|
ILOVALAR
NOTE ON THE TEXT
The text of Gulliver’s Travels given here is taken from volume xi of Herbert Davis’s edition of Swift’s Prose Writings (1965 reprint). It is based on volume iii of George Faulkner’s Dublin edition of Swift’s Works (1735). This text of 1735 seems to have come closer to what Swift originally wrote than the first edition of 1726, and also to have contained revisions representing his last ideas for the book.
First state frontispiece portrait of Gulliver and title-page from the first issue of the first edition, 1726
Portrait of Gulliver from the duodecimo
edition, 1735
EXPLANATORY NOTES
The notes in this edition are indebted to Paul Turner, editor of the Oxford University Press edition of Gulliver’s Travels in 1971 (published as a World’s Classics paperback in 1986). Paul Turner’s notes are the basis for the annotation in this new edition and many of Turner’s glosses, and extensive notes (identified as PT) remain unchanged or only slightly altered here. There is a vast scholarly commentary on Gulliver’s Travels and its contexts, and many sources, analogues, and allusions have been discovered. A comprehensive handbook of Swift’s library and reading identifying where Swift is known to have quoted from, referred to, or alluded to an author in his writings is Dirk F. Passmann and Heinz J. Vienken, The Library and Reading of Jonathan Swift: A Bio-Bibliographical Handbook (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003– ). These notes attempt to focus on essential explanation indicating sources, allusions, and analogues which seem particularly germane to an understanding of the meaning and resonance of a passage. Words and phrases defined in standard dictionaries such as the Concise Oxford Dictionary are not normally glossed here.
All references to classical texts are taken from the relevant volume in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) unless otherwise stated. Biblical references are to the King James Authorized Version. References to Shakespeare are to The Oxford Shakespeare, General Editor Stanley Wells (Oxford University Press).
5 Advertisement. First added in Faulkner’s edition of 1735. Mr. Sympson’s Letter to Captain Gulliver: in fact, it is Captain Gulliver’s letter to his Cousin Sympson. See the discussion of the front matter, Introduction, pp. xv–xxii.
Interpolations . . . made by a Person since deceased: Swift complained that the Reverend Andrew Tooke (d. 1732), a silent partner and mentor of the London publisher Benjamin Motte, had altered the manuscript of the Travels before publication. In October 1733, preparing for the new edition to be published in Dublin by George Faulkner, Swift reminded his friend Charles Ford ‘how much I complained of Motts suffering some friend of his (I suppose it was Mr Took a Clergy-man now dead) not onely to blot out some things that he thought might give offence, but to insert a good deal of trash contrary to the Author’s manner and Style, and Intention’ (Corr., iii. 693. For Swift’s complaints that his satire in the first edition of 1726 had been altered by Motte and Tooke, see also Corr., iii. 57, 66–69, 708) compliment the Memory: Part IV, chapter vi of Motte’s first edition contains an extended passage that was cut from the revised edition published by Faulkner in Dublin in 1735. The passage contains a panegyric of Queen Anne that is also a transparent attack by innuendo on the honour of King George I and imputes a connection between the monarch and his corrupt ministry. The passage was specifically disclaimed as an interpolated paragraph by Charles Ford, writing to Motte, as a friend of the author, on 3 January 1727 (Corr., iii. 66). In ‘A Letter
from Capt. Gulliver, to his Cousin Sympson’, Swift has Gulliver ‘renounce’ all interpolations, ‘particularly a Paragraph about her Majesty the late Queen Anne’. The chapter heading in the Motte edition provocatively praised Queen Anne, reading in part: ‘A Continuation of the State of England, so well governed by a Queen as to need no first Minister’. The ‘interpolation’ reads as follows: ‘I told him, that our She Governor or Queen having no Ambition to gratify, no Inclination to satisfy of extending her Power to the Injury of her Neighbours, or the Prejudice of her own Subjects, was therefore so far from needing a corrupt Ministry to carry on or cover any sinister Designs, that She not only directs her own Actions to the Good of her People, conducts them by the Direction, and restrains them within the Limitation of the Laws of her own Country; but submits the Behaviour and Acts of those She intrusts with the Administration of Her Affairs to the Examination of Her great Council, and subjects them to the Penalties of the Law; and therefore never puts any such Confidence in any of her Subjects as to entrust them with the
whole and entire Administration of her Affairs: But I added, that in some former Reigns here, and in many other Courts of Europe now, where Princes grew indolent and careless of their own Affairs.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
