Tag: Swift’s printer

Evidence that Swift’s Drapier’s Letters were prepared by Sarah Harding, not John Harding

Wooden box with arranged printing press letters

Swift’s Drapier’s Letters all stated on their title pages that they were ‘Printed by John Harding of Molesworth’s Court’ but new evidence shows that the actual printing work was performed by Harding’s wife, Sarah. It is evidence that casts new light on a particular aspect of the prosecution levelled against the fourth of the Drapier’s Letters in late 1724.

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Jonathan Swift – evidence that he was involved in a murder in 1724

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.

Continued on Tinteán: a magazine for Irish Australia.