Jonathan Swift’s literary world

The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels, Hester Grant, William Collins, £25

Early in the 18th century, the Middlesex village of Twickenham began to be noticed by Londoners wearying of the metropolis, drawn by the attractiveness of its Thames-side setting. One admirer was Alexander Pope, a poet of waspish reputation and socially problematic Catholic background, who in 1720 built a riverside villa in the latest Palladian style on a five-acre plot set between a malthouse and a tanner’s yard.

Pope was widely considered England’s pre-eminent poet, thanks to works like Essay on Criticism (1711), from which we get the phrases ‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing’ and ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’. He had also written The Rape of the Lock (1712), a mock-epic about the cutting of a hank of hair belonging to a society beauty, and Windsor Forest (1712/3), a lyrical example of loco-descriptive poetry. He had translated the Iliad, and knew Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and William Wycherley.

He was friends, too, with Jonathan Swift and John Gay – and between May and August 1726 played host to both at his house in what was then commonly called ‘Twitnam’, at a pivotal time in all three men’s creative lives. The works associated with that season have ever since been regarded as among the brightest ornaments of English letters.

Pope had known Swift since Windsor Forest, which as well as evoking that history-haunted tract, was also a commentary on contemporary politics. Pope’s poem was adopted by the Tories as useful agitprop, and the poet annexed by Swift, 21 years older, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and a highly effective veteran of political pamphleteering at an especially turbulent time. Dichotomies and discontents left over from the Civil Wars had found new expressions in vitriolic battles between Whigs – mostly Dissenters, anti-Stuart, and allied to mercantilism and finance – and Tories – mostly Anglicans, pro-Stuart and associated with the landed gentry – with all the writers of the age enthusiastically taking sides.

Swift was famous for Tale of a Tub (1704), a satire on denominational disagreements between Christians, and the clash of old and new learning, and the Bickerstaff Papers (1708-09), an extended lampoon of the Whig astrologer-propagandist John Partridge, which is still funny today. After the Whigs took power in 1715, and began purging Tories at all levels, Swift’s writings waxed increasingly incandescent, sometimes forcing changes in government policy, infuriating Prime Minister Robert Walpole.

Walpole’s period of political dominance, between 1721 and 1742 – nicknamed the ‘Robinocracy’ – was notorious for its corruption and partisanship, and the generally unwanted extension of state power through patronage and preferment. Swift took courageous stances against such practices, frequently risking his liberty, and became a folk hero in Ireland, his writings uniquely able to unite Catholics and Presbyterians against exploitative policies designed in London. Swift was held in such awe in Ireland that on one occasion he was able to disperse a crowd that had assembled to watch an eclipse by telling them it had been put off on his orders. Ironically, Swift saw himself as English, and didn’t much approve of the Irish, but any reservations about his adopted country were outweighed by his desire for social stability, and moral outrage at abuses by the rich and powerful.

Swift brought to Twickenham the militantly ironic manuscript that would make him immortal – Travels into several remote Nations of the World. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver’s Travels is one of the great books of the 18th, or any, century – a masterpiece of surreal invention and sustained invective which gave the English language such words as ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘Yahoo’, and held up the perfect Houyhnhnms to shame humans into better behaviour. Its exposure of cant, folly, gullibility and human weakness is still resonant; Gulliver is, wrote Morris Golden in his 1972 study The Self Observed, ‘more painfully ourselves than any other creation of his century’. Swift made his last tweaks during his time at Twickenham, and on the 8 August 1726 packed it off to the printer, and posterity.

Almost as sensational in their day, if perhaps less read now, were Pope’s The Dunciad (1728) and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (first staged in 1728), both influenced by Gulliver and prodded into being by Gulliver’s author. Swift reputedly snatched a first sketch of The Dunciad out of the fire into which Pope had cast it. Years before, he had given Gay an idea for a ‘Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves’, and now made Gay bring it forward.

Pope penned The Dunciad to poke fun at bad or sycophantic writers, some of whom had recklessly assailed him in print, ironically giving them a more lasting fame than they would ever have attained otherwise. The poem’s portentous closing lines are still cited – ‘Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d; / Light dies before thy uncreating word: / Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All’ – but no stylistic fineness can conceal the essential redundancy of his squibs against such ignes minores as his former publisher Barnaby Lintot, and the malignant Irish cleric-poetaster Jonathan Smedley. The only target who could be called well-known is the dramatist Colley Cibber, who in 1730 became one of the least distinguished versifiers ever to occupy the post of Poet Laureate. The Dunciad nevertheless contributed greatly to contemporary Whig discomfiture, and Pope’s then and future fame.

Gay had written unusually empathetic poetic conjurations of rural life, and finally following up on Swift’s old idea, completed his musical play The Beggar’s Opera, which introduced the characters of Polly Peachum and her highwayman beau Captain Macheath to enthralled London playgoers. Gay supposedly made £800 from the play, leading to a joke that it had made Gay rich, and Rich (the surname of the producer) gay. The strength of the satire is evident from the outset, the first song sung by Polly’s father, a receiver of stolen goods and underworld informer, which runs in part: ‘The Priest calls the Lawyer a Cheat, / The Lawyer be-knaves the Divine: / And the Statesman, because he’s so great, / Thinks his Trade as honest as mine.’ Delighted and scandalised audiences saw shades of Walpole in Mr Peachum, Macheath and a gang-member, ‘Bob Booty’.

Gay’s spin-off, Polly, was accordingly banned by the Lord Chamberlain, which naturally excited frenetic interest. The Duchess of Marlborough paid £100 for a copy, and the Duchess of Queensberry was banished from court for soliciting money for Gay within the precincts of the Palace. The Opera had become a powerful weapon in the Tories’ intellectual armoury. It is ironic to recall that Gay’s most famous modern emulator was the Marxist playwright, Bertolt Brecht.

The conversations of that summer must have been as sparkling as the Thames, and they were occasionally joined by guests like William Congreve, the politician-philosopher Henry St John (1st Viscount Bolingbroke), and the polymathic physician Dr John Arbuthnot, who invented the bluff English archetype, ‘John Bull’. As well as agreeing in morals and tastes, the three were also united in bachelorhood. Gay’s innate indolence appears to have extended to his relations with the opposite sex. Swift was platonically devoted to two women – Esther Vanhomrigh (‘Vanessa’) and Esther Johnson (‘Stella’) – whose correspondence with him reveals the literary lion’s private humanity and humour. The unluckily diminutive and deformed Pope – he was 1.3 metres tall, and suffered from Pott’s disease, which twisted his spine and gave him bladder and bowel problems, joint pains, headaches and eye inflammation – seems to have been celibate much against his will.

In The Twitnam Summer, Hester Grant conjures this dazzling company deftly, memorably conveying the flavour and likely routines of that sunlit season, as the trio conversed, read or wrote, wandered in the celebrated gardens, or sat in the shell- and mirror-encrusted grotto called the Nymphæum in search of shade and classical inspiration. She also offers excellently observed wider vistas of these extraordinary artists in full, the politics and literature of their period, and a capital city full of corruption and disquiet, but also abounding in creativity and vitality, where wits traded brilliant insults and speculative builders raised elegant edifices above stinking streets.

That London is lost, and Pope’s villa has gone, with just the Nymphæum to mark where once a great poet walked with great friends, and all imagined a world less unclean. Three hundred years on from that remarkable meeting of minds, this is a poignant portrait of an England that once was, or maybe could have been – and a satisfying reminder of the power and possibilities of literature.