Thomas Sheridan (1687-1738)

Bibliographical details

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Commentary
Jonathan Swift, Blunders, Deficiencies, Distresses and Misfortunates of Quilca (1724), on shortcomings of Sheridan’s home in Co. Cavan: ‘But one lock and a half in the whole house. The key of the garden lost ... The door of the Dean’s bed-chamber full of large chinks ... the Dean’s bed threatening every night to fall under him ... the little table loose and broken in the joints [...]. A great hole in the floor of the ladies’ chamber, every hour haphazarding a broken leg’. (Quoted in Constantia Maxwell, Ireland Under the Georges (1940; rev. 1949), with the remark that ‘Quilca was the little house in Co. Cavan which belonged to his thriftless friend Thomas Sheridan, where he himself had occasionally spent many happy weeks of quiet enjoyment in the company of Mrs Dingley and Esther Johnson, and where he is said to have written part of Gulliver’s Travels. (op. cit., p.93, ftn.)

Further: ‘But one chair in the house for sitting on, and tha is in a very ill state of health. / The kitchen perpetually crowded with savages. Not a bit of turf in this cold weather; and Mrs Johnson [Stella] and the Dean in person, with all their servants, forced to assist at the bog, in gathering [...]’ (Quoted in Victoria Glendinning, Jonathan Swift, Hutchinson 1998, pp.163-64; cited in Pauline Holland, doct. diss., UUC 2004.)

Jonathan Swift, “History of the Second Solomon”, in Works, ed. Hawksworth, Vol. XI (1784).

[...] Solomon has no ill design upon any person but himself, and he is the greatest deceiver of himself on all occasions. His thoughts are sudden, and most unseasonable alway comes uppermost and he constantly revolves and acts upon his first thoughts; and then asks advice, but never once before. The person mentioned, whom he lampooned in three months after their acquaintance, procured him a good preferment from the Lord Lieutenant: Upon going down to take possession, Solomon preached, at Corke, a sermon on King George’s birthday, on tis texts, Sufficient to the day is the evil therefore. Solomon haivn been famous for a high Tory, and suspected as a Jacobite, it was a most difficult thing to get any [320] thing for him: But that person being an old friend of Lord Carteret, prevailed against all Solomon’s enemies, and got him made likewise one of his Excellencies chaplains. But, upon this sermon, he was struck out of the list, and forbid the Castle, until that same person brought him again to the Lieutenant, and made them friends. A fancy sprung in Solomon’s head,, that a house near Dublin would be commodious for him anjd his boarders, to lodge in on Saturdays and Sundays: Immediately, without consulting with any creature, he takes a leaf of a rotten house at Rathfarnham, the worst air in Ireland, for 999 years, at twelve pounds a year; the land, which was only a strip of ground, not being worth twenty shillings a-year. whent he same person whom he lampooned heard the thing, he begged Solomon to get a clause of surrender, and at last prevailed to have it done after twenty-one years; because it was a madness to pay eleven pounds a-year, for a thousand yearts, for a house that could not last twenty. But Solomon made an agreement with his landlady, that he should be at liberty to surrender his lease in seven years; and, if he did not do it at that time, should be obliged to keep it for 999 years. In the meantime, he expends about one hundred pounds on the house and the garden-wallç and in less than three years, contracts such a hardred for the ouse, that he lets it run to ruin: So that [...].

(pp.320-21; static page view available at unnamed bookseller in E-Bay, 24.01.2024.)

Sir Leslie Stephen, Swift [1882] (London: Macmillan 1899): ‘After the war of Wood’s halfpence Swift became friendly with Carteret, whom he respected as a man of genuine ability, and who had besides the virtue of being thoroughly distrusted by Walpole. When Carteret was asked how he succeeded in Ireland, he replief that he had pleased Dr. Swift. Swift took advantage of the mutual goodwill to recommend several promising clerymen to Carteret’s notice. He was especially warm in behalf of Sheridan, who received the first vacant living and a chaplaincy. Sheridan characteristically spoint his own chances by preaching a sermon upon the day of the accession of the Hanoverian family, from the text, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The sermon was not political, and the selection of the text a pure accident; but Sheridan was accused of Jacobitism, and lost his chaplaincy in consequence. Though generously compensated by the friend in whose pulpit he had committed this “Sheridanism”, he got into difficulties. His school fell off; he exchanged his preferments for others less preferable; he failed in a school at Cavan, and ultimately the poor man came back to die at Dublin, in 1738, in distressed circumstances. Swift’s relations with him were thoroughl characteristic. He defended his cause energetically; gave him most admirable good advice in rather dictatorial terms; admitted him to this closest familiarity, and sometimes lost his temper when Sheridan too a liberty [192] at the wrong moment, or resented the liberties taken by himself.’ [Cont.]

Sir Leslie Stephen (Swift [1882], Macmillan 1899) - cont [no para.]: ‘ A queer character of the “Second Solomon”, written, it seems, in 1729, shows the severity with which Swift could sometimes judge his shiftless and impulsive friend, and the irritability with which he could resent occasional assertions of independence. “He is extremely proud and captious”, says Swift, and “apt to resent as an affront or indignity what was never intended for either”, but what, we must add, had a strong likeness to both. One cause of poor Sheridan’s troubles was doubtless that assigned by Swift. Mrs. Sheridan, says this frank critic, is “the most disagreeable beast in Europe”, a “most filthy slut, lazy, and slothful, luxurious, ill-natured, envious, suspicious”, and yet managing to govern Sheridan. This estimate was probably shared by her husband, who makes various references to her detestation of Swift. In spite of all jars, Swift was not only intimate with Sheridan and energetic in helping him, but to all appearances really loved him. Swift came to Sheridan’s house when the workmen were moving the furniture, preparatory to his departure for Cavan. Swift burst into tears, and hid himself in a dark closet before he could regain his self-possession. He paid a visit to his old friend afterwards; but waws now in that painful and morbid state in which violent outbreaks of passion made him frequently intolerable. Poor Sheridan rashly ventured to fulful an old engagement that he would tell Swift frankly of a growing infirmity, and said something about avarice. “Doctor”, replied Swift, significantly, “did you never read Gil Blas?” When Sheridan soon afterwards sold his school and returned to Dublin, Swift received his old friend so inhospitably that Sheridan left him, never again to enter his house. Swift [193] indeed had ceased to be Swift; and Sheridan died soon afterwards.’. [Cont.]

Sir Leslie Stephen (Swift [1882], Macmillan 1899) - cont. [next para.] ‘Swift often sought relief from the dreariness of the deaney by retiring to, or rather by taking possession of, his friends’ country-houses. In 1725 he stayed for some months, together with “the ladies”, at Quilca, a small country-house of Sheridan’s and compiled an account of the deficiencies of the establishment - meant to be continued weekly. Broken tables, doors without locks, a chimney stuffed with the dean’s great-coat, a solitary pair of tongs forced to attend all the fireplaces and also to take the meat out of the pot, holes in the floors, spikes protruding from the bedsteads, are some of the items; whilst the servants are all thieves, and act upon the proverb, “The worse their sty, the longer they lie.” Swift amused himself here and elsewhere by indulging his taste in landscape gardening, without the consent and often to the annoyance of the proprietor.’ [There follows a narration of Swift’s relations in this vein with Sir Arthur Acheson of Market Hill.] (pp.192-94; Source: Sir Leslie Stephen, Swift [1899 Edn.; rep. by BiblioLife - online; accessed 29.12.2009.) Note that Stephen was the founding editor of the DNB - for which he was knighted - and therefore the most probable author of the article therein.

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Henry Craik (Life of Jonathan Swift, 1894): ‘Most of the summers of 1724 and 1725, he [Swift] spent at Quilca, the quiet country retreat which Dr. Sheridan had made for himself in a bleak spot amongst the wildest of Cavan heaths [...] Round it have clung many traditions of its owner, Swift, and their amusements. The stretch along which Sheridan was wont, as it is said, to attempt a revival of Roman chariot races; the slope close by the lake which he used for a theatre; the seat in the garden where Stella’s arbour stood; the lake itself where Sheridan is said to have constructed an impromptu island out of twigs and turf to astonish Swift - all these have their place in the stories that haunt the neighbourhood, with a vitality strange when we consider how completely the surrounding in habitants are separated from the class for whom Swift wrote and spoke. Not far off is the house of Rantavan, near the street of Mullagh, the home, in Swift’s days, of Henry Brooke, where, according to tradtion, Brooke’s mother showed her superiority to the general fear of the Dean, by meeting Swift on his own ground of sarcasm.’ (Vol. II, p.170.)

W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984): As headmaster of the Cavan Royal School from 1720 to 1726, Thomas Sheridan trained seniors to perform classical plays in the original Greek; the first performances of their kind in Ireland or Britain; Archbishop King refers to one in a letter of Dec. 1720, ‘I was invited to see Hippolytus acted in Greek by Dr Sheridan’s pupils. They did very well—spoke an English preface. The master had made one for them, but a parcel of wags got the boy and made another prologue for him.’ Quoted Elrington Ball, Correspondence of Swift 6 vols. (1910-14), iii, 124, n.3. The dedication of Sheridan’s Philoctetes (Dublin 1725) shows that the performance was attended by the Lord Lieutenant. [Cf. A. Lefanu, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan (London 1824), p.12.] ([Cont.)

W. B. Stanford (Ireland and the Classical Tradition, 1984) - cont.: Swift wrote a commendation to Lord Dorset, Viceroy in 1735, ‘Your Grace must please to remember that I carried you to see a comedy of Terence acted by the scholars of Dr Sheridan with which performance you were well pleased. The doctor is the most learned person I know in this kingdom and the best schoolmaster here in the memory of man having an excellent taste in all parts of literature.’ (Ball, Correspondence, v. p.150). Stanford characterises this as the ‘exaggerated praise by a friend’, and notes a translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, and of Persius’ Satires as well as a Latin grammar and miscellaneous writings. [33]

Further (Stanford): Dublin printing of textbooks nearly restricted to a handsome production of Sheridan’s Philoctetes (1729) printed by Hyde and Dobson in 1725; also eds. of Terence (1729) and Tacitus (1730) from Grierson [by Sheridan?] [54]. Bibl.., T. Sheridan, Philoctetes (1725) [sic].

Richard Cargill Cole, Irish Booksellers and English Writers, 1740-1800 (1986), writes, ‘Sheridan was so alarmed by Dublin printers’ Patrick Wogan and Patrick Byrne’s piracy of his Dictionary, first printed in London, that he wrote a notice in the Edinburgh Advertiser (6 July 1784): “Whoever shall discover any person vending, or exposing to sale, any book or books, of the above pirated edition, in Scotland, or elsewhere in Great Britain, shall, upon conviction of the delinquent, receive the sum of Ten Pounds from the author, over and above the penalty by act of parliament, to be paid by Mr. Alexander Johnston, writer [i.e. lawyer] in Edinburgh.”’ (Cargill, p.7.)

Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior To The Nineteenth Century (John Benjamins Pub. Co., Amsterdam & Philadelphia, 1986), writes: Thomas Sheridan ... made a vigorous attack on the cheaper kinds of pun in a book with the unashamedly punning title, Ars Pun-ica sive Flos Linguarum, or the Flowers of Languages, by ‘Tom Pun-sibi’ (1719); answered by The Folly of Puns by ‘Jack Serious’ (1719), and in a bitterly hostile anonymous broadsheet, Tom-Pun-Sibi Metamorphosed (1719). [p.174].

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Pat Rogers, review of Jonathan Swift & Thomas Sheridan, The Intelligencer, ed. James Woolley (Clarendon Press ?1991), 363pp., in Times Literary Supplement (17 July 1992), [q.pp.]; The Intelligencer appeared more or less weekly between May 11 and early December 1728, split into two series, the break occurring between the tenth and eleventh, with a 20th emerging later in May 1729. Extracts were reprinted in the London paper, [Nathaniel] Mist’s Weekly Journal (becoming Fog’s Journal in the process, when the Jacobite Mist left England). Sheridan’s contributions include a vicious Tale of a Tub-style allegory on the treatment of Patrick and Andrew by their brother George. The first 19 numbers were ed. by William Bowyer in 1729, and Swift’s contributions went into Faulkner’s landmark ed. of Works, 1735. Swift’s familiar contributions include his review of The Beggar’s Opera; a scabrous poem, ‘Mad Mullinix and Timothy’, and several items echoing the gloomy Short View of the State of Ireland (actually reprinted in one Intelligencer issue) and anticipating the Modest Proposal. Thomas Sheridan, best known as father of the person who figures in Boswell’s Johnson, and grandfather of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, shows as an accomplished polemicist and not just a monkey to Swift’s organ-grinder; not easy to distinguish the two men on internal evidence alone; indeterminate authorship of some parts of the series, including the poem on Dean Jonathan Smedley (who can now be dated d.1729); The Intelligencer shows frequent influence from Pope’s gallery of villains in the first Dunciad. The Intelligencer is full of the life of Dublin streets; draws on the resurgent Irish historiography [making] the first ever edition of a Swiftian text set squarely in its Irish context.

Maureen E. Mulvihill, review of Hogan, ed., The Poems of Thomas Sheridan (Assoc. Univ. Presses 1994), in ILS (Fall 1995), p.13; cites John Boyle, 5th Earl Orrery, ‘Thomas Sheridan possessed cacoethes scribendi to the greatest degree, and was continually letting off squibs, rockets, and all manner of little fireworks from the press, by which he offended many particular persons, who, although they stood in awe of Swift, held Sheridan in defiance ... He was slovenly, indigent, and cheerful. He knew books better than men; and he knew the value of money least of all ... he remained a punster, a quibbler, a diffler, and a wit. Not a day passed without a rebus, an anagram, or a madrigal. His pen and fiddlestick were in constant motion.’ (Remarks on the life and writings of Dr Jonathan Swift, 1752).

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Quotations

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References
Peter Kavanagh, Irish Theatre (Tralee 1946), refers to him as author of the first English trans. of Philoctetes of Sophocles (1725), and father of the theatre manager [and namesake].

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1: selects ‘To the Dean when in England in 1726’ [Swift’s Poems, ed. Williams, 1958, III, pp.1042-44, here at 495-60; bibl., p.492]; p.395 [social life similar to that in London in ‘To the Dean’]; p.498.

Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures (Cork UP 1996), cites The Philoctetes of Sophocles, translated from the Greek (Dublin: printed by J. Hyde and E. Dobson for R. Owens Bookseller in Skinner-Row 1725) [ded. to Lady Carteret and Swift] (Cronin, n.100 [p.89].)

A. N. Jeffares & Peter Van de Kamp, eds., Irish Literature: The Eighteenth Century - An Annotated Anthology (Dublin/Oregon: Irish Academic Press 2006), selects “To the Dean, when in England, in 1726” [138; as supra]; from The Intelligencer, 2 [140]; from The Intelligencer, 13 [144].

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Notes
Kith & Kin: Thomas Sheridan was descended from Donnchadh Ó Siaradáin, one of Bedell’s translators of a century before. (See Robert Welch, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish 1789-1897, Gerrards Cross 1988, p.17). And note poss. connection with Bishop Bedell: ‘Early in 1642 he [Bishop Bedell] was allowed to transfer to the house of a clergyman friend, Rev. Dennis Sheridan, at Dromlor, which was already crowded with English refugees. He died there of a fever on 7 Feb. 1642 [...] &c.’ (Dictionary of Irish Biography, 1988;, under Bedell.)

Portraits: A portrait of Thomas Sheridan by J. Stewart held in the Harvard Theatre Collection is reproduced in Jane Dunbar, Peg Woffington (1968), facing p.183; see also “Dr Sheridan’s School”, drawn by T. Archdeaken, in Samuel Whyte, [ed.,] Poems on Various Subjects (1795; rev. edn.), p.44.

Samuel Fitzpatrick (Dublin) has the story about Sheridan preaching the text, ‘Sufficient unto the day ..’, and losing all chance of preferment, adding that the ODNB erroneously states that this was Queen Anne’s birthday. (The story is also told in W. E. H. Lecky’s History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.)

James Joyce: Joyce alludes to Sheridan’s ‘art of panning’ [sic] in Finnegans Wake (1939; p.184).

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