Page 44 - Gullivers

great lengths to protect the anonymity
of his authorship and arranged for the manuscript (which had been copied out
in a feigned hand) to be delivered to Motte in instalments by someone quite unknown to either of them. But, whether he knew the identity of the author or not, Motte recognised that the book would sell well and paid the £200 asked by the intermediary – a sum which he was told would be given to ‘poor seamen’. The book appeared on 28 October 1726 and was an immediate success, the whole of the first printing being sold in a week. Almost immediately afterwards the text appeared serially in The Penny London
Post and in an abbreviated form for children within a year. The book has never been out of print from that day to this and has been translated into scores
of languages.
The immediate popularity of the book was the talk of London (and soon of Dublin too). The publisher of the Penny London Post asserted that the travels ‘bore [a] considerable... Share in almost every Conversation both in Town and Country, not only from the Reputation of their suppos’d author, but the vast variety of wit and Pleasantry with which the several
Relations are interpos’d...’. It is said that Swift himself was delighted to hear one Irish bishop tell another that he ‘did not believe a word of it’.
Because of the mysterious way in which the transcript of Gulliver’s Travels had been delivered to the printer, and because the publisher himself had decided to make some excisions from the text for reasons of political expediency, Swift complained that Motte’s text was not an accurate one. He persuaded his friend Charles Ford to make a list of all the supposed ‘errors’ in Motte’s edition, a list which survives in an interleaved copy of that edition now in
the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. However, we now have what might be termed the definitive text as Swift himself was able to oversee the next major edition of the work which was printed
in Dublin in 1735.
In the years between the two main editions of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift remained in Ireland, the centre of a circle of admiring poets – many of them attractive younger married women – and increasingly enjoying life in the city. His most famous Irish pamphlet, A Modest Proposal, appeared in 1729 and, though his close friend Esther Johnson (“Stella”) died, he continued
42