Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks by Hugh Ormsby-Lennon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks by Hugh Ormsby-Lennon Ian Higgins Hugh Ormsby-Lennon. Hey Presto! Swift and the Quacks. Newark: Delaware, 2011. Pp. 412. $85. Mr. Ormsby-Lennon’s exuberantly erudite and deeply researched book presents a new reading of A Tale of a Tub. It is also a study of the contemporary popular culture of mountebankery, providing a psychogeography of Swift’s London and the habitats of hack, quack, Quaker, tub preacher, and mountebank. Mr. Ormsby-Lennon’s contemporary London guides include Ned Ward (for the East End) and Tom Brown (for the West End). Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais provides a modern theoretical lens on the heteroglossia of Swift’s satiric territory. Hey Presto! displays its author’s panache for comparison, juxtaposition, and analogue. Contemporary contexts are recovered for the Tale with precision and élan. Hey Presto! records the Tale’s echo of the patois and spiel of contemporary charlatanry and medicine shows. It describes Swift’s mimicry of the argot of mountebankery (lay and learned). The Tale is seen as “a quack’s book” to be “shelved under the classis of the stage-itinerant,” belonging to the genre of William King’s A Journey to London (1698), Ned Ward’s The London Spy (1698–1700), and Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700). The strange texture of the Tale—its lexicon, numerology, conflation of street vernacular, polemical, and scholarly idioms—is explained as simulation of the language of hacks, quacks, and showmen in the popular culture. The exhumation of forgotten demotic contexts for the Tale is an important achievement of this book. The pitch for Mr. Ormsby-Lennon’s virtuoso performance (puffed on the back cover) is that Hey Presto! reveals how the stage-itinerant is not only the model for the Tale but is “that missing link, long sought, that conjoins the dual objects of Swift’s ire: ‘gross Corruptions in [both] Religion and Learning.’ ” The putative hack author of the Tale, Swift’s Grubean impersonation, is read against the careers of real quacks (such as William Salmon), fake quacks (such as Rochester in masquerade as a mountebank), stage-itinerants (such as Jo Haines), and many hack authors. The three brothers in Swift’s religious allegory, Peter (Roman Catholicism), Martin (the Church of England), and Jack (Protestant Dissent), are viewed as three mountebanks, related by Mr. Ormsby-Lennon to the three impostors (Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad) in the clandestine manuscript book De tribus impostoribus (The Three Impostors). Mr. Ormsby-Lennon draws on this notorious infidel text, Celsus’s diatribe against Christianity as charlatanry in On the True Doctrine, and other atheistic and heterodox works, ancient and modern, to explain Swift’s satire on corruptions in religion. Contemporary religious polemicists vilified each other as mountebanks, and so did the scholars. In Swift’s satire on learning, early modern scholars appear as mountebanks. J. B. Mencken’s De charlataneria eruditorum (1715) is his touchstone text for the Tale’s theme of the charlatanry of the learned, “the professor as mountebank.” Swift’s satiric inspiration is traced to the Tripos entertainments at Trinity College Dublin, and the scandalous and subversive terrae-filius tradition at TCD and Oxford. Mr. Ormsby-Lennon also has an old tale to tell. He seeks to resurrect Wotton’s contemporary [End Page 53] verdict that A Tale of a Tub “shews at bottom [the author’s] contemptible Opinion of every Thing which is called Christianity.” His thesis of an irreligious Tale is provocative. The “heterodox sallies” of Swift’s Tubbian author are said to “mimic Swift’s own.” Mr. Ormsby-Lennon performs a kind of Whiggish mid-rash on the Tale and other works in the Swift canon, teasing out atheistic or heterodox meanings and secrets. He repeatedly contends, for instance, that Swift’s satiric reference to the neo-Pythagorean and peripatetic magician Apollonius of Tyana (whose miracle working was compared with Jesus Christ’s in anticlerical deist and freethinking works) implies that Jesus was a mountebank and magician. Through Apollonius, a floating signifier and proxy for Christ, Swift can “jab at Jesus.” Hey Presto! asserts that as a priest...