Headnote

The two sets of notes printed here, ‘A Dialogue in Hybernian Stile between A, and B’ and ‘Irish Eloquence’, rework similar material. The text of ‘A Dialogue’ is taken from SwJ 399; that of ‘Irish Eloquence’ from SwJ 426. Both are described by Mayhew, and dated by him to c. 1732–4. Sheridan replied on 20 December 1733, underlining numerous examples of his own, to what Swift, in endorsing his letter, called ‘my eloquent Hybernicisms’, probably some version of the same material: the absence of explanation in the versions given below suggests an Irish rather than an English audience. For the present text, the layout and spacing of the first of these cramped and often indistinctmanuscripts has been adjusted to highlight the structure of the dialogue; adjustments to the manner of indicating the allocations to speakers A and B are not separately recorded.

The present account is indebted to the 1977 edition and commentary by Bliss, which supersedes Davis. The ‘Dialogue’ is also included in Crowley's The Politics of Language in Ireland. The present transcription differs in some details from that given by Bliss: Swift was evidently unsure how to spell some of the expressions he had noted, and his final decision is not always clear from these cramped private jottings. Bliss reviews Mayhew's dating of the manuscripts from watermark and other evidence, and while advocating slightly broader date ranges, broadly agrees that these two drafts should be placed in the mid 1730s; and he suggests that they may be seen in some sense as a counterpart to Polite Conversation, particularly in view of the experiment with dialogue form. He argues that the ‘Dialogue’, with its two speakers, was the first of the two versions, and that ‘Irish Eloquence’, apparently enlarged and recast in letter form, was the second, and that both ‘ridicule the non- Standard speech of a specific class of speakers, the Irish planters’: these settlers were obnoxious to Swift on religious and ideological grounds (note the point in the ‘Dialogue’ when A, whom Bliss identifies as a townsman, possibly a lawyer, asks B whether he is a ‘planter’, and B fails to register the specific force of the question).