Headnote

Swift was an enthusiastic observer of All Fools’ Day (1April), with its tradition of hoaxing acquaintances by preposterous but convincingly presented lies: ideally ‘the victims were not simply deceived by a big lie but betrayed into going on a fool's errand’. The Bickerstaff hoax of 1708 had also had a significant April Fool dimension (see Introduction and Headnote to Predictions). Rogers comments on the ‘intriguing’ possibility, ‘in view of Swift's later addiction to April foolery’, that Swift's ‘Ode to the Athenian Society’ (1692), his first appearance in print, had been published on 1 April. Further instances of such ‘foolery’ include Swift's 1711 allegation to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley that ‘The duke of Buckingham's house fell down last night with an earth-quake, and is half swallowed up; – Won't you go and see it?’, which he immediately reveals as ‘An April fool, an April fool, oh ho, young women’. In 1713 there followed a collaborative but apparently unsuccessful hoax, started as a rumour to be passed on by servants, alleging that a hanged man had been revived after being cut down. In the same year Swift was also involved in the mystification of Bishop Ashe about the circulation of the ‘Hack at TomPoley’s’ pun that he had invented. In 1717 he wrote to Archdeacon Walls of his plan to ‘make April Fools of the Ladyes to morrow’. On 1 April 1721, at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, Swift's friend, the actor-manager Thomas Griffith, spoke an ‘Epilogue’ by Swift to a benefit performance for the distressed weavers. For an April Fool's joke of 1722, see A History of Poetry. A poem of compliment to Mrs Cope of Loughgall, ‘The First of April’, dated byWilliams to 1720–4, also makes crucial reference to the All Fools’ tradition. On 1 April 1732 he wrote to Lady Acheson about a woman supposedly ‘brought to bed … of a half child’ that ‘was dead born’; and Lady Acheson promptly replied that ‘since it was so, I am heartily glad she has got rid of it’.

The text of this 1709 joke is taken from The Post-Boy, no. 2165 (Tuesday 29 March 1709), where Swift's hoax appeared among the advertisements, half way down the second column of the verso.