Jonathan Swift

Life

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, a few months after his father’s death, to English parents. He was educated at Kilkenny College and Trinity College Dublin, and in 1689 went to England as secretary to the retired diplomat Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey. He spent most of the following decade in Temple’s household, reading, writing his first satires and tutoring a young girl, Esther Johnson, whom he called Stella and who remained the closest attachment of his life. He was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1695.

Swift’s early satires, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, were published together in 1704. Between 1710 and 1714 he lived in London as the leading pamphleteer for the Tory ministry of Harley and Bolingbroke, editing The Examiner and moving among the wits of the age, including Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot, with whom he formed the Scriblerus Club. He hoped for an English bishopric. Instead, in 1713, he was made Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and when the Tories fell the next year he returned to Ireland for good.

In Dublin he became an unexpected champion of Irish interests against English policy, most famously in the Drapier’s Letters of 1724, which defeated a scheme to impose a debased coinage on Ireland, and in A Modest Proposal of 1729. Gulliver’s Travels appeared in 1726 and was an immediate success. Stella died in 1728. Swift’s health declined in his sixties, with the vertigo and deafness of what is now thought to have been Ménière’s disease, and he was declared of unsound mind in 1742. He died in 1745 and left most of his estate to found a hospital for the mentally ill in Dublin, which still exists.

Literary significance

Swift is generally regarded as the foremost prose satirist in English. His method, perfected in A Modest Proposal, is to adopt a reasonable-sounding persona and let it argue its way into monstrosity, with no authorial wink. Gulliver’s Travels has had the odd fate of becoming a children’s book in abridgement while remaining, in full, one of the bleakest accounts of human nature in the language. His political writing on Ireland made him a national figure there, and his plain, exact prose style was held up as a model through the eighteenth century and beyond. He also wrote a large body of verse, much of it comic and some of it deliberately coarse.

Where to start

A Modest Proposal takes half an hour and shows the method whole. Gulliver’s Travels, also in our catalog, is the next step; readers who know it only from childhood versions should expect something much stranger and angrier in the third and fourth voyages.