Swift and History: Politics and the English Past. Ashley Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. x+282.

Abstract

Marshall is equally attentive to other Swift scholars. One instance of this is when she reappraises Swift’s abandoned historical project, “Reigns” (written ca. 1700; published 1768), which was spurred by Sir William Temple’s An Introduction to the History of England (1694), but which “reflect[s] an authoritarian impulse too easily obscured by defining Swift’s work as a continuation of Temple’s Introduction” (71). Here she revises influential versions of the Temple-Swift relationship, taking A. C. Elias and Irvin Ehrenpreis to task for their “partly imaginary” versions of it: Swift “made relatively few remarks on his erstwhile patron in later years, which taken together suggest neither bitter traumatization nor veneration” (54). Convincingly dissolving “largely chimerical” biographical assumptions, and finding the idea of Sir William’s influence “at best a distraction” (from her own topic, at least), Marshall models probing, thorough, confident scholarship (55).