A Tale of a Tub Reading Order

A Tale of a Tub (1704) by Jonathan Swift is one of the most savage and formally innovative satirical works in English literature — a prose piece that purports to be written by a mad modern author who digresses so wildly that the digressions overwhelm the main text, satirizing simultaneously the hack writers of Grub Street, the theological controversies between Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Dissent (represented as three brothers, Peter, Martin, and Jack, who inherit a coat from their father and proceed to ruin it in different ways), and the vanity of all learned projects. The book is accompanied by The Battle of the Books (a prose satire on the Ancients-versus-Moderns controversy) and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Swift wrote it in the late 1690s, published it anonymously in 1704, and it was so radical in its apparent mockery of religion that Swift's enemies cited it against him throughout his career — he was never given an English bishopric, and many blamed the Tale. The formal joke at the book's center is that the satire has become so out of control that even the satirist cannot control it: the footnotes multiply, the digressions proliferate, and by the end the modern author has forgotten the allegory of the three brothers entirely. It is the most demanding of Swift's prose works and the one that rewards closest reading most richly.