Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript (review)

Not least among the merits of this perceptive and engaging study is the clarity with which Stephen Karian's opening sentences outline the subject and argument of his work: 'This book explores the uses of print and manuscript throughout Jonathan Swift's career. Its central premise is that our understanding of Swift as an author is incomplete without attending to both print publication and manuscript circulation as well as to their complex intersection' (p. 1). Both subject and argument are congenial to this reviewer and Karian's book does not disappoint either in either respect.

Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript is organized simply and effectively: 'Introduction' (pp. 1–8), 'Swift's Career in Print and Manuscript' (pp. 9–99), 'Print and Manuscript in Three Late Poems' (pp. 101–204), and a short 'Conclusion' (pp. 205–07), the whole followed by forty pages of notes, a bibliography whose primary materials include a useful listing, with brief glosses, of the manuscripts of works discussed, listed in the order in which they appear in the text, and a helpful index. The solidity of construction of this volume adds considerably to the value of the work as a whole. Karian acknowledges from the outset that Swift's relationship to print and manuscript cultures changed over time, identifying three different periods of Swift's career in print: 1701–14, when he had direct contact with London booksellers and printers; 1720–September 1727 when he was in Dublin and writing primarily on Irish affairs; and after September 1727 when he often encountered difficulties in his attempts to publish in London. Necessarily Karian covers some well-trodden ground in this section. He is deft, all the same, in discussion both of such general matters as Swift's sympathy for booksellers' desire (and need) to make money, even as he declined to profit from his own writings, and of more specialized debates concerning the reliability of George Faulkner's assertions concerning Swift's responsibility for the texts of the four-volume 1735 edition. Occasionally, readers might think the author too ready to take some of Swift's more extravagant utterances at face value, as with two comments from a single letter written in 1735 attempting to dissuade Thomas Beach from publishing one of his poems in Dublin and the well-known dismissal of George Faulkner's four-volume 1735 edition of his works (p. 15), or his equally dismissive 1726 remark about 'Cadenus and Vanessa' — 'printing cannot make it more common than it is' — which might indicate widespread manuscript circulation of the poem (though Karian acknowledges that few copies of this 900-line poem survive) but might more plausibly reveal Swift's anxious recognition of how much more damaging to him a print edition of the poem would be (p. 91). Such reservations are outweighed by the ways in which Karian prompts the reader to consider the difference between print and manuscript versions of Swift's works; the discussion of 'The Humble Petition of Frances Harries' (pp. 50–52 and Figures 1 and 2) is a case in point. Even Karian is hard put to apply such insights to all of Swift's early poetry, however, and his conclusion that the early poems didn't circulate much in manuscript before 1708 might have been briefer (pp. 55–59).

By contrast, the discussion of Swift's changing attitudes to manuscript circulation after his return to Ireland in 1714 is both detailed and thought-provoking. Karian distinguishes between different types of manuscript circulation, from a single copy of a single work, through manuscript collections such as Stella's poem-book, to manuscripts beyond Swift's control. In general, the discussion of Swift's poetry in manuscript is more surely handled than the discussion of prose such as 'The History of the Last Four Years of the Queen' (pp. 92–98) and this is borne out in the second part of the book, which consists of exemplary readings of three great...