Between 1688 and 1705, England was politically unstable. The accession of Queen Anne led to a feeling of vulnerability among Establishment figures. Anne was rumoured to be immoderately stupid and was supposedly governed by her friend, Sarah Churchill, wife of the Duke of Marlborough. Although Swift was a Whig for much of this period, he was allied most nearly with the Ancients camp (which is to say Establishment, Church of England, aristocracy, traditional education), and he was politically active in the service of the Church. He claims, both in "The Apology for the &c." and in a reference in Book I of Gulliver's Travels, to have written the Tale to defend the crown from the troubles of the monsters besetting it. These monsters were numerous. At this time, political clubs and societies were proliferating. The print revolution had meant that people were gathering under dozens of banners, and political and religious sentiments previously unspoken were now rallying supporters. As the general dissenting position became the monied position, and as Parliament increasingly held power, historically novel degrees of freedom had brought an historically tenuous equipoise of change and stability.

This infallibly convinced me that your lordship was the person intended by the author. But, being very unacquainted in the style and form of dedications, I employed those wits aforesaid to furnish me with hints and materials, towards a panegyric upon your lordship's virtues. Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Marcus Walsh, editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. For a young Anglican churchman intent on a speedy ascension through the ranks of the church, this was a very damaging charge. Swift's decision to publish the apology in the revised edition of 1710 likely is related to his anxiety about his career at this time, and the Tale's potential to compromise his position. Late 1710, was perhaps the most exciting and promising time in Swift's career; he was being courted by the rising Tory leader Robert Harley to join the Tory cause, and power and importance seemed imminent. Swift was to believe for the rest of his life that his failure to secure the ecclesiastical promotions that he wanted was due to influential (including royal) disapproval of the perceived irreligious tendencies of A Tale of a Tub.

For a broad introduction to Swift's life and the role of A Tale of a Tub in it, see Claude Rawson, "Biographical Introduction", The Character of Swift's Satire: A Revised Focus. Ed. Claude Rawson. Newark: University of Delaware Press (1983): 15–17; for a detailed explanation of the possible dates of composition, see Guthkelch and Smith, xliii–xlvii. There is one thing which the judicious reader cannot but have observed: that some of those passages in this discourse, which appear most liable to objection, are what they call parodies, where the author personates the style and manner of other writers, whom he has a mind to expose. I shall produce one instance of a passage, 10 in which Dryden, L'Estrange, and some But although Swift vigorously maintained the fiction of anonymity in relation to A Tale of a Tub, never at any point did he try to suppress the book as a whole; he only tried to obscure his direct connection with it. But despite the fact that he was desperate that no one should ever know that he wrote A Tale of a Tub, he also seems to have been extraordinarily proud of his satire. The one comment that we have on record from Swift about the Tale comes from a letter transcribed for the Earl of Orrery: Charles Boyle, Dr. Bentley's Dissertations on the epistles of Phalaris and the fables of Aesop. (1698).

would be every fit crying out, ‘Lord! what a filthy crowd is here, pray, good people, give way a little. Bless me! ; that a devil has raked this rabble together, z—ds! what squeezing is this! honest friend, remove your elbow.’ At last a weaver, that stood next him, could hold no longer. ‘A plague confound you (said he,) for an overgrown sloven; and who, in the devil's name, I wonder, helps to make up the crowd half so much as yourself? Don't you consider, with a pox, that you take up more room with that carcass than any five here? Is not the place as free for us as for you? Bring your own guts to a reasonable compass, and be d—n'd, and then I'll engage we shall have room enough for us all.’John M. Bullitt, Jonathan Swift and the anatomy of satire: a study of satiric technique. (Harvard 1961).