A Tale of a Tub was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift, composed between 1694 and 1697 and published in London in 1704. The work is a prose parody divided into sections of "digression" and a "tale" of three brothers, each representing one of the main branches of western Christianity from the 17th-century English perspective. A satire on the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches and English Dissenters, it was famously attacked for its profanity and irreligion, starting with William Wotton, who wrote that it made a game of "God and Religion, Truth and Moral Honesty, Learning and Industry" to show "at the bottom [the author's] contemptible Opinion of every Thing which is called Christianity."Wotton, William. Observations on A Tale of a Tub (1705).
The work continued to be regarded as an attack on religion well into the nineteenth century.Clark, John R. "The Decorum of Madness". Form and Frenzy in Swift's Tale of a Tub. By Clark. New York City:Cornell UP, 1970. Quoting William Wotton: One commentator complained that Swift must be "a compulsive cruiser of Dunghils ... Ditches, and Common-Shores with a great Affectation [sic] for every thing that is nasty. When he spies any Objects that another Person would avoid looking on, that he Embraces".
A Tale of a Tub was enormously popular, presenting both a satire of religious excess and a parody of contemporary writing in literature, politics, theology, Biblical exegesis, and medicine through its comically excessive front matter and series of digressions throughout. The overarching parody is of enthusiasm, pride, and credulity. At the time it was written, politics and religion were still closely linked in England, and the religious and political aspects of the satire can often hardly be separated. "The work made Swift notorious, and was widely misunderstood, especially by Queen Anne herself who mistook its purpose for profanity."Ousby, I. et al. (1993). The Cambridge guide to literature in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. It "effectively disbarred its author from proper preferment" in the Church of England.
The work holds significant importance in both English literature and intellectual history because of its various satirical and radical literary techniques. The work primarily exposes religious hypocrisy and the intellectual trends of Swift's period, including the differences between past and modern thoughts.
The tale
Overview A Tale of a Tub comprises the tale itself, an allegory of the Reformation in the story of brothers Peter, Martin, and Jack as they attempt to make their way in the world, along with various digressions interspersed throughout. Each brother represents one of the primary branches of Christianity in the West. This part of the book is a pun on "tub", which Alexander Pope says was a common term for a Dissenter's pulpit, and a reference to Swift's own position as a clergyman. Peter (named for Saint Peter) stands in for the Roman Catholic Church. Jack (named for John Calvin, but whom Swift also connects to John of Leiden) represents the various dissenting Protestant churches such as Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Congregationalists and Anabaptists. The third brother, middle born and middle standing, is Martin (named for Martin Luther), whom Swift uses to represent the 'via media' of the Church of England. The brothers have inherited three wonderfully satisfactory coats (representing religious practice) by their father (representing God), and they have his will (representing the Bible) to guide them. Although the will says that the brothers are forbidden from making any changes to their coats, they do nearly nothing but alter their coats from the start. In as much as the will represents the Bible and the coat represents the practice of Christianity, the allegory of the narrative is supposed to be an apology for the Anglican church's refusal to either alter its practice in accordance with Puritan demands or ally with the Roman church.For further details on the religious context of A Tale of a Tub, see John Farrell, "Swift and the Satiric Absolute", Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau New York: Cornell UP (2006).
From its opening (once past the prolegomena, which comprises the first three sections), the book alternates between Digression and Tale. However, the digressions overwhelm the narrative, both in their length and in the forcefulness and imaginativeness of writing. Furthermore, after Chapter X (the commonly anthologised "Digression on Madness"), the labels for the sections are incorrect. Sections then called "Tale" are Digressions, and those called "Digression" are also Digressions.For one description of the structure of A Tale of a Tub, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age: Mr Swift and his Contemporaries, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1962): 185–203.
A Tale of a Tub is an enormous parody with a number of smaller parodies within it. Many critics have followed Swift's biographer Irvin Ehrenpreis in arguing that there is no single, consistent narrator in the work.Ehrenpreis, Mr Swift and his Contemporaries, 185–225. One difficulty with this position, however, is that if there is no single character posing as the author, then it is at least clear that nearly all of the "personae" employed by Swift for the parodies are so much alike that they function as a single identity. In general, whether a modern reader would view the book as consisting of dozens of impersonations or a single one, Swift writes the Tale through the pose of a Modern or New Man. See the abridged discussion of the "Ancients and Moderns", below, for more on the nature of the "modern man" in Swift's day.For a more detailed discussion of how different genres figure into Swift's portrayal of the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns, see Leon Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (1987): 125–39.
The digressions individually frustrate readers who expect a clear purpose. Each digression has its own topic, and each is an essay on its particular sidelight. In his biography of Swift, Ehrenpreis argued that each digression is an impersonation of a different contemporary author. This is the "persona theory", which holds that the Tale is not one parody, but rather a series of parodies, arising out of chamber performance in the Temple household. Prior to Ehrenpreis, some critics had argued that the narrator of the Tale is a character, just as the narrator of a novel would be. Given the evidence of A. C. Elias about the acrimony of Swift's departure from the Temple household, evidence from Swift's Journal to Stella about how uninvolved in the Temple household Swift had been, and the number of repeated observations about himself by the Tale's author, it seems reasonable to propose that the digressions reflect a single type of man, if not a particular character.A commonplace in academic discussion. See Elias, A. C., Swift at Moor Park. U Penn Press, 1982. See also McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. On p. 195, McKeon refers to the knowing paradox of the satire of overreading and literalism thus: "The Restoration and the early eighteenth-century reaction against religious 'enthusiasm' [in Tale] represents a counterrevolution, generated by the Calvinist revolution itself, which repudiates what are taken to be its excesses even as it shares with that revolution certain Protestant premises concerning the doctrinaire absolutism of papist methods for distinguishing the vicious from the virtuous, the damned from the saved."
In any case, the digressions are each readerly tests; each tests whether or not the reader is intelligent and sceptical enough to detect nonsense. Some, such as the discussion of ears or of wisdom being like a nut, a cream sherry, a cackling hen, etc., are outlandish and require a militantly aware and thoughtful reader. Each is a trick, and together they train the reader to sniff out bunk and to reject the unacceptable.
Title
At the time, "a tale of a tub" was an idiom synonymous with "a cock and bull story.")
Swift's explanation for the title of the book is that the Ship of State was threatened by a whale (specifically, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes) and the new political societies (the Rota Club is mentioned). His book is intended to be a tub that the sailors of state (the nobles and ministers) might toss over the side to divert the attention of the beast (those who questioned the government and its right to rule). Hobbes was highly controversial in the Restoration, but Swift's invocation of Hobbes might well be ironic. The narrative of the brothers is a faulty allegory, and Swift's narrator is either a madman or a fool. The book is not one that could occupy the Leviathan, or preserve the Ship of State, so Swift may be intensifying the dangers of Hobbes's critique rather than allaying them to provoke a more rational response.For one reading of Swift's use of Hobbes, see Farrell, "Swift and the Satiric Absolute".Paul K. Saint-Amour, "Very Like a Whale: Metaphor and Materialism in Hobbes and Swift", ‘‘Critical Inquiry’’, vol. 41, no. 4 (Summer 2015), pp. 816–851.Jonathan Swift, ‘‘A Tale of a Tub and Other Works’’, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Introduction, pp. xx–xxi; see also "Jonathan Swift and ‘A Tale of a Tub’", Great Writers Inspire, University of Oxford.
Cultural setting During the Restoration the print revolution began to change every aspect of British society. It became possible for anyone to spend a small amount of money and have his or her opinions published as a broadsheet, and to gain access to the latest discoveries in science, literature, and political theory, as books became less expensive and digests and "indexes" of the sciences grew more numerous. The difficulty lay in discerning truth from falsehood, credible claims from impossible ones.For a brief survey of the print revolution in the context of British intellectual history, see Roy Porter, "Print culture", The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment, New York: W. W. Norton and Co. (2000) and for a brief survey of the print revolution in the context of British artistic and literary history, see John Brewer "Authors, Publishers and the Making of Literary Culture" and "Readers and the Reading Public" in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1997). Swift writes A Tale of a Tub in the guise of a narrator who is excited and gullible about what the new world has to offer, and feels that he is quite the equal or superior of any author who ever lived because he, unlike them, possesses 'technology' and newer opinions. Swift seemingly asks the question of what a person with no discernment but with a thirst for knowledge would be like, and the answer is the narrator of Tale of a Tub.
Swift was annoyed by people so eager to possess the newest knowledge that they failed to pose sceptical questions. If he was not a particular fan of the aristocracy, he was a sincere opponent of democracy, which was often viewed then as the sort of "mob rule" that led to the worst abuses of the English Interregnum. Swift's satire was intended to provide a genuine service by painting the portrait of conspiracy minded and injudicious writers.