Headnote

Composed c. 8 June 1728; published; copy text 1728 (see Textual Account).

Published in June 1728, this introduces the general contrast between the calculating uses of discretion and prudence in the making of a career, and the worldly failure of the more ingenuous and principled, and was continued and exemplified in the two character studies in The Intelligencer, no. 7, with which it was later combined as ‘An Essay on the Fates of Clergymen’, when reprinted in the Pope/Swift Miscellanies of 1732.

The idea that discretion in public life is more of a veil for ambition and a form of self-interest appears frequently in Swift's writings, albeit in slightly different ways. The general premise that the discreetly ambitious are prepared to make great sacrifices (even of their self-respect) in order to advance is phrased in Thoughts on Various Subjects: ‘Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest Offices; so climbing is performed in the same Posture with Creeping’ (Davis, vol. I, p. 245). Gulliver is advised by the Emperor of Lilliput to ‘acquire, by my Patience and discreet Behaviour, the good Opinion of himself and his subjects’.Conversely, theKing of Brobdingnag remarks that, in Gulliver's milieu, it seems unlikely ‘that Men are ennobled on Account of their Virtue’, or ‘that Priests are advanced for their Piety or Learning’ (CWJS, vol. XVI, pp. 49, 189). And in ‘On Poetry: A Rhapsody’, the prospective poet, upon publication, is advised not to attempt to influence public opinion directly, but rather ‘Be silent as a Politician’ (Poems, vol. II, p. 644). Such examples could be multiplied, given Swift's suspicion of the ostensible means of advancement in public life.

THE INTELLIGENCER.

There is no Talent so useful towards rising in the World, or which puts Men more out of the reach of Fortune, than that Quality generally possessed by the Dullest sort of People, and is in common Speech, called Discretion, a species of lower Prudence, by the assistance of which, People of the meanest Intellectuals, without any other Qualification, pass through the World in great Tranquility, and with Universal good Treatment, neither giving nor taking Offence.

Headnote

Composed spring 1729; published posthumously, 1762; copy text SwJ 433 & 1765 (see Textual Account).

The Letter on M’culla was an unfinished response to James Maculla's attempt to reverse the scarcity of coins in his A New Scheme Proposed, to the People of Ireland (1728) and to his privately trying to gain Swift's approval for the project. The ongoing problem of Irish coinage was also tackled by Thomas Prior in 1730 (Observations on Coin in General. With some Proposals for Regulating the Value of Coin in Ireland). The general movement in economic thought at this time was towards an acceptance of paper currency (see James Kelly, ‘Jonathan Swift and the Irish Economy in the 1720s’, ECI 6 (1991), 7–36; Patrick Kelly, ‘“Conclusions by no Means Calculated for the Circumstances and Condition of Ireland”: Swift, Berkeley and the Solution to Ireland's Economic Problems’, in Aileen Douglas et al. (eds.), Locating Swift: Essays from Dublin on the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998, pp. 47–59). Maculla was moving towards this principle, but his interim solution was the (unduly complicated) offering of promissory notes on copper; Swift (for whom the absence of an Irishmint was a prime concern) was anyway suspicious of the idea of paper currency and was unsympathetic towards the thinking behind such proposals. In the case ofMaculla, the impracticality of the scheme allowed him to dismiss such projects, and to indulge in some political arithmetic of his own.

Swift's objection to the workings of the scheme, and latent suspicion of the motives behind it meant that when Maculla's plan did not succeed, the need to finish and publish the pamphlet apparently passed, after its initial composition (usually placed in spring 1729). It was first published in 1762, by George Faulkner, and reprinted three years later by Deane Swift in a text with significant differences, complicated further by an extant partial manuscript.

ON M’CULLA's PROJECT

Sr,

You desire to know my opinion concerning Mr. M’cullas Project, of circulating notes stampd on copper, that shall pass for the value of halfpence and Pence.

The appearance of the Drapier's Letters in 1724 had transformed Swift's standing as a public figure in Ireland, and restored his reputation as a political commentator to the vertiginous heights previously reached by The Conduct of the Allies, written for Robert Harley's Tory administration in England in November 1711. Nothing he published after the Drapier's Letters had the same political impact. This judgement applies even to the Modest Proposal, which in retrospect was recognised as by some distance themost important of his writings on public affairs after 1725, but which received a relatively muted reception in Ireland when it first appeared. Indeed, in many of the works included in this volume (which excludes publications on purely ecclesiastical subjects), Swift was in effect re-treading old ground. His observations on the state of the Irish economy reiterated the pessimistic assessment which he had consistently articulated in the years following his exile to the deanery of St Patrick's in 1713, and which had been given a particularly sharp edge in the arguments of the Drapier. He saw Ireland's problems – the backwardness of agriculture, the decline in manufacture and trade, the scarcity of money, even the moral inadequacies of the people – as deriving ultimately from the kingdom's constitutional inferiority, and the way in which this had been, and was still being, exploited by ministers and Parliaments at Westminster to protect English interests and disadvantage the inhabitants of Ireland. But after the withdrawal of ‘Wood's Halfpence’ in 1725 the debate in Ireland over political economy moved on, and took a more constructive turn. A succession of poor harvests from 1727 to 1728 triggered subsistence crises, resulting in the impoverishment and near starvation of small farmers and labourers in the countryside, hosts of beggars on the streets of Dublin, and renewed (and overwhelmingly Protestant) emigration from Ulster to north America. In response, other commentators revisited the fundamental causes of Ireland's woes, and offered variations on Swift's themes. Pamphleteers and parliamentarians discussed ways in which Ireland might be ‘improved’, and in 1731 these would-be ‘improvers’ founded theDublin Society, a forum for the exchange of ideas and information, with the intention that it should become an engine of economic development.

Sources and Conception

The conception of The Reverberator can be traced to a series of public controversies involving individuals with whom James was personally acquainted, which unfolded in American and British newspapers of the mid-1880s. In his Notebook entry for Thursday 17 November 1887 (Appendix B, pp. 282–6), James refers to two unrelated instances of intru-sive journalism, both coincidentally published in the New York World in close succession. His correspondence of the period points to further examples of a similar concern. The Notebook entry chiefly reflects on the ‘queer incident’ of a young American woman named Miss McC. (May Marcia McClellan) who, a year previously, had written an ‘inconceivable letter’ to an American newspaper commenting on the personal and collec-tive characteristics of Italian aristocratic families whose ‘hospitality she had just been enjoying’ in a resort near Lake Como (CN 40). Published on 14 November 1886 under the headline, ‘English, Even in Italy. All the Swells Modelled on British Fashions and Manners’ (Appendix A, pp. 278–81), McClellan's letter occupies only one column of The World's Sunday sup-plement edition and does not appear deliberately to court sensation or hint at scandalous secrets. Expressed in a gossipy, colloquial style, the writer's main point of observation is that the manners and fashions of Italian high society mimic those of the English: ‘it made me feel quite at home to see the preternaturally grave expression, the lurching walk and excessively British garments of these Latin dudes’, McClellan notes. Shortly afterwards (in December 1886 or the following January), James was introduced to May McClellan during a long stay in Florence, by which time he was already aware of the offence and scandal caused by her letter, despite it being written in ‘perfect good faith’ (CN 40). In a letter from Florence to his Venetian-American friend Katherine De Kay Bronson, tentatively dated 15 January 1887, James records visiting the McClellan family and concludes that ‘[t]hey have lived [.. .] in such an atmosphere of newspaper publicity and reporterism that they have lost all sense of perspective and proportion’. Although he admits to being ‘rather touched’ by the ‘girl's compunction’ at the consequences of her unfortunate act, James's sympathy lies more with the ‘poor little Montenegros’, the betrayed Italian family (HJL 3: 155).