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'There is no such man as Isaack Bickerstaff': Partridge, Pittis, and Jonathan Swift

This article appeared in a special issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century Life, co-edited by the author, which contains the proceedings of a conference on eighteenth century letters held in Oxford in 2008. The subject matter of the articles is diverse—from astrological almanacs to early aeronauts—but taken as a whole this collection of essays relates the practical and ethical problems of editing letters to theoretical and methodological issues in literary and historical studies. The volume closes with a miniature edition of the earliest correspondence of the publisher Jacob Tonson the Elder (in themselves valuable documents now made available to scholars) that puts into practice the various approaches to editing letters discussed at the conference and within this special issue. The contributors are a mixture of early career scholars and leading academics from the UK and North America, including Dr. Clare Brant, the author of the most influential recent book on eighteenth-century letters. Two particularly important articles, by Prof. Peter Sabor and Dr. Abigail Williams, present the intellectual basis for two significant new editions of eighteenth-century correspondence (The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson and Jonathan Swift, The Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley 1710–1713, both from Cambridge University Press). These are major new editions that will occupy library shelves for years, and the interventions made by Sabor and Williams, the implications of which are unfolded in this special issue, will shape future scholarship on Richardson and Swift. The author requests that his article be read in this context.