“Fitted to the Humour of

the Age”: Alteration and Print

in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub
Katie Lanning

abstract
Alteration links seemingly disparate ideas and pieces of the text
in Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. In the Tale’s allegory, brothers
alter their coats through over-embellishment. In the Tale’s
digres­sions, the Grub Street narrator alters texts by overvaluing
and reading only added commentary and prolegomena. The
Tale’s material format also demonstrates surface alteration in
its constant shifting between forms and in the changes Swift
makes to the 1710 edition. Books and bodies alike are altered
by layers of new surfaces in the Tale. Swift suggests that in both
cases these exterior alterations possess the ability to disrupt and
dis­tort interiors, producing madness in bodies and mis­reading in
books. Uneasy with the possibility of alterations unbal­ancing
or destabilizing his meaning in an attempt to fit the text “to the
humour of the Age,” Swift creates a work that possesses the poten­
tial to grow with material alteration. Any errors, additions, or
changes to his text over time, even if Swift might despise them,
validate his strategy.

author
Katie Lanning is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. She is working on a dissertation about the mutually influ­
ential relationship between literary form and material format in
British prose fiction of the long eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction 26, no. 4 (Summer 2014)

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516 katie l anning

The works of Jonathan Swift often demonstrate concern for the

disruptive capacity of future print. In Gulliver’s Travels, for
example, Swift depicts the instability and unreliability of print
as an ever-growing collection of surfaces that drive his fictional
author’s work into forgotten depths. Lemuel Gulliver worries that
his travelogue will be obfuscated by newer pub­lica­tions, “sunk
into oblivion by the weight and bulk of those who come last, and
therefore lie uppermost.”1 In the poem “On Poetry: A Rapsody”
(1733), Swift focuses on changes made to a text’s physical surface,
or its printed page. The speaker warns that even changes to the
poem’s typeface can alter its meaning:
To Statesman wou’d you give a Wipe,
You print it in Italick Type.
When Letters are in vulgar Shapes,
’Tis ten to one the Wit escapes.2

Swift describes these typographical adjustments as altered

fashions, putting the “Poem in its modish Dress, / Correctly
fitted for the Press” (105–6). In both examples, Swift views print
as transitory and vulnerable to changing times and tastes. Obso­
lescence or alter­a­tion are the only possible futures for a book in a
world that values only the latest vogue.
The threat of alteration is central to Swift’s satire in A Tale of
a Tub (1704). He puns on the term “alter” frequently to suggest
both its physical and mental denotations. Alterations are changes
to surface appearances, but altered states also suggest changing
or distorted bodies. Humoral theory, for example, centres on the
body’s ability to alter itself based on adjusted balances of humours.
In the Tale, altered tastes and humours create altered texts, and
therefore alteration is both an internal and external process. In
addition, the alteration process occurs in multiple layers of the
text. In the Tale’s allegory, brothers Peter, Jack, and Martin alter
and embellish their coats, because they are interested only in
appear­ing fashionable. In the Tale’s digressions, the Grub Street
narrator discusses and performs illogical readings of ancient
texts solely through added modern commentary. Brothers
and narrator alike wrongly understand alteration as merely a
1 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. David Womersley (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 437.
2 Swift, Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Penguin, 1983), 524, lines
95–98. References are to this edition.

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surface act. Depth is disregarded or forgotten. But even when

changes are focused only on the exterior, these surface changes
still provoke interior alterations. For bodies, this alteration is
humoral: madness con­sumes Peter, Jack, and the narrator. For
books, alteration threatens to distort a text’s meaning, impeding
“correct” interpretations. Swift’s pun on alteration is an apt
method of humour for his strategy. Puns work by functioning
at multiple levels simultaneously, suggesting not simply that
alteration can be both exterior and interior but that is must be.
Swift is uneasy with the possibility of material alterations un­
bal­­ancing or destabilizing a text’s meaning, yet he is willing to
take advantage of material alteration’s potential to fortify his own
meaning. He shows as much in his decision to incorporate an
apology and footnotes into the 1710 edition. His manipulation
of the text in a subsequent incarnation both pleads with its
audi­ence to read the Tale correctly and skewers those modern
com­men­ta­tors who distort his intended meaning. These addi­
tions seek to reshape and restore the central text: the authorial
alterations respond to non-authorial ones.3 Yet Swift creates a
bulwark against modern alteration even before the 1710 edition.
He anticipates alteration to his text; he believes these changes
to be inevitable. Thus, he structures A Tale of a Tub as a satire
that possesses the potential to grow, yet remain consistent, with
material changes. The very subject of Swift’s satire, its emphasis
on the relationship between textual surfaces and depths, makes
print’s flaws work for him. Any distortion of the text’s meaning
over time and over new editions only reinforces Swift’s critique
of the transience and unreliability of print. In this article, I argue
that much of the success of the Tale rests in the potential for
readings and misreadings that are beyond Swift’s control and
shaped by non-authorial hands.

Satire of Surface and Depth

Books and bodies alike are altered by layers of new surfaces in
the Tale. Swift traces the modern taste for surfaces to what he
alternate­ly calls the “fashion,” “vogue,” or “humour” of the
3 The footnotes, from William Wotton’s Defense of the Reflections upon Ancient and
Modern Learning, with Observations upon The Tale of a Tub (London, 1705), alter
both Swift’s and Wotton’s work. They respond to Wotton’s own distortion of
Swift’s text by recontextualizing and distorting Wotton’s words. Swift’s approach
is an eye for an eye, rebalancing one alteration with another.

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current moment. Central to Swift’s satire of the modern valu­

ation of surface is his depic­tion of society’s inclinations as fickle
and fleet­ing. If taste is not stable, print certainly cannot be. In
the Tale’s letter to the reader, Swift’s satiric bookseller represents
the appearances of texts as bodies in altered dress, a metaphor
that immediately resonates with the “Allegory of the Coats.” The
book­seller claims: “I have been lately alarm’d with Intelligence of
a surreptitious Copy which a certain great Wit had new polish’d
and refin’d, or, as our present writers express themselves, fitted
to the Humour of the Age; as they have already done with great
Felicity to Don Quixot, Boccalini, la Bruyere, and other Authors.
However, I thought it fairer Dealing to offer the whole Work in its
Naturals.”4 The bookseller dis­tinguishes between the “new polish’d
and refin’d” copy and the authentic existing in “its Naturals.” He
identifies his book’s value in its appearance, and he likewise
chastises the unauthorized copies with no greater specificity
than the claim that their appear­ances have been altered from the
original, “fitted to the humour of the Age.” “Fitted,” a word com­
monly used in advertising updated editions, establishes another
link between books and bodies: both are dressed to meet new
tastes. The use of the term “humour” is more word­play. It functions
here as a synonym for fashion and also sug­gests preferences that
are based on fancy or whim. In the early eighteenth century,
“Humour” could denote a habitual temperament or frame of
mind,5 but Swift uses the word to capture a “perpetually altering”
age (58), challenging any stable definition—and any definition of
stability—in this term. The altera­tion of language emphasizes the
impermanence of a modern world.
The constantly changing humours of the moment dictate the
appearance of books, and, despite the bookseller’s claim, the Tale
is no exception. The distinction between original and copy is false
and ironic. The “natural” state of this modern book is heavily and
satirically mediated by digression and prefatory matter. It also
bears additional treatises that seem, at least initially, unrelated
to the Tale. The text is just as “fitted” to its audience as the
altered “Quixote,” Boccalini, and La Bruyère that the bookseller
criticizes. Yet the bookseller treats these aspects of the Tale as part
4 Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 19. References are to this edition.
5 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “humour,” accessed 28 May 2014,
http://tinyurl.com/nqwbgx6.

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of its “natural” makeup, not as alteration. Even as the Tale volume

enters new editions with changing surfaces or formats, the book­
seller’s message remains the same. He does not recognize any
addition, medi­ation, or interpretation that distances the book
from its original form. The bookseller’s failure to see how altera­
tion distorts a text parallels the allegorical brothers’ failure to
recognize the danger of over-embellishing their coats. They see
surface, but not its effect on depth.
The Tale’s satire explores the relationship between surface
and depth largely through a conflation of book and body. Swift
presents books as bodies most prominently in the second treatise
of the Tale, The Battel of the Books. Anthropomorphized ancient
and modern volumes conduct war and sustain material injuries:
“then Aristotle, observing Bacon advance with a furious Mien,
drew his Bow to the Head, and let fly his Arrow, which missed the
valiant Modern, and went hizzing over his Head. But Des-Cartes
it hit; The Steel Point quickly found a Defect in his Head-piece; it
pierced the Leather and the Past-board, and went in at his Right
Eye” (156). Book and body are so entwined in Swift’s imagery that
the Descartes volume is shot through both its pasteboard and its
eye. For these books, appendices become appendages, paper
becomes body. Yet physical damage to these paper bodies is a
metaphor for modern corruptions of ancient texts. The materi­
ality of books is a stand-in for the integrity and longevity of the
meaning of texts; surface represents depth.
The Battel demonstrates a collapsed distinction between interior
and exterior that permeates the Tale. In an early digression, the
narrator recognizes the faultiness of reading only the surface of
things. He notes that “the Grubæan Sages have always chosen
to convey their Precepts and their Arts, shut up within the
Vehicles of Types and Fables, which having been perhaps more
careful and curious in adorning, than was altogether necessary,
it has fared with these Vehicles after the usual Fate of Coaches
over-finely painted and gilt, that the transitory Gazers have so
dazzled their Eyes, and fill’d their Imaginations with the outward
Lustre, as neither to regard or consider the Person or Parts of the
owner within” (42). In this passage, the narrator argues what will
become the complete inverse of his ultimate opinion. Here, he
suggests that the important elements of a modern work reside in

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its interior. Readers, “dazzled” by the surface, miss the depth. The
narrator initially intends to correct this surface reading, claiming
that his purpose in this treatise is to explain the productions of
modern society, “which, beside their beautiful Externals, for
the Gratification of superficial Readers, have darkly and deeply
couched under them the most finished and refined Systems of all
Sciences and Arts,” which he hopes to uncover by the anatomical
processes of “Exantlation” or “Incision” (42). Despite his inten­
tion to study texts anatomically like bodies, he is unable to
sustain a scientific interest in the interior of either. As he evolves
into a “Modern,” he perversely categorizes both anatomical study
and textual interpretation as forms of mere surface alteration. He
finds nothing of interest in observing dissected human bodies:
“Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe,
how much it altered her Person for the worse” (112). No longer
convinced that the “depth of things” contains useful information,
he now lauds “that Wisdom which converses about the Surface”
(111). The narrator’s initial interest in the interior gives way to a
modern preference for the exterior, and he declares that nature
has always “put her best Furniture forward” (111). He does not
simply choose preface over text. Rather, he believes the preface
is the text, in much the same way the brothers come to believe a
coat is a soul.6 In both cases, these “Moderns” see all surface, no
depth. Thus, readers witness an important alteration: the nar­ra­
tor’s descent, echoing Peter and Jack’s fall, into modern madness
and illogic.
This mental alteration is matched by a textual one, as the Tale
becomes increasingly dominated by digression and frag­menta­tion.
Gaps distort or conceal meaning. These feigned lacunae indicate
lost depths, yet these passages, apparently scraped or smeared
6 The narrator describes his own work as inverted: the body of his text contains
material usually reserved for a preface. He defends this inversion of interior and
exterior by claiming that the modern preface deserves more attention: “For my
own Particular, I cannot deny that whatever I have said upon this Occasion had
been more proper in a Preface, and more agreeable to the Mode which usually
directs it there. But I here think fit to lay hold on that great and honourable
Privilege of being the Last Writer; I claim an absolute Authority in Right as the
freshest Modern, which gives me a Despotic Power over all authors before me.
In the Strength of which Title I do utterly disapprove and declare against that
pernicious Custom of making the Preface a Bill of Fare to the Book” (85). This
explanation, like Gulliver’s fear of obsolescence, relies on an understanding of
print as ever-growing layers of surfaces. The text of the “freshest Modern” is the
only one that matters.

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from the surface of the text, are not real.7 The depth is void, a
parallel to the emptiness the narrator finds in interiors, be they
flayed bodies or modern books. These moments suggest that the
Tale volume is just a modern surface. Its ultimate joke is that
if we continue to peel back its layers, we will find nothing. The
book is both mad and mad­dening. In section 9, “A Digression
Concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness
in a Commonwealth,” the narrator describes how vapours can
disturb the brain, creating a mad­ness that has “been the Parent of
all those mighty Revolutions, that have happened in Empire, in
Philosophy, and in Religion” (110). Miriam Kosh Starkman and
Kenneth Craven argue that the narrator’s system of maddening
vapours echoes and distorts the Galenic system of humours.8
The narrator’s illogical discussion of imbalanced humours itself
imbalances the Tale, delaying the “Allegory of the Coats” in
favour of more digression. The form of the Tale changes with the
narrator’s mental state—body alters book.

Modern Alterations

Elsewhere in the Tale, modern books alter bodies, or at least claim

to do so. Out of his “great affection for the Modern learned,” the
narrator advocates a new system of learning classics through
modern commentary alone:
You take fair correct Copies, well bound in Calfs Skin, and Lettered
at the Back, of all Modern Bodies of Arts and Sciences whatsoever,
and in what Language you please. These you distil in balneo Mariæ,
infusing Quintessence of poppy Q.S., together with three Pints of
Lethe, to be had from the Apothecaries. You cleanse away carefully
the Sordes and Caput mortuum, letting all that is volatile evaporate.
You preserve only the first Running, which is again to be distilled
seventeen times, till what remains will amount to about two Drams.

7 John R. Clark points out that these lacunae function as one of Swift’s many
para­doxes: they make the modern text appear ancient. Clark, Form and Frenzy
in Swift’s “Tale of a Tub” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), esp. chap. 6.
8 Miriam Kosh Starkman, Swift’s Satire on Learning in “A Tale of a Tub” (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1950), 28; and Kenneth Craven, Jonathan Swift and
the Millennium of Madness: The Information Age in Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub”
(Leiden: Brill, 1992). Craven also notes that Swift’s libraries in 1715 and 1740
contained the ancient medical works of Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, as
well as the modern Paracelsus, Gibson’s Anatomy, Fuller’s Pharmacopaea, and
Highmore’s Anatomy (170).

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This you keep in a Glass Viol Hermetically sealed, for one and
twenty days. Then you begin your Catholick Treatise, taking every
Morning fasting (first shaking the Viol) three Drops of this Elixir,
snuffing it strongly up your Nose. It will dilate itself about the Brain
(where there is any) in fourteen Minutes, and you immediately
perceive in your Head an infinite Number of Abstracts, Summaries,
Compendiums, Extracts, Collections, Medulla’s, Excerpta quædam’s,
Florilegias’s and the like, all disposed into great Order and reducible
upon Paper. (82)

The language echoes that of manuals and treatises that suggest

homemade remedies for illness. Greek and Roman texts by
Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen—all of which appear as ancient
soldiers in The Battel of the Books—contain passages in which the
reader is instructed to correct imbalanced humours by mixing
and consuming an elixir. Yet the details of the narrator’s recipe
expose it as quack medicine. Poppy and lethe induce forgetful­ness
and oblivion: these are hardly correct states in which to learn. In
addition, the narrator refers to these instructions as a “Nostrum,”
a secret recipe typically belonging to a quack.9 He iden­tifies
the recipe’s creator as “a great Philosopher of O. Brazile” (82), a
myth­ical island that by this time was associated with sham dis­
coveries printed in a series of deceptive pamphlets.10 Before even
describing the recipe, then, the narrator has alerted his readers to
its unreliability. He concludes by suggesting the elixir can work
regardless of whether the consumer has a brain, which is a com­
ical corruption of humoral theory in which the brain’s balance is
altered and controlled by the move­ment and mixture of bodily
fluids. Hugh Ormsby-Lennon argues that in moments like this,
the nar­rator adopts the role of a mountebank or quack physician, a
fit­ting comparison, as quack­ery relies on appearance and show, on
decep­tive surfaces that disguise empty or useless depths.11
The narrator’s elixir is quack medicine not simply because of its
sham ingredients. What it purports to achieve is a kind of quack
  9 Hugh Ormsby-Lennon argues that the narrator’s habitual use of “our,” from
the Latin “nostrum,” suggests the narrator’s belief in the curative properties
of his text: “The Tub is, quite literally, his, and Swift’s, nostrum for the world.”
Ormsby-Lennon, Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2011), 158.
10 For more on O-Brazile in late seventeenth-century print culture, see Kate
Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1666–1740: Deception in English Literary and
Political Culture (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2008).
11 Ormsby-Lennon, 25.

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reading. It is a recipe to reduce a text, to be able to read only the

surface. Modern critics come away from “fair correct Copies”
having only absorbed additions and fragments, the “infinite
Number of Abstracts, Summaries, Compendiums, Extracts, Collec­
tions, Medulla’s, Excerpta quædam’s, Florilegias’s and the like.” The
result of snuffing the elixir, then, is not balanced humours but
imbalanced readings. The original texts are gone, washed away as
sordes and caput mortuum; what is left is solely modern apparatus.
In this interaction between book and body, the consumption
of elixir focuses only on what is added to or altered in the text.
This interaction is mirrored by the brothers of the allegory, who
perform a similarly modern reading of their father’s will.
Described as an “Ancient” text, the will bestows each son with
a coat, stipulating that the garments must not be altered. The
brothers, however, live in a society where surface is the crucial
sig­nifier of a person’s worth, and where the humour of the age is
society’s single guiding principle.12 When shoulder-knots come
into fashion, the brothers are attacked for failing to be in vogue:
“That Fellow, cries one, has no Soul; where is his Shoulder-knot?”
(54). Spiritual depth is relocated as surface appearance. Peter
convinces his brothers “to wear on their Coats whatever Trim­
mings came up in Fashion; never pulling off any, as they went
out of the Mode, but keeping on all together, which amounted
in time to a Medley the most Antick you can possibly conceive
... there was hardly a Thread of the Original Coat to be seen,
but an infinite Quantity of Lace, and Ribbands, and Fringe, and
Embroidery, and Points” (88). This “infinite Quantity” matches
the “infinite Number” of modern commentaries in the narrator’s
elixir. The layering of these six embellishments (shoulder-knot,
gold lace, satin lining, fringe, embroidered figures, and points)
mirrors the six pref­a­tory elements in the 1704 Tale volume (title
page, catalogue, dedication, bookseller’s letter, epistle dedicatory,
and preface). Like the characters in the allegorical tale, the
material book lays on additional material in order to parody the
modern preference for superficial alteration.
12 I allude to the allegory’s sect of tailor-worshippers who “held the Universe to
be a large Suit of Cloaths, which invests every Thing.” In describing this sect,
Swift’s narrator asks the oft-cited question, “What is Man himself but a Micro-
Coat, or rather a compleat Suit of Cloaths with all its Trimmings?” (49). Man
becomes coat, a conflation of depth and surface.

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The brothers justify the additions to their coats by altering their

father’s will. They add shoulder-knots, for example, after locating
each letter of the phrase in the text, save the “k” in “knot,” which was
decided to be a modern letter and therefore impossible to locate in
the ancient will. This is an astounding surface reading that ignores
even the meanings of individual words in an effort to combine
letters on the page.13 The next embellishment, gold lace, is added
by justification from commentators, for it is perfectly acceptable,
Peter argues, for “Readers to find out a Meaning in every Thing but
it self ” (55). The brothers justify the incorporation of satin lining
by attaching a codicil to the will claiming satin’s legitimacy. The
material addition of the lining to the coat is matched by the material
addition of the appendix to the will: the brothers physically alter
the text. Like the narrator’s elixir, the brothers’ reading focuses
only on what they have added to the will.
The brothers incorporate the remaining coat embellishments
by performing wilfully incorrect interpretations. Peter argues that
silver fringe is an admissible addition to their coats, despite their
father’s explicit prohibition against fringe, because “he had found
in a certain Author, which he said should be nameless, that the
same Word which in the Will is called Fringe, does also signifie
13 Decades later, Swift continued to demonstrate concern about unreliable and
dishonest surface readings. The Lagado word machine in book 3 of Gulliver’s
Travels, and Gulliver’s subsequent description of the “anagrammatick
method” for reading conspiracy into the most mundane of papers, echo the
brothers’ absurd readings of the will in the “Allegory of the Coats.” See also
Swift’s Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue
(London, 1712) for an earlier but similar perspective on the unreliability of
language. Several scholars have noted Swift’s fear of linguistic corruption,
though my interest here is not in language alone, but in its unreliable and
unstable existence in print. In Language and Reality in Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub”
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), Frederik N. Smith argues that
the satirical target of Swift’s Tale is modern jargon, particularly in the fields of
law, religion, criticism, philosophy, and medicine. Clive T. Probyn and Dustin
Griffin have both studied Swift’s attitude towards unreliable interpretations of
language. Probyn traces Swift’s attitudes towards misreading across several of
Swift’s writings. Probyn’s focus is predominantly on the relationship between
author and reader, but as I argue in this article, the string of publishers, editors,
and other figures in the book trade complicate such a relationship. Probyn,
“‘Haranguing Upon Texts’: Swift and the Idea of the Book,” in Proceedings of
the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Fink, 1985). Like
Probyn, Griffin argues that the Tale performs a struggle for power over textual
interpretation and suggests Swift the writer is driven to control his work’s
reception and meaning. Griffin, “Interpretation and Power: Swift’s Tale of a
Tub,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 34, no. 2 (1993): 151–68.

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a Broom-stick” (57). The absurd claim that their father prohibits

adding broom­sticks to coats flagrantly distorts the text’s mean­ing.
The brothers simi­larly add embroidered figures to their coats by
suggesting a “favourable Interpretation” of their father’s for­bid­
dance: he surely did not mean the same embroidered figures that
are now in style (58). Again, the text is purposeful­ly misread, a new
meaning falsely applied to it. Finally, the brothers abandon their
father’s will altogether and add a myriad of points to their coats.
These examples demonstrate other kinds of textual alteration: the
reader’s interpretation and the text’s ultimate obsolescence. These
final alterations to the will are the most dangerous and damaging.
In the brothers’ disregard for the will, the text sinks into oblivion,
discarded and forgotten just as Gulliver fears his work will become.
Before its obsolescence, the will suffers increasingly unreliable
readings. Inter­pretation is the least tangible and controllable way
that the meaning of a text can change.
The perils of misinterpretation generate another alteration to
the Tale: Swift’s “Apology” added to the 1710 edition. This material
change to the printed work attempts to correct readers’ inter­pre­ta­
tions of the central allegory, to reroute meaning through alteration
not unlike the brothers’ codicil to the will. One method of cor­
rection is the apology’s insistence on the text’s wit and humour.
Swift’s apologist argues, “The Author cannot conclude this Apology
without making this one Reflection; that, as Wit is the noblest and
most useful Gift of human Nature, so Humour is the most agree­
able; and where these two enter far into the Composition of any
Work, they will render it always acceptable to the World” (14).14
Wit and humour are tools of satire; they expose the ludicrous
and illogical in modern learning and religion and thus require a
different kind of reading. Swift gives the word “humour” another
dimension in the Tale: it refers not only to the fleeting taste of the
age but also to the method by which Swift critiques that taste.
The apology also claims that the Tale possesses a curative func­
tion. Swift’s apologist suggests that his readers might become
“infected” by faulty readings of and responses to his work. He asks,
“Why should any Clergyman of our Church be angry to see the
Follies of Fanaticism and Superstition exposed, tho’ in the most
14 I refrain from identifying the voice of the apology as Swift’s, as I believe the
piece contains ironies similar to the narrator’s voice, as Judith C. Mueller
discusses in her article, “Writing under Constraint: Swift’s ‘Apology’ for a Tale
of a Tub,” ELH 60, no. 1 (1993): 101–15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873309.

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ridiculous Manner? Since that is perhaps the most probable way to

cure them, or at least to hinder them from farther spreading” (6).
Swift’s language of disease and cure positions A Tale of a Tub as a
medicinal remedy for modern corruption. In noting this conceit,
Craven describes Swift’s role as that of “the primitive satirist as
physician.”15 But should we take Swift at his word in the apology?
Is he a physician or a quack? The suggestion that the Tale can
alter and improve its readers is echoed by Swift’s narrator who
claims, for example, “I hold my self to give as much Light as is
possible, into the Beauties and Excellencies of what I am writing,
because it is become the Fashion and Humour most applauded
among the first Authors of this Polite and Learned Age, when they
would correct the ill Nature of Critical, or inform the Ignorance
of Courteous Readers” (84). This echo is problematic. Apologist
and narrator each depict their work as a cure for readers, but these
cures are contradictory, as these figures stand on opposite sides
of the ancient-modern debate. Swift’s apologist claims to cure
because his work is steadfast, while the narrator claims to cure
because his work molds itself to the “Fashion and Humour” of the
day. Continuing to play with the ambiguities between depth and
surface, Swift paradoxically presents the Tale as both a permanent
and impermanent text.

Peter’s Last Laugh?

This paradox of permanence and impermanence requires an
under­standing of the text’s materiality. The Tale’s arrange­ment
is often read as disjointed, yet readers cannot simply eliminate
pieces in an attempt to locate a central text. The complex structure
of the book—its intrusive digressions, its appended treatises—
makes it impossible to determine how the apparently unrelated
components could actually be separated from one another. What
is more, these seemingly dis­parate pieces function together. As
Ronald Paulson and Howard Weinbrot both suggest, digressions
become increasingly entwined with the allegory, and The Battel
of the Books and the fragmentary Mechanical Operation of the
Spirit each enhance and expand Swift’s satire within the Tale.16
15 Craven, 160.
16 Ronald Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s “Tale of a Tub” (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1960); and Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire
Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005).

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swift’s a tale of a tub

The 1704 edition reinforces these connections in the printer’s

decision to number the pages of the Tale, Battel, and Mechanical
Operation fragment continuously as one unified text. The edition
also includes much of the prefa­tory material in this numbering,
a significant indication of in­cor­poration, as many early books
either left prefatory matter unnum­bered or numbered only in
lower-case Roman numerals.17 This continuous numbering sug­
gests that the producers of the book did not consider the Tale’s
prolegomena as superficial intro­duction, but saw it as part of
the Tale itself. The book collapses borders between interior and
exterior at the material level of print.
Swift’s composite material volume is not only multifaceted but
also dynamic. The Tale enacts what Weinbrot calls “Menippean
satire by addi­tion.” This form of satire relies on a text’s own ex­
pan­sion and trans­cendence past its initial target and scope.18 The
satire of A Tale of a Tub, Weinbrot argues, succeeds because Swift
builds part after part to reflect the growing threat of modern
orthodoxy in both religion and scholarship. The text weaves its
critique as it vacillates between allegory and digres­sion and moves
from Tale to Battel to fragment; it main­tains its satire by altering
its shape. It is in this way both permanent and im­permanent: its
satire remains stable as its form changes. The book’s meaning
thus relies on alter­ation and supplementation, the very elements
that drive Peter and Jack mad.
Because much of the Tale’s critique is wrapped up in its material
presentation, alterations in later editions extend the performance
of the book as a mad, modern text that cannot stop changing.
I pro­pose that we consider Swift’s A Tale of a Tub not only a
satire by addition but also a satire by edition. Weinbrot’s focus
on addition urges us to attend to “relations among parts” in our
read­ing of the book, unit­ing Swift’s treatises, digression, and
apology as multiple expressions of a single voice.19 Yet, even past
Swift’s lifetime, ver­sions of the Tale present new additions and
altera­­tions that ex­panded and adapted the text, fitting it to a new
age. The central distinction between satire by addition and by
17 George Faulkner’s Dublin editions reinforce this unity. The 1756 volume, for
example, omits the word “finis” from the end of the Tale and The Battel of the
Books. The volume only bears “finis” on the final page of the book, marking
one ending to one unified text.
18 Weinbrot, 115.
19 Weinbrot, 119.

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528 katie l anning

edition, then, is that the latter term looks beyond the author’s
rela­tion­ship to the book. Satire by edition locates additional
agency within the book and its material makers—publishers,
com­posi­tors, illustra­tors, and other figures separate from the
author—to build, intentionally or not, on the author’s satire.
Recog­niz­ing the Tale as satire by addi­tion expands what Frank H.
Ellis identifies as the Tale’s “creative act” to include later materials
by Swift, particular­ly his apology.20 Recognizing the Tale as satire
by edition expands the boun­­daries of the text’s creative act even
further, considering how Swift’s humour intensifies as editions
are altered by new actors over time.
Of course, any text that endures through multiple editions
under­goes a series of alterations and new formats. This is part
of Swift’s great frustration with print’s non-fixity in general. But
because the Tale’s particular satire is aimed at the alteration and
inter­preta­tion of texts, material changes to the Tale are relevant
to and become sublimated as part of the text’s critique. This is
Swift’s safeguard against the instability of print. The only thing
reliable about print for Swift is its unreliability, and he harnesses
that unreliability to fuel his own satire. Any errors, additions,
or changes to his text over time, even if Swift might despise
them, only justify his point. New surfaces enrich the Tale’s
depths. Take, for instance, the inclusion of illustrations in the
1710 edition. The sixth illustration in the volume, depicting
Martin and Jack remov­ing their embellishments, is particularly
interesting. Though Martin’s face remains stoic, Jack appears
crazed: his mouth is agape, his eyes wide, and his body contorted
as he rips his tattered coat. The contrast between the two
brothers’ mental states is reflected in their outward appearances,
with the image nicely visualizing the assertions of the text. This is
what we expect all illustra­tions to do. Yet, in A Tale of a Tub, the
20 Frank H. Ellis, “No Apologies, Dr. Swift!,” Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no.3
(1997): 71–76, http://tinyurl.com/km82y25. Ellis argues that the Tale’s apology
is not part of the text’s “creative act” in part because the addition possessed
a different motivation than the original text. Ellis writes, “The impulse that
created the fifth edition of A Tale of a Tub in 1710 was commercial, not
artistic” (75). Ellis’s edition of the Tale (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006) follows
the 1704 edition, calling it and the 1755 edition the only “textually authorial”
versions of the Tale (xxi). While I find value in acknowledging authorial
intent, I am wary of devaluing an edition based on its commercial aims.
Instead, I am interested in tracing editions that alter a text from its original
form, as it is these non-authorial changes that generate such anxiety in Swift’s
attitude towards print.

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swift’s a tale of a tub

relationship between the text and the illustration serves Swift’s

satire in a more complex way. In depicting Martin and Jack’s
removal of embellishments, the illustration adds another embel­
lish­ment to the text: itself. This trade-off suggests that even the
brothers’ belated impulse to correct modern alteration is futile.
Once the process begins, it cannot be reversed. In addition, in
the 1710 edition held in the University of Wisconsin’s Special
Collec­tions, this sixth illustration is misplaced in the text.
Though the page contains the instructions “page 138,” the binder
has placed the illustration opposite page 238. This mis­reading
and misplacement, though certainly unintentional and indeed
corrected in later issues, is an apropos demonstration of Swift’s
critique of modern books. Alteration becomes distortion and
dis­ruption. Finally, because engraving required different paper
and inking methods, illustrations were printed separately from
text. In the 1710 edition, an illustration inserted as a verso page
facing a recto page of text creates a pair of blank pages facing
each other. The effect gives the impression of a blank book, an
emp­tiness at the centre of the text that parallels the many false
interiors noted by the narrator. Such an alteration is both an
addition and a void, certainly a Swiftian paradox, though he had
no hand in creating it.
Other editions throughout the eighteenth century contribute
to the Tale’s endless alteration. A 1720 edition printed by Thomas
Johnson incorporates “A Table, or Index, or Key to the Tale of
a Tub, &c.” and an “Abstract of what follows after Sect. IX in
the Manuscript.”21 Both additions resonate with the modern
pro­legomena targeted in the narrator’s elixir, which simplify
and reduc­e the text. This edition also includes a “History of
Martin,” con­tinu­ing the allegory of the brothers, and inserts a
new digression into the Tale. Charles Bathurst’s 1739 edition in­
cor­porates less intru­sive alterations: printer’s ornaments in the
prefatory material.22 The list of other treatises by the author is
bordered by fleurons, and the dedicatory epistle concludes with a
bold figural design, as if the orna­ment marks the border between
21 Marcus Walsh’s introduction to the Tale provides some historical context for
this edition, titled Miscellaneous Works, Comical and Diverting (The Hague:
Thomas Johnson, 1720). Of particular interest is Walsh’s assessment of the
volume’s suspicious claims of authenticity for these additional materials (see
esp. lxxxvii–xc).
22 Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: C. Bathurst, 1739).

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the modern introductory apparatus and the tale proper. Though

this seems like a minimal change, and is of a type rarely if ever
noted as a substantial alteration to any text, the addition of any
visual decoration to the Tale directly echoes the brothers’ actions
in the allegory.23 Like Johnson’s 1720 edition, R. Wilson’s 1750
edition seems either completely oblivious to Swift’s satire on
modern books or wholly dedicated to preserving and expanding
it.24 The book relocates The Mechanical Opera­tion of the Spirit,
placing it between the Tale and The Battel of the Books. A run­
ning title, “A Fragment of the Tale of a Tub,” is attached to The
Mechanical Operation, thereby insisting on unity between
the treatises. The edition also moves Swift’s apology, placing it
at the end of The Battel of the Books, therefore eradicating the
piece’s goal of preparing readers for the text.25 Finally, the edition
adds more of the elements that Swift decries in his narrator’s
elixir recipe: extra notes to “explain the difficult parts,” as well
as a table, index, and list of omissions. Charles Cooke’s 1798
edition boasts, as nearly every Cooke publication does, that
it is finely “embellished” with copper­plate illustrations.26 The
design of these illustrations mirrors that of the brothers’ coats,
overwhelmed with layers of decora­tion (see Figure 1). Decora­
tive luxury printing was central to Cooke’s business model,
and he fit the Tale to the ornate style of the Romantic age.
This edition is part of Cooke’s “Pocket Library of Select Novels.”
Thus, it not only alters the text’s appearance but also updates its
genre. In addition, the physical reshaping of the Tale to better fit
into a pocket and onto the body of the reader is another excellent
23 Christopher Flint and Janine Barchas each write compellingly about the
relation between text and printer’s ornaments in eighteenth-century fiction. I
follow the method they have established in attempting to suggest a correlation
between an edition’s material construction and the text’s changing meanings.
Flint, “In Other Words: Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Ornaments
of Print,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14, no. 3 (2002): 625–72, doi: 10.1353/
ecf.2002.0025; and Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the
Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
24 Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: R. Wilson, 1750).
25 For more on the apology’s placement and function, see Weinbrot, 121–24.
Weinbrot argues that the apology is meant to be introductory, as it “darkens
the Tale’s initially comic front matter” (121). This challenges Frank H. Ellis’s
contention that the apology should appear as an appendix. See Weinbrot,
328–29n10; and Ellis, “No Apologies, Dr. Swift!”
26 Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: C. Cooke, 1798), title page.

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swift’s a tale of a tub

enactment of the text’s satire, here realizing Swift’s figurative

associations between books, clothes, and bodies.
This insistence on altering and updating the Tale persists into
the nineteenth century. New notes, illustrations, and intro­duc­tions
re-dress the text again and again for new readers in new periods.
Thomas Tegg’s 1811 edition incorporates copious notes from the
works of Lord Orrery and John Hawkesworth, and these com­­men­­
taries often dominate the text in a modern inver­sion of pro­por­tions
(see Figure 2).27 An abridged edition from 1836 pos­sesses historical
notes tailored to its new audience, with the major­ity of the notes ex­
plaining conflicts among religious sects of the eighteenth century.
This 1836 edition presents plates of the brothers in late Regency
attire, modern­iz­ing their dress. The up­dated illustrations echo the
very act the brothers perform: adap­tation to changing fashions.
Again, an image depicting Jack and Martin’s attempt to return
the coats to their original state simultaneously moves the coats
further away from their initial appear­ance (see Figure 3). The
brothers para­doxically remove and add updated styles at the
same time, tearing lace and embroidery from nineteenth-century
tail­coats. This edition also makes clear its adap­ta­tion to a chang­
ing political climate, most explicitly in its dedi­ca­tion “To the
Con­serva­tives of the British Empire.”28 The abridgment encom­
passes these alterations under the banner of a new title: Tale of
a Tub, with Variorum Notes and a Supplement for the Use of the
Nineteenth Century. A new age, a new Tale.
The University of Wisconsin Memorial Library holds copies
of both the 1811 and 1836 editions discussed above. Bound into
both volumes are illustrations from eighteenth-century editions.29
To date, these are the only extra-illustrated copies of the Tale I
have found, but their existence side-by-side on the library shelf
is curious. It suggests that a collector or bibliographer attempted
to recon­struct older versions of the text with newer versions, as
the eighteenth-century illustrations are inserted alongside their
nineteenth-century counterparts. The resulting effect is a layer
27 Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: T. Tegg, 1811).
28 Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: Roak and Varty, 1836), n.p.
29 The 1811 edition contains a full set of illustrations from the sixth edition (1724),
including the frontispieces to the Tale and The Battel of the Books. An additional
illustration of the brothers reading the will, placed after the 1724 and 1811
versions of the scene, is likely from the 1741 edition printed in Dublin. The 1836
edition contains two illustrations from the seventh edition (1727).

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532 katie l anning

of images—of different sizes, textures, and colorations of pages—

that represent in material form the accumu­la­tion and alteration of
print described within the text (see Figure 4).
A Tale of a Tub, then, is not one tale but many. The satire ex­
tends through these changing material editions. The Tale’s print
history suggests not simply that readers always access a medi­
ated volume, but that such mediation contributes to the text’s
satirical claims. Its apparent surfaces and the alterations to them
are all part of the story. What is more, different types of editions
reflect certain states of the alle­gorical coat. Vari­orum and abridged
editions gesture towards Peter’s coat, overwhelmed by altera­tions
and addi­tions that make the original object hard­ly recognizable.
Extra-illustrated volumes mirror Jack’s coat: pieced together, with
inserted illustrations flutter­ing between pages like Jack’s tatters,
they present a con­fused jumble of new and old. Recent scholar­­ly
editions are like Martin’s coat, attempt­ing recuperation by includ­
ing fac­sim­iles of original pages or returning to initial spell­­ings.
And yet, also like Martin’s coat, they still bear modern additions;
elements such as end­notes and chronologies contextualize the text
for new gener­a­tions of scholars.30 Each of these editions is only a
moment of the Tale. In its multiplicity of material for­mats and its
accumulation of new surfaces, A Tale of a Tub is always chang­ing,
per­­form­ing the frustrations of the mad, modern book. The Tale
must ceaselessly be, to Swift’s amusement and despair, “fitted to the
Humour of the Age.”
•

30 The scholarly edition I use in this article, edited by Marcus Walsh, also
enacts satire by edition in its several appendices. Though the appendix is a
decried form in Swift’s satire, Walsh’s appendices include primary sources
crucial to contextualizing the Tale: letters between Swift and Benjamin
Tooke, Wotton’s writings on the Tale, Edmund Curll’s Complete Key to
the Tale of a Tub, selections from Swift’s Miscellaneous Works (1720),
and Swift’s Moor Park reading list. These elements enhance Swift’s satire
both by helping a twenty-first-century audience appreciate some of his
more nuanced humour and critique, and, paradoxically, by presenting
more material fodder for his parody of such aids to understanding. Walsh’s
edition includes images of original title pages, 1710 illustrations paired with
images of original sketches, and a detailed textual introduction with notes
on historical collation. These altera­tions demonstrate a scholarly concern
for how Swift constructed his text, and how that text changed through­out
the eighteenth century; at the same time, they perform the very kind of
changes they document.

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swift’s a tale of a tub

Figure 1. Richard Corbould’s illustration from the Charles Cooke edition of

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: Cooke, 1798), opp. p. 95. The image
places the illustration within a larger vignette, layering decoration much like Peter
layers embellishments. The British Museum offers a digital reproduction of this
illustration in their online image gallery (use the online BM search engine).

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534 katie l anning

Figure 2. This page dominated by footnotes appears in Thomas Tegg’s edition of

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London, 1811), 150. Containing only four lines of
the Tale, the imbalance between text and commentary echoes the narrator’s em­
phasis on modern textual apparatus. Reproduced courtesy of Memorial Library,
University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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 Figure 3. Illustration from Jonathan
Swift, Tale of a Tub, with Variorum
Notes and a Supplement for the Use
of the Nineteenth Century (London:
Roak and Varty, 1836), opp. p.
36. Jack and Martin wear clothes
appropriate to the late Regency
fashion of the 1830s. Reproduced
courtesy of Memorial Library,

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University of Wisconsin-Madison.
536 katie l anning

Figure 4. Collection of illustrations in Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London:

T. Tegg, 1811), 90–91. The centre illustration is part of Tegg’s edition, and on
either side are inserts: the plate on the left is from a 1724 London edition and
the plate on the right is from a 1741 Dublin edition. Reproduced courtesy of the
Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-
Madison. Photograph by the author.

ECF 26, no. 4 © 2014 McMaster University

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