Swift on False Witness

This essay discusses discussions of the status and reliability of direct witness in antiquity and in the Early Modern period, situating within the homelitic tradition on 'sins of the tongue' Jonathan Swift's 1715 sermon on the ninth commandment. In the context of the Jacobite rebellion and the repression that followed, this sermon must be read as a challenge to the 'spies and informers' which he and his Tory friends felt themselves to be surrounded. The essay then broadens the issue, finding on Gulliver's Travels a generalised distrust of direct testimony, a distrust which connects interestingly with Swift's skeptical attitude to the early novel, which relied heavily on first person witnesses narrators as guarantors of authenticity.