A tongue-in-cheek manual on how servants should cope with the demands of their masters and perform their tasks in ways that will best satisfy their indolence, wastefulness and greed,
Directions to Servants takes a caustic and irreverent look at master-servant relations.
Written towards the end of his writing career, this pamphlet – paired here with
Polite Conversation, another work often attributed to the Dean – shows Swift at his witty and mischievous best.
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'Few of us have servants now, so for servants read tradesmen and note how far Swift’s advice to
the greedy, incompetent, profligate and shiftless still applies. The Directions are relentlessly,
caustically subversive.'
The Times
'
Directions to Servants strikes back at the master-servant dependency with an amusing blend of
cynical parody and puerile insolence.'
The Independent
'Not only a cause of unending entertainment, but, in the final analysis, worthy of detailed study
and, indeed, worth heeding, even in the most humble households, and on all sides of the Irish
Sea, down to the letter...a central document in the long, comic and sly history of Irish disrespect.'
Colm Tóibín
'Jonathan Swift's
Directions to Servants… takes the view of the underling every time… reissued by Oneworld Classics at £7.99, [it] is the perfect gift for your butler.'
TLS
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Read an excerpt from
Directions to Servants
By the same author:
