A Tale of a Tub and Other Works
by Jonathan Swift
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This volume contains the three works which together make up Jonathan Swift's early satiric and intellectual masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub: the Tale itself, The Battel of the Books, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Incorporating much new knowledge, this 2010 edition provides the first full scholarly treatment of this important work for fifty years. The introduction discusses publication, composition, and authorship; sources, analogues and generic models; reception; and religious, show more scientific and literary contexts (including the ancients and moderns controversy). Detailed explanatory notes address many previously unexplained issues in this famously rich and difficult work. Texts have been fully collated and edited according to modern principles and are accompanied with a textual introduction and full textual apparatus. Illustrations include title pages, the eight engravings from the fifth edition, and original designs for these engravings. Extensive associated contemporary materials, including Edmund Curll's Key and William Wotton's Observations, are provided. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Swift's Tale of a Tub may not be as well known as Gulliver's Travels, but it is perhaps his signature work. The Tale is a rambling, frequently scathing satire directed at Catholics, Calvinists, Authors, Critics, and a host of leading intellectuals of Swift's day. It has moments that are very funny, and finds some pretty inventive ways to skewer its targets. Much of it is targeted at people and issues that have long since been forgotten, making it somewhat unaccessable to the modern reader. The appended Battle of the Books is short, accessible, and pretty funny.
Well-known book but not easy. Clever defence of Anglicanism/Lutheranism against Catholicism and Calvinism through analogy. Full of obscure references which require a detailed knowledge of the historical period. What the tub is I did not gather.
Jonathan Swift is a brilliant satirist and if I was a contemporary of Swift's or aware of the issues he was mocking, then I might have enjoyed this book. Instead, this short book is filled with long digressions mocking organized religion or possibly government. I have to admit that about half way through I was completely lost and really not following his mockery.
If I had been reading this book in print, I would have saved my place with a bookmark and put it back on the shelf to revisit later, maybe after I learned more about the times. But this was a book that I had subscribed to through Daily Lit, which sends installments every day via email. This is the 2nd book that I've tried this way and I have to say that I don't think this format show more of reading works for me. The installments are all the same length so sometimes I found myself wanting to read more, or wanting to walk away and then return to the book. But once I was half way through a LONG email, I felt like I had to finish it and it was more like slogging through required reading vs. reading for pleasure. show less
If I had been reading this book in print, I would have saved my place with a bookmark and put it back on the shelf to revisit later, maybe after I learned more about the times. But this was a book that I had subscribed to through Daily Lit, which sends installments every day via email. This is the 2nd book that I've tried this way and I have to say that I don't think this format show more of reading works for me. The installments are all the same length so sometimes I found myself wanting to read more, or wanting to walk away and then return to the book. But once I was half way through a LONG email, I felt like I had to finish it and it was more like slogging through required reading vs. reading for pleasure. show less
Jonathan Swift ; edited with an introduction by Angus Ross and David Woolley
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Apparently doomed to an obscure Anglican parsonage in Laracor, Ireland, even after he had written his anonymous masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (c.1696), Swift turned a political mission to England from the Irish Protestant clergy into an avenue to prominence as the chief propagandist for the Tory government. His exhilaration at achieving importance show more in his forties appears engagingly in his Journal to Stella (1710--13), addressed to Esther Johnson, a young protegee for whom Swift felt more warmth than for anyone else in his long life. At the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories in 1714, Swift became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In Ireland, which he considered exile from a life of power and intellectual activity in London, Swift found time to defend his oppressed compatriots, sometimes in such contraband essays as his Drapier's Letters (1724), and sometimes in such short mordant pieces as the famous A Modest Proposal (1729); and there he wrote perhaps the greatest work of his time, Gulliver's Travels (1726). Using his characteristic device of the persona (a developed and sometimes satirized narrator, such as the anonymous hack writer of A Tale of a Tub or Isaac Bickerstaff in Predictions for the Ensuing Year, who exposes an astrologer), Swift created the hero Gulliver, who in the first instance stands for the bluff, decent, average Englishman and in the second, humanity in general. Gulliver is a full and powerful vision of a human being in a world in which violent passions, intellectual pride, and external chaos can degrade him or her---to animalism, in Swift's most horrifying images---but in which humans do have scope to act, guided by the Classical-Christian tradition. Gulliver's Travels has been an immensely successful children's book (although Swift did not care much for children), so widely popular through the world for its imagination, wit, fun, freshness, vigor, and narrative skill that its hero is in many languages a common proper noun. Perhaps as a consequence, its meaning has been the subject of continuing dispute, and its author has been called everything from sentimental to mad. Swift died in Dublin and was buried next to his beloved "Stella." (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- A Tale of a Tub and Other Works
- Original publication date
- 1704
- Dedication
- To
Hermann Real and Heinz Vienken
and to the memory of
Irvin Ehrenpreis - First words
- The present volume contains the contents of the volume which Swift himself first published early in 1704, namely, A Tale of a Tub, A Full and True Account of the Battle of the Books, and A Discourse of the Mechanica... (show all)l Operation of the Spirit, A Fragment. (Introduction)
The wits of the present age being so very numerous and penetrating, it seems the grandees of Church and State begin to fall under horrible apprehensions lest these gentlemen, during the intervals of a long peace, should find ... (show all)leisure to pick holes in the weak sides of Religion and Government. (Preface)
Whoever hath an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb, with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them. (A Tale of a Tub) - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The Kingdom of Absurdities [c], first printed in 1779 as 'sketches from Swift's own hand writing', is related to the ninth of the 'Treatises writ by the same Author' (p. I), and may be compared with a longer unfinished piece surviving in manuscript, entitled 'Of Publick Absurdityes in England'. (Introduction)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Besides, I have been unhappily prevented in that design by a certain domestic misfortune, in the particulars whereof, though it would be very seasonable and much in the modern way to inform the gentle reader, and would also be of great assistance towards extending this preface into the size now in vogue, which by rule ought to be large in proportion as the subsequent volume is small; yet I shall now dismiss our impatient reader from any further attendance at the porch, and having duly prepared his mind by a preliminary discourse, shall gladly introduce him to the sublime mysteries that ensue. (Preface)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Therefore, I shall here pause a while till I find, by feeling of the world's pulse and my own, that it will be of absolute necessity (for us both) to resume my pen. (A Tale of a Tub) - Blurbers
- Johnson, Samuel
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- English, French, German
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- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
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- ASINs
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