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Text and Possible Occasion for Swift's “Day of Judgement”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Maurice Johnson
Maurice Johnson*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
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Abstract

No modern commentary on this changelessly relevant poem identifies its specific occasion as that of a new attempt by dissenters in 1732 and 1733 to repeal the Sacra mental Test Act in Ireland, Such an occasion is, however, suggested or explicitly stated by eighteenth-century transcribers of the poem, including William Collins, William Shen-stone, Ralph Griffiths, and the anonymous author of The Friends (1773), a rare novel in which “The Day of Judgement” first appeared in print. Substantive variants in the early transcriptions, often intensifying the criticism of dissenters, are significant in understanding how the poem was read in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift's authorship is corroborated by similarities in other works by him on the same subject in 1732-33, a somewhat later date than that usually assigned for the poem's composition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 2 , March 1971 , pp. 210 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 216 See Sidney L. Gulick, Jr., “Jonathan Swift's ‘The Day of Judgement,‘ ” PMLA, 48 (1933), 850–55.

Note 2 in page 216 See Harold Williams, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), n, 576–78, for a history of the poem.

Note 3 in page 216 Voltaire, Œuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1957), pp. 1023, 1024.

Note 4 in page 216 Letters to his Son (London: Dodsley, 1774), ii, 274–75.

Note 5 in page 216 William Collins: Drafts & Fragments, ed. J. S. Cunningham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), pp. 41–42 (text of “A Heathen Day of Judgment” from Warton papers, Trinity Coll., Oxford, on pp. 42–43).

Note 6 in page 216 Shenstone's Miscellany 1759–1763, ed. Ian A. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 130, n. (text of “Doomsday” from Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, N. Zeal., on pp. 129–30).

Note 7 in page 216 Shenstone's Miscellany, p. 129, n.

Note 8 in page 216 Essays on Men, Manners, and Things, in Shenstone's Works, 2nd ed. (London: Dodsley, 1765), II, 183.

Note 9 in page 216 Shenstone's Miscellany, p. 129, n.

Note 10 in page 216 Letter to Edmond Malone, 17 Oct. 1784, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy & Edmond Malone, ed. Arthur Tillotson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 1944), p. 39.

Note 11 in page 216 Univ. of Pennsylvania copy.

Note 12 in page 216 The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ii, 578.

Note 13 in page 216 Quoted in Gulick, p. 853; Gulick's text of the poem (pp. 853–54) agrees (except for a period rather than a comma in 1. 20) with the text from a British Museum copy of the St. James's Chronicle printed in John Hayward, Swift: Gulliver's Travels and Selected Writings in Prose and Verse (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1934), p. 804.

Note 14 in page 216 The Monthly Review, 51 (July 1774), 24–26. Griffiths, the editor, is identified as author of the review of Chesterfield's Letters and of the notes on “The Day of Judgement” in B. C. Nangle, The Monthly Review: First Series 17491789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), Item 4045, p. 202.

Note 15 in page 216 See Gulick, pp. 850–51.

Note 16 in page 216 Works (London, 1775), xvn, 503. This is the large octavo edition of Swift's Works printed for Bowyer, Nichols, Bathurst, Strahan, the Rivingtons, Davis, Owen, Longman, Dodsley, Cadell, and Johnston. The poem is on pp. 503–04. In the quarto edition the poem is in Vol. ix, also 1775.

Note 17 in page 217 Poems on the Day of Judgment formed a popular sub-genre in the Restoration and first half of the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century John Pomfret, in his Pindaric verses “On the General Conflagration, and Ensuing Judgment,” wrote the line “Loud Thunders roar, and darting Lightnings fly” (1. 17), which, when divested of adjectives, becomes “And Thunder roars, and Light'ning flies !” in Swift's poem. It is chiefly in the omission of any saved sheep who enter Heaven, and in his plummeting descent into the low language and scornful dismissal of his concluding couplet that Swift differs from Pomfret. In order to intensify his assault upon the reader's sensibilities when the expected shifts into an unexpected “bite,” Swift disarmingly imitates a popular style at the outset.

Note 18 in page 217 “Steele” in The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century, in Works (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), ix, 23940.

Note 19 in page 217 Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography (London: Cape, 1954), pp. 448, 462.

Note 20 in page 217 Prose Writings, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939), ii, 115.

Note 21 in page 217 Oliver Ferguson, Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1962), pp. 182–83.

Note 22 in page 217 Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), p. 191.

Note 23 in page 217 Swift and the Church of Ireland, pp. 111–23.

Note 24 in page 217 Williams, Poems, m, 803–05.

Note 25 in page 217 Williams, Poems, m, 811–13. But also see Swift's “Fable of the Bitches. Wrote in the Year 1715, on an attempt to repeal the Test Act” (publ. 1762), in which Bawty (the Presbyterian bitch) has her ill-fathered litter in the kennel of Musick (the Church of England), and then, “lost to Shame and Honour, / Set all her Cubs at once upon her; / Made her retire, and quit her Right, / and loudly cry'd—a Bite, a Bite” (11. 39–42).

Note 26 in page 217 The Life of Jonathan Swift (London: Macmillan, 1894), ii, 228.

Note 27 in page 217 For instance, he wrote to his London publisher concerning persons in high places who would advocate the “wicked project” of repealing the Test Act: “For which if I should pray God to forgive them, his divine justice will not suffer him.” And to a bishop who had voted for the Bills of Residence and Division, he wrote that he calls on “God to witness” his conviction that bishops who voted for either of the bills did so only “to make the whole body of the clergy their slaves and vassals until the Day of Judgment.” (To Benjamin Motte, 9 Dec. 1732, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, Oxford: Clarendon, 1965, iv, 90; and to Bishop Stearne, July 1733, iv, 183.)

Note 28 in page 217 Gulick, p. 855.

Note 29 in page 217 Katherine Hornbeak, “Swift's ‘Letter to a Very Young Lady,‘ ” Huntington Library Quarterly, 7 (1944), 183, quoting Hoey's Dublin Mercury, No. 667 (29–31 Jan. 1771), in Notes and Queries, 8th ser., II (16 July 1892), 46.

Note 30 in page 217 Gulick, p. 855.