Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on November 30, 1667, some seven months after the death of his father, an English lawyer also named Jonathan Swift who had settled in Ireland ^[1]. His mother, Abigail Erick, came from Leicestershire, and the fatherless child depended heavily on the charity of his uncle Godwin Swift, a successful Dublin attorney. This precarious start marked him. Throughout his life Swift resented dependence of any kind, and biographers have traced his fierce insistence on independence back to a childhood spent as a poor relation ^[2].

A strange episode colored his infancy. His nurse reportedly carried the baby off to England for roughly three years before returning him to Dublin, an incident Swift himself recorded in an autobiographical fragment ^[1]. At age six he entered Kilkenny College, then the best school in Ireland, where the playwright William Congreve was a younger schoolmate. In 1682 he proceeded to Trinity College Dublin, where his academic record was uneven; he received his bachelor's degree in 1686 by what the college termed special grace, a formula that has been variously interpreted but which Swift later described with characteristic self-mockery ^[2].

The political upheaval of 1688 and 1689, when war between Jacobite and Williamite forces spread to Ireland, cut short his studies for an advanced degree. Like many Protestants of English descent, Swift left for England, joining his mother in Leicester before finding a position that would shape the rest of his life ^[1].

In 1689 Swift entered the household of Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat and essayist living at Moor Park in Surrey, as his secretary ^[1]. The arrangement lasted, with interruptions, until Temple's death in 1699. At Moor Park Swift read widely in Temple's library, took a master's degree at Oxford in 1692, and wrote his first serious poetry. More importantly, he met Esther Johnson, the young daughter of a household servant, whom he tutored and nicknamed Stella. Their bond, whatever its exact nature, lasted until her death ^[3].

Swift grew restless with his subordinate position. In 1694 he returned to Ireland and took orders in the Church of Ireland, receiving the small and isolated prebend of Kilroot near Belfast in 1695 ^[2]. He found the posting dispiriting and soon went back to Temple. During this second residence at Moor Park he drafted the works that would announce his genius: A Tale of a Tub, a wild satire on corruptions in religion and learning, and The Battle of the Books, a comic skirmish in the quarrel between ancient and modern authors. Both appeared in a single volume in 1704, published anonymously, and both displayed the ventriloquism and irony that became his signature ^[4].

After Temple died, Swift returned to Ireland as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley and in 1700 became vicar of Laracor in County Meath, with a prebend in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin ^[1]. Esther Johnson and her companion Rebecca Dingley moved to Ireland around 1701 and remained near him for the rest of Johnson's life.

Between 1701 and 1714 Swift shuttled between Dublin and London, gradually becoming one of the most feared political writers in England. He first wrote for the Whigs, but the party's coolness toward the Church of Ireland's interests pushed him away. When Robert Harley and the Tories came to power in 1710, Swift transferred his pen to their cause and was welcomed into the inner circle of the ministry ^[2].

From 1710 to 1714 he edited and wrote The Examiner, the Tory weekly, and produced pamphlets of enormous influence. The Conduct of the Allies, published in November 1711, attacked the continuation of the War of the Spanish Succession and the Duke of Marlborough's conduct of it; the pamphlet sold in the thousands and helped prepare public opinion for the Treaty of Utrecht ^[4]. During these London years he also wrote the long series of intimate letters to Esther Johnson later published as the Journal to Stella, a document prized by historians for its daily record of politics and by readers for its playful private language ^[3].

Swift hoped his services would be rewarded with an English bishopric or deanery. Queen Anne, reportedly offended by the irreverence of A Tale of a Tub, would not have him in England. In 1713 he was installed instead as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, a substantial post but one he initially regarded as exile ^[1]. When the queen died in 1714 and the Tory ministry collapsed, Swift's political career in England was finished. He returned to Ireland, as he put it in a letter, like a poisoned rat in a hole, and did not visit England again until 1726 ^[2].

The Dublin years produced a second, unexpected career. Swift began applying his satiric gifts to the condition of Ireland, a kingdom whose trade and parliament were subordinated to English interests. His Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720) urged the Irish to burn everything English except their coal, and the printer was prosecuted for publishing it ^[4].

His greatest Irish campaign came in 1724 and 1725 with the Drapier's Letters. Writing as M. B. Drapier, a fictional Dublin shopkeeper, Swift attacked the patent granted to the English ironmaster William Wood to mint copper halfpence for Ireland, arguing that the coinage would drain the kingdom of value and that Ireland deserved the same rights as England. The letters roused national resistance, the government offered a reward of three hundred pounds for the author's identity, no informer came forward though the authorship was an open secret, and Wood's patent was withdrawn in 1725 ^[5]. The victory made Swift a popular hero in Dublin, celebrated with bonfires and bells on his birthday.

His most ferocious Irish work appeared in 1729. A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents or Country suggests, in the calm voice of an economic projector, that the impoverished Irish sell their infants as food for the rich. The pamphlet's sustained irony, in which humane outrage speaks entirely through inhuman logic, has made it the most studied short satire in English ^[4].

In 1726 Swift traveled to London carrying the manuscript of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, published that October under the name of its narrator, Lemuel Gulliver. The book was an immediate success across all classes of readers ^[2]. Its four voyages carry Gulliver to Lilliput, where he towers over a race of six-inch politicians; to Brobdingnag, where he is a curiosity among giants; to Laputa and its neighbors, where speculative science and abstract learning run to absurdity; and finally to the country of the Houyhnhnms, rational horses who rule over the bestial, human-shaped Yahoos.

Gulliver's Travels works simultaneously as a parody of travel narratives, a satire on European politics and pride, and an unsettling inquiry into human nature itself. The fourth voyage in particular has divided critics for three centuries: some read it as evidence of Swift's misanthropy, others as a carefully constructed trap that satirizes Gulliver's own despairing conclusions ^[6]. Swift told his friend Alexander Pope that his aim was to vex the world rather than divert it, yet the book has never stopped doing both, surviving as a children's classic in abridgment and as a dark masterpiece entire ^[2].

The London visits of 1726 and 1727 also renewed his friendships with Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot, fellow members of the Scriblerus Club they had formed in 1714 to mock false learning. Pope and Swift jointly published several volumes of their miscellaneous works in the following years ^[4].

Swift never married, or at least no marriage was ever acknowledged. His relationship with Esther Johnson, Stella, remains one of literary history's puzzles. Some early accounts claimed a secret marriage around 1716; most modern biographers find the evidence inconclusive ^[3]. A second attachment complicated the picture. Esther Vanhomrigh, a young woman he met in London and addressed as Vanessa, followed him to Ireland and pressed for a declaration he would not give. She died in 1723, and Swift's poem Cadenus and Vanessa, written years earlier, is the chief record of the affair. Stella died in January 1728, and Swift, too ill or too stricken to attend the funeral in his own cathedral, wrote a grieving character of her that praises her judgment, wit, and courage ^[3].

As dean, Swift was conscientious and charitable. He gave a third of his income to charity and saved another third to endow a hospital ^[1]. He continued writing verse, much of it in a deliberately plain, anti-poetic style: On Poetry: A Rapsody, the birthday poems to Stella, and Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, a self-elegy in which he imagines his friends' reactions to his death with comic honesty.

From youth Swift had suffered attacks of vertigo, deafness, and nausea, now generally identified as Meniere's disease, a disorder of the inner ear ^[2]. The episodes worsened with age. In 1742 he was found of unsound mind and memory by a commission of lunacy, and guardians were appointed to manage his affairs. He died in Dublin on October 19, 1745, at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried in St Patrick's Cathedral beside Esther Johnson ^[1]. He left the bulk of his fortune to found St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill, which opened in 1757 and still operates in Dublin ^[7].

Swift composed his own epitaph in Latin, and its most famous phrase, translated by W. B. Yeats as savage indignation, has become shorthand for his temper as a writer: the tablet in St Patrick's records that he has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more ^[1]. That indignation was always harnessed to craft. Swift perfected the ironic persona, the mask through which an author says the opposite of what he means, and every later satirist from Voltaire to George Orwell has worked in his shadow ^[6].

Among Jonathan Swift achievements, several altered their fields outright. Gulliver's Travels has never gone out of print since 1726 and has been translated, adapted, and filmed continually; the words Lilliputian and yahoo entered the English language from its pages ^[2]. A Modest Proposal remains the model taught wherever irony is studied. The Drapier's Letters made him an early voice for Irish rights, and Irish writers from Yeats to contemporary novelists have claimed him as a founding figure of their tradition, though Swift himself identified with the English community in Ireland ^[5].

Basic Jonathan Swift facts, his Dublin birth in 1667, his deanery, his death in 1745, only frame the harder question of what drove him. Readers of any Jonathan Swift biography meet a churchman who doubted human pretensions to reason, a private man who wrote the most public prose of his age, and a satirist who claimed to hate mankind in the lump while loving individuals. Three centuries on, his sentences still cut ^[6].