Chapter 2 - Friends and Family

Summary

In an era preoccupied with ideals of friendship, Swift can appear something of an outlier. This chapter focuses on the significance of Swift’s friendship with so-called ‘Scriblerians’ (principally Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot). Famously, Swift cultivated a reputation for misanthropy that cut against the vaunted sociability of his time, but even in the day-to-day management of his friendships he was inclined to temper affection with reservation. Unlike Pope or Gay, Swift refuses to be drawn or to let friendship itself be drawn into a self-congratulatory mode. The chapter concludes with a sustained reading of ‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift’ (wr. 1731), in which friendship becomes a battle for pre-eminence, a constant source of irritation insofar as it exposes one’s own inadequacies, but is no less genuine for it.