This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
THE
JOURNAL TO STELLA
BY
JONATHAN SWIFT
EDITED, WITHINTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY
GEORGE A. AITKEN
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1901
p.vPREFACE
The history of the publication ofthe Journal to Stella is somewhat curious. OnSwift’s death twenty-five of the letters, forming theclosing portion of the series, fell into the hands of Dr. Lyon, aclergyman who had been in charge of Swift for some years. The letters passed to a man named Wilkes, who sold them forpublication. They accordingly appeared in 1766 in the tenthvolume of Dr. Hawkesworth’s quarto edition of Swift’sworks; but the editor made many changes in the text, including asuppression of most of the “little language.” The publishers, however, fortunately for us, were public-spiritedenough to give the manuscripts (with one exception) to theBritish Museum, where, after many years, they were examined byJohn Forster, who printed in his unfinished Life of Swiftnumerous passages from the originals, showing the manner in whichthe text had been tampered with by Hawkesworth. Swifthimself, too, in his later years, obliterated many words andsentences in the letters, and Forster was able to restore not afew of these omissions. His zeal, however, sometimes ledhim to make guesses at words which are quiteundecipherable. Besides Forster’s work, I have hadthe benefit of the careful collation made by Mr. Ryland for hisedition of 1897. Where these authorities differ I haveusually found myself in agreement with Mr. Ryland, but I havefelt justified in accepting some of Forster’s readingswhich p. viwererejected by him as uncertain; and the examination of themanuscripts has enabled me to make some additions and correctionsof my own. Swift’s writing is extremely small, andabounds in abbreviations. The difficulty of arriving at thetrue reading is therefore considerable, apart from theerasures.
The remainder of the Journal, consisting of the firstforty letters, was published in 1768 by Deane Swift, Dr.Swift’s second cousin. These letters had been givento Mrs. Whiteway in 1788, and by her to her son-in-law, DeaneSwift. The originals have been lost, with the exception ofthe first, which, by some accident, is in the British Museum; butit is evident that Deane Swift took even greater liberties withthe text than Hawkesworth. He substituted for“Ppt” the word “Stella,” a name whichSwift seems not to have used until some years later; he adoptedthe name “Presto” for Swift, and in other ways triedto give a greater literary finish to the letters. The wholeof the correspondence was first brought together, under the titleof the Journal to Stella, in Sheridan’s edition of1784.
Previous editions of the Journal have been but slightlyannotated. Swift’s letters abound with allusions topeople of all classes with whom he came in contact in London, andto others known to Esther Johnson in Ireland; and a largeproportion of these persons have been passed over in discreetsilence by Sir Walter Scott and others. The task of theannotator has, of course, been made easier of late years by thepublication of contemporary journals and letters, and of usefulworks of reference dealing with Parliament, the Army, the Church,the Civil Service, and the like, besides the invaluableDictionary of National Biography. I have also beenassisted by a collection of MS. notes kindly placed at my