The chapter charts the topography of English imaginative writing in the period leading up the publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726. A substantial opening section focuses on works for which Swift’s literary circle were responsible, including works by his fellow Scriblerians as well as Matthew Prior, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele. The three following sections focus, respectively, on significant publications in prose, poetry, and drama that Swift would have noticed.

This chapter analyses the material that precedes the chapter summaries and the main narrative of Gulliver’s Travels. It establishes that the purpose of the prefatory material, both verbal and visual, is to make the reader uncertain whether or not they are reading a true story. The purpose of that is to tease and vex the reader, with the broader satirical intention of calling into question the very concept of truth. Swift is pointing out that human beings are systematically perverting language so as to express intentionally untrue statements, chronic mendacity, and its destabilisation of the linguistic system being a manifestation of human corruption. The chapter examines political lying in the early eighteenth century, then literary lying in prose fiction, situating Gulliver as a critique of reader-credulity and ‘absorptive’ reading encouraged by novels. The chapter explains the aims of the text and its preliminaries in their 1726 and 1735 states.

This chapter explores the possibilities for and limitations upon social mobility as Defoe conceived them. His own biography exemplified the roller-coaster trajectory of the first-phase professional writer. In his non-fictional prose, he showed that commoners without pedigree, land, or title could aspire to the highest social echelons. His fiction, though, was energized by the opposite trajectory: downward mobility. His protagonists live on the paper-thin line between respectability and criminality, terrified of falling off the edge. The conflict between an absolute system of morality as prescribed in the Ten Commandments and the relative morality by which people in the world must live is one experienced repeatedly by Moll Flanders and other Defovian characters. Understanding the pragmatic ethical codes to which such characters must resort does not, though, entirely explain their fictional fates. Narrative energy is produced by the gap between the explicable and the mysterious in his characters’ motivations and actions.

Recent levels of scholarly activity suggest that Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke remain the pre-eminent Irish writers of the period 1700–1780. Swift’s works are currently being newly edited under the auspices of Cambridge University Press and a new edition of his Correspondence was completed in 2014. It is timely, therefore, to take stock of how these and other bibliographical and critical resources have altered our approach to Swift. The present chapter conducts this assessment, first by looking at the kind of normative critical approach with which the author was himself furnished when encountering Swift as a student; and subsequently by surveying the areas of biography, Irish studies, and book history in which research activity since 2010 has been intense. The chapter discusses recent critical approaches to Swift, identifying the paradigms which studies of this highly controversial writer create and challenge, asking what it means to read Swift in the twenty-first century.

In 1635, the poet Edmund Waller wrote in celebration of the new, albeit highly incongruous, porticoed west front added by Inigo Jones to 'Old' St Paul's Cathedral. In Waller's poem 'Upon His Majesties Repairing of Pauls', Charles I is credited with completing his father's vision of improving the Cathedral's dilapidated state. The steeple was never repaired after being toppled by the violent thunderstorm in June 1561, and the extensive damage to the roof was inadequately addressed: Waller could justly call the old Cathedral 'Our Nations glory, and our Nations crime'. The poem is a canny performance. Waller's task is to celebrate a not altogether satisfactory piece of restoration in a context where others were calling for an entirely new building - a proposal that carried divisive political overtones. Eschewing 'Ambition' that would 'affect the fame / Of some new structure; to have born her name' (lines 27-8), the king displays both the modesty and greatness of his mind 'to frame no new Church, but the old refine' (line 36). In tacit response to Puritan attacks on Laudian reform, Waller presents Charles as a moderate whose innovations are of a piece with the original architecture of the church.

Are great works of imaginative literature, such as Gulliver's Travels, made out of life, or are they made out of other books? In 1919, T. S. Eliot published a landmark essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” arguing that the true worth of a writer was not to be found in “those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else,” but rather that “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot's anti-romantic account minimizes originality and foregrounds hard work. Artistic achievement results from consciousness of the past, of cultural history. Literature is made of other literature, Eliot contends, more surely than it is made out of life experience. Readers of Swift might feel, perhaps should feel, that the antithesis is a false one. Nevertheless, Eliot's argument is persuasive enough to suggest that investigating the way in which a major writer modifies, and is modified by, pre-existing literary traditions, can be a valuable approach to the creative work. Our most direct source of knowledge here must derive from what Swift himself read. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter will be concerned with the books that Swift read, and with his way of reading them. The second section will focus more generally on what he made of what he read.

How was the city imagined in eighteenth-century poetry? To chart the territory, and measure the distance that the reader traverses in the journey from early to late century, a reader might compare two poems: Jonathan Swift's “A Description of a City Shower,” first published in The Tatler 238 on 17 October 1710, and William Blake's “London”, the eighth poem in the “Experience” section of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). (Texts given at the end of the chapter.)

In Swift’s poem, a worsening rain shower becomes a downpour and finally merges with the “flood” of the Fleet River, London’s open sewer flowing down from the north towards the Thames. Its serpentine slither collects up the town’s effluent disemboguing into the river from Smithfield Market, conveys the rubbish via St. Sepulchre’s Church (whose bells would send prisoners under sentence of death on their way to Tyburn to be hanged) and deposits it into the Holborn conduit via Snow Hill stream. At least half-seriously, the topographical organization is also a moral organization by the poem’s close: the gradually gathering inundation and the term “flood” cannot but suggest the early chapters of Genesis in which Noah’s flood is described and, shortly afterwards, the wicked cities are destroyed – London, Swift subliminally suggests, is the new Sodom/Gomorrah. Various aspects of city life, realistic observations of the effects of rain on urban dwellers (metonyms) are ratchetted up into metaphors for the condition of city life – its squalor, crowdedness, and degradation.

Even eighteenth-century scholars tend to know very little more about Thomson as a playwright than that Fielding parodies a line from his play Sophonisba (1730) in the rewritten, annotated version of Tom Thumb. In fact Sophonisba is one of the principal targets in The Tragedy of Tragedies, identified by name in Scriblerus Secundus’ preface to assist Fielding's argument against notional detractors that it is quite legitimate for his play not to resemble the printed sources from which it presumably derives. Thomson's Sophonisba, Scriblerus points out, does not resemble earlier versions of that story by Mairet and Lee, the heroine being entirely devoid of passion: a Queen Elizabeth to their Mary, Queen of Scots. Thereafter, Scriblerus in his role as a learned commentator combining the talents of a Bentley and a Dennis, notes several parallels between his text and Thomson's, the most celebrated of which is given in my epigraph. The courtier Grizzle bleats his love for the Princess Huncamunca, his forlorn sigh fleshed out, so to speak, by some biological, or perhaps metallurgical, evidence:

Post-Romantic conceptions of originality make it difficult for us to regard as other than paradoxical the claim that ‘An Allusion to Horace’, the poem in which Rochester is most indebted to a precursor, is also one of his most original contributions to English poetry. If Rochester was not quite the first English poet to press a Roman satire into the service of his own times, he was the first to appreciate that this could be done systematically over the length of an entire poem, to wit Horace's Satire 1.10. Doubtless, Rochester did not intuit the full potential of this new medium. That would come, not so much through the greater poetic genius of Alexander Pope, as through Pope's more developed understanding of the phenomenology of reading the ‘imitation’. As soon as you cease to rely on your reader's hazy memory of the original Latin, and print it in juxtaposition to your own English, using typography when necessary to call attention to your own especially felicitous adaptations, knowing departures and virtuoso puns, you achieve effects that were not possible for Rochester. Where, for instance, Rochester could simply omit an Horatian passage that he did not see as having any relevance to contemporary circumstances (such as that commencing ‘scilicet oblitus patriaeque’, in which Horace condemns that practice of adulterating the native satiric strain with Greek words), later satirists like Pope and Johnson, fearing that the reader would construe this as a ‘cop-out’, would invest far more effort in inventing parallel circumstances.