Jonathan Swift

• 1. Introduction

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  Jonathan Swift, dying near 78, asked to be buried under the pillar next to the monument of Primate Narcissus Marsh, a man he had openly disdained in life. His own epitaph in St Patrick's Cathedral speaks of fierce indignation that can no longer injure the heart, and it commands every passing voyager to imitate, if you can, this champion of liberty. He had spent his fortune of 12,000 pounds founding a hospital for the mentally ill. He had spent his pen inventing fictional islands, fictional surgeons, and a fictional name that survives today as Vanessa. How did an Anglican cleric born in Dublin in 1667 come to be called the greatest satirist of his era? Why did he hide behind names like Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, and M. B. Drapier? And what did he mean, late in life, when he pointed at a withered tree and said, I shall die at the top?

• 2. The Borrowed Pen

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  Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon and later a sea captain, never existed, yet his name carried Swift's masterpiece into the world in 1726. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World was published anonymously, and even the correspondence negotiating its release was staged between the printer Benjamin Motte and Gulliver's also-fictional cousin. Swift built this habit into a method. He published nearly all his work under invented names or none at all.

  Isaac Bickerstaff became his most recognisable mask. In 1708 a cobbler named John Partridge issued a popular almanac of astrological predictions, and Swift answered with Predictions for the Ensuing Year, foretelling that Partridge would die on the 29th of March. A day later Swift issued a pamphlet announcing that Partridge had indeed died, a claim widely believed despite the man's protests that he was alive.

  M. B. Drapier was the voice Swift used to fight a coinage. The English government had granted William Wood a monopoly to mint copper coins for Ireland, and many feared he would flood the country with debased money for profit. Posing as a draper, Swift wrote so effectively that the government offered a reward to anyone who would name the author. No one did. Scholars suggest these masks did more than amuse; in the politically sensitive conditions of England and Ireland, a pseudonym could shield a satirist from persecution.

• 3. Stella And Vanessa

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  Esther Johnson was eight years old when Swift met her at Moor Park, the daughter of an impoverished widow who served as companion to Sir William Temple's sister. Swift became her tutor and gave her the nickname Stella, and the close but ambiguous bond lasted the rest of her life. He did not wish her to marry anyone else. When their mutual friend William Tisdall meant to propose to her in 1704, Swift wrote to dissuade him, then privately scorned Tisdall as an interloper, and the two men were estranged for years.

  Vanessa was Swift's own invention, both the woman's nickname and a name now common worldwide. He coined it for Esther Vanhomrigh, daughter of Dutch merchants, by joining Essa, a pet form of Esther, to the Van of her surname. She features in his poem Cadenus and Vanessa, which became the source of the popular name. She followed him to Ireland in 1714 and settled at Celbridge Abbey, infatuated and likely answered in part by his affection, only for him to draw back. She died in 1723 at the age of 35, after destroying the will she had made in his favour.

  Denis Johnston, cited approvingly by the British politician Michael Foot, offered a startling explanation for Swift's tangled conduct. Johnston proposed that Swift's true father was Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Dublin, and that Stella was Sir William Temple's illegitimate daughter. By that reckoning Swift was Stella's uncle, so any marriage between them would have been incestuous and unthinkable. It would follow that he could never marry Vanessa without making Stella appear a cast-off mistress, an appearance he would not allow. The theory appears in the Dictionary of Irish Biography and, unattributed, in the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature.

• 4. Whig And High Churchman

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  Lord Godolphin's Whig administration heard Swift, between 1707 and 1710, press the claims of the Irish clergy to the First-Fruits and Twentieths, a grant known as Queen Anne's Bounty worth about 2,500 pounds a year. They were unsympathetic. The opposition Tory leadership was not, and when they took power in 1710 they recruited him as editor of The Examiner. In 1711 his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies attacked the Whig government for failing to end the long war with France.

  Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, were the two Tory chiefs between whom Swift often mediated. He sat in the inner circle as their secret and illegal negotiations produced the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, ending the War of the Spanish Succession. The animosity between the two men brought Harley's dismissal in 1714. That same year Queen Anne died, George I acceded, the Whigs returned, and the Tory leaders were tried for treason over those very negotiations.

  Swift described his own divided loyalties plainly. As a lover of liberty, I found myself to be what they called a Whig in politics, he wrote, but as to religion, I confessed myself to be an High-Churchman. As an Anglican he feared a return of Catholic monarchy and what he called Papist absolutism. In his Thoughts on Religion he urged restraint, writing that every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private.

• 5. The Reluctant Patriot

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  Queen Anne disliked Swift, and her dislike shaped his exile. She thought A Tale of a Tub blasphemous, and she resented The Windsor Prophecy, in which he tactlessly advised her on which bedchamber ladies to trust. She could not bestow the Deanery of St Patrick's herself, but she made clear he would never have received it had she been able to prevent it. With the Whigs back in power, Swift returned to Ireland in disappointment, a virtual exile, to live, in his words, like a rat in a hole.

  Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, published in 1720, turned that bitterness toward Irish causes and earned him the standing of an Irish patriot. The Government tried clumsily to silence him. His printer Edward Waters was convicted of seditious libel in 1720. Four years later a grand jury refused to find the Drapier's Letters seditious, though everyone knew Swift had written them.

  William Whitshed, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, became the target of an attack on the Irish judiciary almost unmatched in its ferocity, Swift naming him a vile and profligate villain. The public stood with the author. Returning to Dublin from England, he was greeted by a banner reading Welcome Home, Drapier. The campaign worked. Wood's patent was rescinded in September 1725 and the coins were kept out of circulation, an outcome Swift later recalled as one of his best achievements.

• 6. The Cruelty Of Satire

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  A young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, wrote Swift in 1729, in a voice not his own. A Modest Proposal, published in Dublin by Sarah Harding, has its narrator recommend with grotesque calm that Ireland's poor sell their children as food to the rich. The true reforms appear only as things the narrator scornfully refuses to consider: taxing absentees, rejecting foreign luxury, teaching landlords one degree of mercy toward their tenants. This deadpan, ironic method gave the language a new adjective, Swiftian.

  A Tale of a Tub, his first major prose work, already carried these techniques in 1704. Its main thread follows three sons who each inherit a coat from their father with strict instructions to make no alterations. The coats fall out of fashion, the sons hunt for loopholes in the will, and they struggle with one another for power, the three representing the main threads of Christianity. Between the chapters the narrator wanders off into whimsical digressions on unrelated subjects.

  The Battle of the Books grew out of a literary quarrel. Sir William Temple had defended classical writing in his 1690 essay, holding up the Epistles of Phalaris, only for William Wotton and later Richard Bentley to show the Epistles were a forgery. Swift wrote his Battle in defence of Temple and the cause of the Ancients. Gulliver's Travels, written in part at Woodbrook House in County Laois, hides its politics in its episodes. The giant Gulliver dousing the Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it stands for the Tories' illegal peace treaty, which Swift judged a good thing done in an unfortunate manner.

• 7. Dying At The Top

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  I shall be like that tree, Swift once said, pointing at it. I shall die at the top. Death became a fixed preoccupation after Stella's, and in 1731 he wrote his own obituary, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, published in 1739. His friends were going before him. John Gay died in 1732, John Arbuthnot in 1735, and Alexander Pope in 1744.

  Will Durant, in The Story of Civilization, recorded the wreck of Swift's final years. Symptoms of madness first appeared in 1738. In 1741 guardians were appointed to watch lest in his outbursts of violence he should harm himself. In 1742 his left eye swelled to the size of an egg, and five attendants had to restrain him from tearing it out. He went a whole year without speaking. Some, like the author J. B. Priestley, read the last chapters of Gulliver's Travels as proof of approaching insanity, while Bewley attributed the decline to terminal dementia.

  Esther Johnson had died on the 28th of January 1728, with Swift praying at her bedside and composing prayers for her comfort, though he was too ill to attend her funeral at St Patrick's. Years afterward a lock of hair believed to be hers was found in his desk, wrapped in paper inscribed, Only a woman's hair. When Swift died on the 19th of October 1745, he was laid out for the people of Dublin to pay their respects, then buried in his own cathedral by her side, as he had wished.

• 8. A Name That Outlived Him

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  Swift crater, on Mars's moon Deimos, carries his name because Swift had predicted the existence of the moons of Mars. The honours reach far beyond that. Since the late 18th century he has stood among the most popular Irish authors in the world, and a 2017 study of library holdings found Gulliver's Travels the most widely held work of Irish literature in libraries globally.

  George Orwell named Swift as one of the writers he most admired, even while disagreeing with him on nearly every moral and political question. John Ruskin counted him among the three people in history most influential to him. The modernist poet Edith Sitwell wrote a fictional biography titled I Live Under a Black Sun in 1937, and the first woman to write a life of Swift, Sophie Shilleto Smith, had published Dean Swift back in 1910.

  Trim, County Meath, where Swift long resided, holds his memory in statues, streets, and a recurring Trim Swift Festival, though that festival was cancelled in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not returned. The hospital his fortune founded, opened in 1757 and once known as St Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles, still treats patients as a psychiatric hospital. The man who feared dying at the top left behind a place for the minds he feared losing his own to.