There was one text that Kenny thought was particularly relevant to his search for the truth about the epitaph. In 1732, Swift completed a poem titled “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.” in anticipation of his demise. The poem describes how Swift will be forgotten by his friends, and by the reading public. Its final verses contain some egregious claims, not least that Swift’s brutal satires have never been cruel: “Yet malice never was his aim; / He lash’d the vice, but spar’d the name; / No individual could resent, / Where thousands equally were meant.”
“Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” was widely misunderstood in Swift’s lifetime, and for centuries afterward. Alexander Pope, a friend of Swift’s, dismissed its final stanzas as “too vain” and “not true.” But, as several scholars have since noted, Pope got Swift wrong. Swift was being ironic in these passages: mocking himself, and mocking vanity of all kinds. (The claim that he had “lash’d the vice, but spar’d the name” was undermined by the long list of enemies he ravaged, by name, earlier in the same poem.) In other words, the boasts were Swift’s joke—on himself, and on the remembrance business in general. Kenny wondered if the same misunderstanding had afflicted “the greatest epitaph in history.”
Kenny’s quest to understand where Swift’s last joke was hidden began with studying epitaphs in general. (One night, as Kenny and Hennigan read together on their living-room couch, she asked what was so absorbing him; it was the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland.) Then, after reëncountering Swift’s epitaph, he attempted to understand Swift himself as thoroughly as possible, by reading every major biography and as many secondary works as he could handle, including large volumes of Swift’s correspondence. Finally, he “started looking at matters related to the epitaph,” Kenny said, adding, “I was first interested in making sure of my case that Swift was up to something, rather than necessarily to figure out what he was up to.”
This went on for years, as Kenny disappeared into several “wonderful diversions” that allowed him a more acute understanding of Swift. For instance, the Dean had written another epitaph in the cathedral, for the Duke of Schomberg, who died, at the Battle of the Boyne, in 1690. Kenny told me that it was “one of the maddest epitaphs” he’d ever seen. On our walking tour, we stopped to read its Latin text. In it, Swift settles scores with Schomberg’s relatives, who failed to respond to Swift’s entreaties to erect a monument to the Duke’s memory. “His reputation for virtue among strangers was stronger than the ties of blood,” it reads. Swift also paid for the text to be published in London newspapers, so that Schomberg’s skinflint relatives would see it. “Apparently the King and Queen were furious,” Kenny told me. “They thought it might lead to a breach with Prussia.”
The Schomberg epitaph taught Kenny something: Swift was unafraid to use marble to make a point. But it was only in March, 2025, that it became obvious to Kenny what the point may have been. He bought a secondhand copy of a rare printing of Swift’s long and elaborate will from a bookseller, for thirty-five euros. He had read the will online several times, but something about having the paper copy led him to read it differently.
One night, Kenny brought the will into the bedroom to show Hennigan something that had tickled him. Swift had mischievously bequeathed his first-, second-, and third-best “beaver hats” to his friends, allowing them to squabble after his death about how he might have ranked the garments. Another detail also jumped out: