INTRODUCTION.
INTRODUCTION.
When Swift began to write the letters known as the Journal to Stella, he was
forty-two years of age, and Esther Johnson twenty-nine. Perhaps the most
useful introduction to the correspondence will be a brief setting forth of
what is known of their friendship from Stella's childhood, the more specially
as the question has been obscured by many assertions and theories resting on a
very slender basis of fact.
Jonathan Swift, born in 1667 after his father's death, was educated by his
uncle Godwin, and after a not very successful career at Trinity College,
Dublin, went to stay with his mother, Abigail Erick, at Leicester. Mrs. Swift
feared that her son would fall in love with a girl named Betty Jones, but, as
Swift told a friend, he had had experience enough "not to think of marriage
till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am sure will not be in some
years; and even then, I am so hard to please that I suppose I shall put it off
to the other world." Soon afterwards an opening for Swift presented itself.
Sir William Temple, now living in retirement at Moor Park, near Farnham, had
been, like his father, Master of the Irish Rolls, and had thus become
acquainted with Swift's uncle Godwin. Moreover, Lady Temple was related to
Mrs. Swift, as Lord Orrery tells us. Thanks to these facts, the application
to Sir William Temple was successful, and Swift went to live at Moor Park
before the end of 1689. There he read to Temple, wrote for him, and kept his
accounts, and growing into confidence with his employer, "was often trusted
with matters of great importance." The story--afterwards improved upon by
Lord Macaulay--that Swift received only 20 pounds and his board, and was not
allowed to sit at table with his master, is wholly untrustworthy. Within
three years of their first intercourse, Temple had introduced his secretary to
William the Third, and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a
bill for triennial Parliaments.
When Swift took up his residence at Moor Park he found there a little girl of
eight, daughter of a merchant named Edward Johnson, who had died young. Swift
says that Esther Johnson was born on March 18, 1681; in the parish register of
Richmond,[1] which shows that she was baptized on March 20, 1680-81, her name
is given as Hester; but she signed her will "Esther," the name by which she
was always known. Swift says, "Her father was a younger brother of a good
family in Nottinghamshire, her mother of a lower degree; and indeed she had
little to boast in her birth." Mrs. Johnson had two children, Esther and Ann,
and lived at Moor Park as companion to Lady Giffard, Temple's widowed sister.
Another member of the household, afterwards to be Esther's constant companion,
was Rebecca Dingley, a relative of the Temple family.[2] She was a year or
two older than Swift.
The lonely young man of twenty-two was both playfellow and teacher of the
delicate child of eight. How he taught her to write has been charmingly
brought before us in the painting exhibited by Miss Dicksee at the Royal
Academy a few years ago; he advised her what books to read, and instructed
her, as he says, "in the principles of honour and virtue, from which she never
swerved in any one action or moment of her life."
By 1694 Swift had grown tired of his position, and finding that Temple, who