Swift and Steele as Partisan Writers

After their quarrel in the Spring of 1713 Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele became public enemies. They were the champions respectively of the Tory and Whig parties in a pamphlet-periodical war of such intensity that it had a permanent effect upon the Parliamentary language of England and the careers of the two opponents.

Steele became the conspicuous leader of the shrewd and effective program to split the Tory government and bring it down. Swift responded in pamphlets, poems, and—as his enemies insisted and he denied—in The Examiner. Steele replied by launching The Englishman.

The clarity and force of the encounter sprang from the extraordinary literary talent of both Swift and Steele. Talent of a magnitude comparable with theirs has not again been so completely at the disposal of partisan interests, and while they changed the course of parliamentary history, they were themselves changed in the process.

This book is an account of the principle events of this clash between extraordinary minds, based on the publications to which the two men contributed, on their correspondence, and on the responses they provoked from press and Parliament. However, the book is primarily concerned with the efforts of this crisis on Swift. His frustration, defeat, and withdrawal to Ireland appear to have had important consequences in defining the emotional pattern of Gulliver's Travels, published twelve years later.