Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, seven months after his English father's death, and raised in straitened circumstances by an uncle who paid for his education at Kilkenny College and Trinity College Dublin, where he took his degree speciali gratia — by special grace, the seventeenth-century equivalent of being passed over the bar of his examiners' patience. The Williamite War drove him to England in 1689, where he became secretary to the retired diplomat Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey. There he read voraciously, met the eight-year-old Esther Johnson — "Stella" — whose education he supervised and whose life would remain entangled with his own for the next forty years, and began to write.

He was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1695 and held a series of small Irish livings while pursuing literary and political ambitions in London. A Tale of a Tub (1704), an extravagant satire on religious and intellectual corruption, made his reputation and probably cost him a bishopric — Queen Anne was said to have been scandalized by it. He moved between Whig and Tory camps according to which would defend the established Church and ended up the chief Tory propagandist of Robert Harley's ministry from 1710 to 1714. When the Tories fell with Anne's death in 1714, Swift's English career fell with them. He returned to Ireland as Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin — preferment he had wanted and now experienced as exile.

He turned his fury on Irish conditions. The Drapier's Letters (1724) successfully blocked an English coinage scheme that would have flooded Ireland with debased halfpence and made Swift a national hero. A Modest Proposal (1729) — proposing that the Irish poor sell their year-old children as food for the rich — is the most savage piece of satire in the English language, sustained at white heat and never breaking character. It works because the economic reasoning is impeccable and the moral horror is left entirely to the reader. Gulliver's Travels (1726), published anonymously in London, ranges across four voyages — the miniature Lilliputians, the giant Brobdingnagians, the flying island of Laputa, and finally the rational Houyhnhnms and bestial human Yahoos — and ends in a misanthropy so complete that readers have argued for three centuries about how far Swift endorsed it and how far the deluded Gulliver is himself the final target.

His private life was strange and circumscribed. Stella lived near him in Dublin until her death in 1728, but they were never publicly acknowledged as anything more than friends; whether they secretly married is one of the unsettled questions of biography. A second woman, Esther Vanhomrigh — "Vanessa" — pursued him passionately and died in 1723 after an apparent confrontation about Stella. From the mid-1730s his health collapsed; he suffered from Ménière's disease, then progressive dementia, and was declared non compos mentis in 1742. He died in October 1745 and was buried beside Stella in St. Patrick's. The Latin epitaph he wrote for himself reads in part ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit — where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart — which Yeats called the greatest epitaph in history and which Swift earned the hard way.