A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift

First published: 1704, as A Tale of a Tub: To Which Is Added an Account of a Battle Between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James’s Library; and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit

Type of work: Satire and social criticism

Principal characters

• Peter, representing the pope or the Roman Catholic Church
• Martin, representing Martin Luther, hence the Lutheran and Anglican churches
• Jack, representing John Calvin, hence the Calvinist Dissenters

The Work:

A Tale of a Tub has been called the greatest of English satires. The point is debatable, but the work is surely a most spirited, complex, and amusing contribution to this genre. Jonathan Swift also showed his satirical genius in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and in his famous essay, “A Modest Proposal” (1729), advocating the eating of infants.

Satire is written when an author wishes to attack something. Swift spent a lifetime attacking the pretensions and stupidity of the world around him. His main object in A Tale of a Tub, he said, was to ridicule “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning.” These, readers discover, include pedantic scholars, egoistic critics, fanatic literalists in religion, and clever theologians. Such people poison society with misapplication of their reasoning powers.

Swift wisely sees to it that his sense of outrage at the religious and scholarly varieties of human stupidity is complemented throughout by an elevating sense of the comic. The opening dedication to Lord Somers, for example, shows Swift in one of his contrived comic poses. In the dedication, engagingly posing as a gullible and naïve bookseller, he satirizes the excessive praise so prevalent in dedications of the time. The genius of the attempt is the fact that hyperbole itself is the method he employs.

With the second of the prefatory dedications, Swift’s target becomes clearer. Addressing “His Royal Highness Prince Posterity,” Swift makes a great and ironic show of ascribing great wit and literary achievement to his age. Swift has his tongue quite firmly in cheek in this passage and implies that the wise one seeks out virtue and value in all ages. Modernity alone has no just claim; what is new is not necessarily the best. Swift’s position, therefore, in the “Battle of the Books” (an intellectual controversy of his time), tended to favor the ancients or the classics as opposed to the moderns.

In the subsequent preface, Swift continues with his consummate irony to excoriate the writers of his time. He explains his title. When seamen meet a whale, they throw out an empty tub to divert him lest he wreck the ship. If the ship is the ship of state and the whale represents the vast body of scurrilous and destructive writers and thinkers who “pick holes in the weak sides of religion and government,” then the tale, says Swift, shall serve as a similar decoy for the wits of the day to attack.

On the surface, Swift’s intention and meaning seem plain. He raises the perennial cry against two swarms of pests: the egoistic poetasters who set themselves up as wits, intellects, and critics, and the newer philosophers whose theories seem harmful to England’s Christian and constitutional way of life, as in the case of Thomas Hobbes. As a conservative, a good Anglican, and a defender of the ancients, Swift was understandably angered, but latent in the argument, as is often the case with sensible Swift, is his recognition that in fact there are flaws in the existing schemes of religion and government: “a great many are hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy, and wooden.” The point here is simply that Swift’s satire is distinguished not only by its sharp edge but by its double edge.

Swift proceeds through his preface by calling into play parody, well-turned phrase, artful digression, and mock diffidence—all of these in preparation for the style and the method of the treatise itself and all playing harmoniously in one of the world’s great symphonies of irony. Eleven sections of the tale proper go before the conclusion. Part 1 is the introduction. With part 2, the tale officially begins, with “Once upon a time. . . .” The tale resumes in sections 4, 6, 8, and 11, with the intervening sections consisting of digressions that are called such. The tale proper contains Swift’s satire on abuses in religion; the digressions satirize abuses in learning.

The introduction serves further to establish Swift’s pose as a pedantic and prolific scholar. Ironically, he satirizes pedantry as he laboriously extracts allegories out of simple tales.

Swift’s own tale then begins; the reader is forewarned to observe its own patterns of allegory. The characters involved are three brothers, triplets: Peter, Martin, and Jack. They represent Saint Peter (the Roman Catholic Church), Martin Luther (the Church of England, founded as a consequence of the Reformation), and John Calvin (the Dissenters). On his deathbed, their father bequeaths each a simple and durable coat to be worn carefully and never altered. The coat represents the New Testament doctrines of the early Christian Church. When the three brothers decide to become men about town, they need to remodel their coats with shoulder knots, gold lace, silver fringes, and embroidery to be in fashion. Swift focuses his satire on the sophistry and abuses of logic by which clever Peter finds in the father’s will a license for these alterations.

Having thus caustically attended to Roman Catholic accretions, Swift now turns to the field of learning in his first digression. This is a biting attack on modern critics, who seek out only the worst in an author and catalog his defects. Swift ironically commends these creatures of prey, pretending to find glorious historical antecedents for their kind.

Returning now, in section 4, to the tale, Swift excoriates various institutions of the Roman Catholic Church: penance, Purgatory, private confession, holy water, papal bulls, celibacy, relics, and more. He describes each institution with great dignity and seriousness, as Swift here takes an opportunity to blend his satire on religious excesses with his satire on pedantry. Therefore, the focus of the tale is still on Peter, who styles himself Lord Peter and claims precedence over his brothers. Martin and Jack finally rebel and obtain a copy of their father’s will, which made them all equal heirs. Angry Peter forces them from the house where all have been living together. Thus, the allegory recounts the Reformation.

At this high point, nothing could be more inappropriate than a digression; and so with intent the comic Swift presents a digression. With irony, he satirizes the habit of modern writers to expatiate on their own virtues and discoveries while they ridicule the ancients.

Swift records the further adventures of Martin and Jack. Martin carefully removes the fopperies from his coat and manages to get it somewhat back to its original state. Jack, however, with too great zeal, rips off the decorations with such haste that his coat is torn to rags. He envies Martin, and so these two have a disagreement. Thus is allegorized the split between Luther and the less temperate Calvinist reformers. Martin (or the established church in England) represents Swift’s ideal or norm, a middle course between Peter’s ingenuity and Jack’s fanaticism. Swift offers another digression “in praise of digressions.” The butt of the satire is the modern writer and his habit of neglecting method, style, good grammar, and originality. Instead, he compiles his mindless writings chiefly by plagiarizing and digression.

Swift returns to the tale proper and invents a fantastic sect of “Aeolists” as he continues his satire of Jack and his followers. They were wind worshipers who venerated humanity as a wind-producing machine with outlets at both ends. Swift’s satire is addressed against the bombast and energy of Calvinist preachers.

Section 9 is the famous digression on madness, full of dextrous shifts in irony that have endlessly fascinated readers. Swift continues his jokes on the theme of wind by suggesting that madness occurs when malign vapors rise from the lower regions of the body to poison the brain. Both good and bad results derive from this distemper: wars, new philosophies, and all striking achievements of the human race. What happens is that one’s fancy gets in control of one’s reason, and imagination overwhelms common sense.

Swift, an imaginative writer, is not deriding the imagination but its misuse. Swift’s argument is that when minute scholarship turns into pedantry, this is evil; but to be content with superficial knowledge is evil as well. Swift slices through the dilemma by cautioning against the most serious error, self-deception. Let one conduct one’s life sensibly, understanding the full nature and implications of one’s acts. Be neither superficial nor pedantic but intelligent, Swift recommends.

Section 10 blends heavy irony and lighthearted comedy as Swift attacks the hypocrisy and the self-regard of modern writers and slyly toys with the reader. With a jab at perverse scholars such as numerologists and Cabalists, he returns to his tale proper. In the tale proper, Swift lampoons fanatic, Scripture-quoting Calvinists, their doctrine of predestination, their aversion to music in churches, their insistence on simplicity, and their apparent courting of persecution. In short, Jack’s increasing whims and affectations make him appear more and more like Peter, much to the dismay of both.

A rambling conclusion ends the book, after Swift successfully defends good sense in religion and in learning through the process of ridiculing aberrations. If there is a chief victim of his mockery, it is William Wotton, a scholar whose angry comments (which might have been better left unwritten) Swift gleefully adds as footnotes to subsequent editions.

Occasional use of scatology and satirical excesses flaw the work in the eyes of some critics, especially Swift’s contemporaries: Swift responded in the fifth edition by making certain alterations, omitting, for example, a short synoptic piece of the tale and a digression on war, both of which followed section 9. A lengthy and angry “Apology” (or defense) also accompanied this edition. Over the years, however, critics have frequently viewed A Tale of a Tub as a masterpiece, a highly moral work offering an indirect recipe for the conduct of a Christian humanist.

Bibliography

Clark, John R. Form and Frenzy in Swift’s “Tale of a Tub.” Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. Focuses on the artistry of Swift’s satire, exploring A Tale of a Tub as “a work of mimetic art.” Argues that Swift carries out his satiric intent with great originality while staying within the tradition.

Connery, Brian A., ed. Representations of Swift. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Collection of papers delivered at 1999 conference about Swift. Among other topics, the papers analyze A Tale of a Tub and discuss Swift and gender, class, and Ireland.

Fox, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Collection of essays about Swift’s life and work, including discussions of Swift’s religion, his language and style, his representation of women, and Swift the Irishman. “A Tale of a Tub and Early Prose” by Judith C. Mueller analyzes this novel.

Fox, Christopher, and Brenda Tooley, eds. Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. The introduction discusses Swift and Irish studies, and the subsequent essays all consider aspects of Swift as an Irish writer.

Glendinning, Victoria. Jonathan Swift: A Portrait. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Illuminates the life and personality of this proud and intractable man. Investigates the main events and relationships of Swift’s life, providing a portrait set amid controversy and paradox.

Harth, Phillip. Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of “A Tale of a Tub.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. A learned investigation of the novel’s religious background. Rejects arguments that A Tale of a Tub has a unity that fuses the two objects of its satire, religion and learning, in one coherent whole.

Hudson, Nicholas, and Aaron Santesso, eds. Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and Its Legacy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Collection of essays examining the satirical style and content of Swift’s work. Some of the essays discuss his work in relationship to previous satirical writing by John Dryden and others; other essays compare his work with that of Alexander Pope and assess his influence on Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Beckett.

Kelly, Ann Cline. Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Chronicles the creation of Swift’s literary legend in his own time and in succeeding generations. Swift realized that in “a print-contracted world, texts create authors, not the other way around,” and Kelly demonstrates how the writer constructed a print persona that differed from the “real” individual.

Paulson, Ronald. Theme and Structure in Swift’s “Tale of a Tub.” New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960. Emphasizes the moral import of A Tale of a Tub, stressing Swift’s penetrating insight into the nature of evil. Pleads a case for Swift as an artist who gave A Tale of a Tub a “unified structure.”

Smith, Frederik N. Language and Reality in Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub.” Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979. Finds in A Tale of a Tub two styles of language that coincide with two ways of knowing the world. Argues that Swift rejects the “intellectualized” approach in favor of the “experience-oriented.”