Born:

1682

Died:

1741

The seventy-or-so letters that survive from the correspondence between Swift and Ford make up an important sub-corpus of Swift's writing, and were edited by David Nichol Smith for the Clarendon Press in 1935. Ford owned the estate of Woodpark in Co. Meath, but spent much of his time in London, where he held the office of Gazetteer in 1712, and that of man-about-town in perpetuity. For Swift he seems to have represented certain qualities – independence, modest gentlemanly easiness, readiness in business – that he valued in himself but was never able fully to develop. Along wiith Gay he acted as a crucial intermediary with the book trade during the publication of Gulliver's Travels, and seems to have become guardian of the 'true' textual tradition of that book, which allegedly had been 'mangled' by Motte in 1726.