A Tale Of A Tub

“I should now, in right of a dedicator, give your Lordship a list of your own virtues, and at the same time be very unwilling to offend your modesty; but chiefly I should celebrate your liberality towards men of great parts and small fortunes, and give you broad hints that I mean myself.”

At the beginning of the book, Swift puts in a letter written to John Lord Somers. In it, he writes about the book that he will be presenting to the Lord and says that he will tell the Lord about the Lord’s own virtues and asks him if he will protect the manuscript. Perhaps he wrote this letter to Lord Somers because before he became a lawyer and Lord Chancellor, he was a writer and still held a high appreciation for literature. It seemed that if anyone in government had a sympathetic ear, it would be him.

“I do here make bold to present your Highness with a faithful abstract drawn from the universal body of all arts and sciences, intended wholly for your service and instruction.”

The narrator (or Swift) writes to the King to tell him about his book. He states that it is about all subjects meant for the King to learn from. Indeed, A Tale of a Tub has much for the King to process, but perhaps Swift is being facetious when he says that it is meant to benefit the King because it seems that the King will either fail to understand the allegories, or have Swift’s head.

“To this end, at a grand committee some days ago, this important discovery was made by a certain curious and refined observer, that seamen have a custom when they meet a Whale to fling him out an empty Tub, by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the Ship.”

Seamen use a tub in order to push a whale away from the ship. Swift compares this whale to Hobbes’s Leviathan, which was a critique of religion and government.