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 sixteen-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.