Commentary

The Intelligencer was a weekly paper written alternately by Swift and Thomas Sheridan. Like several of the pamphlets of this period, it was first printed in Dublin by Sarah Harding, who became Swift’s favoured printer after the death of her husband, John.

Intelligencers XVI and XVII were written by Thomas Sheridan. These versions were printed in the Swift-Pope Miscellanies. This text represents an intermediate stage in the development of the text of the essays, with some corrections of the first Dublin printing.

References: The Intelligencer, ed. James Woolley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74), vol. xii, pp. 28-61, 325-9; Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. iii, pp. 581-6; The Bowyer Ledgers, ed. Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (London: Bibliographical Society; New York: Bibliographical Society of America); Keith Maslen, ‘George Faulkner and William Bowyer: The London Connection’, in his An Early London printing House at Work: Studies in the Bowyer Ledgers (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), pp. 223-33.