Today, 19 April 2025, marks 300 years since the death of John Harding, Swift’s Dublin printer. Harding took the risk on Swift’s pseudonymous Drapier’s Letters. For the fourth of these Letters, he was imprisoned to await trial, where he would been interrogated as to the true identity of M. B. Drapier, but that court appearance never eventuated. The evidence that Harding was murdered in order to protect Swift, possibly even with tacit knowledge on Swift’s part, is crystal clear, but for 300 years historians have pretended otherwise with a wilful blindness that makes comedy of Swift Studies and eighteenth-century Irish History.
This article presents the argument in short form. A full-length article is accessible via the ’18th Century Studies’ page of this blog.
Craig Pett, Independent journalist 