Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, political writer and the greatest prose satirist in English. Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he wrote Gulliver's Travels, which mocks human pride through voyages to lands of tiny and gigantic people, and A Modest Proposal, a savage satire on the poverty of Ireland.
Genres
novels and stories, essays
Between Ireland and England
Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, seven months after the death of his father, an English lawyer. Raised by relatives, he studied at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1689 he became secretary to the retired diplomat Sir William Temple at Moor Park, in Surrey, where he read widely and met Esther Johnson, a young girl he later called Stella.
Ordained in the Church of Ireland, he served small parishes and wrote his first satires, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, published in 1704, which mock religious quarrels and pedantry.
The political writer
From 1710 Swift was in London, writing pamphlets and the journal The Examiner for the Tory ministers Harley and Bolingbroke, and enjoying the friendship of Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot in the Scriblerus Club. He hoped for an English bishopric, but Queen Anne distrusted him.
In 1713 he was made Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and when the Tories fell the next year, he returned to Ireland for good. He became a fierce defender of the Irish against English economic policies, notably in The Drapier's Letters (1724), which made him a popular hero.
Gulliver and after
Gulliver's Travels, published anonymously in 1726, tells of a ship's surgeon who visits Lilliput, whose inhabitants are six inches tall, Brobdingnag, a land of giants, the flying island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, rational horses. It was an instant success, read by children as an adventure and by adults as a satire.
A Modest Proposal followed in 1729. In his last years Swift suffered from deafness and vertigo, and was declared unable to manage his affairs in 1742. He died in 1745 and left most of his fortune to found St Patrick's Hospital, a hospital for the mentally ill that still exists in Dublin.
Anecdotes
A deceased astrologer
In 1708, under the name Isaac Bickerstaff, Swift published predictions mocking a popular almanac maker, John Partridge, including the date of Partridge's death. When the day came, he published an account of the death. Partridge's protests that he was still alive only made the joke more famous.
His own epitaph
Swift wrote his own Latin epitaph, placed in St Patrick's Cathedral, saying that he lies where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. W. B. Yeats later translated it into a short English poem.
Frequently asked questions
What is Gulliver's Travels about?
The four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver to imaginary lands, Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms, used by Swift to satirise politics, science and human nature.
Is A Modest Proposal serious?
No. It is a satire: by proposing with a straight face that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food, Swift denounced the cruelty of landlords and the indifference of the authorities.
Where is Swift buried?
In St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, where he was Dean for more than thirty years, beside Esther Johnson, his Stella.