Predictions for the Year 1708

Summary

Headnote

Published 1708; copy text 1708 (see Textual Account). The title from the title page runs as follows: ‘PREDICTIONS FOR THE YEAR 1708. Wherein the Month and Day of the Month are set down, the Persons named, and the great Actions and Events of next Year particularly related, as they will come to pass. Written to prevent the People of England from being further impos’d on by vulgar Almanack-makers. By ISAAC BICKERSTAFF Esq;’.

The Predictions for the Year 1708 ascribed to Isaac Bickerstaff, with its prophecy that the best-selling almanac-writer and radical Whig propagandist John Partridge (1644–1715) would die on 29 March, was the paper that set in motion the celebrated Bickerstaff hoax, traditionally represented in the Swift canon by a group of works loosely called the Bickerstaff papers (see Textual Account). The three prose pieces actually published by Swift as the hoax ran its course in 1708–9 were Predictions for the Year 1708, The Accomplishment of the First of Mr Bickerstaff's Predictions and A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq. In 1709 he would also publish A Famous Prediction of Merlin, a related but separate hoax. All four of these papers are included in the body of the present volume. Customarily considered alongside these prose pieces is Swift's Elegy on Mr. Patrige, the Almanack-maker, who Died on the 29th of this Instant March, 1708, with its concluding Epitaph on the ‘Cobler, Starmonger, and Quack’: ‘Weep all you Customers that use / His Pills, his Almanacks, or Shoes’. ‘Squire Bickerstaff Detected, which was from 1727 printed as a supplement to the Bickerstaff hoax, was never ascribed to Swift, whereas ‘An Answer to Bickerstaff’, not printed in his lifetime, seems likely to be a paper that he composed but withheld from publication (see Textual Account: these papers appear in the present volume as Appendices D and E). The affair prompted a wide variety of pamphlets of uncertain attribution, some purporting to be the work of the principals in the controversy.

Predictions, long read as a satire motivated primarily by enlightened scorn for astrology, has more recently been related to Swift's love of All Fools’ Day hoaxes (the date of death being calculated to fall just before 1 April), and interpreted as a response to Partridge's radical Whig views on Church and state.