Newsgroups: bit.listserv.c18-l
Date:         Thu, 20 Aug 1992 18:11:57 EDT
From:         BCJ@PSUVM.BITNET
Subject:      TLS REVIEWS WOOLLEY: KUDOS FOR HIS INTELLIGENCER

    For your information, we're posting the recent review of James
Woolley's edition of Thomas Sheridan & Jonathan Swift's _The
Intelligencer_.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.  363 pp.  (L50).

                   "The Dean in Dublin"
                        Pat Rogers
                    TLS (July 17, 1992)

     With a fine disdain for exactitude, the *Intelligencer* appeared
in Dublin more or less weekly between May 11, 1728, and early December
of the same year.  Only the first number was dated.  It must have been
split into two series, and James Wooley infers that the break took place
between the tenth and eleventh issues, during the summer parliamentary
vacation.  A twentieth paper emerged out of the blue on May 1729; others
may have been projected (Jonathan Swift left "hints" for other essays,
which Woolley prints in an appendix), but that proved to be the end of
the journal.  Meanwhile, the high-flying London newspaper *Mist's
Weekly Journal* (in the process of becoming *Fog's* journal, owing to
the enforced exile of its Jacobite proprietor, Nathaniel Mist) reproduced
many extracts from the Dublin issues.  In 1729, William Bowyer reprinted
the first nineteen numbers in volume form, and Swift's contribution went
into George Faulkner's landmark edition of the Dean's writings in 1735.
     Several of the Swiftian portions of the *Intelligencer* have thus
become familiar to generations of readers.  These include an essay on the
recent smash-hit, *The Beggar's Opera*; a scabrous poem, "Mad Mullinix
and Timothy"; and several items echoing the gloomy *Short View of the
State of Ireland* (actually reprinted in one of the *Intelligencer*
numbers) and anticipating the *Modest Proposal*, which would burst upon
the world a year later.  Logically it would seem that the main contri-
bution of a complete edition such as this would be to highlight the
remaining portions, that is, the more than moiety supplied by Thomas
Sheridan. It is indeed true that Woolley's introduction provides the
best account we so far possess of Sheridan, the Dublin schoolmaster who
became one of Swift's closest friends (though he was over twenty years
younger than the Dean).  He is best known today for his son, the actor
and theorist of elocution, Thomas Sheridan II, who figures in Boswell's
*Life of Johnson*; and for his grandson, Richard Brinsley. These essays
show that the first Thomas was an accomplished polemicist in his own
right, not just the monkey to Swift's organ-grinder.  It would not be
easy to distinguish between the hand of the two men from internal
evidence, and some parts of the series remain of indeterminate author-
ship. Woolley thinks that the poem in the delayed twentieth issue
probably was by Swift, and he is in the best place now to judge such
matters.  It should be added that the subject of this poem, Dean
Jonathan Smedley, also emerges from the shadows in the commentary; it
is shown from a ship's log that Smedley die *en route* to a chaplaincy
at Fort St George, unknown to Swift and Pope, who went on sneering at
his likely fate in India.  All previous sources, from the *DNB* down-
wards, have left the date of Smedley's death a blank; we can now fill
in 1729.
     Good as it is to have Sheridan's side given its full weight, and
to read his vicious *Tale of a Tub*-style allegory on the Treatment of
Patrick and Andrew by their brother George, the real meat of the edition
comes in the material on Swift himself.  The ostensible subject is
always Ireland, and generally Dulin; but Swift's mind is liable to
wander back to Tyburn or to English rogues like Peter Walter.  The
influence of Pope's gallery of villains in the first *Dunciad*, which
Swift was just relishing, can often be detected.  For this reason, I
suspect that when Sheridan describes a woman gamester as having to borrow
"the money from a certain *Collonel*" to cover debts, he may have himself
borrowed the satirists' favourite extortionist and predator on women,
Colonel Francis Charteris.  Woolley suggests that the smooth ecclesiasti-
cal careerist in No. 7 may be based on Bishop White Kennett, though some
details do not quite fit.  It might be added that the character's name,
Corusodes, may not derive from the Greek *koruzodes* -- that is,
"sniveller" -- but from *korustes*, a "helmeted man".  The best known
fact about Kennett -- after a spectacular episode when he was allegedly
depicted as Judas -- was the plate he wore in his forehead, covered
with a black patch.
     Woolley's annotations are outstandingly pointed; they do not avoid
difficulties, and they are reliable on classical and biblical references,
proverbial usages, and much else.  The *Intelligencer* is full of the
life of Dublin streets, and historians of the second city, in what used
to be a neglected phase, will find this edition a rich trove.  Unlike the
great founding fathers of editorial scholarship on Swift, Harold
Williams and Herbert Davis, the present editor has been able to draw on
the findings of a resurgent Irish biography.  He has absorbed these with
a revisionist economic history, a fuller knowledge of the growth of
native architecture, and a minute familiarity with the workings of the
book trade in Dublin.  Future editors will be expected to show the same
awareness of bibliographical issues, as well as a similar inwardness
with public and private archives.  This is a daunting standard to set,
but that is in the nature of things, since Woolley has produced the
first-ever edition of a Swiftian text set squarely in its Irish
context, and incidentally the most satisfactory version of any text by
Swift which has yet come before us.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU