Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift (review)

Several Swift collections have appeared over the past few years. This one, composed of papers originally delivered at a Huntington Library symposium, is notable for several reasons: it serves as a kind of overture for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (most of the contributors are affiliated with the work, and several allude to material forthcoming in that edition); it represents an effort to "bring together" (xi) work on Swift by historians and literary critics; and it attempts to discuss Swift's relevance while avoiding "topics specifically dedicated to familiar major works ... A Tale of A Tub, Gulliver's Travels, and A Modest Proposal have been left to find their natural place within the various political and literary contexts provided by the individual contributors" (xi-xii). To hamstring Swift by limiting mentions of his greatest works seems a bit unfair, even a little sadistic, but it does raise the question of whether Swift's political writing is of equal importance to his literary writing, and whether it can truly stand alone as the object of scholarly interest. On one level the answer is clearly no: it is hard to imagine a wide academic audience reading A Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England, Concerning the Sacramental Test if its author had not also written Gulliver's Travels. Nor can we really think of Swift as simply a political pamphleteer among many others, one who happened to write a popular satire or two. Surely, after all, the authority and importance of the minor non-literary works is inevitably linked to the authority built up by the major literary works. Would we read, or even acknowledge, Isaac Newton's poems if he had not also written the Principia? This is not to deny that there is value in reading Newton's poems, or Swift's political ephemera, or Ezra Pound's fascist pamphlets for that matter. It is simply that "political Swift" is not independent of "literary Swift." And the literary Swift depends upon the canonical works.

Still, it is a provocative twist, and one that will surely find an appreciative audience. After all, Swift studies (like eighteenth-century studies generally) remains on the whole deeply, resolutely historicist, a fact reflected in the general tone of this book: heavy on the historical footnotes and light on the literary theory. And yet, by splitting the collection into "history" and "literature" sections, Rawson seems to acknowledge that at some basic level the essays are aimed at two different audiences. The first is historians of the period, who will rightly be drawn to Mark Goldie's "Situating Swift's Politics in 1701," a clear and forceful articulation of Swift's anti-Lockean positioning, and an interpretation of it as foreshadowing his move away from the Whigs. Equally, they will likely appreciate David Hayton's very thorough analysis of the motivations and thought processes of those Irishmen who worked as parliamentary managers and under-managers in Dublin Castle in mid-century. Hayton's erudition and attention to detail are impressive, even if Swift himself is relegated to brief, symbolic mentions in the opening and closing pages of the essay. More literary-minded historians can turn to a second group of essays, led by S.J. Connolly's reading of Swift's pamphlet Reasons Humbly Offered, which acknowledges the existence of literary tropes in the political writing (such as polemical exaggeration and the adoption of a persona) that complicate political and historical analysis. Robert Mahony's is perhaps the best of these more literary-minded historical essays, due in no small part to his substantial attention to A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, and A Modest Proposal. The presence of these texts allows him to talk about the complexity of Swift's irony, and point out that while Swift so often seems strikingly modern in his...