Polite Conversation

Summary

Headnote

Published 1738; copy text 1738b (see Textual Account). The title from the title page runs as follows: ‘A TREATISE ON Polite CONVERSATION’.

Conversation was a topic of lifelong concern to Swift, and the development of Polite Conversation can be traced over four decades (see Introduction above). Swift noted two of the sayings he would use in the dialogues in his account book for 1702–3. At this time he was in Ireland, and an Irish dimension to the work is confirmed by the identification of other sayings as specific to the Irish English that Swift would have known in his youth. He seems to have continued his collections during his several visits to England; and a Londonmilieu is indicated by the place names and allusions of the published dialogues, perhaps implying a specific charge against an English elite blamed for the oppression of the Church and of Ireland. Johnson found in Polite Conversation and Directions to Servants evidence of ‘a mind incessantly attentive, and, when it was not employed upon great things, busy with minute occurrences’, and argued that Swift ‘must have had the habit of noting whatever he observed; for such a number of particulars could never have been assembled by the power of recollection’. Mayhew, who located sayings from Polite Conversation among Swift's informal jottings, also concluded that Swift, like his creation Simon Wagstaff, made notes from conversation: ‘Itmay reasonably be concluded that Wagstaff's methods and Swift's were the same; that this page of manuscript represents portions of actual conversations which Swift overheard in Dublin drawing rooms and recorded in briefest form, hot as he heard them, later to be written out fair, and amplified.’ Mackie Jarrell argued, in contrast, for Swift's use of published proverb collections, while David Hamilton supported Mayhew's account. Proverb books could account for only a proportion of the material; they would not explain variation between Swift's forms and those published; and their actual role in Swift's sense of the proverb tradition remains unclear (and indeed, Swift's letters and poems demonstrate that he had at his fingertips many more such sayings than would find a place in Polite Conversation).