SWIFT, Jonathan, and others.

£22,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

An Excellent New Ballad: or, the True E---sh Dean to be Hang'd for a R-----pe. A substantial volume of political, legal, and ecclesiastical tracts, a coherent archive of Irish High-Church and Tory pamphleteering from the decades in which Swift was politically active, including several items relating to controversies in which he was directly or indirectly engaged. The latest piece included is the rare first edition of Swift's 1730 broadside mocking the Reverend Thomas Sawbridge.In the Ballad, Swift satirizes Sawbridge, Dean of Ferns, who was accused in June 1730 of raping Susanna Runcard. Following a trial later in the same month, Sawbridge was acquitted, according to Swift, because "he bought her off", with no effect on his deanship. Swift uses the dean's actions to comment on the broader English ecclesiastical elite and their sense of impunity in Ireland. Two works by members of Swift's Dublin-London literary network are William Congreve's The Mourning Muse of Alexis (1695) and William King's The Fairy Feast (1704), the latter attributed to Swift in its title. Also included is the defence of Swift's friend Bishop Atterbury against the pains and penalties imposed on him.Six items relate directly to the Irish Toleration controversy of the 1690s, in which High-Church Anglicans opposed concessions to Presbyterian dissenters. Five relate to Church of Ireland institutional politics. Others cluster around the Irish Tory ascendancy during Swift's most active political years (1710-14

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