Jonathan Swift
1667–1745

Jonathan Swift, greatest of English prose satirists, came from a Yorkshire clerical family on his father’s side, while his mother was a Leicestershire lady. He was born in Dublin on 30 November 1667, seven months after his father’s early death. At six he was sent to Kilkenny school, and in 1682 entered Trinity College, Dublin. After a desultory college career he came to England (1688) and the next year became secretary to Sir William Temple, a distant connection of his mother, at Moor Park, Surrey. His independent nature, however, rebelled against the subservience of the occupation, and , returning to Dublin, he took orders (1694–95), and was given the living at Kilroot near Belfast. But country obscurity proved little to his taste, and in 1696 he accepted Temple’s invitation to return and help him with his papers. By this time Swift’s ‘Stella’ – Hester Johnson (born at Sheen on 13 March 1681), daughter of the companion of Temple’s widowed sister, had grown up into a beautiful and intelligent girl, and the kindly solicitude of the young Irishman, who guided her education, developed into an enduring affection. The quiet retirement at Moor Park, where he remained until Temple’s death in 1699, and the solitude had given him time to produce the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books, both published in 1704, anonymously, like almost all Swift’s works. The former is held by some to be the greatest of Swift’s satires; in it the cant of religion, the pretensions of letters, hypocrisies of every form, are exposed with the keen enjoyment of the iconoclast. The Battle of the Books is a travesty of the idle controversy then waging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle and Bentley concerning the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers. As secretary to Lord Berkeley, Lord Deputy of Ireland, Swift enlivened the society of Dublin Castle; as vicar of Laracor near Trim (1700), and prebendary of St Patrick’s Cathedral from 1701–1710 he divided his time between Laracor and London. His reputation as a wit and his suspected authorship of The Tale of the Tub and the Battle of the Books, assured his position in society in the clubs. He now wrote his humorous tales of the unlucky almanac-maker, Partridge, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, and vindicated his position as a churchman by the Argument to Prove the Inconvenience of Abolishing Christianity, Project for the Advancement of Religion and Sentiments of a Church of England Man (all in 1708). ‘Stella,’ who had come to Ireland by Swift’s advice, passed much of her time between Trim and Dublin. During 1710–13 Swift was chiefly in London, engaged in political work. The Whigs had done nothing for him; the Tories longed to win him to their cause; and Swift was a friend of Harley, the Lord Treasurer. So Swift became a Tory, and converted the Examiner into a de>adly weapon against the Whigs. Swift’s Examiners (Nov. 1710–June 1711), which may almost be said to have created the ’leading article’ and established the power of the press, are plain, trenchant statements of policy and criticisms of opponents. He also expressed his views in numerous brief and telling skits, broadsides and pamphlets, such as his political masterpiece The Conduct of the Allies (1711) and Public Spirit of the Whigs (1714). His writings undoubtedly contributed to Marlborough’s overthrow and to the peace of Utrecht in 1713. Swift was meanwhile preparing his History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne, not published until 1757; he also wrote a Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue (1712). His life during these three years is recorded in his Journal to Stella, the most faithful and fascinating diary the world has seen, in which all his hopes and fears, all that he did and thought, are set down in perfect honesty and with no thought of publication. Swift had throughout declined to accept pay for his political labours. He waited for ecclesiastical preferment; but the queen would not bestow a bishopric on the author of the Tale of the Tub. A year after he was made Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin (1713) the queen died, the Whigs came into office, and his political influence in London was gone forever. A romantic episode in his London life had been the passion he inspired in Esther Vanhomrigh whom he called ‘Vanessa’ and who, when he went to Ireland, followed him; he tried to repress Vanessa’s passion. She died in 1723 and by her testamentary directions Swift’s metrical version of their romance was published as Cadenus and Vanessa (1726). What his real relations were with the two women, why he did not marry, or, if he did eventually go through the ceremony with ‘Stella’, why he kept his marriage a secret, and why they never lived together, remain mysteries still. There can be no doubt that he was devotedly attached to ‘Stella’ to her dying day (28 January 1728). After the accession of King George, Swift retired to his deanery, and except for two journeys to England in 1726 and 1727, remained there for nearly thirty years. He devoted much of his energies to the wrongs of Ireland from no love of the land of his exile, but out of ‘a perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression.’ His Drapier’s Letters (1724), Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacturers (1720) and Modest Proposal (1729) possess all the merits of his style and method. Besides his Irish tracts, a good deal of light verse, often exceedingly coarse, and his Polite Conversation (1738), a witty parody of small-talk, and Directions to Servants, a savage satire on menial incapacity, Swift’s Irish period is notable for the completion of the most famous of all his works, Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In this immortal satire we see Swift’s genius in its full maturity; with all its deadly satire on the cant and shams of the world, it is also a wonderful story-book and its daring fancy, yet strange sobriety, its bizarre situations, its plausibility and its delightful playfulness make it a classic with children as well as grown-up men. His life had become very lonely and sad and he dwelt in constant dread of that mental overthrow which he felt was coming. In 1740 brain disease drove him to the verge of madness, but after two years, clouded by periods of unspeakable torment he sank into a lethargy and died on 19 October 1745.