A Book that Found its Tide

A Tale of a Tub was first published, together with The Battel of the Books and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in 1704 — and readers have had difficulty with it ever since. The Tale's central narrative is straightforward enough: a father dies, leaving each of his three sons — Peter, Martin, and Jack — a coat. He also leaves a will, in which he gives his sons firm instructions on the proper management and upkeep of these coats: its gist is that they are not to be tampered with. The sons, however, wilfully misread the will in order to accessorise their coats, adding shoulder-knots, gold lace, flame-coloured linings, and other appendages. Martin and Jack eventually recognise the folly of this course of action and remove the extraneous items, Martin doing so with great care and Jack doing so in a fanatical rage which leaves him 'a Meddley of Rags, and Lace, and Rents' (p. 93); Peter continues in his garish and unlicensed pomp. To early readers (whose testimony is frequently drawn on in Marcus Walsh's excellent new edition) the underlying message of this fable was clear. The three brothers stand for the Roman Catholic Church, for the Church of England, and for the dissenting Protestants; their differing attitudes to their coats represent the different paths taken since the Reformation — with Martin's moderate behaviour representing the via media of the Anglican Church.

The difficulty comes with the chaotic manner in which the Tale is told; its structure is insanely digressive and it draws on a bewildering range of sources. In particular, Swift refers constantly to the debates of the 1690s over the usefulness of classical culture and the authenticity of the Dissertations of Phalaris — and lashes out constantly at Richard Bentley and William Wotton, the scholars who had challenged the authority of the classics (the metaphorical clash between Wotton and Bentley on the one hand and Swift's former employer, Sir William Temple, on the other is wonderfully literalised in The Battel of the Books). Swift makes his narrator a half-crazed, ultra-modern hack, whose concern is not with transmitting his thoughts to posterity, but with addressing himself to the particularities of his current situation. The hack most clearly reveals his skewed sense of priorities in his discussion of 'a certain author called Homer . . . not without some Abilities' (we might compare Temple's description of Homer as 'the most universal genius that has been known in the world . . . the vastest, the sublimest, and the most wonderful genius', quoted by Walsh, p. 403 n.), whom he berates for, amongst other things, 'his gross Ignorance in the Common Laws of this Realm, and in the Doctrine as well as Discipline of the Church of England' (p. 83). The hack's crime is to approach Homer with an inappropriate set of criteria — to refuse to acknowledge the possibility of communication across the centuries. For someone of his persuasion it is impossible for an author to speak to the present age without speaking of it. Throughout the volume there is an emphasis on the historical situation — and the looming expiry date — of the words we are reading: 'all the towardly Passages I shall deliver in the following Treatise, will grow quite out of date and relish with the first shifting of the present Scene' (p. 27). Indeed, with the consumption of literature increasingly resembling that of food or fashion, the teller foresees a time when 'a Book that misses its Tide, shall be neglected, as the Moon by Day, or like Mackarel a week after the season' (p. 134). This must have been troubling for readers even in 1704; so many of the references arise from the controversies of the previous decade, that even on its first publication the volume must have had a distinctly fishy smell.

The overwhelming concern of the 1704 volume is with the way in which...