CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

INTRODUCTION

The two pieces here reproduced have long been unavailable; their connections with Arbuthnot are rather complex. The Story of the St. Alb-ns Ghost has been ambiguously associated with Arbuthnot since the year of its first publication, but it does not seem to have been reprinted e the nineteenth century when editors regularly included it among the minor works of Swift. Whoever wrote it, the Story is a lively and effective Tory squib, whose narrative vigor can carry even the twentieth-century reader over the occasional topical obscurities. A Catalogue of the ... Library of ... Dr. Arbuthnot has never been reprinted at all, and appears to be unknown by scholars who have thus far written about Arbuthnot.

The Story of the St. Alb-ns Ghost, the first piece included, has always been of doubtful authorship, and must for the present so continue. Two days after the Story first appeared, Swift tantalizingly wrote to Stella: "I went to Ld Mashams to night, & Lady Masham made me read to her a pretty 2 penny Pamphlet calld the St Albans Ghost. I thought I had writt it my self; so did they, but I did not" (22 February 1712). Whoever wrote it, the Story succeeded: it was pirated within a week, and had reached its third regular "edition" within three weeks of the first; it appeared in a fifth and apparently final edition on 19 July 1712.[1] Now just during these same months Arbuthnot was producing his first political satires, five pamphlets later gathered under the title History of John Bull. He published the first of these 4 March 1712 and the last 31 July 1712.[2] There are several thematic and methodological connections between The Story of The St. Alb-ns Ghost and the John Bull pamphlets: as Tory propaganda pieces, they attack leading Whigs and make the usual suggestions about irreligion, moral turpitude and misuse of public funds. Furthermore, they do so by means of vigorous if sometimes difficult reductive allegories which mock the victims by presenting them as farcical figures from low life. The connection as well as the difficulties must have appeared quite early, for some enterprising publisher (presumably Curll)[3] soon brought out A Complete Key to the Three Parts of Law is a Bottomless-Pit, and the Story of the St. Alban's Ghost. Although the exact date of this is not known, it must lie between the termini 17 April and 9 May 1712, the dates of the third and fourth parts respectively of John Bull. Furthermore, a "Second Edition Corrected" of the Key appeared before the publication of pamphlet four. (The last pages of these two Keys, concerning the Story of the St. Alb-ns Ghost, are reproduced in the Appendix.) The Key ran through two further editions as A Complete Key to the Four Parts of Law is a Bottomless-Pit, and the Story of the St. Alban's Ghost, presumably before 31 July 1712, and came to a fifth (seemingly last) edition with a more general title referring to "all Parts" of John Bull, and still including the Story.

While the Keys by association suggest Arbuthnot as author, the only other contemporary document attributes the Story to a different physician and wit: the so-called Miscellaneous Works of Dr. William Wagstaffe (London, 1726) reprint the fourth edition of the Story. Now the Miscellaneous Works were printed some five months after the death of Dr. Wagstaffe and more than three months after that of the supposed editor Dr. Levett;[4] it is possible that the contents are in part erroneous. In any case, Arbuthnot, Wagstaffe and Swift remain the possible authors with whom scholars must deal until some further evidence is forthcoming. Roscoe interprets Swift's ambiguous remarks in the Journal to Stella as an indirect acknowledgement, and Dilke goes one step further in assuming that the so-called Miscellaneous Works of Dr. Wagstaffe are a mystification, a means for Swift to pass off works which he did not wish to include in the Miscellanies with Pope. Sir Walter Scott thinks that the Story is probably a collaboration between Arbuthnot and Swift, "judging from the style"; Professor Herbert Davis dissociates Wagstaffe material generally from the writings of Swift, but does not specifically mention the Story; however, "Mr. Granger thought St. Alban's Ghost, attributed to Dr. Wagstaffe, was [Arbuthnot's]."[5]

Although recent scholars seem to agree in selecting Wagstaffe as author of the Story, the evidence of the 1726 Works is implicitly contradicted by the Keys. I have made two separate attempts to solve the question of authorship, neither of which has been fully satisfactory. The first of these, a computerized test based on the methods of Professor Louis T. Milic for distinguishing works by Swift from works by other authors, has given inconclusive results. In this test the Story was the chief unknown, and was compared with samples of similar length from Swift, Arbuthnot, Wagstaffe and, as a control, Mrs. Manley, who wrote politically keyed narratives but has never been associated with the Story. The Story turned out to be fairly similar to all four authors in the number of different three-word patterns (D), and unlike all of them in number of Introductory Connectives (IC), where Wagstaffe stood the highest, and the Story by far the lowest. In the proportion of Verbals (VB) the Story and Wagstaffe were fairly close together and different from the other authors tested, who clustered near the Swift figures. Thus the test tends to exclude Swift, Arbuthnot and Mrs. Manley as possible authors, but does not encourage a full confidence in replacing them with Wagstaffe. (It also tends to show that some of the other pieces included in the so-called Miscellaneous Works of Dr. Wagstaffe differ considerably in the usages tested both from one another and from the patterns established by the signed works of Dr. Walstaffe.)[6]