Harrison’s Tatler no. 5

Summary

Headnote

Published 1711; copy text 1735 (see Textual Account).

In 1711, Richard Steele brought the Tatler to a close, and the Whig poet William Harrison (1685–1713), best known for his praise of Marlborough in his topographical poem Woodstock Park (1706) was encouraged by Bolingbroke and Swift to attempt a continuation. The McLeods suggest that Harrison's continuation, under Swift's guidance, ‘might be considered the tory response to the more whiggish attitudes of the original Tatler’.

Harrison's previous reputation was as a poet, and Swift had serious reservations about his aptitude for the periodical essay. Swift seems to have supplied Harrison with two essays, nos. 5 and 20 in Harrison's series, as well as hints for others, including the first, which set up the continuation's connection with Steele's original Tatler. Although in 1711 Swift successfully solicited a diplomatic secretaryship forHarrison, he returned unpaid in January 1713 and died the following month: his only extant letter to Swift is dated from Utrecht, 16 December 1712. Swift, who had remained a loyal supporter, was deeply saddened by his death: he concerned himself forHarrison's mother and sisters, organised his funeral, and cleared his debts.

Harrison's Tatler 5, written, like the Tatler proper, in the person of Isaac Bickerstaff (whom Swift had created in Predictions) belongs to a genre of dream-vision already well established in the Tatler proper. The lions in the royal menagerie at the Tower of London were a standard tourist attraction, classed in Tatler 30 as ‘Entertainments to raw Minds, because they strike forcibly on the Fancy’: Swift had seen them in 1710. Cf. the account given by Edward Ward in The London Spy (whose fourth edition had appeared in 1709):

A maid, some years since, being a servant to the keeper, and a bold spirited wench, took pleasure, now and then, to help feed the lions, and imprudently believing the gratitude of the beasts would not suffer them to hurt her, she would venture sometimes, though with extraordinary caution, to be a little more familiar with them than she ought to be.