Page 20 - Gullivers

When he had been in Laracor a few weeks earlier, he had occupied much of
his time writing to friends in London, complaining of the insufferable dullness of country life. In one letter headed simply ‘The Country in Ireland’, he wrote
‘I am here in a way of sinking into utter oblivion’ (letter of 3 August 1713), and
a month later he lamented that he was now ‘fitter to look aster Willows, and to cutt Hedges’ than play the part in national politics to which he aspired. In terms of the pœtic imagination, however, everything that Swist’s culture had taught him to read and admire suggested a contrast between an urban existence that was stressful and morally corrupt and a rural life that was both peaceful and innocent.
This tension was not peculiar to Swist. His friends, Alexander Pope and John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera (1728), both wrote in praise of an idealised country life, while spending as much time as possible in the city. The opening section of The Deserted Village (1770) is one of the most famous of all portrayals of an ideal rural community yet its author, Oliver Goldsmith, spent much of
his adult life in London. In his famous imitation of Juvenal’s third verse satire, London (1738), Samuel Johnson enquired:
For who would leave, unbrib’d, Hibernia’s land, Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?
to which question T.S. Eliot would wittily reply ‘Samuel Johnson, if anyone’.
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