Chapter 8 - Critical Reception before 1900

Summary

Most early responses to Swift’s work were fuelled by personal and political opinion. However, as this chapter shows, some responses were also critically significant. In the later eighteenth century, the amusement that had originally greeted many of Swift’s works was replaced by disapproval of their smutty informality. Although early readers and imitators had discerned Swift’s frequent use of a constructed narrator, most later eighteenth-century critics rather witlessly conflated Swift the man with his disturbed personae, and recoiled accordingly. A section on his later reception, Swift was either ignored or disliked by Romantic poets and novelists; the few exceptions were those interested in satire or political journalism. Despite Thackeray’s denunciation of Swift’s beastliness in 1853, by the turn of the century Swift was a towering example of the power of English literature.