A guinea a week was ample board in 1714

Meanwhile, Dean Swift, 

angry with the political 

folly of his friends .., 

and in a fit of dudgeon 

because he had failed to 

obtain the post of histor-iographer to Queen Anne, 

had become the paying 

guest of a country cler-gyman, thirty miles from Binfield, and there re-

venged himself on the 

world in general by bor-

ing himself into a state 

of mulish muteness; since 

for days together he would 

refuse to speak.

  

  He lived the simple life, 

  and paid the country clergyman 

  (who must have found him an

  unaccountable guest) a guinea 

  a week for his board.

The life at the vicarage does not 

seem to have held many excitements, 

apart from the Dean's behaviour, 

which could not be relied upon, and 

which contained many possibilities; 

but Swift seems to have revelled in 

his self-inflicted boredom, for he 

told Vanessa in a letter (after ex-

plaining that he liked his reverend 

host very well): 

"Mr Geree is such a melancholy, thoughtful man, partly from nature and partly from solitude, that I shall soon catch the spleen from him. His wife has been this month twenty miles off at her father's, and will not return within these ten days, and perhaps the house will be worse when she comes."

Edith Sitwell

Alexander Pope

1930

Penguin Books, 1948©