Among the jocularities of literature none is greater than Squire Bickerstaff’s; and none has had greater results—with perhaps one exception. The practicality of the Squire’s jest and the flavor of it suited the century of Squire Western rather than our own. But its excuse was in the end it served of breaking the old astrologer’s hold upon the people.
Jonathan Swift is the writer to whom the original Bickerstaff squibs are in the main to be ascribed. It is due to Swift’s clarity and strength that they are among the best of literary fooling.
But Swift was not alone. He had the help of Addison, Steele, Prior, Congreve, and other wits of Will’s Coffee-House and St. James’s. Together they set all London laughing. Upon Swift’s shoulders, however, falls the onus of the joke which must have been his recreation amid pamphleteering and the smudging of his ecclesiastical hand with political ink. It happened in 1708.
The English almanac was not in Swift’s day as in later times a simple calendar of guesses about the weather. It was rather a “prognosticator” in ambiguous phrase of war, pestilence, murder, and such horrors as our yellow press nowadays serves up to readers, like in development to the conning public of the old almanacs. It was at all times solemn and dogmatic. What the almanac prognosticated was its philomath’s duty to furnish. His science and pre-science builded a supposed influence of the stars and their movements upon the moral life of man.
Squire Bicker staff’s jest had to do with almanac-makers, and was directed against a chief pretender, Dr. Partridge, the astrologer and philomath Pope refers to when he speaks of the translation of the raped “Lock” to the skies:
“This Partridge soon shall view in cloudless skies,
When next he looks through Galileo’s eyes;
And hence th’ egregious wizard shall foredoom
The fate of Louis and the fall of Rome.”
In the seventeenth century the ascendency of these charlatans had become alarming. One of the most adroit and unscrupulous of their number—William Lilly—had large following. They not only had the popular ear, but now and then a man like Dryden inclined to them. Nor did Sir Thomas Browne “reject a sober and regulated astrology.”
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the scandal of their excesses was growing, and it was then that Swift came forward—just as Swift was constantly coming forward with his great humanity, in one instance to save Ireland the infliction of Wood’s halfpence, and again in protest against English restriction of Irish trade; poor Swift’s heart was always with the poor, the duped and undefended—it was then that Swift came forward with “Predictions for the year 1708. Wherein the Month, and the Day of the Month, are set down, the Person named, and the great Actions and Events of next Year particularly related, as They will come to Pass. Written to Prevent the People of England from being farther imposed on by the vulgar Almanack-Makers.”
The surname of the signature, “Isaac Bickerstaff,” Swift took from a locksmith’s sign. The Isaac he added as not commonly in use.
“I have considered,” he begins, “the gross abuse of astrology in this kingdom, and upon debating the matter with myself, I could not possibly lay the fault upon the art, but upon those gross impostors, who set up to be the artists. I know several learned men have contended that the whole is a cheat; that it is absurd and ridiculous to imagine the stars can have any influence at all upon human actions, thoughts, or inclinations; and whoever has not bent his studies that way may be excused for thinking so, when he sees in how wretched a manner that noble art is treated by a few mean, illiterate traders between us and the stars; who import a yearly stock of nonsense, lies, folly, and impertinence, which they offer to the world as genuine from the planets, though they descend from no greater a height than their own brains....