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Men1726 Jonathan Swiftdean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, crossed the Irish sea with the manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels in his bag. Beneath the child-friendly dialogue about a sailor stranded on an island full of Lilliputian scumbags, the book was a sly comedy about public life under the political elite of the Whigs, whom Swift saw as a class of morals.
Swift’s destination was not Whitehall, but Twickenham – “Twitnam”, as they knew it – the home of his old friend, the poet Alexander Pope. Here he wanted to develop a plan to bring out his sulphurous skills in a more efficient manner, which would not get him into legal trouble. For the Pope he could be sure of a sympathetic accomplice. Both men were members of the Scriblerus Club, an informal organization of critics who maintained a positive atmosphere and book association. The Pope was no longer interested in the world, although his distaste was for the Hanoverian Philistines, who had arrived from Germany in 1714 to claim the British throne. The Pope, whose Catholicism prevented him from being a royal, said he did not need to rush to court to win her favor. Instead, he emphasized the virtues of his independent life on the banks of the Thames.
The third hero of Hester Grant’s delightful foray into the world of early Georgian comedy is John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera. The musical featured a brutal dismissal of Robert Walpole, the all-conquering leader of the Whigs, whom Gay considered no better than a highwayman and a thief. Unlike Swift and Pope, Gay kept his writing to writing. All the while he was a sunny soul, fond of drink and hopeless about money, staying up all night. In the summer of 1726 he went to Twitnam to live in the Pope’s elaborately designed house, which was filled with underground chambers filled with stones, shells and stained glass.
It wasn’t all pretty. Grant is very good at the unpleasant aspects of life in the 18th century. Take Swift’s regular route between Dublin and London. Riding expensive horses meant locking yourself in a box of fetid, jiggery with five strangers while you tried to get them to puke on their legs (Swift was vulnerable here due to Ménière’s disease, which was a good distraction). Then there were the endless ones lying around in the shelters of a small port like Holyhead while you waited for the tides and the weather to help you. The contents of the bag were moving separately and almost astray, and it is not surprising that Swift was known as a misanthrope.
What is perhaps less successful is Grant’s decision to organize the group’s history according to the idea that these few weeks in 1726 were “the most important in the history of English literature”, marking a “crucial period” in the career of each individual. The hard truth is that Swift had already written Gulliver’s Travels by the time he arrived at Twitnam, while Pope was still working on the tedious task of translating Homer, which he did for the money (he was not the free spirit he likes to portray). His masterpiece, The Dunciad, referring to the folly of the Hanoverian court, would not see the light of day for another two years. John Gay, meanwhile, spent the summer of 1726 doing his usual shilly-shallying: it would be 1727 before he wrote The Beggar’s Opera.
Yes, there is a story that these summer weeks were like a creative laboratory, which produced several proofs of ideas that will eventually bear fruit in artistic writings. But Grant has to work harder to convince the reader that these three smart men were doing something different from what smart people usually do when they get together: gossiping, chatting and going to different parties. In his previous book, which dealt with many unknown brothers, the Sharps, who became very popular in the 1780s, Grant did an excellent job of keeping the connection. Here he is writing as beautifully as ever, but he still fails to create a compelling story that connects the three previously known characters.
