Monash University > Library > Exhibitions > Fifty Books from Fifty Years >

1. Jonathan Swift

Chosen:
Professor Clive Probyn,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts

Vindication of the Protestant dissenters, from the aspersions cast upon them in a late pamphlet, intitled, The Presbyterians Plea of merit, in order to take off the test, impartially examined : to which are added, some remarks upon a paper, call'd, The Correspondent. (Dublin : Printed by S. Powell in Crane-Lane, 1733)

When I introduce my English Honours students to the work of Jonathan Swift, I like to show them some material evidence. Among the treasures of the Monash Swift Collection there is the first London edition of A Modest Proposal; a unique printed and manuscript version of Swift’s greatest poem, Verses of the Death of Dr Swift; first, second, third, fourth and fifth editions of A Tale of a Tub. Each brings us close to Swift and even closer to the world of print culture of the day: hand set in movable lead type, on hand-made paper, bound in calf or (‘Morocco’) goat leather, and hand-stitched—each one is a unique physical object.

Choosing one example from such richness would not necessarily result in the first state of the first edition of Swift’s masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, nor the Map of the World by the Dutch cartographer Herman Moll, from which the maps in Gulliver’s Travels were copied, nor even one of Swift’s autograph letters—the one carefully preserved by its recipient Miss Kelly and received as she was leaving Ireland for ever, or even the letter to Swift’s most trusted friend and intermediary with the London publishing world, Charles Ford, owned by Monash but missing from the standard edition of the letters.

Each of these, and there are many such, would undoubtedly dignify any Swift collection in the world. But the Monash Collection offers another possibility. It is an anonymous 48-page Dublin pamphlet rather unpromisingly entitled: A Vindication of the Protestant Dissenters, from the Aspersions cast upon them In a Late Pamphlet, intitled, The Presbyterians Plea of Merit, In order to take off the Test, Impartially Examined, To which are added, Some remarks Upon a Paper, call’d The Correspondent (1733). It is not by Swift, but a very sharp critique of Swift’s earlier pamphlet (i.e. The Presbyterian’s Plea of Merit), dealing with a political controversy of little general interest today.

What, then, is so special about this single pamphlet?

No manuscript survives of Swift’s greatest works, A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels, The Drapier’s Letters, A Modest Proposal, Verses on the Death. The Vindication is, however, a surviving example of something just as interesting: Swift’s working papers. It carries a series of marginal marks, crosses, words, phrases, whole sentences, questions, expressions of personal affront and exclamations—all in his unmistakeable handwriting. We may see here how Swift actually read a (hostile) text, and we see before us how his marginal comments will form the centre of a new, and as yet unwritten text (the ironic Reasons for repealing the Sacramental Test, in favour of the Catholics). Swift’s annotations are in black ink, and when he came to answer the answerer, he adopted the latter’s arguments and phrases in order to compose more than a rebuttal. One word in particular is lifted from the anonymous text into the embryonic Swiftian text-in-the-making—an image of physical pain and torture (‘Brand’). The annotated Vindication, then, is even closer than a first draft to that moment of (angry) textual reaction which will eventually generate more (Swiftian) writing. It is both a source and a part of something yet to be born. It is an example of how Swift’s writing is in so many examples a reaction to something already written.

The fact that Swift’s own copy of the annotated Vindication survives, and is accessible to readers, also vindicates the idea of a Rare Books Collection. It is a particular and unrepeatable physical object. It exists uniquely in time and space. It preserves a moment of biographical significance in bibliographical form. It is a trace of that fierce political and writerly reaction from the most reactive writer in the whole of the eighteenth-century. Reading this text today enables us to experience at first hand that essential Swiftian rage, what he called on his own funerary inscription, a ‘savage indignation’, that fierce, driving energy that makes him still the greatest satirist in English. .’

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