Bums, Farts & Other Inappropriate Acts The Meaning of Dr. Jonathan Swift's Preoccupation with the Nether End, and a Full Text of The Benefit of Farting and Arse Musica

In this work John Partridge (assisted by John Martin) proves that Jonathan Swift was the author of The Benefit of Farting and Arse Musica (1722 and subsequent editions). The volume contains a poem about Hester (Vanessa) Van Homrigh that the author maintains was written by Jonathan Swift and which establishes that his relationship with her was sexual. John Partridge contends that when writing about farting Swift is in a broader sense claiming an intimacy with women that included sex. He begins the task of identifying the fifty-two women listed in Arse Musica for their 'prowess in farting'. Their names are hidden by suggestive pseudonyms that are difficult for a modern reader to decipher but which were obvious to Swift's contemporaries. This list includes women from both aristocratic families and the wives of tradesmen. These women, it would seem, organized themselves into a fan club or family dedicated to Swift, an activity that Swift's contemporary and biographer Lord Orrery denounced as the keeping of a seraglio at the Deanery. John Partridge asserts that some of these women had children by Swift. To demonstrate this he sets out a proof that Swift had children by Laetitia Pilkington, destroying the myth that Swift was asexual. Not since Norman O. Brown's 'The Excremental Vision' in Life Against Death (1959) has such insight been granted into the mind, art and being of Jonathan Swift.