Swift, Jonathan

Political pamphleteer, Irish patriot, dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral (Church of Ireland) in Dublin, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) is now remembered for writing "A Modest Proposal" and Gulliver's Travels. His parents were Anglo-Irish colonists, and Swift devoted himself to the interests of that class. He earned his B.A. from Trinity College in 1686, an M.A. from Oxford in 1694, and launched his career as an Anglican priest in Ulster in 1695. During the next decade he nursed his prospects in church and state. Like most of the Anglo-Irish, he was a Whig, and his first great satires, Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, both published in 1704, established him as a propagandist for the Whig cause. But at his core he believed that Britain was best served by safeguarding Anglican privilege, so he switched allegiance, lending his wit, in the periodical Examiner, to leaders of the conservative Tory ministry, the earl of Oxford and Viscount Bolingbroke, when they rose to power in 1710. When the Tories fell in 1714, Swift was suspected of treason and was spied on. He returned to Ireland feeling himself an exile and hardly comforted by the deanship of Saint Patrick's—meager spoils of his brief political eminence.

He conducted a love affair with Esther Johnson (whom he called Stella), whom he first met when he was twenty-two and she was only eight years old. He kept the relationship secret and most likely platonic to satisfy his idiosyncratic notions of intimacy, but he may have married her clandestinely. Though they lived in separate houses, their peculiar friendship continued until her death in 1728. His letters to her comprise the famous Journal to Stella, which was published in 1766.

Eventually, Swift began to think of himself as an Irishman and to resist the dependency that England had imposed on Ireland. His wildly popular series of Drapier's Letters (1724) attacked England's deliberate corruption of Irish coinage and excited much of the Irish citizenry to national consciousness. "A Modest Proposal," written five years later, upbraided all classes of Irish for the moral and material poverty of the country. In what is probably the most famous example of irony in Irish literature, Swift's proposer suggests that the poor father their children like cattle to fill the plates of the rich. Swift's greatest work, Gulliver's Travels (1726), satirized not only his contemporaries but all humanity. Even as the episodes among the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians continue to delight readers today, Gulliver's last sojourn on the island of philosophical horses and bestial humans have earned Swift the reputation of a misanthrope. Later generations of Irish writers such as James Joyce considered Swift the fountainhead of an irreverent, satirical, vital stream in Irish literary history.

Swift, Jonathan

Bibliography