University of Virginia Library

III

On January 5, 1738/9 William King wrote to Swift explaining the reasons for cuts made in the original manuscript. Having taken legal advice, which apparently suggested that the lines on Queen Anne's death and the lines on the Whig ministry's actions following the accession of the King could be construed as treasonable, cuts were reluctantly made. Other cuts were made in deference to Pope's judgment (letter to Mrs. Whiteway, January 30, 1738/9), and King goes on in the former letter to say that since the story of the medals 'is pretty well known . . .

care has been taken that almost every reader may be able to supply the blanks.' As we have seen, variants crept in; but the note is far more inflammatory than the text and is present in all copies with ms. additions. The likelihood of this note coming directly from Swift is undeniable. As a gesture of conciliation towards Swift's supposed displeasure at the cuts, King offered the following: "if after having received the printed copies, which I will send you next week, you shall resolve to have the poem published intire as you put it into my hands, I will certainly obey your commands, if I can find a proper person to undertake the work. I shall go to London the latter end of the next week, when I'll write to you by a private hand more fully than I can venture by the post (Correspondence, V, 133 [my italics]). But King was forestalled. On March 6, King wrote again to Mrs. Whiteway, revealing Faulkner's undoubtedly authorised scheme to expose the discrepancy between the King-Pope version and the original manuscript: "I was not a little mortified yesterday, when the bookseller brought me the Dublin edition, and at the same time put into my hands a letter he had received from Faulkner, by which I perceive the Dean is much dissatisfied with our manner of publication, and that so many lines have been omitted, if Faulkner speaks truth, and knows as much of the Dean's mind as he pretends to know. Faulkner hath sent over several other copies to other booksellers; so that I take it for granted this will soon be reprinted there from the Dublin edition. . ." (Correspondence, V, 139).

Such obliquity is characteristic of Swift's methods of arranging the publication of his works, and although only incomplete printed notes were added in Faulkner's Dublin edition, it was in conformity with Swift's known intention as expressed in the letter of May 1, 1733, to Pope. There would be no point, and some danger, in Faulkner sending to King's London bookseller transcriptions of notes which King and Pope had already cut out on treasonable grounds. Again, it would appear that the complete Notes were to be kept for private release, if at all, by Faulkner in Dublin. There could have been only two sources for this: a manuscript by Swift himself, or more likely copies circulated with Swift's tacit approval, in which relatively minor variants flourished in the absence of an authoritative printed text, as ICN makes clear at 278 n (see above) and as Faulkner's Advertisement makes plain. Additional evidence for the latter is contained in the prefatory matter to Faulkner's Dublin edition of Swift's Works, 4 vols., 1735, for the second volume of which (containing the poems) corrections were made from a copy of the Miscellanies, 1727-32 (Rothschild) in Swift's own hand. In the Publisher's Advertisement the formula 'the supposed Author' (also used in S926) is used half a dozen times. Williams is led to suspect on

stylistic grounds that the Advertisement was actually written not by Faulkner but by Swift himself. Be this as it may, the Preface describes Swift's willingness to allow manuscript copies to circulate: "If we are truly informed, the supposed Author hath often protested, that he never did write three Copies of Verses with the least Intention to have them printed, although he was easy enough to show them to his Friends, and at their Desire was not very scrupulous in suffering them to take Copies."[11]

Williams (III, 827-829) describes the same circumstance in relation to the Legion Club (1736), and reproduces Faulkner's claim to have used Swift's own manuscript for his text of the poem in 1762/3. Of the 1762 Works, Faulkner writes in 'To the Reader' of how Swift 'corrected every Sheet of the first seven Volumes that were published in his Life Time, desiring the Editor to write Notes' (I, vii). Faulkner goes on to affirm that the intimacy and professional trust between author and printer extended even to Swift's private admission of A Tale of a Tub's authorship. Even so, it is beyond belief that Faulkner himself could have written, except to Swift's dictation, the notes on the Queen, the medals, and on the Irish parliament—all of which were withheld from the Notes. Faulkner's role as editor and publisher was explanatory, not evaluative. Of the nearly seventy notes by Faulkner included in Williams's edition a very few supply names for textual blanks, seven are broadly concerned with defining cant words or linguistic usage; eleven concern details of Dublin topography or Irish customs; fifteen deal with textual history and dating of the poems; thirty-four are concerned with details of characters mentioned, with biographical notes and comments on Swift's circle of friends. Only two quite exceptional notes rise to the level of either rage or raillery comparable with the notes to the Verses. That on Smedley (III, 893)— 'A very stupid, insolent, factious, deformed, conceited Parson, a vile Pretender to Poetry, preferred by the D. of Grafton for his wit'—reads like Swift's own revenge on the compiler of Gulliveriana (1728) and the author of An Epistle to . . . Grafton contained therein.[12] The second, on Sheridan (III, 1012-13), includes a signed affidavit from Sheridan himself and appears to be a fragment of the Swift-Sheridan bagatelle which flourished for many years, and which Faulkner simply reproduces.

Swift's efforts were often deliberately employed to resist attempts at

attribution. He delighted both to cover his tracks and to observe closely the efforts of his pursuers. For this reason Faulkner especially was required to adopt a policy of seemingly naive ignorance. Proximity to Swift demanded impersonal detachment as a publisher, hence my argument that Faulkner knew more than he could say and possessed more than he could print. Negative external evidence, paradoxically, only increases this conviction. Thus, if Faulkner knew precisely what was missing in the 1739 octavo Verses, in 1746 he had an opportunity to bring out a truly complete (and posthumous) edition of the poem in the Works. The new Publisher's Advertisement promises exactly this:

Faulkner does make some emendations, but only of a minor stylistic and factual nature. For example, the note on Pulteney is updated (he was made Earl of Bath in 1742); Friendship replaces Favour in the note on Lady Suffolk; the variant line 'I led a Heart' persists; the last note states that Swift had died in Ireland; and the earlier note stating that Swift was 'not acquainted with one single Lord Spiritual or Temporal' now reads 'not acquainted with many Lords Spiritual or Temporal.' But with only one important exception (l. 277, where Walpole's name is inserted), all the blanks remain blank, none of the known manuscript continuations is included, and no space is provided for the missing notes. Moreover, the fact that Faulkner makes no reference to his own 1739 edition but states on the 1746 title-page that the Verses were 'Printed in the Year 1743' suggests that this edition of the poem was determined by other than a desire for a canonical text. As a testimony of loyalty to Swift's known desire not to have the complete poem printed before his death, Faulkner's continuingly incomplete text is, at the very least, a remarkable example of a self-denying ordinance. For subsequent editors, this could have closed the door on all attempts at reconstruction. But it is in no sense the last word. Instead of settling questions, it poses more. At lines 183-187 (the medals episode) Faulkner's 1746 text provides yet another set of variants, indicating if nothing else that none of the manuscript additions in the S926s examined here could have been transcribed from this later edition. All relate back to an earlier and arguably single manuscript source.

Faulkner thus evaded the task of producing a public text of the Verses 'as compleat as possible' in 1746. It is only to the purchasers of the 'private', annotated text of the 1739 octavo that we can refer for evidence that complete notes certainly existed, remarkably consistent with each other across at least eight different contemporary manuscript

copies, and in a form known to Faulkner in 1739. Swift's death did not stop the flow of dangerous new copy to Faulkner, as the analogous publishing history of An Epistle to a Lady and On Poetry: A Rapsody shows;[13] the printer's risky game of textual hide-and-seek was still necessary in order to avoid the continuing threat of legal consequences. But as far as the Verses was concerned, at least some of Faulkner's customers had fully availed themselves of his invitation to fill in the blanks for themselves.[14]