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Jonathan Swift's Hoax of 1722 Upon Ebenezor Elliston

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Jonathan Swift's Hoax of 1722 Upon Ebenezor Elliston JONATHAN SWIFT'S HOAX OF 1722 UPON EBENEZOR ELLISTON BY GEORGE P. MAYHEW, M.A., Ph.D. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY I HILE examining some Dublin newspapers from the Wperiod 1719-22 I lately came upon additional information which may be useful to readers of Dr. Daniel L. McCue's recent scholarly account of " A Newly Discovered Broadsheet of Swift's Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezor Elliston '. * In addition to Swift's parody, the three other sources of information about Ebenezor Elliston, the victim of Swift's hoax of 1722, have hitherto been : The Last Farewell of Ebenezor Elliston To This Transitory World, an autobiographical Dublin broadsheet of 1722 preserved now in Archbishop Marsh's Library, Dublin, and printed by Professor Herbert Davis as an Appendix (pp. 363-7) to volume IX of his edition of Swift's Prose Writings ; 2 George Faulkner's headnote to Swift's broadsheet as published in the 1735 Dublin edition of Swift's Works ;3 and a note appended to the same piece by Thomas Sheridan, the younger, in his 1784 edition of Swift's Works.* Both of these last two pieces of in­ formation were accepted without question and have been merely paraphrased or summarized by such later editors of Swift's Works as John Nichols, who mistakenly attributed Sheridan's note to Faulkner, by Sir Walter Scott, and by Temple Scott.5 1 Harvard Library Bulletin, xiii (Autumn, 1959), 362-8. Hereafter referred to within the text by page number alone. 2 14 vols., Oxford, 1939- (in progress). Hereafter referred to within the text by vol. and page number alone and in the footnotes as Davis, Prose Writings. Swift's broadsheet as printed by Faulkner is contained in vol. ix, pp. 35-41. 3 Vol. iv, P. 375. 4 Vol.ix, P.300. 5 See vol. xii, p. 55 of Nichols's edn. of 1801 ; vol. vi, p. 296 of Scott's 2nd edn. of 1824 (reprinted 1883-4), hereafter referred to as W. Scott, Swift's Work*; vol. vii, p. 55 of Temple Scott's edn. of 1897-1908, hereafter referred to as T. Scott, Prose Worths. 360 JONATHAN SWIFT'S HOAX OF 1722 361 The two following accounts from Whalley's [Dublin] News- letter, a report of the action of the Dublin burgesses upon a petition by Elliston, and an advertisement from Hardings Im~ partial [Dublin] News-letter, published by John Harding, the printer of both Swift's broadsheet and of Elliston's Last Farewell, furnish additional information about Elliston's life of crime and the perpetration of Swift's hoax upon him. In fact, the advertise­ ment seems to me to refer to the forthcoming publication of the very broadsheet discovered at Harvard by Dr. McCue. These newspaper accounts show that the method of Jonathan Swift's macabre joke upon Ebenezer Elliston follows the pattern earlier established by Swift in such other hoaxes as, for instance, the famous one on Partridge in 1708.1 The date and wording of Harding's advertisement show that Swift's realistic parody of a criminal's "dying " speech was set up some time in advance of the actual, and in this case, the literal, springing of the trap on 2 May 1722, the day of Elliston's execution. The additional information from Dublin records and newspapers permits us also to trace more clearly Swift's motives in singling out Elliston as his victim, to evaluate with some precision the efficacy of Swift's method of satiric verisimilitude, and, finally, to establish the signi­ ficance of his hoax on Elliston within the wider scope and aims of Swift's satire between 1720 and 1727, during which time The Drapier Letters and Gulliver's Travels were being written and eventually published. At almost the very moment in 1720 when the miserable con­ dition of the weavers of Dublin compelled Swift to break his six years of silence and once more to take up his pen in aid of his oppressed country, the first notice of Ebenezor Elliston, a " much reduced " weaver of silk or stockings, appeared as a news report in Whalleys News-letter for Saturday, 5 March 1729/20 : Dublin, Mar. 5. At the Quarter-Sessions of this City Yesterday [Friday, March 4,1720] Derby MacCormuck a famous Robber, who for some time past, has pestered this City and the Roads, leading to it, Jam. McManus and James Keating, a Boy about 16 or 17 Years of Age, all of the Gang of Mc.Cormuck were 1 See also Irvin Ehrenpreis, " Swift's April Fool for a Bibliophile ", The Book-Collector, ii (1953), 205-8. There (p. 208) Professor Ehrenpreis remarks that " Swift's notions for hoaxes were not often original. He generally picked 24.
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