2013 NOTES AND QUERIES
JONATHAN SWIFT, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. DAVID
WOMERSLEY. Pp. civ þ 806 (The Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012. £85.00 (ISBN 9780521841641).
DAVID WOMERSLEY’s new edition of
Gulliver’s Travels is a scholarly feat—and
feast—of Brobdingnagian proportions. In add-
ition to two introductions (the first general, the
second textual), a select bibliography, an
index, and chronologies of Swift’s life and the
narrative of Gulliver, the reader is treated to
the various frontispiece portraits of Gulliver,
to Pope’s commendatory verses, and to
passages from Swift’s correspondence with
friends and publishers that make reference to
Gulliver’s Travels, including transcriptions and
translations of the epistolary exchange with the
Abbé Desfontaines, the book’s French
translator.
In his excellent general introduction
Womersley traces the beginnings of Gulliver’s
Travels in the Scriblerian project and Swift’s
early writings, and then neatly places it in con-
versation with The Drapier’s Letters (1724–5)
and The History of the Four Last Years of the
Queen (a manuscript to which Swift returned in
1721) as a means of eliciting the complex inter-
play of Irish and English political concerns and
contexts at work in Swift’s book. Womersley
carefully unpicks a selection of phrases to
illustrate the depth of such intertextual connec-
tions: mention of ‘a Bristol Barrell’, for ex-
ample, can be read, via The Drapier’s Letters,
as an allusion to England’s oppression of
Ireland that bespeaks Swift’s ‘infuriated sym-
pathy’ with the Irish (lv–lvi); while Gulliver’s
near escape from the claws of a kite and his
tumble into a molehill (Part II, Ch. V) are
shown to resonate with Swift’s views of
Walpole and William III respectively. The
overriding imperative of Swift’s satiric prose,
Womersley argues in the closing sections of
this lucid critical discussion, is that of
vexation: disconcerting allusions and abrupt
shifts in mode are part of the ‘guerilla warfare’
Swift wages against his reader (lxxxix).
For all the merits of this edition’s prefatory
material and appendices, it is in its
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exceptionally thorough annotations and ex-
tended textual introduction that this
Gulliver’s Travels most clearly and successfully
distinguishes itself from all other editions of
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Swift’s book, past and present. The textual
introduction, which takes up some 150 pages,
is a triumph of clarity and precision in the face
of potentially bewildering bibliographic com-
plication. Womersely provides a list of authori-
tative editions, an impressive historical
collation of noteworthy variants in authorita-
tive editions published in Swift’s lifetime,
manuscript readings from five key (but here
rejected) sources, and a marvellous reconstruc-
tion of the history of the text. In what at mo-
ments reads like an adventure story all of its
own, Womersley charts the journey of
Gulliver’s Travels into print—and seemingly ir-
reversible textual corruption—with Swift going
to considerable lengths to maintain his ano-
nymity. He travelled to London in March
1726 with a copy of the text in an amanuensis’s
hand, leaving the holograph manuscript to
cross the Irish Sea with his friend Charles
Ford a few months later. These copies circu-
lated within the Scriblerian circle during the
summer, accruing a number of late revisions
(including, perhaps, the adoption of Lemuel
Gulliver as narrator), before negotiations
with the publisher Benjamin Motte took
place pseudonymously and in letters written
in John Gay’s hand. Swift then returned to
Dublin, leaving the holograph manuscript in
the care of friends, with Motte eventually
given it under cloak and dagger. Finally,
Motte and his silent partner Andrew Tooke
made a number of excisions and insertions to
attenuate the work’s incendiary political satire,
and divided the manuscript amongst five print-
ing houses for the sake of haste and secrecy.
Swift’s displeasure upon receiving the pub-
lished—and, as far as he was concerned,
mangled—edition begins a fresh chapter in
this narrative, as authorial disavowal and the
confusion of restoration and revision take the
‘intended’ text of 1726 ever further from sight.
The original manuscripts are now lost, and
though the three surviving interleaved copies
of the first of Motte’s editions—containing
many corrections and revisions—are
612 NOTES AND QUERIES
‘fascinating documents, wonderfully expressive
of Swift’s liminal position between the worlds
of scribal publication and print publication’,
they do not, Womersley concludes, possess au-
thority enough to merit adoption in a critical
edition as part of an amended 1726 text (646).
Womersley thus takes as his copy text the edi-
tion published in Dublin in 1735 by Charles
Faulkner as part of the edition of Swift’s
Works, and, unlike other current editors who
have adopted this text, he does not insert the
description of Lindalino’s rebellion in Part III
(a thinly-veiled allegory of Irish defiance
during the Wood’s halfpence affair that exists
only in one of the interleaved copies); Swift,
he conjectures, likely rejected this passage in
1725 (723).
Where Womersley takes a judicious ‘light
touch’ to textual emendation (653), his ex-
planatory annotations are as close to exhaust-
ive as is possible or desirable. Immediately
following the text proper, he provides thirty-
six long notes that give sustained attention to
such topics as the political freight of ‘innu-
endo’ in the period of Jacobite unrest, Swift’s
labile sense of ‘public good’, and his attitudes
towards such figures as Queen Anne and
Robert Walpole, and such issues as party
politics and standing armies. As in the intro-
ductory essay, Womersley’s elucidations
assiduously and productively trouble easy his-
torical, textual, and biographical distinctions,
and develop a compelling portrait of Swift’s
political frustrations and ambivalences.
These glosses supplement 1,496 footnotes.
The sheer volume of information provided
here—notes regularly fill half a page—may
overwhelm some readers, and it is certainly
the case that comprehensiveness occasionally
results in unnecessary replication (the term
‘pocket-perspective’, for instance, is glossed
on all three occasions of its use). But this is
a very small price to pay for annotations
that—in addition to providing the standard
fare of dictionary definitions and parallels to
Swift’s other works—repeatedly tap into the
rich and sometimes unexpected veins of allu-
sion that lurk just behind incidents, phrases,
and tropes. Such notes leave the reader marvel-
ling at the fecundity of Swift’s imagination and
the erudition of author and editor alike. For
example, in the plans of the architect Gulliver
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encounters in the Academy of Lagado, who
intends to build houses from the roof down-
wards like ‘those two prudent Insects the Bee
and the Spider’, Womersley registers allusions
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to images of inverse architecture in Thomas
Brown and Martinus Scriblerus, notes the
praise of bees and spiders as skilled builders
offered by Virgil and Pliny (as well as
Hobbes’s critique of such anthropomorphism),
and finally reminds us that Swift had already
mined these associations in The Battel of the
Books (261, n. 11). Other glosses usefully alert
us to repeated and modulated occurrences of
particular gestures, motifs, or phrases across
the text, such as Gulliver’s kissing of various
hands and feet (68, n. 3), and even occasion-
ally—and delightfully—glance forward to
record Swift’s influence upon later writers,
including the likes of William Godwin (404,
n. 25), Conrad (199, n. 34), and Nabokov
(168, n. 24).
As Womersley notes in his introduction,
Swift’s text is ‘really the record of a voyage
through a library’ (civ). In this splendid new
edition, readers of Gulliver’s Travels have never
been better positioned to experience the mani-
fold pleasures and surprises of this journey.
DAVID FRANCIS TAYLOR
University of Toronto
doi:10.1093/notesj/gjt204
ß The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press.
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Advance Access publication 30 October, 2013
CHRISTOPHER REID, Imprison’d Wranglers: The
Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons,
1760–1800. Pp. xiv þ 270. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012., £60.00. (ISBN 978
0 19 958109 2).
IN the late eighteenth century, a boy of seven,
the heir to a great name and estate, was re-
minded by his tutor that ‘the art of speaking
well’ should never be out of his thoughts.
Oratory was, he asserted, ‘so useful in every
part of life, and so absolutely necessary in
most. A man can make no figure without it
in Parliament, in the Church or in the Law’.
Sons in élite families were educated in the ways
of Cicero and Quintilian, who became