Stewed, roasted, baked or boiled

Claude Rawson

  • The Intelligencer by Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, edited by James Woolley
    Oxford, 363 pp, £50.00, March 1992, ISBN 0 19 812670 0
  • Jonathan Swift: A Literary Life by Joseph McMinn
    Macmillan, 172 pp, £35.00, May 1991, ISBN 0 333 48584 X

The Intelligencer was a periodical mainly but not exclusively of Irish interest. It ran to 19 more or less weekly numbers between May and December 1728, with a longish interruption in the summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short View of the State of Ireland’ in No 15, perhaps the single most eloquent of his Irish writings, and close in time and subject-matter to A Modest Proposal, a more famous work (though not for its eloquence, or not in the same sense).

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