I.

Introduction

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Anglo-Irish satirist and political pamphleteer, considered one of the greatest masters of English prose and one of the most impassioned satirists of human folly and pretension. His pamphlets, prose, letters, and poetry were all marked by highly effective and economical language.

Swift was born in Dublin on November 30, 1667, and educated at Trinity College in the city. His father was a lawyer whose family had gone to Ireland after the Restoration. His cousin was the poet John Dryden. He obtained employment in England in 1689 as secretary to the diplomat and writer Sir William Temple, a distant relative of his mother. Swift's relations with his employer were not amicable, and in 1694 he went back to Ireland, where he took religious orders. Effecting a reconciliation with Temple, he returned to Temple's household in 1696. There he supervised the education of Esther Johnson, daughter of the widowed companion to Temple's sister. Swift remained with Temple until Temple's death in 1699. Swift's stay, although frequently marred by quarrels with his employer, gave him the time for an immense amount of concentrated reading and for writing.

II.

Early Writings

Among Swift's earliest prose work was The Battle of the Books (1704), a burlesque of the controversy then raging in literary circles over the relative merits of ancient and modern writers. In this work Swift championed the ancients and, with mordant satire, attacked the pedantry and sham scholarship of his day. His Tale of a Tub (1704) is the most amusing of his satirical works and the most strikingly original. (“Good God!” he is reported to have said, “what a genius I had when I wrote that book”). In it Swift ridiculed with matchless irony various forms of pretentious pedantry, mainly in literature and religion. The book gave rise to grave doubts concerning Swift's religious orthodoxy, however, and it is thought that because Queen Anne was offended, Swift lost his chance for ecclesiastical preferment in England. He certainly took a pragmatic, if contentious, line on religious faith in his An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), stating, “I conceive some scattered notions about a superior power to be of singular use for the common people, as furnishing excellent materials to keep children quiet when they grow peevish, and providing topics of amusement in a tedious winter-night”.

Although nominally a Whig, Swift differed from his party on many important questions. In 1710 a Tory government came to power in England, and Swift was quickly won over to its ranks. He then turned his biting satire against the Whigs in a series of brilliant short pieces, assumed the editorship of The Examiner, the official Tory publication, and produced a number of pamphlets, in all of which he defended the policies of the Tory administration. Of these papers the most eloquent and influential was The Conduct of the Allies (November 1711), in which Swift charged that the Whigs had prolonged the War of the Spanish Succession out of self-interest. The pamphlet was instrumental in procuring the dismissal of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, the commander-in-chief of the British armies.

III.

Stella and Vanessa

Swift began his Journal to Stella in 1710; Stella was his private name for Esther Johnson, who was then living in Dublin. This series of intimate letters, with its terms of endearment drawn from the language of the nursery, reveals a curious aspect of the great satirist's enigmatic personality. Scholars are unsure of Swift's exact relationship with Stella; they may have been secretly married. Another significant woman in Swift's life was Esther Vanhomrigh, daughter of a Dublin merchant of Dutch descent. Vanhomrigh (whom Swift also taught and whom he referred to as Vanessa) became passionately enamoured of him, but he did not return her love.

With fellow poets Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot, Swift founded the Scriblerus Club, a group of friends who met to discuss literature and to concoct parodies of pedantic scholarship. In 1713, he was appointed dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. The following year the Tory administration fell, and Swift's political power was ended. In 1724 and 1725 he anonymously issued his Drapier's Letters, a series of highly effective pamphlets that secured the end of the royal patent granted to an Englishman coining copper halfpence pieces in Ireland. Swift was trying to protect the Irish people from a further debasement of their currency. For his championing of their cause in these essays and in A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift became a hero of the Irish people. A Modest Proposal embodies the mordantly ironic suggestion that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food to the wealthy, thus turning an economic burden to general profit: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London”, he writes, “that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

IV.

Gulliver's Travels

Swift's masterpiece, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, more popularly titled Gulliver's Travels, was published anonymously in 1726; it met with instant success. Swift's satire was originally intended as an allegorical and acidic attack on the vanity and hypocrisy of contemporary courts, statesmen, and political parties, but in the writing of his book, which is presumed to have taken more than six years, he incorporated his ripest reflections on human society. Gulliver's Travels is, therefore, a savagely bitter and sometimes indecent work, mocking all humankind. Nonetheless, it is so imaginatively, wittily, and simply written that the first book became and has remained a favourite children's story.

Swift's later years, after the deaths of Stella and Vanessa, were overshadowed by a growing loneliness and dread of insanity (the poet Edward Young reported that Swift had once pointed to the withered crown of a tree and remarked, “I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top”). He suffered frequent attacks of vertigo, and a period of mental decay ended with his death on October 19, 1745. He was buried in his own cathedral beside the coffin of Stella. He had long imagined his own death, and in his poem “Verses on the Death of Dr Swift” (1739) he had predicted reactions to his demise: “Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay / A week, and Arbuthnot a day. / St John himself will scarce forbear / To bite his pen, and drop a tear. / The rest will give a shrug, and cry, / 'I'm sorry—but we all must die!'.” His epitaph, written by Swift himself in Latin, reads “Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, D.D., dean of this cathedral, where burning indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can a man who was an undaunted champion of liberty.”