Introduction

Jonathan Swift's public spirit is most obviously commemorated in his Irish writings. Investigations of Swift's politics usually sketch a gradual move away from some formal alignment with either the Whig party or the Tories. In his 'Life of Swift', Samuel Johnson found A Tale of a Tub an exception to Swift's other work. Swift is precise about his aims, the principal one being stability in culture, yet how one prevents usage or 'Practice' adulterating this native idiom we must assume is down to a branch of government, and a most illiberal one at that. On the one hand, it is quite clear that Swift was a committed writer, there is a curiously deep and emotional scepticism at all programmes of reform. Swift's views on the Wood scheme were given authority and conviction by the Drapier, his freely chosen textual identity, and not directly from the actual author, whose reception would derive from a reader's prior knowledge of Swift himself.