"His Hob-Nailed Shoes: Time as a Creature and Reformation Polemic in Swift's A Tale of a Tub"

Ferguson, Rebecca. "His Hob-Nailed Shoes: Time as a Creature and Reformation Polemic in Swift's A Tale of a Tub," Reading Swift: Papers from the Seventh Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift," ed. Janika Bischof, Kirsten Juhas, and Hermann J. Real. Leiden, Netherlands: Wilhelm Fink, 2019. Pp. 128-165.

Perhaps Blake's most annoying revision of eighteenth-century thought was his dubious declaration that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." This comes to mind when confronting the 700 pages and twenty-six essays of this volume; Swift might have pointed out the irony of this plethora. Ferguson annotates two sentences in A Tale of a Tub with thirty-seven pages and ninety-four footnotes of historical background; as with the Dunciad Variorum, the text is overwhelmed by notes.

This is not to belittle Ferguson's information-gathering skills, but rather to suggest that self-control is not always a bad idea. The classical and medieval background of Time as devourer, an...