A Tale of a Tub is Jonathan Swift at his most vicious, most playful, and most unreadable which is precisely why it remains essential. Written in secret between 1694 and 1697 and published without the author's consent in 1704, this prose labyrinth pairs a simple allegory three brothers, each representing a branch of Western Christianity with a sprawling, manic series of digressions that parody everything from scholarly footnotes to medical quackery to political panphlets. The surface story satirizes religious excess with brutal directness. The digressions, by contrast, attack the very act of writing and reading, flooding the reader with mocked-up prefaces, fake appeals to patrons, and endless interruptions that themselves become the joke. Swift intended this as an attack on enthusiasm, pride, and credulity in all their forms, religious and secular. The work made him famous and notorious in equal measure. Queen Anne herself thought it profane, and Swift later believed it cost him advancement in the Church. It is a book that refuses to let you comfortable, attacking its targets while simultaneously mocking the very language used to attack them. For readers who relish difficulty, who want satire that works on multiple levels at once, who want to understand how modern irony was born this is where it begins.
