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.”