It speaks well for Motte's sagacity that he should have been willing to undertake the publishing of so violent a book at all, and we are little surprised that he balked at certain passages, and that, to avoid offense, "he got those alterations and insertions made" which Swift afterward so bitterly resented. In the letter to Knightley Chetwood quoted above, Swift said: "In my Judgment I should think it hath been mangled in the press, for in some parts it doth not seem of a piece, but I shall hear more when I am in England." In a letter to Ford written more than six years later, we find him still recurring to the matter:
"Now you may please to remember how much I complained of Motte's suffering some friend of his (I suppose it was Mr. Tooke, a clergyman, now dead) not onely to blot out some things that he thought might give offence, but to insert a good deal contrary to the author's manner and style and intention. I think you had a Gulliver interleaved and set right in those mangled and murdered pages ... To say the truth I cannot with patience endure that mingled and mangled manner as it came from Motte's hands, and it will be extremely difficult for me to correct it by other means, with so ill a memory and so bad a state of health." Swift had good reason to complain about this matter as he did, personally and through Ford, who wrote to Motte blaming him for the printer's gross errors. "Besides the whole sting is absent out of several passages in order to soften them. Thus the style is debased, the humours quite lost, and the matter insipid," cries the enraged author. The interleaved copy was forthcoming, and the text as corrected was printed in Dublin in 1735.
The bibliography of the book is perplexing. There seem to have been four distinct issues, or, rather, editions, during the first year; while copies of the same edition show many variations. The edition to which the large paper copies belong is usually called the first. In it the four parts are paged separately, and the portrait of Gulliver, signed "Sturt et. Sheppard. Sc.," is found in two states. One of these states, evidently the first, has the inscription, "Captain Lemuel Gulliver, of Redriff Ætat. ſuæ 58.," in two lines below the oval. The other has the inscription around the oval, as follows: "Captain Lemuel Gulliver Of Redriff Ætat. Suæ LVIII.," and beneath, where the name was before, a quotation from Persius now appears.
The three other editions have distinct differences of type, setting and ornaments. The portrait in all of these is of the second state. Two of these editions have the parts paged separately, but one has a continuous pagination for each volume. One edition was reissued in 1727, with verses by Pope prefixed. On the title-page of the first volume it is called "second edition," and on that of the second volume, "second edition corrected." This edition was probably considered by the publisher to be the most correct, and was therefore, probably, the last issued in 1726.
Octavo.
Collation: Two volumes. Volume I: 1 l., xvi, 148 pp.; 3 ll., 164 pp. Volume II: 3 ll., 155 pp.; 4 ll., 199 pp. Portrait, four maps.
ALEXANDER POPE
(1688-1744)
43. An | Essay | On | Man | Addreſs'd to a Friend. | Part I. | [Printer's ornament] London: | Printed for J. Wilford, at the Three Flower-de-luces, be- | hind the Chapter-Houſe, St. Pauls. | [Price One Shilling.]