General Textual Introduction

Summary

Swift's Irish prose writings after the Drapier's Letters were often works of controversy or addressed to a particular debate (some more successfully so than others), and thus frequently written with an immediate purpose. As such, their dissemination in Dublin was often relatively straightforward, using the same printers, and often not requiring a particularly high standard of printing: the work needed to be published, not refined and endlessly revised. Unpublished works, polemics that were not finished or whose time quickly passed, were collected posthumously by later editors. London printings and reprintings complicated matters somewhat, but, nevertheless, none of the works included in this volume offer the sort of intractable textual problems that make the choice of a copy text in itself an act of conjecture as much as judgment.

The transmission of Swift's prose pamphlets in this period can be thought about with reference to his own view of his writing at this time. Stephen Karian has suggested that Swift's ‘late period’ begins around September 1727 (the end of his final visit to England). It was at this time, Karian argues, that he ‘was no longer seeking patronage that might alter his residence and ecclesiastical position in Ireland. That acceptance of his professional status seems to have liberated him toward being quite politically outspoken as a writer, even more outspoken than earlier.’ Although Karian's argument is applied to Swift's increased poetic output from this point, the mixture of apparent resignation (as his writings will avail him little personally) and liberation (as he has little to fear from the consequences) can be applied to his polemical prose in these years, and the manner of its arrival into the world.

Swiftwas apparently very ambivalent about the value of his topical writings from this time onwards, most explicitly in telling Pope (in 1731) that ‘I write Pamphlets and follysmeerly for amusement, and when they are finished, or I grow weary in the middle, I cast them into the fire, partly out of dislike, and chiefly because I know they will signify nothing.’ A year later he described how ‘As to Ireland … I remember to have published nothing but what is called the Drapier's letters, and some few other trifles relating to the affairs of this miserable and ruined Kingdom.’