Swift and History: Politics and the English Past by Ashley Marshall (review)

"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present," Edith Bouvier Beale muses in the cult film Grey Gardens. This excellent, probing, if at times extremely repetitive study demonstrates that Jonathan Swift was in agreement with the exiled former debutante. Far from being uninterested in history or being himself a failed historian, Swift, Ms. Marshall contends, remained immersed in the past, recent and deep, in ways that had particular implications for his engagement with a shifting political present. Swift was not only a profoundly historical thinker: he seriously contemplated—and, at times, experimented with—taking up the historian's mantle. His various works, this study demonstrates, have "modal interrelationships" with historical writing and in some cases align closely with the more capacious and dynamic conceptions of history (especially of political—or "politic"—history) that were available in his lifetime.

The opening chapters give us Swift as history boy. The first provides a "topographical" survey of how history was understood—and of the classical and modern history circulating—at the turn of the eighteenth century. The chapter tapers neatly into a discussion of Swift's "most substantive marginalia" as a guide to what and how he read, yielding a particularly fruitful discussion of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, which Swift appears to have read at least four times, presented here as an illuminating point of comparison for Swift's own forays into documenting conflict. Here, as throughout this book, the level of erudition is high and command of Swift scholarship formidable. Chapter 2 reconsiders Swift's relationship with William Temple. Where the previous chapter established broad parallels with historical models, this chapter argues firmly against the influence of Temple's generic writings about the basis of government on Swift, despite broad parallels with Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome. The ensuing discussion of Swift's account of the reigns of the four kings after William the Conqueror elaborates this claim while looking ahead to the book's developing argument about the authoritarianism underpinning Swift's political thinking.

Three chapters and a conclusion follow. The central of these, on Swift's so-called History of the Four Last Years of the Queen (provocatively deemed the "most psychically important of all his writings") provides the hinge on which many of the book's core arguments turn. Rejecting the dismissal of Swift as a historian based on "his selectivity, his bias, and his proclivity toward irony and caricature," the chapter argues that Swift, in his partisanship and proximity to events, was aligned both with recent historiographical practice and earlier models. This chapter is followed by an account of Swift's political views (on which more below) and preceded by a less focused chapter, which traces Swift's engagement with history across his writings through to Gulliver's Travels. The conclusion to the book, underscoring Swift's alignment with Tory historiography, reiterates a further core argument about the change Swift underwent during his lifetime. Just as his political outlook was not static, so his approach to the past underwent dramatic changes. Accounts of Swift that see him writing bad history or dismissing (as Gulliver does) the entire enterprise of history miss the significance of the "mode of history-writing he inherited," while failing to see that the "skepticism" he expresses toward history dates from after his political exile. Swift went from being an author who believed we "could learn the lessons of history" to one with "little faith that history-writing can be constructive."

While Swift and History ranges widely—from the theory and practice of history to its entanglement with partisanship and eighteenth-century political thought, with a wealth of learning on display throughout—its framing remains biographical. Although building to a concluding chapter on the Travels would have risked cliché, readers might have wished for a more straightforward chronological structure (that would have, for example, addressed the myriad texts...