Headnote

The Intelligencer, the journal jointly written by Swift and Thomas Sheridan, consisted of twenty papers published in 1728–9 in Dublin. Swift made seven prose contributions, one of which (No. 15) was a reprint of A Short View of the State of Ireland, with an introduction by Sheridan. (In this volume, Sheridan's introduction is provided in the textual apparatus, pp. 357–9.)

The Intelligencer was not the first periodical in Ireland: it followed the Dublin Journal in importing from England the format of the Spectator, Tatler and Examiner (which Swift had edited from 1710 to 1711, and contributed to thereafter). The rationale for The Intelligencer is explained by Swift in the first number: topics were to be miscellaneous, but able to include observations on contemporary political and cultural issues as well as arguments concerning education, agriculture, economics and emigration.

The Dublin printings by Sarah Harding published each number as a separate pamphlet. There were collected London editions in 1729 and 1730; numbers 5, 7 and 9 were included in the so-called ‘Third’ volume of the Pope– Swift Miscellanies of 1732; and all Swift's papers, save the first, in Faulkner's 1735 Works. For plans of potential Intelligencer papers, see Associated Materials I, pp. 283–6, ‘Hints for Intelligencer Papers’.