Jonathan Swift, privy to a murder? Could the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the champion of the Irish people and the man widely considered the greatest ever prose writer in the English language, have been party to the purposeful killing of another human being, his own printer? This is what I am asserting in an aspect of my research which has grown from my 2015 thesis, which was concerned with Swift’s dealings with the Dublin print industry in the 1720’s. It seems a preposterous notion. Evidence that has never been seen in almost three hundred years? Of a murder that implicates a writer who has been universally revered from before his death in 1745 through to and including today? This evidence, in my view, has been on the face of the record all this time.
Continue reading in Tinteán: a magazine for Irish Australia.Tag: Swift’s printer
‘The death of Swift’s printer John Harding – new evidence that implicates Swift’, Melbourne Irish Studies Seminar Series, 17 November 2020.
With an introduction by Professor Dianne Hall. Zoom presentation accessible here.
”Elegy on the death of John Harding’ (April 1725) – evidence of Swift’s authorship’, presented in the XVII David Nicol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies: Dark Enlightenments, virtual conference, 13 November – 11 December 2020.
Video presentation accessible here.
