Page 24 - Gullivers

As the eighteenth century went on, the city came increasingly to serve as
the legitimate subject-matter in pœms from Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues, John Gay’s Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets in London or Pope’s The Dunciad (1728; 1744) to William Blake’s coruscating ‘London’ (1795) or Wordsworth’s admiring sonnet on London as seen from Westminster Bridge that begins: ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ (‘Upon Westminster Bridge’, 1802).
What all these pœms have in common, of course, is that the city described
is London. In the early-eighteenth century, London was the greatest of
all European cities, followed by Paris, Venice, Naples, Amsterdam and Lisbon. Towards the end of Swist’s lifetime, its rapidly-increasing population reached almost 700,000 – in contrast to the two next largest English cities, Bristol and Norwich, whose inhabitants numbered no more than 50,000 or so each. By these standards, Dublin – whose population of c. 45,000 in 1685 had grown to 92,000 by 1725 and would reach around 120,000 by the time of Swist’s death – was large but scarcely a match for London. And, as Swist would argue in a great deal of political writing, above all in the 1720s and 30s, its political influence was small since, while Ireland might be a nation, its parliament’s capacity to legislate on the country’s behalf was severely limited by the provisions of Poynings’ law,
as strengthened by the 1720 Declaratory Act.
This is not to underestimate the importance of Dublin during the eighteenth century: it was Europe’s eleventh most-populated city, aster all, larger than Madrid, Milan or Berlin. Moreover, the city Swist knew in the last thirty years of his life was developing not only in population but in prosperity and in the magnificence of its buildings. Since he was a great walker, Swist came to know this city well. Even when he was an undergraduate, the main College building was a fine one, though not as imposing as the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham - designed by Sir William Robinson – which, it was suggested, might better serve as the university than as a home for old soldiers.
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