Curll said the Key was given to him by ‘Ralph Noden, Esq; of the Middle Temple’, whether Noden wrote the key or was an agent is not clear. The Key presents Thomas Swift as the author of the allegorical sections of the Tale, with Jonathan Swift allowed the digressions. As Guthkelch and Nichol Smith remark, the Key is somewhat dull, and even in places unreliable.

References: Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. xvi-xvii, 329-48; Irvin Ehrenpeis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. ii, pp. 337-8; Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, (2007).