Commentary

Miscellaneous Works, Comical and Diverting contains some interesting and puzzling materials. The printer is Thomas Johnson of the Hague, who, free from the restraints of British copyright law and the Stationers’ Company, had earlier ‘pirated’ Pope’s Iliad. Mervyn Jannetta told me that he thought that the London pirate, James Watson, sometimes worked under Johnson’s name. This volume, however, seems to be an authentically Dutch production. In reprinting Tale of a Tub it prints this ‘Table’, which, in addition to a not particularly interesting summary, prints ‘The History of Martin’ and an inset ‘Digression on the Nature Usefulness and Necessity of Wars and Quarrels’. The history and digression might possibly belong to an earlier version of Tale of a Tub and have been supplied by Swift’s cousin Thomas. On balance I think not. Marcus Walsh has an excellent discussion of the problem in his volume of the Cambridge edition (forthcoming).

References: A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. lx-lxiv; Irvin Ehrenpeis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. i, p. 185-225; Robert M. Adams, ‘Jonathan Swift, Thomas Swift, and the Authorship of A Tale of a Tub’, Modern Philology, 64 (1967), pp. 198–232; Dipak Nandy, ‘Jonathan Swift, Thomas Swift, and the Authorship of A Tale of a Tub’, Modern Philology, 66 (1969), pp. 333–7.