Bibliographical Note

Swift has here been allowed, so far as possible, to tell his own story in his own words. They are to be found in his Correspondence, magnificently edited by F. Elrington Ball (6 vols., 1910-1914), in his Prose Works, competently edited by Temple Scott (12 vols., 1897-1908), and in his Poems, inadequately edited by W. E. Browning (2 vols., 1910) to accompany the Prose Works. These sources furnish the text wherever Swift speaks in the biography, except in the letters to Vanessa which, like her letters to him, are quoted from the originals lately discovered and edited by A. Martin Freeman in Vanessa and Her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift (1921). The text has been modernized. Since so little of what Swift wrote survives in actual manuscript or in printed versions to which he gave much care, to reproduce his spelling and punctuation from first or early editions would be only to perpetuate the vagaries of his different editors and printers.

Swift’s eighteenth-century biographers, with their passion for gossip, were all superseded by Sir Walter Scott, who included in his Works of Jonathan Swift (19 vols., 1814) a memoir written with curiosity and vigor, if not with exact knowledge. Scott in turn was superseded by John Forster, whose Life of Jonathan Swift (1875) unfortunately was carried through only one of the three proposed volumes. The earliest, and latest, extended, documented, exhaustive biography was Sir Henry Craik’s Life of Jonathan Swift (1882; 2d edition in 2 vols., 1894), which remains the best detailed account of Swift’s life. Sir Leslie Stephen’s Swift (1882) is a masterly critical narrative. Compared to it the study of Swift in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1781) seems full of Johnsonian wrong-headedness, and that in Thackeray’s English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century (1853) full of Thackerayan whimper and sniffle. The only recent biographical studies of Swift which are not negligible are Emile Pons’s La Jeunesse de Swift et le Conte du Tonneau (1925) and F. Elrington Ball’s Swift’s Verse (1929), which are both excellent.

Of Swift’s various works the best edited is A Tale of a Tub: To Which is Added The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, by A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (1920), followed by Swift: Selections from his Works edited by Sir Henry Craik (1892-1893). As a rule the introductions and notes in Temple Scott’s Prose Works are as good as any. The Journal to Stella is there edited by Frederick Ryland, and Gulliver’s Travels by G. R. Dennis. Gulliver’s Travels, one of the greatest books of the world, has never been satisfactorily edited. When it has the editor it deserves he will be saved a good deal of work by C. H. Firth’s acute Political Significance of Gulliver’s Travels (Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. IX, 1919) and by William A. Eddy’s lubberly but learned Gulliver’s Travels: A Critical Study (1923).

A bibliography of the writings of Swift is given in Vol. XII of Temple Scott’s Prose Works, and a bibliography of writings by and about him in Vol. IX (1912) of The Cambridge History of English Literature. The present biography says in the text little more about the specific works than Swift says himself. Titles and dates, however, are listed in the Index in the entry “Swift, Jonathan,” which amounts to a precise chronological survey of his life and of those writings which throw light on it.

To cite all the general histories of Swift’s age, all the biographies of his contemporaries, all the memoirs and diaries and letters and special studies and collateral sources which have contributed to this narrative would be mere ostentation. But all such sources have been scrupulously consulted during the period of almost twenty years since the book was first projected.

Most of Swift’s previous biographers have devoted much of their energy to debating the many points of gossip which have arisen about him, particularly about his malady, about his relations to Stella and Vanessa, and about his eccentricities in Ireland. His latest biographer has preferred to examine the entire evidence, to select what he believes to be the truth, to tell it, and to leave gossip where gossip belongs. He has considered it hardly fair to ask his readers not only to read his story but also to choose which one of several stories they would like to believe. His difficulties belong with the secrets of his trade.