In 1726, Jonathan Swift, dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, crossed the Irish Sea with the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels in his luggage. Beneath the child-friendly chatter about a sailor marooned on an island full of tiny Lilliputians, the book was a scabrous satire on the corruption of public life under the politically ascendant Whigs, whom Swift regarded as a pack of moral pygmies.
Swift's ultimate destination, though, was not Whitehall but rather the idyllic Twickenham – "Twitnam", as they knew it – home of his old friend, the poet Alexander Pope. Here he intended to work out a plan for anonymous publication of his sulphurous masterpiece, one that would not land him in legal trouble. In Pope he could be sure of a sympathetic co-conspirator. Both men were members of the Scriblerus Club, an unofficial association of dissident wits who nonetheless set great store by literary collaboration. Pope was equally disaffected with the state of the nation, although his loathing was directed towards the philistine Hanoverians, who had arrived from Germany in 1714 to take up the British throne. Pope, whose Catholicism disqualified him from royal patronage, made a big point of not having to scramble for favours from the court. Instead, he emphasised the superiority of his life of suburban independence on the banks of the Thames.
The third hero of Hester Grant's enjoyable dip into the world of early Georgian satire is John Gay, author of The Beggar's Opera. The musical comedy comprised a savage takedown of Robert Walpole, leader of the all-conquering Whigs, whom Gay regarded as no better than a highwayman and a thief. Unlike Swift and Pope, though, Gay reserved his invective solely for his writing. The rest of the time he was a sunshiny soul, fond of a drink and hopeless with money, forever scrounging a bed for the night. In the summer of 1726 he fetched up at Twitnam to stay at Pope's exquisitely designed villa, which came complete with an underground grotto furnished with flints, shells and glittering glass.
It wasn't all lovely. Grant is very good on the less salubrious aspects of life in the 18th century. Take Swift's regular trundle between Dublin and London. An expensive carriage ride meant sealing yourself into a fetid, jiggery box with five strangers while trying hard not to vomit into their laps (Swift was vulnerable here thanks to Ménière's disease, which played havoc with his balance). Then there was the endless lying around in grubby lodgings in a small port such as Holyhead while you waited for the tide and weather to turn in your favour. Factor in luggage that travelled separately and was virtually bound to go astray, and it is no wonder Swift got the reputation for being a misanthrope.
Less successful perhaps is Grant's decision to organise this group biography around the proposition that these few weeks in 1726 were some of "the most consequential in English literary history", marking a "pivotal moment" in each man's career. The stubborn fact remains that Swift had already written Gulliver's Travels by the time he turned up at Twitnam, while Pope was still labouring on a tedious translation of Homer, which he was doing for the money (he was never quite the free spirit he liked to suggest). His masterpiece, The Dunciad, about the stupidity of the Hanoverian court, would not see the light of day for another two years. John Gay, meanwhile, spent the high summer of 1726 doing his usual shilly-shallying: it would be 1727 before he got down to writing The Beggar's Opera.
There is, of course, a case to be made that these summer weeks were a kind of creative laboratory, which produced several proofs of concept that would ultimately bear fruit in literary masterpieces. But Grant has to work very hard to convince the reader that these three clever men were doing anything different from what clever people always do when they get together: gossiping, chatting and going off on a hundred different tangents. In her previous book, which concerned a largely unknown set of siblings, the Sharps, who rose to social and political prominence in the 1780s, Grant did an excellent job of maintaining a sense of cohesion. Here she writes as beautifully as before, yet fails to make a persuasive case for braiding together three already very famous literary lives.
The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver's Travels by Hester Grant is published by William Collins (£25).
