This electronic edition of Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella has been running since the beginning of September 2007. For the first annual cycle of the journal it will be functioning as a 'beta' version, still very much under construction. On 2 September 2010 it will be relaunched from the beginning in its completed form, to mark the centenary of the events it records.

The site has been designed with a dual purpose in mind. In the first place, it is a diversion for curious readers and for lovers of Jonathan Swift's more famous works. But it is also intended as a scholarly resourse for students and teachers of Swift's writings, and for literary historians of the eighteenth century more generally. The biographies, booklists and chronologies that support the Journal have been prepared to a high academic standard, and all the information on this site may be used with confidence.

One of the great advantages that this site has over conventional print editions is its hypertextuality. Where Swift mentions a recent issue of The Tatlerii that he has written anonymously (as he does on 23 September 1710, for example,) the reader is able to click instantly onto an electronic version of the essay. Conventional print media are too unwieldy for this sort of cross-referability.

This electronic version of the Journal to Stella has informal links with the ongoing edition of Swift's collected works soon to be published by the Cambridge University Press. Wherever possible its scholarly conventions and standards are consistent with those of the CUP, and we hope eventually to include page-references to the forthcoming CUP edition of the Journal, which is being edited by Dr. Abigail Williams.

In terms of the form of the site, our debt to Phil Gyford's work at www.pepysdiary.com is almost too obvious to need mentioning. We hope at least to approximate the high standards of this pioneering webpage.