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REVIEWS 155 Ian Higgins. Swift's Politics: A Study in Disaffection. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xiii + 232pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-418143 . Scholars have traditionally considered 1710 a watershed year in Swift's life, the time when he shifted from being a relatively hot-blooded Whig to a lukewarm Tory. It was not until F.P. Lock published his Swift's Tory Politics (1983), however, that anyone offered a thorough analysis of Swift's high church, Tory leanings. Building on the early "Ode to Sancroft" and a handful of passages scattered throughout the political writings and correspondence , Lock argued that Swift was considerably more Tory than prevailing criticism allowed. J.A. Downie subsequently reviewed Lock's book for Eighteenth-Century Studies (19.1 [1985], 113-15) and condemned it as "anachronistic" and "thoroughly unsound." In the meantime, Downie's Jonathan Swift: Political Writer (1984), which pointedly upheld the view that Swift was a staunch Old Whig (and included an Appendix refuting "Swift's Alleged Jacobitism"), had appeared. It is this dispute that Ian Higgins seeks to resolve in Swift's Politics (the Tory is now taken for granted), a vindication of his mentor Lock's earlier effort. In this the book succeeds. But it achieves much more as well, for Swift's Politics is a full-scale exercise in the (modem) Tory re-interpretation of literary history that will force Swift scholars to reckon with its findings. Whatever doubts remained about Swift's Tory sympathies after Lock's limited study Higgins dispels through a meticulously researched and documented analysis of contemporary political literature. Drawing on the wealth of revisionist scholarship on Jacobitism that has appeared in the last dozen years (the longest entries in the bibliography belong to the new 'Tory" historians—J.C.D. Clark, Eveline Cruickshanks, and Mark Goldie, to name just three), Higgins pores over Swift's prose, poetry, and correspondence and advances provocative new readings. Let me begin with his work on Swift's letters, since it offers some of the most intriguing information, while pointing up the difficulties of his method. Higgins's premise is that 'Tories and Jacobites generally practised prudence in print, preferring strategies of obliquity and ambiguity to plain political statement" (p. 74), and he concedes that "no positive evidence of Jacobitism exists in Swift's extant writings" (p. 79). The latter is the point on which Downie—reasonably enough—had rested his Old Whig case. Nevertheless, Higgins provides a barrage of letters in which, he argues, are signalled Swift's Tory positions. The evidence of Swift's well-known letter to Archbishop King (22 December 1716) is expected. But when the letter is placed alongside an earlier communication to the Archbishop (13 November 1716) concerned with the continuing schism between Church and Court, and another from Erasmus Lewis in which he cautions the new Dean to avoid provoking the wrath of the Whig ascendancy (12 January 1716— 17), the Tory implications of Swift's stance become plain. One also wonders why letters like that of 3 May 1715, from the Tory printer John Barber, have not previously received their due: "We have 20 frightfull Accounts of your being sent for up, and your papers seized," Barber writes, "for you are the reputed Author of every good thing that comes out on our side" (p. 5). To be sure, one of the difficulties with studies of Jacobitism is that, owing to the underground nature of the movement, scholars too often have to rely upon inference and innuendo. It is a dangerous game to play, and when Higgins suggests that "honest" was an epistolary code-word for Jacobite, and that Swift used it as such, he pushes the point to its limits. Higgins produces enough examples of the device (pp. 79ff.) to raise some questions (especially when considering that the government sometimes opened Swift's mail), but this evidence remains rather circumstantial. 156 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 Higgins's extensive readings of the Tale and Gulliver's Travels more substantially situate these works in their Tory contexts. The Tale's dedication, he persuasively contends , is actually a subtle Tory attack on the Whig Lord Somers's...

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