Jonathan Swift Biography and List of Works

Irish author and journalist, dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral (Dublin) from 1713, and the foremost prose satirist in English language. Swift became insane in his final years, but until his death he was known as Dublin's foremost citizen. Among Swift's best-known works is Gulliver's Travels (1726). Swift provides such a convincing air of authenticity and realism to Gullivers journeys and adventures that many contemporary readers believed them to be true.

"They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilante, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves; but honesty has no fence against superior cunning: and since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit; where fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no Law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone and the knave gets the advantage."
(from Gulliver's Travels: 'A Voyage to Lilliput')

Swift was born in Dublin. He studied at Kilkenny Grammar School (1674-82), Trinity College in Dublin (1682-89), receiving his B.A. in 1668 and M.A. in 1692. When the anti-Catholic Revolution of 1688 aroused reaction in Ireland, Swift moved to the household of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Surrey, in England. He worked there as a secretary (1689-95, 1696-99). In 1695 he was ordained in the Church of Ireland (Anglican), Dublin. After Temple's death in 1699, Swift returned to Ireland. He made several trips to London and gained fame with his essays. Throughout the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), Swift was one of the central characters in the literary and political life of London.

"As the common forms of good manners were intended for regulating the conduct of those who have weak understandings; so they have been corrupted by the persons for whose use they were contrived. For these people have fallen into a needless and endless way of multiplying ceremonies, which have been extremely troublesome to those who practice them, and insupportable to everyone else: insomuch that wise men are often more uneasy at the over civility of these refiners, than they could possibly be in the conversations of peasants or mechanics."
(from 'A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding', 1754)

From 1695 to 1696 Swift was the vicar of Kilroot, Laracor from 1700, and prebendary of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (1701). Between the years 1707 and 1709 he was an emissary for the Irish clergy in London. Swift contributed to the 'Bickerstaff Papers' and to the Tattler in 1708-09. He was a cofounder of the Scriblerus Club, which included such member as Pope, Gay, Congreve and Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford.

In 1710 Swift tried to begin a political career among the Whigs but changed his allegiance and took over the Tory journal The Examiner. With the accession of George I, the Tories lost political power and Swift withdrew to Ireland. Esther Vanhomrigh, whom Swift had met in 1708, followed him and later proposed marriage. Swift rejected her offer and wrote the poem 'Cadenus and Vanessa'. Finally in 1723 he broke off the relationship. From 1713 to 1742 he was the dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. It is thought that Swift suffered from Ménière's disease and many considered him insane - however, from the beginning of his twentieth year he suffered from deafness. Swift had predicted his mental decay when he was about 50 and remarked to the poet Edward Young when they were gazing at the withered crown of a tree: "I shall be like that tree, I shall die from the top." He died in Dublin on October 19, 1745. As a churchman Swift had spent a third of his earnings on charities and he saved another third each year to found St. Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles in 1757. Swift left behind a great mass of poetry and prose, chiefly in the form of pamphlets. William Makepeace Thackeray once said of the author: "So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling."

"Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth."
(from a letter to Alexander Pope)

Swift's religious writing is little read today. His most famous works include THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS (1697), which explores the merits of the ancients and the moderns in literature. The authors of renowned books take sides in the battle. In it Swift states, "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." A TALE OF A TUB (1704) is a religious satire. It has at its core a simple narrative of a father who has triplets and, upon his death, leaves them each a coat, which will grow with them. Although the book was published anonymously, it established Swift's reputation.

In ARGUMENTS AGAINST ABOLISHING CHRISTIANITY (1708) the narrator argues for the preservation of the Christian religion as a social necessity. When an ignorant cobbler named John Partridge published an almanac of astrological predictions, Swift parodied it in his book PREDICTION FOR THE ENSUING YEAR BY ISAAC BICKERSTAFF. He foretells the death of John Partridge on March 1708, and affirmed on that day his prediction. Partridge protested that he was alive but Swift proved in his 'Vindication' that he was dead. DRAPIER'S LETTERS (1724) is against the monopoly granted by the English government to William Wood to provide the Irish with copper coinage. In A MODEST PROPOSAL (1729) the narrator with horrifying logic recommends, that Irish poverty can solved by the breeding up their infants as food for the rich. When the actor Peter O'Toole read it at the reopening of the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in 1984, several members of the audience departed.

Gulliver's Travels (1726) - Defoe's novel about Robinson Crusoe had appeared in 1719 and in the same vein Swift makes Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and a sea captain, recount his adventures. In part one, Gulliver is wrecked on an island where human beings are six inches tall. The Lilliputians have wars, and their conduct is clearly laughable, with their self-importance and vanities - these human follies only reduced into a miniature scale. Gulliver's second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag. "I cannot but conclude that the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." (from Gulliver's Travels: 'A Voyage to Brobdingnag') He meets giants who are practical but do not understand abstractions. In the third voyage contemporary scientist are held up for ridicule: science is shown to be futile unless it is applicable to human betterment. Gulliver then travels to the flying island of Laputa and the nearby continent and capital of Lagado. There he meets pedants obsessed with their own special field and utterly ignorant of the rest of life. On the island of Glubbdubdrib Gulliver encounters a community of sorcerers who can summon the spirits of the dead, allowing him to converse with Alexander, Julius Caesar, Aristotle and others. He meets the Struldbrughs, who are immortal and, as a result, utterly miserable and become senile in their 80s. In the fourth part Gulliver visits the land of Houyhnhnms, where horses are intelligent but human beings are not. The horses are served by degenerate creatures called Yahoos, demonstrating that the human race will destroy itself without divine aid. Swift wrote the book with a serious purpose - "to mend the world". Gulliver's Travels is a topical social satire, a work of propaganda, in which Swift attempts to show the consequences of humanity's refusal to be reasonable. It is still widely read all over the world - the two first books especially are children's favourites - and open to many interpretations.

Other traveller's tales: Homer's Odyssey, Marco Polo's Travels, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, adventures of Baron Münchausen by Rudolf Eric Raspe (1737-1794), etc.

For further reading: The Life of Jonathan Swift by Henry Craik (1882); The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift by Ricardo Quintano (1936); Swift: An Introduction by Ricardo Quintano (1955); Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives by Phyllis Greenacre (1955); Swift and Ireland by Oliver W. Ferguson (1962); Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age by Irvin Ehrenpreis (1962-83, 3 vols.); Swift: "Gulliver's Travels", ed. by Richard Gravil (1974); Swift's Landscape by Carole Fabricant (1982); The Character of Swift's Satire, ed. by Claude J. Rawson (1983); Jonathan Swift: Political Writer by J.A. Downie (1984); Jonathan Swift by David Nokes (1985); Gulliver's Travels by S. Brean Hammond (1988) - See also: Cyrano de Bergerac, Alexander Pope, John Gay

A TALE OF A TUB, (1704)