Jonathan Swift led a disappointed life in many ways, and with all due respect, after reading "A Tale Of A Tub" and learning something about its composition, it's not hard to see why.
Swift was an early practitioner of witty, sarcastic satire. Which is fine, except that he made copious fun of the Church in England, which was where he was trying to make his living. Even today, making fun of your meal ticket is not exactly the way to advance in your profession, and in the early years of the 1700s, when religious conflict was at a high pitch, one can only imagine how favorably church leaders responded to being teased.
Today, understanding "A Tale Of A Tub" takes a while, and even in its own day, Swift had to write a pretty lengthy preface to explain what he was about. For openers, he had to explain his title, since the piece hasn't got a tub anywhere in it. Turns out that whaling ships in those days would sometimes throw a big wooden tub overboard when a whale approached, hoping that it would go after the tub and leave the ship alone. The preface tells us that the British state was at that time under attack by certain writers who went after the religious life of the nation, particularly Thomas Hobbes in his work "Leviathan" (which is an archaic word meaning "whale"), and this piece is intended to preserve that religious life by drawing off the attention of said writers.
Needless to say, this is a pretense – "A Tale Of A Tub" is itself a merciless satire of religion. It concerns three brothers named Peter, Martin, and Jack, whose father at his death has little to leave to them in the way of money or property, but he does leave them each a coat which will keep them warm and healthy if they follow the instructions in their father's will. And what are those instructions? Simply to leave the coats alone – to avoid cutting, ripping, or redesigning them in any way, certainly to avoid altering them to follow fashions. So guess what the brothers do? I won't even bother to answer that one.
This whole story is intended as an allegory of Christian expression in England at the time, with the father standing in for God, his will for the Bible, the coats for faith and religion, Peter (as in St, Peter the first pope) for Catholicism, Martin (as in Martin Luther) for early Protestantism, Jack (as in John Calvin) for other Protestant sects like the Puritans and Quakers, and so on. The brothers behave according to the manner in which the respective Christian churches allegedly behaved, and get into the kind of trouble you might expect.
It's not a bad story by any means, though we might find it kind of hard to follow in this day and age, but the real treat is that alternate chapters consist of digressions - on madness, prefaces, digressions themselves, and anything else that seems to strike the narrator's fancy. For instance, we learn in one such digression that all advancement of the human race comes from some form of madness – without it, people are naturally inclined to remain content with the way things are. The narrator tells us that all such madness is the result of vapors rising from the lower regions of the body into the brain. Whether the result leads to revolution in human thought and action, or simply to getting thrown into an asylum, depends entirely on timing. Looking around at today's world, we can only admire Swift's uncanny ability to foretell the future.
I found "A Tale Of A Tub" pretty slow going, mostly because of the language. Swift was a great stylist, but this was his first published work, and whether or not his audience was familiar with his vocabulary and syntax I have no way of knowing, but today it's a hard slog. I enjoyed it, but I can't recommend it as an introduction to Jonathan Swift. If you haven't read him before, I'd start with one of his later works, like "A Modest Proposal" or "Gulliver's Travels" – both equally funny and vicious, but easier to understand today. Then dive into "A Tale Of A Tub" if you like.
Benshlomo says, Young writers, like young people of many vocations, can be inclined to show off.
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