Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise

The purpose of this study is to put forward an interpretation of Swift's work based entirely on the writings themselves and on their relation to ideas, attitudes, and literary methods current in his own day. It arises from the belief that one cause of the frequent misunderstanding of the major satires is that they have been considered in isolation from the political tracts, the letters, the sermons, the sets of maxims, and even in isolation from one another. It is perfectly possible, I believe, to interpret Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, and indeed all Swift's work, satisfactorily, by following his guidance as a responsible satirist in each individual work, and this is what the last two chapters of this study set out to do. Swift's characteristic ways of thinking and of writing are intimately related to the conditions of his time. His ideas are, for the most part, traditional, those of his Christian classical heritage, but his ways of reaching them, holding to them, and expressing them in words are intensely individual -- individual and yet conditioned by the difficulties of an age in which the tradition to which he owed allegiance was under steady attack from various sides. - Preface.