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The Origins of Gulliver's Travels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Irvin Ehrenpreis
Irvin Ehrenpreis*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Extract

Until the publication of The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford, literary scholars thought that Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels between 1715 and 1720, a period when he published almost nothing. His starting point was, they believed, sketches made up by the Scriblerus group—Pope, Swift, and others—in 1713 and 1714, and finally produced by Pope in 1741. Then D. Nichol Smith, in his edition of the Ford letters, proved that Swift wrote Part i of Gulliver in about 1721–22, Part ii around 1722–23, Part iv in 1723, and Part iii (after Pt. iv) in 1724–25. Swift continued to revise it, probably until it was published in the autumn of 1726.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 5 , December 1957 , pp. 880 - 999
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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Footnotes

1

Read, in a shortened form, before the International Association of University Professors of English (Jesus College, Cambridge, 23 Aug. 1956). I am indebted to Mr. Jonathan Wordsworth of Brasenose College, Oxford, for greatly improving the style of this paper. I have profited from the more general criticisms of Professor George Sherburn, who disagrees, however, with several of my conclusions.

References

2 Oxford, 1935, pp. xxxviii–xlii and passim. Charles Firth used some of Smith's evidence (not quite correctly) in “The ”Political Significance of Gulliver's Travels,“ Proc. of the Brit. Acad., ix (1920), 237–259.

3 For recent examples, see Ricardo Quintana, Swift, An Introduction (Oxford, 1955), pp. 145 ff., and Charles Kerby-Miller, ed. Memoirs of … Martinus Scriblerus (New Haven, 1950), pp. 315–320.

4 For convenience, I call Oxford and Bolingbroke by their titles even before they became peers. In using quotations, I ignore the original capitals and italics where they do not bear on the meaning; and I indicate omitted words only within a quotation, not before or after.

5 Four Essays on Gulliver's Travels (Princeton, 1945), pp. 69–80.

6 Swift's Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis, xi (Oxford, 1941), 15. Until otherwise designated the Prose Works cited will be Davis' edition; page references to Gulliver will be found in the text.

7 A Tale of a Tub, ed. D. Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1920), p. 238.

8 Four months afterward, there was a rumor that Swift had been arrested. In an odd coincidence he mentions this and the pamphleteers together, thus joining the themes of the episode in Gulliver's Travels: “I doubt you have been in pain about the report of my being arrested. The pamphleteers have let me alone this month” (17,18 Feb. 1712).

9 Laurence Hanson, Government and the Press 1695–1763 (Oxford, 1936), p. 62.

10 Prose Works, viii (1953), xvi–xvii, 194.

11 Raynaldus, Annales ecclesiastici, xx (Rome, 1663), annus 1509, par. 2.

12 Par. 27. R. B. Gottfried shows that it was written by Daniel, not Ralegh; and he dates it between 1605 and 1612 (SP, liii [April, 1956], 172–190). Daniel uses the figure elsewhere as well: e.g., Complete Works, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1896), iv, 162–163.

13 See Ch. iii of the Politick Touchstone in the 1704 translation of Boccalini's Advertisements from Parnassus … [and] The Politick Touchstone, iii, 7–11 (following p. 256 of the same vol.).

14 Prose Works, viii, 134 (my italics).

15 The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. F. E. Ball (London, 1910–14), ii, 348–349—hereafter cited as “Ball” with volume and page numbers.

16 11 Nov. 1710; 3, 4, 15 April, 3 Nov. 1711.

17 PMLA, lxx (Sept., 1955), 715.

18 The Early Essays and Romances of Sir William Temple, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford, 1930), pp. 8, 5, 6, 11, 28.

19 Ibid., pp. 25, 28.

20 Henry Craik, Life of Jonathan Swift, 2nd ed. (London, 1894), i, 95.

21 See his edition of Gulliver's Travels (New York, 1938), p. 142, n.

22 “Swift's Earliest Political Tract and Sir William Temple's Essays,” Harvard Stud. and Notes in Philol. and Lit., xix (1937), 3–12. Myrddin Jones, in an unpublished B. Litt. thesis, adds further evidence to that of Allen; see his MS., “Swift's Views of History” (1953), in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

23 To appreciate the connection of all this material with Gulliver one should first read Temple's essays, “On the Original and Nature of Government” and “Of Popular Discontents,” then Chs. i and v of Swift's Discourse, and finally Chs. vi and vii of the Voyage to Brobdingnag.

24 Works (London, 1770), iii, 42–43.

25 Works, i, 45. Professor H. W. Donner has kindly pointed out to me that this motif is one more sign of Gulliver's connection (often slighted) with More's Utopia. The explosive attack on mercenaries in Bk. ii, Ch. viii, of the Utopia re-enforced the attitude which Swift had learned from Temple.

26 The term “deist” was seldom used with any precision in the 18th century. Bolingbroke would not have admitted to the title, although his works were normally received as subversive of Christianity; cf. Boswell's Johnson, ed. Hill-Powell (Oxford, 1934—50) i, 268–269. Avowed deists were extremely rare, but Swift threw the label about with great freedom; cf. his Prose Works, iii (1940), 71, 79, 92, 122. For Swift's considered view of the deists, see Louis Landa's “Introduction to the Sermons” in the Prose Works, ix (1948), 108–116.

27 Sermon, “Upon the Excellency of Christianity,” Prose Works, ix (1948), 249.

28 Sermon, “On the Testimony of Conscience,” Prose Works, ix, 154.

29 The Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1722), p. 36.

30 Characteristicks, ed. J. M. Robertson (London, 1900), i, 280. Of course, Shaftesbury, in spite of his influence, was a sound Christian.

31 The Inquirer (London, 1797), p. 134.

32 Political Justice, ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto, 1946), ii, 209, n. For detailed evidence, see James Preu, “Swift's Influence on Godwin's Doctrine of Anarchism,” JHI, xv (June 1954), 371–383.

33 Sir Thomas More (London, 1935), p. 128.

34 Fielding's Works, ed. W. E. Henley (London, 1903), i, 240–241 (Bk. iii, Ch. iii).

35 Ball, iii, 24–28, 25, 30, 89.

36 Reflections concerning Innate Moral Principles (London, 1752), p. 55; Philosophical Works (London, 1754), iv, 256.

37 Ball, iii, 111, 172, 175, 291.

38 Letters to Ford, pp. 100–101.

39 Ball, iii, 208–209. That Bolingbroke means Christian revelation is clear from his parallel with Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. iv, Ch. xix, pars. 4, 8.

40 Philosophical Works, iii, 334.

41 D. G. James saw the connection between the Houyhnhnms and Bolingbroke, but he quite misunderstood it; see his Life of Reason (London, 1949), pp. 256–261. Miss Kathleen Williams, whose book on Swift will soon be ready, has reached conclusions similar to my own.

42 Ball, ii, 44 and n., 45 and n., 242, 280–281, 305–306.

43 Letters to Ford, p. 101; Swift's Poems, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1937), iii, 1034.

44 Ball, iii, 235, 276; Letters to Ford, p. 122.

45 Ball, m, 267, 268, 275, 271.

46 Life of Jonathan Swift (London, 1784), pp. 384–385.

47 Swift's Prose Works, ed. Temple Scott (London, 1897–1908), xi, 156. Hereafter the Prose Works cited will be this edition.

48 Poems, iii, 1035, 1036.

49 Thomas Sheridan himself was no kinder when he put Quilca into verse, and he also wrote mercilessly concerning his house in Dublin; see Swift's Poems, iii, 1043–1047.

50 E.g., Kerby-Miller, pp. 319–320.

51 E.g., Case, Four Essays, passim; also Marjorie Nicolson and N. M. Mohler, “The Scientific Background of Swift's Voyage to Laputa,” Annals of Science, ii (1937), 299–334.

52 I am indebted to Dr. Theodore Redpath for a discussion clarifying this statement.