A teel of a tum
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Jump to navigationJump to search- A Tale of a Tub: this is the second reference to A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift's 1704 literary sensation (the first is FW 004.22: tete in a tub, with reference to a tub and the adverb swiftly in the next line). The main section of A Tale of A Tub is an allegory involving three brothers who represent Catholicism, non-Anglican Protestantism, and Anglicanism; much of the rest is a collection of parodies of various writers and schools of thought. Very Wakian, and a key text for FW
- a tale of a tub: a cock-and-bull story; an apocryphal story
- "The phrase A Tale of a Tub was used by Sir Thomas More to describe a pointless speech. Ben Jonson gave the name to an early comedy, in which one of the characters was ‘Squire Tub’. Defoe, in a pamphlet published in 1704, on the grievances of Irish Dissenters, speaks of a certain Bill as a ‘Tale of a Tub’, exactly in the sense here used by Swift, from whom it is quite possible that Defoe borrowed the phrase" – note by Henry Craik to ‘The Author's Preface’ from A Tale Of a Tub
- tub: pulpit → Alexander Pope cited tub as slang for a pulpit
- a tale of a tomb
- a tale of a time
- A Tale of a Town: a play by Edward Martyn, revised by George Moore as The Bending of the Bough → FW 003.01: bend of bay
- teel: till
- eel: kind of fish → this paragraph contains the names of many species of fish
- tumulus
- tum: the sound of a plucked string or drum → continuing the musical allusions in this paragraph
- dumb: in FW, Swift is often described as being deaf-and-dumb → Taubling in the next line
