Jonathan Swift

'Farewell, deelest ickle MD. Lele deer ME. Lele lele lele sollahs bose. 'Which is not a quote from Harry Hemsley's long-forgotten Horace, or a rejected draft for Peepo!, but Jonathan Swift closing, in typical fashion, one of the letters that were collected as The Journal to Stella. Puzzlement is of often expressed as to why this 'strange, grim man' should engage in baby-talk - and, equally, elsewhere, as to why his ferocious account of Lemuel Gulliver's travels into several remote nations of the world should have found its way into the nursery - and is still thought by many to be a book for children. As Glendinning shows, such contradictions run all through Swift's life and works - inexplicable except by explanations that themselves become contradictory. She is fascinated by them, and this has led to her writing not a fashionable 900-page tombstone biography but what she calls in eighteenth-century fashion a 'character'. A chronological framework needs to be present, since the sequence of personal and political events helps to suggest reasons for the contradictions, but Glendinning is analyst rather than annalist and allows the framework to dissolve whenever reflection is prompted or whenever she needs to examine some other character with a role in Swift's ultimately tragic life. This method makes her book approachable by readers who do not care for tombstone exhaustiveness. Diversions, say, into the importance of coffee-houses, or the conduct of my lords Oxford and Bolingbroke, or the nature and reception of scatalogical verse are seamlessly integrated into the character-study itself, and even the notes-and-sources documentation - amusingly labelled 'Trainspotting' - is managed in a far more civilised fashion than in academic tomes (pity about the proof-reading though - 'saeva ignatio' indeed!). Although Glendinning commences her remarks about Gulliver with some sensible comments on its appeal to children (chucking in a reference to the Alice books as 'startlingly Swiftian in their play on scale and optical reversions' - and a mention of The Borrowers too) she cannot be expected to dwell on the Captain's fate in the hands of Bowdlerising publishers or the makers of cartoon movies. But her 'character' still has much to offer anyone surveying contemporary, let alone eighteenth-century, children's literature. The whole book is a reminder that writers have powerful reasons for constructing the texts before readers get their chance - and in her beautiful final chapter, 'Midnight', Glendinning surely takes us as close as anyone to the complex forces that generated Swift's words upon the page. Furthermore, to observe with her his fierce, uncompromising, and above all lucid polemics you cannot help but reflect on the meagre and frequently obscurantist discourse of today's didactic fictioneers and critics. (The Dean could have taught the rapchaps a thing or two as well.)