A Tale of a Tub

Front Cover
The Floating Press, 2009 M12 1 - 220 pages
Jump into Jonathan Swift's take-no-prisoners parody of seventeenth-century Christianity. Equal parts uproarious humor and incisive satire, A Tale of a Tub dissects the foibles and shortcomings of three brothers, each of whom represents a different branch of the Christian religion. Swift, himself a clergyman, sealed his reputation as one of England's most ruthless -- and notorious -- satirists with the book's publication. It's a thought-provoking and rollicking read whether you're a believer or a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic.

From inside the book

Contents

Section VIII A Tale of a Tub
129
Section IX A Digression Concerning the Original the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth
139
Section X A Farther Digression
158
Section XI A Tale of a Tub
166
The Conclusion
184
The History of Martin
190
A Digression on the Nature Usefulness and Necessity of Wars and Quarrels
197
The History of Martin Continued
200

Section IV A Tale of a Tub
86
Section V A Digression in the Modern Kind
102
Section VI A Tale of a Tub
111
Section VII A Digression in Praise of Digressions
121
A Project for the Universal Benefit of Mankind
203
Endnotes
207
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2009)

Apparently doomed to an obscure Anglican parsonage in Laracor, Ireland, even after he had written his anonymous masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (c.1696), Swift turned a political mission to England from the Irish Protestant clergy into an avenue to prominence as the chief propagandist for the Tory government. His exhilaration at achieving importance in his forties appears engagingly in his Journal to Stella (1710--13), addressed to Esther Johnson, a young protegee for whom Swift felt more warmth than for anyone else in his long life. At the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories in 1714, Swift became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In Ireland, which he considered exile from a life of power and intellectual activity in London, Swift found time to defend his oppressed compatriots, sometimes in such contraband essays as his Drapier's Letters (1724), and sometimes in such short mordant pieces as the famous A Modest Proposal (1729); and there he wrote perhaps the greatest work of his time, Gulliver's Travels (1726). Using his characteristic device of the persona (a developed and sometimes satirized narrator, such as the anonymous hack writer of A Tale of a Tub or Isaac Bickerstaff in Predictions for the Ensuing Year, who exposes an astrologer), Swift created the hero Gulliver, who in the first instance stands for the bluff, decent, average Englishman and in the second, humanity in general. Gulliver is a full and powerful vision of a human being in a world in which violent passions, intellectual pride, and external chaos can degrade him or her---to animalism, in Swift's most horrifying images---but in which humans do have scope to act, guided by the Classical-Christian tradition. Gulliver's Travels has been an immensely successful children's book (although Swift did not care much for children), so widely popular through the world for its imagination, wit, fun, freshness, vigor, and narrative skill that its hero is in many languages a common proper noun. Perhaps as a consequence, its meaning has been the subject of continuing dispute, and its author has been called everything from sentimental to mad. Swift died in Dublin and was buried next to his beloved "Stella."

Bibliographic information