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Nicholas McDowell, bertrand a. goldgar and ian gadd (eds). English Political Writings, 1711–1714: The Conduct of the Allies and Other Works. By Jonathan swift., The Review of English Studies, Volume 61, Issue 250, June 2010, Pages 476–478, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgq043
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Extract
This is volume eight in the projected eighteen-volume sequence of the new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, but the first to appear in print. It contains the polemical works of the final years of Queen Anne, when Swift was the chief, if unofficial and anonymous, propagandist for the Tory government and in almost daily contact with its chief ministers Robert Harley (Earl of Oxford) and Henry St John (Viscount Bolingbroke). The central issues of these years, when the polemical battle between Whig and Tory was vicious, were England’s continued involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession and the succession to Anne, and all the tracts in this volume deal with these two issues in some respect. The objective of the Cambridge Swift is, according to the general editors in their brief preface, two-fold: ‘to provide an informed understanding of Swift’s place in the political and cultural history of England and Ireland’ and to have ‘Swift’s texts … collated and analysed afresh’. The argument for replacing the great editions of Swift by Herbert Davis and Harold Williams is based on their age, lack of annotation, and incomplete textual analysis. The two editors of this volume evidently assumed clearly demarcated tasks, with the veteran Goldgar (who died in 2009) writing the forty-five page introduction and the notes to the text, and Gadd contributing an immense ‘Textual Introduction and Accounts of Individual Works’ which stretches to almost 200 pages, some thirty-five per cent of the volume.
