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  • Chapter 28 - Walpole and the Opposition

  • from Part V - The External World
  • Edited by Joseph Hone, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book:
    Jonathan Swift in Context
    Published online:
    02 May 2024
    Print publication:
    09 May 2024, pp 224-231

  • Summary

    This chapter explores Swift’s persistent hostility towards Sir Robert Walpole through a close analysis of three relatively unknown short political pieces Swift wrote between the summer of 1727 and the winter of 1730. An opening section excavates the origins of Swift’s animosity to Walpole, which had roots in the later part of the reign of Queen Anne, when Swift was involved in the Tory campaign against the Whig lords. The next section looks at the unpublished text ‘The Court and Empire of Japan’, written in late June 1727. The third section analyses ‘A Letter to the Writer of the Occasional Paper’, which takes aim against Walpole’s stable of hack writers, alongside ‘The Answer of the Right Honourable William Pulteney Esq. to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole’. Even in 1730, three years after his last visit to England, he was deploying the full range of his agile, satirical, antagonistic voice against Walpole.