Page 30 - Gullivers
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In their day, the birthday verses to Charles Ford were private, not public, pœtry and like ‘The Legion Club’ – though for different reasons – not published until aster Swist’s death.
When Swist wrote for immediate public consumption – as he did in Gulliver’s Travels – it was important to address the cultural and political centre of Great Britain and Ireland – and that centre, for Swist, was London. Despite such contributions to the country’s literature and political life as The Drapier’s Letters (1724-1725) or A Modest Proposal (1729), Swist continued to believe Ireland to be too marginal to the concerns of the truly polite - i.e. metropolitan - audience he wished to reach when dealing with the fundamental questions of human existence. So, Swist took Travels through Several Remote Nations to London to
be published. And Dublin has only a marginal role to play in the narrative of Gulliver’s Travels: as Lindalino in Book III’s allegorical account of the Wood’s Halfpence controversy to which the Drapier’s Letters were Swist’s contribution (an account that, in any case, the publisher suppressed in the first edition as being too politically dangerous).
‘To Charles Ford, Esq’, however, reveals two important facts to be taken
into account when considering Swist’s broader relationship to the Irish capital. Like any city – like the London of Gulliver’s Travels - Dublin is both a physical location and an idea. As such it dœs not only offer the writer material for representation; it is also susceptible to imaginative transformation by the writer’s art. For Swist, the problem was the fact that he was in Dublin at all, in what he persisted - though not always with entire seriousness - as considering an ‘exile’ in the land of his birth. If London was for him the metropolis, how could Dublin, how could Ireland serve as the material for the writer ambitious of lasting fame, or of doing his country good? Such questions troubled Swist yet reluctantly - and facetiously at first – Swist came to see Dublin as a possible location for pœtry.
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