Secrets of Swift's intimate letters revealed

Art 28 Jan 11 The crossing out of words visible in Swift's letters was actually done by Swift himself, Dr Williams has found. Image with kind permission of the British Library Board An Oxford University academic has applied digital image analysis to intimate letters sent simultaneously by Jonathan Swift to two women, with some surprising results. Assisted by an FBI forensic document analyst, Dr Abigail Williams has found that the Anglican clergyman famous for writing sophisticated satires such as Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal used a peculiar form of deletion to disguise his intimacies. Where some of Swift's most intimate lines have been crossed out, it has previously been thought that this was done by someone else - perhaps a censor - at a later date. But Dr Williams has claimed that it was Swift himself who scored through these lines. Dr Abigail Williams of the Faculty of English Language and Literature has retranscribed and edited the letters from Jonathan Swift to two women (Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley), which constitute Swift's The Journal to Stella , as part of the Cambridge University Press edition of Swift's collected works for the first time. The original letters are held in the British Library.