Sean D. Moore. Swift, the Book and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. 288. $65.00 (cloth).

Abstract

regicides, William Goffe and John Dixwell, who fled abroad at the Restoration, is no mere afterthought. Major, as editor, recognizes that these republican refugees after 1660 were as much exiles as their royalist counterparts before 1660 and that a comparison between the experiences of the two groups is entirely valid. In fact, Major and Peacey are the two contributors who address most directly the question of how their subjects coped psychologically with the actual experience of exile. But there is a crucial difference. Whereas most royalist exiles had been able to live openly in foreign lands, Goffe and Dixwell spent decades living secret lives within the Stuarts’s colonial territories in New England, knowing that exposure would probably send them to the gallows or the block. One can only suppose that they thought that their enemies’ earlier periods of exile had been altogether easier.