Arthur Mainwaring as Reader of Swift's 'Examiner'

Abstract

If it is true that 'one of the most conspicuous aspects of contemporary literary criticism is an emphasis upon readers and the act of reading, to the exclusion and even to the avowed extinction of authors and literary objects',l then an account of Arthur Mainwaring as a reader of Swift's Examiner may be timely as well as instructive. For Mainwaring was not an 'ideal reader' or a 'mock reader',2 or a typical reader, or a hypothetical eighteenthcentury reader. He was a real flesh and blood reader who wrote down his response to each number of Swift's Examiner in essays that he called The Medley. He was, in addition, an interesting man. 'A Man of the Belles Lettres, a Wit, a Declaimer, a Mythologist, a Poet and a Learned Historian' is what one hostile critic called him, and he was all of these things and more.3 But since he is not so well known as Swift, it may be helpful to tell enough about him to enable his biases and prepossessions as a reader to be assessed. A notice of Arthur Mainwaring ( 668712) by John Adam Cramb in The Dictionary of National Biography provides the basic facts. Mainwaring was born at Ightfield into the Shropshire branch of an Anglo-Norman family long established in Cheshire. His grandfather, Sir Arthur Maynwaring, had been a favourite of Prince Henry at the court of James I. His mother was a Cholmondeley, another Cheshire family distinguished for its services to the Stuarts. The Cholmondeleys were related to the Seymours, of which the younger branch was represented by Charles, 'the proud Duke' of Somerset.