"I Hope to Write as Bad as Ever": Swift's Journal to Stella and the Intimacy of Correspondence

When Swift left Ireland for London at the very end of August 1710, on his mission to plead the cause of the Irish clergy with Queen Anne, he wrote confidently that he would be home by Christmas, little imagining that he would be away for almost three years.¹ The letters he wrote back to Esther Johnson and her companion Rebecca Dingley in Dublin anticipate an imminent return that was endlessly deferred as Swift became further embroiled in the workings and writings of the Tory ministry.² Whilst the Journal to Stella clearly demonstrates Swift's enjoyment of his new role close to the center of political power, it also articulates his sense of distance and isolation from what he envisages as the pastoral idyll of his parish of Laracor, and the cosy domesticity of Johnson, Dingley, and their mutual friends in Ireland: in January 1711 he writes mournfully (and not entirely truthfully) of his time in London, and of his longing for MD, his abbreviated name for the two friends: "Farewel, dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy day since he left you, as hope saved."³ The letter writing of the Journal clearly offered Swift a way of compensating for the geographical distance and physical absence from Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, and enabled forms of intimacy not physically possible. In this essay, I will explore the textual manifestations and complications of that intimacy. There are mysteries about the biographical basis of the relationships embedded in the Journal to Stella that will remain: questions as to whether Esther Johnson secretly married Swift; whether it can be true that Swift never saw Johnson other than in the company of Rebecca Dingley; or why Dingley even came over to Ireland as a companion to Johnson, who was effectively the child of her cousin's serving woman.⁴ The purpose of this essay is not to establish the biographical facts behind these and other questions, nor to use biography and speculation to interpret the Journal. I shall instead examine how the undoubted intimacy between Swift and his correspondents is represented textually. I shall argue that the manuscript evidence of the letters is central to understanding the peculiar nature of the relationship between the three figures.

Intimacy, Speech, and Bodies

The letters to Johnson and Dingley are a hybrid affair: they exemplify what we have come to see as a heterogeneity typical of the familiar letter in this period.⁵ In this case, they interweave a high political narrative with a daily record of their author's eating, visiting, shopping, and sleeping habits. The mass of domestic and quotidian detail that peppers Swift's accounts clearly offers one form of intimacy.⁶ We might too consider what A. B. England has called the "pdfr" style of the letters ("pdfr" is the name Swift uses of himself in the Journal), the species of apparently undirected narrative designed to give the impression that the author is thinking while he writes.⁷ The letters also purport to be conveying secret information: that there are actually few political secrets within these letters does not detract from the fact that Swift proclaims the clandestine nature of his information partly as a way of demonstrating his affection and closeness with his correspondents.⁸ Within the letters, Swift uses a variety of additional epistolary conceits to transcend the temporal and geographical distance from his correspondents. One of these is the concept of the letter as conversation, of its words as speech. As numerous theorists and historians of epistolary form have noted, this is a commonplace of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letter, an idiom used to create a fantasy that the addressee will surmount absence.⁹ What is distinctive about Swift's practice in the Journal to Stella is the extent to which Swift literalizes this metaphor through linguistic play, by employing his "little language." As scholars have discussed, the psychology of the little language may have worked in various ways: it infantilized the relationship with...