Valerie Rumbold - Jonathan Swift: Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift

General Editors

Claude Rawson

Yale University

Ian Higgins

Australian National University

David Womersley

University of Oxford

Ian Gadd

Bath Spa University

Textual Adviser

James McLaverty

Keele University

AHRC Research Fellows

Paddy Bullard

University of Oxford

Adam Rounce

Keele University

Daniel Cook

Keele University

Advisory Board

John Brewer, Sean Connolly, Seamus Deane, Denis Donoghue, Howard Erskine-Hill, Mark Goldie, Phillip Harth, Paul Langford, James E. May, Ronald Paulson, J. G. A. Pocock, Pat Rogers, G. Thomas Tanselle and David L. Vander Meulen

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

Jonathan Swift

Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises

Polite Conversation, Directions to Servants and other Works

Edited by

Valerie Rumbold

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521843263

Cambridge University Press 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Swift, Jonathan, 1667--1745.

Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises : Polite Conversation, Directions to Servants and other works / Jonathan Swift ; edited by Valerie Rumbold.

pages cm. -- (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift ; No. 2)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-521-84326-3 (hardback : alk. paper)

1. Satire, English. I. Rumbold, Valerie. II. Title.

PR3722.R86 2013

828.509 -- dc23 2013012202

ISBN 978-0-521-84326-3 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This edition is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and this volume has also been supported by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Research Leave Scheme

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift General Editors Preface

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift is the first fully annotated scholarly edition ever undertaken of Swift's complete works in both verse and prose. The great editions of Swift by Herbert Davis and Harold Williams have remained standard for over half a century. We are all greatly indebted to them, but the time has come to replace or revise their texts and commentary in the light of subsequent historical, biographical and textual knowledge. Davis's fourteen-volume edition of the Prose Writings offered valuable introductions but no annotation. The commentary to his separate edition of The Drapier's Letters , and Williams's commentaries to the Poems and Journal to Stella , though excellent in their time, must now be supplemented by a considerable body of more recent scholarship. The Cambridge Edition's detailed introductions, notes and appendices aim to provide an informed understanding of Swift's place in the political and cultural history of England and Ireland, and to establish the historical, literary and bibliographical contexts of his immense achievement as a prose satirist, poet and political writer. The editors of individual volumes include distinguished historians, as well as leading scholars of eighteenth-century literature.

For the Cambridge Edition, Swift's texts will be collated and analysed afresh, with attention to new evidence of drafts, autographs, transcripts and printed editions, including revisions of Swift's own Works . All lifetime editions will be investigated for their authority. The choice of the version to be printed will be based on an assessment of the work's nature and of the particularities of its history. As a general rule the last authoritative version of the work will be chosen, but in the case of works that are bound in tightly to an immediate context of controversy (polemical tracts, for example), the first edition will usually be chosen instead. In all cases editors will have regard to Swift's overall conception of his text, including issues of typography and illustration. All substantial authorial variants will be recorded in the apparatus, along with those accidental variants editors deem significant, and full introductions will provide the history of the text and the rationale for editorial decisions.

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the generous assistance that so many colleagues have given to this project. First of all, I am grateful to the general editors of CWJS , Ian Gadd, Ian Higgins, Claude Rawson and David Womersley, for allowing a confirmed Pope editor to take on Swift, and for their warm support and many helpful suggestions over the years since I wrote my initial proposal in 2002. Since at that point I was already committed to editing the 1728 and 1729 Dunciad s for the Longman Annotated English Poets Poems of Alexander Pope , which appeared in 2007, I particularly appreciate their willingness to accommodate a delayed start on Swift. Among fellow-labourers on CWJS and the associated electronic Jonathan Swift Archive (jonathanswiftarchive.org.uk), I am especially grateful to Paddy Bullard, Sean Connolly, Daniel Cook, David Hayton, Stephen Karian, Adam Rounce, Marcus Walsh and James Woolley for their generous assistance and sharing of expertise; and, for astuteness, patience and hospitality on a heroic scale, it is, as always, a particular pleasure to thank James McLaverty. Special thanks are also due to John Burrows, for sharing and discussing his work on the computer analysis of A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet (Appendix H). Many others too have responded with patience and generosity to repeated requests and enquiries: I would like to thank particularly Stephen Bernard, David Fairer, Alexander Lindsay, George Lukowski, Greg Lynall, Paddy Lyons, James May, Richard McCabe, Thomas McGeary, John McTague, Pat Rogers and Min Wild.

My colleagues in the English Department at the University of Birmingham have been an indispensable source of discussion, support and expertise over many years, and I owe a particular debt to Hugh Adlington, Maureen Bell, David Griffith, Tom Lockwood, Anne McDermott, Sebastian Mitchell, Kate Rumbold, Gillian Wright and other members, past and present, of the Restoration, Eighteenth Century and Romantics cluster. Marilyn Washbrook and Bonnie Graham have been unfailingly generous with practical assistance and know-how, and my colleagues in Arts IT have dealt quickly and cheerfully with many technological issues along the way. The enthusiasm of students who have worked on Swift with me in Imagining the City, Gossip, Scandal and Celebrity and Writing Revolutions has been an inspiration throughout. I should also like to put on record how much I owe to Susan Hunston, as always, for her wisdom and kindness during my work on this project.