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Reading the Material Text of Swift's Verses on the Death.(Critical Essay)

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From: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Date: 20010622
Author:KARIAN, STEPHEN

Most modern readers of Jonathan Swift's greatest poem encounter a text that eighteenth-century readers would never have known. When we read a modem edition of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, we generally find a single version, entirely printed, containing no lacunae, and with footnotes either reduced in size or relegated to the back of the book. The visual and material qualities of eighteenth-century texts often differ from modern ones, but in the case of the Verses those differences are not only in degree but in kind. In the eighteenth century there were two dramatically ...

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