Commentary

This is the first volume of the first Dublin edition of Gulliver’s Travels and provides a significant revised text. Teerink thinks it was published about 2 December 1726 and that it might have been sold by a group of booksellers: G. Risk, G. Ewing, and W. Smith. The revisions of the text are not radical, but they may well carry Swift’s authority, a personal attempt at correction that was separate from Charles Ford’s listed and interleaved corrections of the text. There is a very full account of what may be a group of witnesses to Swift’s earliest revisions in David Woolley’s ‘Swift’s Copy of Gulliver’s Travels: The Armagh Gulliver, Hyde’s Edition, and Swift’s Earliest Corrections’ .

John Hyde worked as a bookseller, printer, and bookbinder, from 1709 to 1728. He had a significant association with Swift, beginning with a reprint of Conduct of the Allies in 1711. He played an important role in the Dublin book trade, providing TCD with stationery and being chosen three times as the Stationers’ candidate for the Dublin Common Council. In 1719 Swift recommended him as an agent for collecting subscriptions for Prior’s poems. On his death he was described as ‘the most Eminent and noted Bookseller in this City’.

References: References: The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74), vol. xi; Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. iii, pp. 442-72, 497-508; Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); David Woolley, ‘Swift’s Copy of Gulliver’s Travels: The Armagh Gulliver, Hyde’s Edition, and Swift’s Earliest Corrections’, in The Art of Jonathan Swift, ed. Clive T. Probyn (London: Vision Press,1978), pp. 131-78; Michael Treadwell, ‘The Text of Gulliver’s Travels, Again’, Swift Studies, 10 (1995), 62-79; Mary Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550-1800 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 2000).