SWIFT, JONATHAN (1667–1745)

SWIFT, JONATHAN (1667–1745), English satirist, poet, and clergyman. Swift was born in Dublin to English parents, Jonathan and Abigale Erick (or Herrick) Swift. His father had died before Swift's birth, and he was raised by his father's family from the age of three when his mother returned to Leicestershire in England. He attended Kilkenny Grammar School, where William Congreve, the future dramatist, was a fellow pupil, and went on to Trinity College, Dublin, where, because of his infractions of discipline, his degree was conferred on him only by "special grace" in 1686.

Swift went to England in 1689 and became a secretary to the retired statesman Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey. It was here that he met Esther Johnson ("Stella"), who was nine at the time, and became her tutor. They were lifelong friends, and she was the "Stella" of his Journal to Stella, written 1710–1713. (Some believe that they were secretly married in 1716, but the evidence is inconclusive.) In 1689, Swift suffered an attack of Ménière's disease, which affects the inner ear and causes vertigo and nausea; the affliction was to plague him for the rest of his life. Swift had taken an M.A. at Oxford, which provided him with the necessary qualification for ordination, and after leaving Temple's service in 1694, he went to Ireland, where he was ordained in the Anglican division of the Irish church and received the small prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast. In 1696 he returned to Moor Park, where he edited Temple's letters and wrote his first important prose works, The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, both of which were not published until 1704. The former is an allegorical satire attacking corruption in the church and scholarly pedantry, the latter a mock-heroic satire ridiculing the controversy about the ancients and the moderns that was raging at the time.

After Temple's death in 1699 left him homeless and without a patron, Swift went to Ireland where he received a prebend in St. Patrick's, Dublin, and the living of Laracor. On frequent visits to London he met Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope and associated with various Whig writers. During this time he wrote several defenses of Christianity (such as An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 1708), vicious lampoons of public figures, and satirical essays under the pseudonym of "Isaac Bickerstaff" (1708–1709). In 1710 Swift traveled to London to petition against a tax crippling the Irish clergy and remained there for three years. Disenchanted with Whig policies, especially the party's association with Dissenters and what he regarded as its animosity toward the Anglican Church, he became an advocate for Tory politics and edited the party's newspaper, The Examiner, in 1710–1711. He also contributed to The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Intelligencer and wrote The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a treatise that outlined the Tory plan for ending the War of the Spanish Succession. Swift participated in the intellectual debates and lampoons of the Scriblerus Club, formed with Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley, earl of Oxford.

Swift had alienated the establishment in England, and it appears that the influence of his friends in high places was not sufficient to secure his advancement. Bitterly disappointed, he returned to Ireland. He had been awarded a Doctor of Divinity in 1701 and was appointed dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin in 1713; except for brief absences, he remained in Ireland for the rest of his life. Biographical detail between 1715 and 1720 is sketchy. In 1708 he had met Esther Vanhomrigh ("Vanessa"), who had fallen in love with him; she followed him to Ireland, where she was disappointed by Swift's lack of response to her feelings for him. His own feelings are reflected in Cadenus and Vanessa, a pastoral and comic self-reflection that he wrote around 1713, though it was not published until 1726, three years after Vanessa's death.

The Whigs had returned to power in 1714, and Swift began writing attacks on their unfair policies toward Ireland. His patriotism emerged with the enormously popular A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), a lampoon that attacked the England treatment of the Irish poor. Along with The Drapier Letters (1724), an exposéof a patent to introduce a new copper coin that would have devalued Ireland's currency, it established Swift as a national hero.

In 1726 Swift spent the summer with Alexander Pope at Twickenham and published his most popular work, Gulliver's Travels. An anti-Whig satire, a dazzling adventure story, and a narrative that perceives humanity from four different viewpoints through Gulliver's voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and Houyhnhnmland, the work has profound political implications. Swift's financial security was assured by this time, but ill health and mental problems manifested themselves in the late 1720s, especially after the death of Stella in 1728. In 1729, his bitter and ironic A Modest Proposal appeared; it is a parody and an indictment of the amoral economic utilitarianism of the Whigs. The 1730s also saw Swift writing elegiac poems to Stella, and scatological poems such as "Lady's Dressing Room." Between 1730 and 1735, he published Rhapsody of Poetry and Verses on His Own Death. He also continued to correspond with friends in London. Bookseller George Faulkner published a complete edition of Swift's works, including a corrected edition of Gulliver's Travels, in 1735. In the late 1730s, Swift wrote A History of the Peace of Utrecht and Directions to Servants, both of which were published posthumously.

Swift's great popularity with Dublin's population was secured through his preaching and his writings on the unfair treatment of Ireland, but especially through his generous contributions to charity; at his death he left £11,000 to found a hospital for the mentally ill. His health deteriorated seriously and that, plus memory loss, affected his writing. Beginning in 1742, he suffered from dementia; he died 19 October 1745. He was buried next to Stella at St. Patrick's and was universally mourned by Dublin.

SWIFT, JONATHAN (1667–1745)

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