oxford had made some mistakes, among them his deceptive means of making peace, his giving the Duke of Ormonde, commander of the English army, restraining orders, and his making political use of Jacobites. Arbuthnot, criticizing Defoe’s strategy but also Oxford’s self-destructive strain, suggested to Swift on October 19 that the Secret History was either contriv’d by an enimy, or by himself [i.e., Oxford], to bring doun vengeance (C, II:86).

Defoe’s Secret History seems to have prompted Swift’s fourth substantial attempt to put into historical perspective the experience of the Tory Ministry. In Dublin in October before leaving for Trim and beyond, Swift wrote twenty rich pages of Memoirs, Relating to That Change Which Happened in the Queen’s Ministry in the Year 1710. These Memoirs served as a small taste of the much more ambitious project that he had contemplated from early in his time writing for the Tory ministry: The scheme I offered was to write her Majesty’s reign; and that this work might not look officious or affected, I was ready to accept the historiographer’s place.⁸ Swift believed that the Queen was well aware of his desire, but neither she nor Oxford nor Lady Masham during 1714 (they had other, more urgent concerns) ever gave Swift the information he wanted to write this history: after soliciting near four years, to obtain a point of so great importance to the Queen and her servants, from whence I could propose nothing but trouble, malice, and envy to myself, it was perpectually put off (WO, VIII:110). In its place, Swift tells briefly in these Memoirs the story of Robert Harley and Abigail Masham’s gradual 1709–1710 takeover of the government and of the Queen’s heart. Though these Memoirs are brief, Swift with them and his other historical works has been largely successful in getting historians since his time to see the political issues of 1710–1714 with more complexity than was propagated in the party-line Whig view that prevailed in Swift’s time.

In Ireland in 1714, Swift wanted desperately to tell the Tory story of the years 1710–1714 because the Whig story, though Swift thought it was wrong, was all too plausible. He himself makes the Whig story plausible in his summary of it:

what would be more easy to a malicious pen than to charge the Queen with inconstancy, weakness, and ingratitude, in removing and disgracing the Duke of Marlborough, who had so many years commanded her armies with victory and success; in displacing so many great officers of her court and kingdom, by whose counsels she had in all appearance so prosperously governed; in extending the marks of her severity and displeasure towards the wife and daughters, as well as relations and allies, of that person [the Duke of Marlborough] she had so long employed and so highly trusted; and all this by the private intrigues of a woman of her bed-chamber [Lady Masham], in concert with one artful man [Oxford], who might be supposed to have acted that bold part only from a motive of revenge upon the loss of his employments, or of ambition to come again into power? (109–10)

To counteract this Whig version of the story, Swift begins his Memoirs in the manner of character writers of the seventeenth century, with a key insight into Queen Anne’s character—she had not a stock of amity to serve above one object at a time (111)—that sums up well one of the notable features of her reign, as she shifted her trust from her husband Prince George to her first minister Sidney Godolphin to Robert Harley and at the same time among her household staff from the Duchess of Marlborough to Abigail Masham to the Duchess of Somerset. Swift also portrays Anne’s political decisions as stemming primarily from personal rather than political motives. Historians after Swift have agreed with him that the fears that most influenced her, were such as concerned her own power and prerogative, which those nearest about her [in 1708–1710] were making daily encroachments upon, by their undutiful behaviour and unreasonable demands (112). Swift, though, gives credit to Anne as a tactician: There was not, perhaps, in all England, a person who understood more artificially to disguise her passions than the late Queen (110).

Swift in these Memoirs provides a number of details about the Whigs in power between 1708 and 1710 that he had refrained from providing, even when challenged to do so, in his 1710–1711 Examiners. Not surprisingly, he portrays the Duchess of Marlborough, Queen Anne’s long-time attendant, as self-serving. In his view, the duchess did not show any appropriate deference to her friend Anne when Anne became Queen. Worse, the deportment of the Duchess of Marlborough, while [Prince George, Anne’s husband] lay expiring [in 1708], was of such a nature, that the Queen, then in the heights of grief, was not able to bear it (112). Shortly after George died, the Duke of Marlborough made the presumptuous request that he be appointed General for Life, and the Queen was highly alarmed at this extraordinary proceeding in the Duke, and talked to a person whom she had then taken into confidence [Abigail Masham], as if she apprehended an attempt upon the crown (114). The Duke of Argyll, though he owed much to Marlborough, offered to bring him in dead or alive, which Swift felt was evidence both of how serious Marlborough’s threat was and of how intemperate Argyll was.⁹ The Marlborough circle included others who were equally presumptuous toward the Queen, such as the Earl of Sunderland, married to one of the Marlboroughs’ daughters, whose ungovernable temper had made him fail in his personal respects to her Majesty (112).

Lord Treasurer Godolphin, though a man of talent, was resented by Queen Anne because he was too ready at all times to do the Duchess of Marlborough’s bidding (111). He and the Duke of Marlborough insisted that Anne make the political appointments they desired (among them, dismissing Harley), threatening otherwise to resign. Even their fellow Whig Lord Somers complained of Marlborough and Godolphin: some months before [Prince George’s] death, my Lord Sommers, who is a person of reserve enough, complained to me with great freedom of the ingratitude of the Duke and Earl, who after the service he and his friends had done them in making the Union, would hardly treat him with common civility (114). In a pair of sermons preached in August and November 1709, Rev. Henry Sacheverell linked Godolphin with Volpone, the sly fox nobleman from Ben Jonson’s famous play of 1606 who systematically deceives his colleagues. In response, Godolphin put Sacheverell on trial, and though his sentence, a three-year suspension from holding public office, was mild, his trial made him a public martyr, and swung the English public in 1710 toward voting for an overwhelmingly Tory House of Commons. Again, Somers among the Whigs, in Swift’s telling, provided the voice of reason: my Lord Sommers, a few months after, confessed to me . . . that he had earnestly, and in vain endeavoured to dissuade the Earl [of Godolphin] from that attempt [to impeach Sacheverell] (115).

Swift writes that Queen Anne, in the political context of the strong public feelings evoked by Sacheverell’s impeachment, wanted to speak with Harley about forming a new ministry. Harley was diffident, or at least pretended to be so, but Mrs. Masham, in right of her station in the bed-chamber, had taken all proper occasions of pursuing of what Mr. Harley had begun (116). Harley preferred a moderate change, a joint Whig-Tory ministry, but inevitably, having put her Majesty upon going greater lengths than she had first intended, it put him upon innumerable difficulties (117). The Queen decided first to begin making new appointments without consulting the Duke of Marlborough or the Earl of Godolphin: The Duke, much surprized at this new manner of treatment, and making complaints in her Majesty’s presence, was however forced to submit (117). Swift was not reluctant to criticize his heroes, like the Queen, when he believed they were wrong. Anne, he writes, took the Treasurer’s staff from the Earl of Godolphin; which was done in a manner not very gracious, her Majesty sending him a letter, by a very ordinary messenger, commanding him to break it (118). He also acknowledges in his final paragraphs the damaging split in the Tory ministry between Harley and Henry St. John, a split he attributes here to St. John’s idea that he was the intended target of Guiscard’s assassination and to his ambition to become chief minister should Harley have died from his wound.

After his character sketches of the principal figures in the Whig-Tory upheaval of 1708–1710, and giving Anne’s reasons for dismissing the Whigs, Swift shifts to a sketch of his own background, making these Memoirs much the most personal of his histories. He begins by explaining the origins of his own shift from Whig to Tory, with his study of government and his writing of his Contests and Dissensions pamphlet in 1701. His account makes clear who Swift knew in the corridors of power during his early years in London (Lord Somers and Baron Halifax), how entangled his thoughts were between Whig and Tory principles, and that he had detested the Earl of Wharton long before 1710. As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1708 to 1710, Swift writes, Wharton behaved himself with the utmost profligateness, injustice, arbitrary proceedings, and corruption, with the hatred and detestation of all good men, even of his own party (118). Swift also spells out Harley’s motives in 1710 that led Swift to want to join his administration: Mr. Harley, in order to give credit to his administration, resolved upon two very important points; first, to secure the unprovided debts of the nation; and secondly, to put an end to the war (126). He emphasizes that both Harley and Queen Anne staunchly supported the Church of England, always a central issue in his thinking. In these Memoirs for the first time Swift publically brings himself to the fore as the person who negotiated the Queen’s Bounty for Ireland, and who received the Queen’s promise for a further and more important favour to the clergy of Ireland [the Crown Rents, beyond the First Fruits]; which the Bishops there, deceived by misinformation, . . . prevented me from bringing to a good issue (123). Although Swift’s account of himself in these Memoirs is favorable, it seems accurate, and reasonably humble.

Swift’s 1714 Memoirs were written more for retrospective assessment than as an attempt to steer current politics. They were also written in calmness, not in anger or despair: it would be difficult to guess, on reading the Memoirs, that its author while in the vortex of power had stored up enough resentment to write Gulliver’s Travels. In these Memoirs Swift was clearly backpedaling from power, acknowledging, now that he could no longer use his power to get more, that in reality he never had much: Having continued, for near the space of four years, in a good degree of confidence with the ministry then in being, though not with so much power as was believed, or at least given out, by my friends as well as my enemies, especially the latter, in both houses of parliament, . . . I thought it might probably, some years hence . . . be an entertainment to those who will have any personal regard for me or my memory, to set down some particularities which fell under my knowledge and observation, while I was supposed, whether truly or no, to have part in the secret of affairs (107). Swift here is writing again in the give-with-one-hand, take-away-with-the-other-hand style that he used in his love letters to Jane Waring: I had power; I did not have much power; I had enough power that I can say that I did not have power and you will not believe me.

Swift makes a special point in these Memoirs that during these transactions, and ever since, [I] was a person without titles or public employment (108), emphasizing not only his public service, but his independence and the ungratefulness of his employers. But it was of course in part due to his own stubbornness and desire for independence that his employers had a difficult time determining how to reward him. Swift clearly hoped, though he professed not to, that these Memoirs would be published in 1714: if, after the fate of manuscripts, these papers shall, by accident or indiscretion, fall into the public view, they will be no more liable to censure than other memoirs, published for many years past, in English, French, and Italian (108). Swift places himself here, a little prematurely, in the European tradition of literate memoir-writing politicians, like Cardinal de Retz, or Philip de Comines, whom he praises in his Advertisement for a later attempt he made in the memoir genre, his 1731 Memoirs of Captain John Creichton.

Overall, Swift’s Memoirs serve to shade how Swift would like us to perceive several prominent officials: they reassure the reader that Queen Anne and Oxford were pro-Church but not extreme Tories, they spell out details of the power hunger of the Marlboroughs and of the lack of respect for Anne from other Whigs like Godolphin and Sunderland. They repeat Swift’s conviction that Wharton was an extreme Whig and an obnoxious person, they portray Somers as a moderate, they acknowledge the split between Oxford and Bolingbroke, and they explain how and why Swift steered himself through a channel between the extremes of Whig and Tory. All in all, Swift’s memoirs serve as a quiet, sober, believable portrait. They might have had a moderating effect if they had been published in 1714, but most probably too few readers were ready or willing to listen at this time even if they had been published.

Having finished these Memoirs in Dublin in October 1714, Swift rode back to Trim, as the first stage of a trip to visit Knightley Chetwode at his estate at Woodbrooke. While Swift had been in Dublin, he was made aware that one of his Laracor neighbors, Sir Arthur Langford, had taken advantage of Swift’s nearly four-year absence in England to support financially and personally a weekly conventicle for dissenting services. Swift responded on October 30 by writing a letter to Langford that tells us much about his everyday treatment of Dissenters:

Since my last return from England many persons have complained to me that I suffered a conventicle to be kept in my parish. . . . I have always looked upon you as an honest gentleman, of great charity and piety in your way, and I hope you will remember at the same time, that it becomes you to be a legal man. . . . You know the Dissenters in Ireland are suffered to have their conventicles only by connivance, and that only in places where they formerly used to meet. . . . It has been the weakness of the Dissenters to be too sanguine and assuming upon events in the State which appeared to give them the least encouragement. . . . The most moderate Churchmen [i.e., myself!] may be apt to resent when they see a sect, without toleration by law, insulting the established religion. Whenever the legislature shall think fit to give them leave to build new conventicles, all good Churchmen will submit but till then we can hardly see it without betraying our Church. I hope, therefore, you will not think it hard if I take those methods which my duty obliges me, to prevent this growing evil. (C, II:92)

Swift concludes, I am, with true friendship and esteem (C, II:92). This letter is a model of diplomacy, and an indicator of Swift’s core gentleness. The evidence we have suggests that he treated Catholics with similar respect throughout his life. Swift’s letter to Langford had little effect, nor did Swift probably expect or even hope that it would. Langford died less than two years later, and left bequests for the upkeep of his chapel and for the maintenance of a Presbyterian minister. As long as the conventicle was causing no fuss, Swift seems to have been content not to harass a good man.¹⁰

After a few days at Trim and Laracor, Swift left in early November to visit Chetwode at Woodbrooke, about forty miles west. Setting out from Trim, Swift was overtaken within a mile by a messenger from Esther Vanhomrigh. Just two months after he had left England for Ireland, Hessy and her sister Moll had made the same trip. Though Hessy was only twenty-six, she was to live only nine more years, and though she had not lived in Ireland since she was nineteen, she was to spend those remaining nine years entirely in Ireland. Moll, only twenty in 1714, was to die at the age of twenty-seven, two years before her sister. Hessy and Moll had business as well as Swiftian reasons to go to Ireland: they were trying to gain some control over their estate from their father’s estate lawyers. Upon arrival in Ireland, the young women settled first in their family’s Dublin town home in Turnstile Alley. But Hessy asked in the letter now delivered to Swift that he come meet her in Celbridge, at her family’s country home, about ten miles west of Dublin. The same evening Swift received Hessy’s letter he wrote back to her from Phillipstown, en route to Chetwode’s, Is Kildrohod [Celbridge] as beautifull as Windsor, and as agreeable to you as the Prebends Lodgings there; is there any walk about you as pleasant as the Avenue, and the Marlborough Lodge (C, II:93). Swift had a special fondness for the Prebend’s lodge at Windsor and for the royal grounds it stood among. Hessy had visited him there with her family in September 1712, and from the evidence of these remarks he had fond memories of their walks or rides there, but the fact that she visited with her family would seem to preclude Windsor’s having been a site of a romantic liaison.

Not surprisingly, Swift’s concern for discretion ratcheted up as he and Esther Vanhomrigh were for the first time in the same city, Dublin, as Esther Johnson. He rejected out of hand Hessy’s idea that they meet at Celbridge: "I would not have gone to Kildrohod (Celbridge) to see you for all the World.¹¹ I ever told you, you wanted Discretion. I am going to a Friend [Chetwode] upon a Promise, and shall stay with him about a fortnight; and then come to Town, and I will call on you as soon as I can, supposing you lodge in Turn-stile Alley, as your Servant told me (C, II:93). Swift was as good as his word, and visited Hessy soon after he returned from Chetwode’s. In a teasing tone, he concluded, A Fig for Yr Letters and Messages" (C, II:93). Such a mock dismissal is easier to make, even in teasing I think, to someone you have not slept with.

When Swift arrived at Woodbrooke on the afternoon of November 6, he found no sign of Chetwode or his wife; only the Chetwode children and servants were at home, while the Chetwodes were away at a baptism where Knightley was serving as godfather. Let in by Chetwode’s servants, but not finding a pen, Swift wrote a note in pencil and sent it to the Chetwodes by way of the carriage that was setting off to pick them up: Not to disturb you in the good work of a Godfather nor spoil yr dinner, I onely design [that] Mrs. Chetwode & you would take care not to be benighted [i.e., please do not stay overnight]; but come when you will you shall be heartily welcome to my House. The children’s tutor is gone out & so there was no pen & ink to be had (C, II:94). The thought of Swift as babysitter for the evening in an unfamiliar house calls to mind Boswell’s question to Samuel Johnson, if, Sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a newborn child with you, what would you do?¹² I suspect that the resourceful Swift took more readily to the task than Johnson would have.

Swift had an excellent time on this visit to Woodbrooke, enjoying the country as well as Chetwode and his family. He wrote to