University of Virginia Library

'Travelling West-Ward': The Lost Letter from Johathan Swift to Charles Ford
by
Clive Probyn

As Swift turned his back on London on 1 June 1713 neither he nor the Tory party was in a healthy state. The former still suffered from shingles, and both from fits of dizziness. Moreover, as his biographer has remarked, 'The fifteen months of European suspense over the peace negotiations were to be almost coterminous with Swift's suffocating humiliation over his preferment.'[1] At least the professional uncertainty was now over. Accompanied as far as St Albans by his good friend John Barber (1675-1741), Printer to the City of London since 1710, and printer of Swift's own The Examiner, Swift covered

180 miles to Chester in six days. He missed the ships for Ireland by just one day, and so had the inn at Chester to himself for two nights, with time to catch up on his correspondence. He then proceeded via Holyhead to Dublin, arriving there at 9 o'clock on the evening of Wednesday 10 June. Three days later he was installed Dean of St. Patrick's, the permitted limit of his ecclesiastical ambitions.

Swift initially though the journey to Chester would restore his health. On 31 May he had assured Vanessa that he would 'ride but little every day.'[2] In the event, he set a cracking pace, arriving at Chester thoroughly weary; his head felt 'something better,' yet his account book records a payment of 16s. 11d. to an apothecary (Saturday 6 June).[3] On the same day (6 June) he wrote to Vanessa's mother, referring her to Erasmus Lewis (Harley's Under-Secretary of State) for an account of his largely uneventful journey. On the Sunday, he wrote a short letter to his close and confidential friend Charles Ford (1682-1743) at his Whitehall office, where, through the influence of Swift, he had been appointed editor of The London Gazette on 1 July 1712.

In 1935 David Nichol Smith's edition of The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford appeared, containing the sixty-nine extant letters from their joint correspondence of 'well over a hundred' (Nichol Smith's estimate). Fifty-one of the letters are from Swift to Ford. The fourth in chronological sequence, dated 7 June 1713, is a mere fragment: "If dissolving the Union could be without ill consequence to the Ministry, I should wish for it with all my heart. But I have been too long out of London to judge of Politicks.'[4] Nichol Smith's source for this fragment was the Christie's sale catalogue of 4 June 1896. The letter was offered but not sold at auction and subsequently disappeared; thus Harold Williams could reproduce only the fragment in his five-volume edition of Swift's Correspondence in 1963.[5] Apparently, when the fifty-one Swift letters in the original series were broken up in 1896, ten letters were randomly selected and dispersed at auction. Nichol Smith was able to locate nine of them (most of these being in the Pierpoint Morgan Library; forty-three others between Swift and Ford were in the Rothschild Library), and published them all. Until now, the only letter not published in full was the letter to Ford of 7 June.

The complete letter, now in the Swift Collection of Monash University, is reproduced below and in Plate 1. It is addressed: 'To Charles Ford Esqr, / at His Office at White-hall / London.'[6]

This concise and allusive letter brings together several of Swift's pressing social and political concerns, as well as a number of his closest friends. It was Swift who had brought Ford and Lewis together for the first time, on 9 December 1710.[7] John Barber and Benjamin Tooke printed Ford's The London Gazette until Ford was tipped out of office (22 September 1714), and Barber was to be proceeded against for printing Swift's own Publick Spirit of the Whigs (advertised 23 February 1714).[8] Erasmus Lewis (1670-1754), of course, was Swift's intimate friend at the centre of Harley's administration since 1704, 'a Cunning Shaver, / And very much in HARLEY's Favour' ('Part of the Seventh Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated,' 1713, ll. 7-8). He was also Swift's trusted postman for his confidential letters to both Stella and Vanesssa.

The 'Writing table' had been the very personal gift of Elizabeth Villiers (1657?-1733), Countess of Orkney ('the most intrested joyner that ever made a thing of this natuer'[9]), and the circumstances of its construction and arrival are described by Swift in a letter to Stella of 28 October, where she is called 'perfectly kind, like a mother', and (in an earlier letter) 'the wisest woman I ever saw.'[10] Swift's letter to the 56-year-old cast-off mistress of William III (21 November), ten years his senior, is crammed with playful banter and some sexual innuendo. The gift clearly had been left in Ford's keeping, and

the threat to Barber no doubt referred to a 'blunder' of protocol in a recent issue of Ford's Gazette.

Of greater interest is Swift's quotation of a couplet from Marvell's The Last Instructions to a Painter (composed c. 1667: published 1689; ll. 335-336). Overt allusions to Marvell are exceedingly rare in Swift's works, the one to Marvell's Answer to Parker in the Apology to A Tale of a Tub being the most familiar. There are none to his poetry. Even so, here is confirmation that Swift, like almost everybody else in the period, was aware of Marvell's best-known poem. Marvell's coruscating attack on Charles II's parliament may perhaps lie behind Swift's savage attack on the Irish House of Commons in The Legion Club (1736). Certainly, Swift's poem has a strong if unrecognised claim to be considered as part of the poetic 'Advice to a Painter' genre first popularised in England by Waller. Swift owned the 1664 octavo edition of Waller's poems.[11] Denham's celebrated 'Advices' continued the Marvellian theme, and mimickry of the former's well-known lines in 'Cooper's Hill' is specifically forbidden in Swift's—and/or Mary Barber's—'Apollo's Edict' (ll. 46-49: 1721). Being no Court-poet, Swift enjoyed neither access to panegyrical limners nor acquaintance with those visual artists as expert as himself in grotesque engraving: thus The Legion Club concludes with the following apology:

The immediate, and to Swift himself the least pleasant, context of this letter is political, i.e. the motion in the House of Lords on 1 June to bring in a Bill to dissolve the Union with Scotland. Harley's necessarily strenuous defence of the Union carried most, but not all Tories with him. The reference to the Treaty of Commerce, a section of the Treaty of Peace establishing trade with France (Bolingbroke's pet project, voted upon 18 June) was also defeated. This Whig triumph, Vanessa believed, would have been prevented if Swift had been in London rather than in Dublin.[13] In the general election in the following August and September, a Tory government was again returned. By 8 July, however, Swift was ostentatiously preferring the pastimes of 'a Country Vicar', hedging, ditching and expelling cows rather than 'driving out Factions and fencing against them.'[14]

Ford had inherited his modest paternal estate at Woodpark, Co. Meath, in 1705; its 100 acres lay between Dublin and Trim, and although it provided Swift with many hours, and Stella and Rebecca Dingley with many weeks, of pleasant relaxation (commemorated in 'Stella at Wood-Park, A House of Charles Ford, Esq; eight Miles from Dublin', 1723), Ford ('Don Carlos') had the tastes of a bon vivant, scorned Dublin society, and preferred to satisfy them in London. Swift's caution to Ford against financial profligacy characteristically reflected his own anxiety that the financial burdens which he would assume as Dean in a week's time would be beyond his means.

Notes