A Tale of a Tub

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William Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. [1694; 2nd enlarged ed. 1697; 3d enlarged ed. 1705]. But if no other argument could occur to exclude the bench and the bar from the list of oratorial machines, it were sufficient that the admission of them would overthrow a number which I was resolved to establish, whatever argument it might cost me; in imitation of that prudent method observed by many other philosophers and great clerks, whose chief art in division has been to grow fond of some proper mystical number, which their imaginations have rendered sacred, to a degree that they force common reason to find room for it in every part of nature; reducing, including, and adjusting every genus and species within that compass, by coupling some against their wills, and banishing others at any rate. Now, among all the rest, the profound number THREE is that which has most employed my sublimest speculations, nor ever without wonderful delight. There is now in the press, and will be published next term, a panegyrical essa Upon publication the public realised both that there was an allegory in the story of the brothers and that there were particular political references in the Digressions. A number of "Keys" appeared soon thereafter, analogous to contemporary services like CliffsNotes or Spark Notes. "Keys" offered the reader a commentary on the Tale and explanations of its references. Edmund Curll rushed out a Key to the work, and William Wotton offered up an "Answer" to the author of the work. This debate about ancient and modern learning is clearly intimately bound up with the interrogation of authority and authorial status that we see in A Tale of a Tub. The Ancients and Moderns debate was in essence about a question of origins, and of textual authority. It was about how far the authority of the classical poets extended. If you took the Ancients argument to its logical conclusion, no truly newgreat literature could ever be produced, because the summit had already been achieved. The best that was left was imitation. And so you could read the tissue of allusions and borrowings that constitutes the Tale as a trope for the indebtedness of modern literature, for its dependence upon earlier texts that render the idea of modern originality meaningless. And in formulating a brilliant work out of a collage of older ones the tale, Swift gestures toward the way in which the ancients can continue to generate new and imaginative literature: the habits of allusion and imitation that were at the centre of the neoclassicism of the Ancients could also be generative. Even though Swift published the "Tale" as he left Temple's service, it was conceived earlier, and the book is a salvo in one of Temple's battles. Swift's general polemic concerns an argument (the " Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns") that had been over for nearly ten years by the time the book was published. The "Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns" was a French academic debate of the early 1690s, occasioned by Fontenelle arguing that modern scholarship had allowed modern man to surpass the ancients in knowledge. Temple argued against this position in his "On Ancient and Modern Learning" (where he provided the first English formulation of the commonplace that modern critics see more only because they are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants), and Temple's somewhat naive essay prompted a small flurry of responses. Among others, two men who took the side opposing Temple were Richard Bentley (classicist and editor) and William Wotton (critic).

Created: By Jonathan Swift, between 1692 and 1704 Use of language Language: [EN] Whole text in English. Language: [LA] Many words and phrases in Latin. Language: [FR] Some words and phrases in French. Language: [GR] Some words in Greek. Language: [IT] A word in Italian. Revision History It were endless to recount the several methods of tyranny and destruction which your governor is pleased to practise upon this occasion. His inveterate malice is such to the writings of our age, that of several thousands produced yearly from this renowned city, before the next revolution of the sun, there is not one to be heard of: unhappy infants! many of them barbarously destroyed, before they have so much as learnt their mother tongue to beg for pity. Some he stifles in their cradles, others he frights into convulsions whereof they suddenly die; some he flays alive, others he tears limb from limb. Great numbers are offered to Moloch; 32 and the rest, tainted by his breath, die of a languishing consumption. But this answerer insists, and says, what he chiefly dislikes is the design: what that was, I have already told, and I believe there is not a person in England who can understand that book, that ever imagined it to have been anything else, but to expose the abuses and corruptions in learning and religion.

It is now six years since these papers came first to my hand, which seems to have been about a twelvemonth after they were written; for the author tells us in his preface to the first treatise, that he has calculated it for the year 1697, and in several passages of that discourse, as well as the second, it appears they were written about that time. We confess Immortality to be a great and powerful goddess; but in vain we offer up to her our devotions and our sacrifices, if your highness's governor, who has usurped the priesthood, must by an unparalleled ambition and avarice wholly intercept and devour them. C. M. Webster, Swift's Tale of a Tub compared with Earlier Satires of the Puritans. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 47/1 (March 1932) 171–178. Clark, John R. "The Decorum of Madness". Form and Frenzy in Swift's Tale of a Tub. By Clark. New York City:Cornell UP, 1970.

For a young Anglican churchman intent on a speedy ascension through the ranks of the church, this was a very damaging charge. Swift's decision to publish the apology in the revised edition of 1710 likely is related to his anxiety about his career at this time, and the Tale's potential to compromise his position. Late 1710, was perhaps the most exciting and promising time in Swift's career; he was being courted by the rising Tory leader Robert Harley to join the Tory cause, and power and importance seemed imminent. Swift was to believe for the rest of his life that his failure to secure the ecclesiastical promotions that he wanted was due to influential (including royal) disapproval of the perceived irreligious tendencies of A Tale of a Tub. To conclude: with those allowances above required, this book should be read; after which, the author conceives, few things will remain which may not be excused in a young writer. He wrote only to the men of wit and taste, and he thinks he is not mistaken in his accounts, when he says they have been all of his side, enough to give him the vanity of telling his name, wherein the world with, all its wise conjectures, is yet very much in the dark; which circumstance is no disagreeable amusement either to the public or himself. By the time the brothers have finished, the Will, or the Word that they are authorising their actions with is no longer the true, original, sacred word, but their corrupt and self -serving version of it. The pre-text underwriting the allegory of the coats is no longer the Bible, but a distorted misreading of it, a fallen text that must be discredited. Thus we have moved across into parody. The impact of an allegory is to reveal the privileged status of the pretext, while a parody aims at undermining the value of the pretext. Difference between Athens and England, as to general and particular satire. The Author designs a panegyric on the world, and a modest defence of the rabble.] For further details on the religious context of A Tale of a Tub, see John Farrell, "Swift and the Satiric Absolute", Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau New York: Cornell UP (2006).which he once lent a gentleman, who had designed a discourse of somewhat the same subject; he never thought of it afterwards; and it was a sufficient surprise to see it pieced up together, wholly out of the method and scheme he had intended; for it was the groundwork of a much larger discourse, and he was sorry to observe the materials so foolishly employed. Swift also satirises contemporary developments in the book trade: the expanding commercialism of the literary marketplace, and the hybrid forms of scholarship, history, and pamphlet that it was spawning. The Tale is just such a hybrid. And it makes a nonsense of typographical innovation, the random and pointless use of asterisks, hyphens, and parentheses gesture towards an over-excited print culture whose sense of literary merit has got lost in new and various forms of textual egotism. Daniel Carey, 'Swift among the freethinkers'. Eighteenth-century Ireland: Iris an dá chultúr, 12 (1997), 89–99. Claude Rawson (ed.), Jonathan Swift: a collection of critical essays. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jeresey, 1995). To instance only in that passage about the three wooden machines mentioned in the Introduction: in the original manuscript there was a description of a fourth, which those who had the papers in their power, blotted out, as having something in it of satire, that I suppose they thought was too particular; and therefore they were forced to change it to the number three, from whence some have endeavoured to squeeze out a dangerous meaning that was never thought on. And, indeed, the conceit was half spoiled by changing the numbers; that of four being much more cabalistic, and, therefore, better exposing the pretended virtue of numbers, a superstition there intended to be ridiculed.

Ross, Angus and David Wooley, eds. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works: Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-283593-2. Rawson, Claude. The Character of Swift's Satire: A Revised Focus. Newark: U. of Delaware Press, 1983. ISBN 0-87413-209-6

It is another pattern of this answerer's fair dealing, to give us hints that the author is dead, and yet to lay the suspicion upon somebody, I know not who, in the country; to which can be only returned, that he is absolutely mistaken in all his conjectures; and surely conjectures are, at best, too light a pretence to allow a man to assign a name in public. He condemns a book, and consequently the author, of whom he is utterly ignorant; yet at the same time fixes in print what he thinks a disadvantageous character upon those who never deserved it. A man who receives a buffet in the dark, may be allowed to be vexed; but it is an odd kind of revenge, to go to cuffs in broad day with the first he meets, and lay the last night's injury at his door. And thus much for this discreet, candid, pious, and ingenious answerer.

These ideas about originality are reflected in the Tale's relationship to one of its major influences. The text that the Tale most explicitly situates itself in relation to is one that also poses problems of classification as 'original work': John Dryden's Translation of the Works of Virgil in English, of 1697. Dryden's Virgil was the big publishing sensation of the decade. The former laureate issued his definitive version of the great Latin's epic poems, and Dryden's Virgil remained the standard edition until well into the twentieth century.Horowitz, James (September 2020). " 'Almost Normal', or, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Swift But Were Afraid To Ask". Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. 43 (3): 281–291. doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12704. ISSN 1754-0194. S2CID 225457781. Guilhamet, Leon. Satire and the Transformation of Genre. Philadelphia: U. of Penn. Press, 1981. ISBN 0-8122-8053-9 All upcoming public events are going ahead as planned and you can find more information on our events blog others I shall not name, are here levelled at; who, having spent their lives on faction and apostasies and all manner of vice, pretended to be sufferers for loyalty and religion. So Dryden tells us, in one of his prefaces, of his merits and sufferings, thanks God that he possesses his soul in patience; in other places he talks at the same rate; and L'Estrange often uses the like style; and I believe the reader may find more persons to give that passage an application: But this is enough to direct those who may have overlooked the author's intention. David George Boyce; Robert Eccleshall; Vincent Geoghegan (eds.), Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland. (Basingstoke and New York 2001).