Commentary

A good example of a London piracy. Although this edition was printed in 1709, the same year as Benjamin Tooke’s first edition, it has no textual authority, its text deriving from Tooke’s. Hills was a notorious pirate and poor printer. Gay refers to ‘Pirate Hill’s brown Sheets, and scurvy Letter’ in his lines prefixed to Lintot’s Miscellany of 1712.

References: The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74), vol. ii, pp. 41-63, 278-9; Irvin Ehrenpeis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. ii, p. 276-80, 289-94; John Gay: Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton Dearing, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. i, p. 40.