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Jonathan Swift

1667–1745

 

Though the author of Gulliver's Travels is often spoken of as an English writer, he was a Dubliner by birth and death.  Though he enjoys universal fame as a writer, Jonathan Swift also has a more local reputation as an Irish patriot of an unusual kind.

      The posthumous child of an English father, he was born on 30th November 1667, in a little square in the shadow of Dublin Castle.  He was educated at Kilkenny College and at Trinity College in Dublin, where his training was strictly Anglican.  Though he enjoyed literature at the university, he did not care for either philosophy or the formalities of rhetoric.  He was no student, and his degree was specially granted to him.  In 1689, having sought his mother's advice, he was appointed secretary to Sir William Temple (whom some have suggested was his real father) at Moor Park near London.  There he stayed between 1689 and 1694.

      Having been ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1695, he was given a living in a small Ulster prebend at Kilroot, outside Belfast.  He did not find this agreeable, as the parishes were rundown and the local people mostly dour Presbyterians.  He went home to Moor Park, where, among other duties, he had to tutor Esther Johnson (or Stella, as he calls her in his writings), the daughter of a companion of Temple's sister.  It has been supposed (again, by a few) that Stella was also Temple's child, Swift's half-sister.

      At this time he wrote his earliest poems anonymously, as well as The Battle of the Books, which deals with the superiority of the classics over the modern writers, and A Tale of a Tub, a satirical account of the consequences of the Reformation and Christian divisions.  In January 1699 Sir William Temple died, so Swift had to seek another place.  In 1700 he was given another clerical living in Ireland, at Laracor in Meath.  He took a doctorate degree at Trinity College in 1701.  For a while he divided his time between Dublin, where he was a social success, and London, where he gained a reputation as a political writer.  A natural conservative, he took the Tory side in politics, satirizing the dominant Whigs (who had been in power since the fall of James II).  His life in the heat of English politics is described in his Journal to Stella.  She too had gone to live in Dublin after their patron died.

      When the Tories came to power Swift had hoped for a bishopric, but the queen's advisors influenced her to refuse him.  However, he was given the deanery of St Patrick's in Dublin.  The return of his political foes, the Whigs, ensured there would be no further advancement in the Anglican Church for him.  Initially he saw himself as exiled in Dublin from the real life in London, and with no hope of an English bishopric.

      When he returned to Dublin, Swift was followed there by Esther van Homrigh - the Vanessa of his later writings - whose family had been prominent in the life of the city.  She was infatuated with him, and he was unable to untangle himself from her.  Swift's relationships with Stella and Vanessa remain shadowy and mysterious, though the notion that Swift and Stella were half siblings might go a long way in explaining odd aspects of his behaviour.  It may be that he was married to Stella secretly in 1716, and that he might have had sexual relations with Vanessa, but none of this is certain.

      To many of his contemporaries he appeared as what one writer called a 'scabrous, mad misanthrope, faithless priest, and heartless lover'.  The modern judgement would be different.  Now we are more aware of the literary and rhetorical devices by which he masked his own personality with that of others, from Isaac Bickerstaff to Capt. Lemuel Gulliver.

      It was in Ireland that Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, published anonymously in 1726.  Though this became, in part, a children's favourite, the book itself has a very adult theme, for it is filled with Swift's loathing of mankind.

      In Dublin and his own journeys around the countryside, Swift became conscious of the condition of Ireland itself.  The English politician grew into the Irish patriot.  The Ireland he was defending was, of course, largely that of English settlement, but Ireland was changing at the time, and the defence of Ireland's interests was to the benefit of all.

      His satirical writings, such as his essay 'A Modest Proposal' (1729), in which an 'economist' (of a kind we still have with us!) argues that the surplus babies of Ireland should be fattened for eating, concerned the abuses of English rule in Ireland.  In the Drapier Letters (1724-25) he defended the economic interests of Ireland against the exploitation of English adventurers, in particular William Wood of Wolverhampton, who had been granted coinage rights.

      Swift remained in touch with his friends in England, but his mind slowly gave way.  He was not insane, but it is now thought he suffered from Ménières disease, which began to affect him about 1736.  In 1742 he retreated into depression, was declared legally insane, and was confined to a home, where he died on 19th October 1745.

      Swift left all he owned to found St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill, an institution which survives to this day.  At midnight he was buried in his cathedral, beside Stella.  His epitaph, in his own words, is on a plaque above the spot:

 

Here lies Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral.

Go traveller and imitate if you can

his brave struggle for human liberty.

 

That, at least, is the record of the patriotic dean who was admired by the Dubliners he lived among.  Swift was among those who began the process of creating the identity of modern Ireland as a country with mixed cultures.

      For the world at large, Gulliver's Travels remains one of the great books of all time.  Swift's satiric anger has been a major influence on writers since.  In clear and limpid language, he lashed out not only at the passing abuses of the day, but also those perennial failings of human nature which he scorned.