Construing and Deconstructing Swift’s A Tale of a Tub

The appearance of volume 1 of the Cambridge Works of Swift provides us with a learned, judicious, richly annotated text of A Tale of a Tub. In Hey Presto!, Hugh Ormsby-Lennon offers a dizzying and difficult, but unquestionably important, revisionary interpretation of Swift’s bewildering farrago. Reading the two alongside one another is a fascinating, provocative, and disconcerting venture.

Marcus Walsh’s edition of A Tale of a Tub and Other Works represents a huge leap forward in our understanding of Swift’s maddest satire. Few Swiftians have felt any acute need for a new edition of A Tale: the A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith edition (1920; 2nd ed., 1958) was remarkably good for its day, and it has been used with little or no complaint for decades. But A Tale is an immensely complicated book, and the massive, wide-ranging, and generally exemplary annotation in the Cambridge volume drastically improves its page-by-page comprehensibility. Walsh’s endnotes reflect the enormous and often contentious arguments advanced by numerous critics in the last half century or so, as well as his own erudition, and the results provide ample evidence that a new edition was very much in order.

This is a substantial book. In addition to A Tale, The Battel of the Books, and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, Walsh includes two additional categories of primary material. First, “early writings clearly acknowledged by Swift,” comprising editorial materials associated with Sir William Temple’s works and letters as well as Swift’s extant correspondence (in appendix A) with Benjamin Tooke, Jr., the publisher of A Tale. Second, “writings by others, which have a clear, vital and contemporary connection with the Tale” (xxxi) in appendices B, C, and D. Walsh prints excerpts from William Wotton’s Observations upon the Tale of a Tub (1705) and from Miscellaneous Works, Comical & Diverting, by T.R.D.J.S.D.O.P.I.I. (published in Holland in 1720). Walsh also includes Edmund Curll’s important but neglected Complete Key to the Tale of a Tub (1710). Much of the bulk of Walsh’s volume comes from its editorial apparatus. The front matter runs to 90 pages, roughly 60 of which are devoted to a lucid and informative introduction. Walsh’s end-notes occupy 219 pages—9 more than are taken up by the texts being glossed.

Walsh’s inclusion of related writings is sensible, and trial collation suggests that his texts are highly accurate representations of his sources—but the real virtue of this edition is its annotation. Walsh’s notes are commendably discursive, providing a good deal more than identification of sources and targets. A few particularly extensive glosses of passages in A Tale are those of “the profound Number THREE” (347–48n9), “a Sect arose” (365–66n20), and “The Learned Æolists” (416–18n1). Anyone seeking a quick demonstration of the utility of Walsh’s annotation need only look at the dedication to Lord Somers. That two-and-a-half-page component of A Tale gets four pages of notes, including more than a page on the dedicatee and, what is especially important, on Swift’s changing views of him. “In 1704 the dedication to Somers is a standard attempt to secure patronage,” Walsh suggests, but “by 1710 the same dedication, uttered by a disappointed potential client, who was now about to throw his hat into the Tory camp, has become ironic” (329). Such detailed commentary—always to the point and never self-indulgent—is immensely useful, and in this case a salutary reminder that A Tale in 1710 does not always function as it had in 1704. Several of the notes are multipage mines of information, but the whole corpus of annotation is extremely rich. It is also admirably well documented: Walsh carefully...