Jonathan Swift Biography
Jonathan Swift Biography
Jonathan Swift Biography
Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland and died on October 19,
1745, Dublin. Swift’s father, Jonathan Swift the elder, was an Englishman who had settled
in Ireland after the Stuart Restoration (1660) and become steward of the King’s Inns, Dublin.
In 1664 he married Abigail Erick, who was the daughter of an English clergyman. In the
spring of 1667 Jonathan the elder died suddenly, leaving his wife, baby daughter, and an
unborn son to the care of his brothers. The younger Jonathan Swift thus grew up fatherless
and dependent on the generosity of his uncles. His education was not neglected, however, and
at the age of six he was sent to Kilkenny School, then the best in Ireland. In 1682 he entered
Trinity College in Dublin, where he was granted his bachelor of arts degree in February
1686 speciali gratia (“by special favour”), his degree being a device often used when a
Swift continued in residence at Trinity College as a candidate for his master of arts degree
until February 1689. But the Roman Catholic disorders that had begun to spread through
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Dublin after the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) in Protestant England caused Swift to seek
security in England, and he soon became a member of the household of a distant relative of
his mother named Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, Surrey. Swift was to remain at Moor
Temple was engaged in writing his memoirs and preparing some of his essays for
publication, and he had Swift act as a kind of secretary. During his residence at Moor Park,
Swift twice returned to Ireland, and during the second of these visits, he took orders in the
Anglican church, being ordained priest in January 1695. At the end of the same month he was
appointed vicar of Kilroot, near Belfast. Swift came to intellectual maturity at Moor Park,
with Temple’s rich library at his disposal. Here, too, he met Esther Johnson (the future
Stella), the daughter of Temple’s widowed housekeeper. In 1692, through Temple’s good
Between 1691 and 1694 Swift wrote a number of poems, notably six odes. But his true genius
did not find expression until he turned from verse to prose satire and composed, mostly at
Moor Park between 1696 and 1699, A Tale of a Tub, one of his major works.
Published anonymously in 1704, this work was made up of three associated pieces: the
“Tale” itself, a satire against “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning”;
the mock-heroic “Battle of the Books”; and the “Discourse Concerning the Mechanical
Operation of the Spirit,” which ridiculed the manner of worship and preaching of religious
enthusiasts at that period. In the “Battle of the Books,” Swift supported the ancients in the
longstanding dispute about the relative merits of ancient versus modern literature and culture.
But “A Tale of a Tub” was the most impressive of the three compositions. This work was
outstanding for its exuberance of satiric wit and energy and marked by an incomparable
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command of stylistic effects, largely in the nature of parody. Swift saw the realm
of culture and literature threatened by zealous pedantry, while religion—which for him meant
rational Anglicanism—suffered attack from both Roman Catholicism and the Nonconformist
(Dissenting) churches. In the “Tale” he proceeded to trace all these dangers to a single
source: the irrationalities that, according to Swift, disturb humankind’s highest faculties—
After Temple’s death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin as chaplain and secretary to the earl
of Berkeley, who was then going to Ireland as a lord justice. During the ensuing years he was
in England on some four occasions—in 1701, 1702, 1703, and 1707 to 1709—and won wide
recognition in London for his intelligence and his wit as a writer. He had resigned his
position as vicar of Kilroot, but early in 1700 he was preferred to several posts in the Irish
church. His public writings of this period showed that he kept in close touch with affairs in
both Ireland and England. Among them was the essay “Discourse of the Contests and
Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome,” in which Swift
defended the English constitutional balance of power between the monarchy and the two
In London, Swift became increasingly well-known through several works: his religious and
political essays; A Tale of a Tub; and certain impish works, including the “Bickerstaff”
pamphlets of 1708–09, which put an end to the career of John Partridge, a popular astrologer,
by first prophesying his death and then describing it in circumstantial detail. Like all Swift’s
satirical works, these pamphlets were published anonymously and were exercises in
impersonation. Their supposed author was “Isaac Bickerstaff.” For many of the first readers,
the very authorship of the satires was a matter for puzzle and speculation. Swift’s works
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brought him to the attention of a circle of Whig writers led by Joseph Addison, but Swift was
uneasy about many policies of the Whig administration. He was a Whig by birth, education,
and political principle, but he was also passionately loyal to the Anglican church, and he
came to view with apprehension the Whigs’ growing determination to yield ground to
the Nonconformists. He also frequently mimicked and mocked the proponents of “free
thinking”: intellectual skeptics who questioned Anglican orthodoxy. A brilliant and still-
A momentous period began for Swift when in 1710 he once again found himself in London.
A Tory ministry headed by Robert Harley (later earl of Oxford) and Henry Saint John (later
Viscount Bolingbroke) was replacing that of the Whigs. The new administration, bent on
bringing hostilities with France to a conclusion, was also assuming a more protective attitude
toward the Church of England. Swift’s reactions to such a rapidly changing world are vividly
recorded in his Journal to Stella, a series of letters written between his arrival in England in
1710 and 1713, which he addressed to Esther Johnson and her companion, Rebecca Dingley,
who were now living in Dublin. The astute Harley made overtures to Swift and won him over
to the Tories. But Swift did not thereby renounce his essentially
Whiggish convictions regarding the nature of government. The old Tory theory of the divine
right of kings had no claim upon him. The ultimate power, he insisted, derived from the
people as a whole and, in the English constitution, had come to be exercised jointly by king,
Swift quickly became the Tories’ chief pamphleteer and political writer and, by the end of
October 1710, had taken over the Tory journal, The Examiner, which he continued to edit
until June 14, 1711. He then began preparing a pamphlet in support of the Tory drive for
peace with France. This, The Conduct of the Allies, appeared on November 27, 1711, some
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weeks before the motion in favour of a peace was finally carried in Parliament. Swift was
rewarded for his services in April 1713 with his appointment as dean of St.
With the death of Queen Anne in August 1714 and the accession of George I, the Tories were
a ruined party, and Swift’s career in England was at an end. He withdrew to Ireland, where he
was to pass most of the remainder of his life. After a period of seclusion in his deanery, Swift
gradually regained his energy. He turned again to verse, which he continued to write
throughout the 1720s and early ’30s, producing the impressive poem “Verses on the Death of
Doctor Swift,” among others. By 1720 he was also showing a renewed interest in public
affairs. In his Irish pamphlets of this period he came to grips with many of the problems,
social and economic, then confronting Ireland. His tone and manner varied from direct
factual presentation to exhortation, humour, and bitter irony. Swift blamed what he perceived
as Ireland’s backward state chiefly on the blindness of the English government; but he also
insistently called attention to the things that he believed the Irish themselves might do in
order to better their lot. Of his Irish writings, the “Drapier’s Letters” (1724–25) and “A
Modest Proposal” (1729) are the best known. The first is a series of letters attacking the
English government for its scheme to supply Ireland with copper halfpence and farthings. “A
Modest Proposal” is a grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-spirited citizen suggests
that Ireland’s overpopulation and dire economic conditions could be alleviated if the babies
of poor Irish parents were sold as edible delicacies to be eaten by the rich. Both were
published anonymously.
Certain events in Swift’s private life must also be mentioned. Stella (Esther Johnson) had
continued to live with Rebecca Dingley after moving to Ireland in 1700 or 1701. It has
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sometimes been asserted that Stella and Swift were secretly married in 1716, but they did not
live together, and there is no evidence to support this story. It was friendship that Swift
always expressed in speaking of Stella, not romantic love. In addition to the letters that make
up his Journal to Stella, he wrote verses to her, including a series of wry and touching poems
titled On Stella’s Birthday. The question may be asked, was this friendship strained as a
result of the appearance in his life of another woman, Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he named
Vanessa (and who also appeared in his poetry)? He had met Vanessa during his London visit
of 1707–09, and in 1714 she had, despite all his admonitions, insisted on following him to
Ireland. Her letters to Swift reveal her passion for him, though at the time of her death in
1723 she had apparently turned against him because he insisted on maintaining a distant
attitude toward her. Stella herself died in 1728. Scholars are still much in the dark concerning
the precise relationships between these three people, and the various melodramatic theories
Swift’s greatest satire, Gulliver’s Travels, was published in 1726. It is uncertain when he
began this work, but it appeared from his correspondence that he was writing in earnest by
1721 and had finished the whole by August 1725. Its success was immediate, and it stood as
his masterpiece. Then, and since, it had succeeded in entertaining (and intriguing) all classes
of readers. It was completed at a time when he was close to the poet Alexander Pope and the
poet and dramatist John Gay. He had been a fellow member of their Scriblerus Club since
1713, and through their correspondence, Pope continued to be one of his most important
connections to England.
Gulliver’s Travels was originally published without its author’s name under the title Travels
into Several Remote Nations of the World. This work, which is told in Gulliver’s “own
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words,” is the most brilliant as well as the most bitter and controversial of his satires. In each
of its four books the hero, Lemuel Gulliver, embarks on a voyage; but shipwreck or some
other hazard usually casts him up on a strange land. Book I took him to Lilliput, where he
wakes to find himself the giant prisoner of the six-inch-high Lilliputians. Man-Mountain, as
Gulliver is called, ingratiates himself with the arrogant, self-important Lilliputians when he
waded into the sea and captured an invasion fleet from neighboring Blefescu; but he fell into
disfavor when he puts out a fire in the empress’ palace by urinating on it. Learning of a plot
Gulliver’s Travels’s matter-of-fact style and its air of sober reality confer on it an ironic depth
depreciation of humankind? Swift certainly seemed to use the various races and societies
Gulliver encountered in his travels to satirize many of the errors, follies, and frailties that
human beings are prone to. The warlike, disputatious, but essentially trivial Lilliputians in
Book I and the deranged, impractical pedants and intellectuals in Book III are shown as
imbalanced beings lacking common sense and even decency. The Houyhnhnms, by contrast,
are the epitome of reason and virtuous simplicity, but Gulliver’s own proud identification
with these horses and his subsequent disdain for his fellow humans indicated that he too had
become imbalanced, and that human beings were simply incapable of aspiring to the virtuous
Last years
The closing years of Swift’s life have been the subject of some misrepresentation, and stories
have been told of his ungovernable temper and lack of self-control. It has been suggested that
he was insane. From youth he had suffered from what is now known to have been Ménière’s
disease, an affliction of the semicircular canals of the ears, causing periods of dizziness and
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nausea. But his mental powers were in no way affected, and he remained active throughout
most of the 1730s—Dublin’s foremost citizen and Ireland’s great patriot dean. In the autumn
of 1739 a great celebration was held in his honour. He had, however, begun to fail physically
and later suffered a paralytic stroke, with subsequent aphasia. In 1742, he was declared
incapable of caring for himself, and guardians were appointed. After his death in 1745, he
was buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. On his memorial tablet is an epitaph of his
own composition, which says that he lies “where savage indignation can no longer tear his
heart.”
Swift’s legacy
Swift’s intellectual roots lay in the rationalism that was characteristic of late 17th-century
England. This rationalism, with its strong moral sense, its emphasis on common sense, and its
distrust of emotionalism, gave him the standards by which he appraised human conduct. At
the same time, however, he provided a unique description of reason’s weakness and of its use
by people to delude themselves. His moral principles are scarcely original; his originality lies
rather in the quality of his satiric imagination and his literary art. Swift’s literary tone varies
from the humorous to the savage, but each of his satiric compositions is marked by
concentrated power and directness of impact. His command of a great variety of prose styles
is unfailing, as is his power of inventing imaginary episodes and all their accompanying
details. Swift rarely speaks in his own person; almost always he states his views by ironic
morally obtuse citizen of “A Modest Proposal.” Thus, Swift’s descriptive passages reflected
the minds that are describing just as much as the things described. Pulling in different
directions, this irony creates the tensions that are characteristic of Swift’s best work, and
reflects his vision of humanity’s ambiguous position between bestiality and reasonableness.
Reference
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Quintana, Ricardo .( 2023) retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-
Swift/Withdrawal-to-Ireland