II.

Early Writings

Among Swift's earliest prose work was The Battle of the Books (1704), a burlesque of the controversy then raging in literary circles over the relative merits of ancient and modern writers. In this work Swift championed the ancients and, with mordant satire, attacked the pedantry and sham scholarship of his day. His Tale of a Tub (1704) is the most amusing of his satirical works and the most strikingly original. (“Good God!” he is reported to have said, “what a genius I had when I wrote that book”). In it Swift ridiculed with matchless irony various forms of pretentious pedantry, mainly in literature and religion. The book gave rise to grave doubts concerning Swift's religious orthodoxy, however, and it is thought that because Queen Anne was offended, Swift lost his chance for ecclesiastical preferment in England. He certainly took a pragmatic, if contentious, line on religious faith in his An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), stating, “I conceive some scattered notions about a superior power to be of singular use for the common people, as furnishing excellent materials to keep children quiet when they grow peevish, and providing topics of amusement in a tedious winter-night”.

Although nominally a Whig, Swift differed from his party on many important questions. In 1710 a Tory government came to power in England, and Swift was quickly won over to its ranks. He then turned his biting satire against the Whigs in a series of brilliant short pieces, assumed the editorship of The Examiner, the official Tory publication, and produced a number of pamphlets, in all of which he defended the policies of the Tory administration. Of these papers the most eloquent and influential was The Conduct of the Allies (November 1711), in which Swift charged that the Whigs had prolonged the War of the Spanish Succession out of self-interest. The pamphlet was instrumental in procuring the dismissal of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, the commander-in-chief of the British armies.