Jonathan Swift(1667–1745)

Jonathan Swift was born at 7 Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the thirtieth of November 1667, posthumous son of an English clerk to the Irish King's Inns who had died seven months before his birth. He was raised by his uncle Godwin Swift, schooled at Kilkenny College, the leading Protestant Irish grammar school of the period (William Congreve was a schoolfellow), and at fifteen entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his BA by special grace in 1686. The political collapse of 1688 sent him across the water to England as a young man without funds, and he took service in 1689 as private secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey, the retired Whig diplomat and gentleman-essayist whose household and library set the literary direction of his next decade.

He was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1695, took the small prebend of Kilroot near Belfast for two years, and through the 1690s and 1700s wrote his way into the central literary life of London. A Tale of a Tub (composed in the 1690s, published anonymously in 1704) was the first work in the English language to take the religious controversies of the Reformation and make them the subject of sustained narrative satire; his contemporary readers had nothing comparable to set beside it. The Battle of the Books (1704) put the ancient-against-modern literary quarrel of the period into mock-heroic verse. Through the 1710 to 1714 Tory ministry of Robert Harley and Henry St John, Swift became the central pamphleteer of the government, edited the Examiner from late 1710, wrote the great Conduct of the Allies in 1711 that helped force the Treaty of Utrecht and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, and was at the heart of the literary club, the Scriblerians, that included Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot and Lord Bolingbroke.

On the fall of the Tory ministry in 1714 he returned to Ireland and to the Deanery of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, which he had been appointed to in 1713, and held the deanery for the next thirty-one years. From St Patrick's he turned the full force of his prose on the constitutional injustices of the British government of Ireland. The Drapier's Letters of 1724, published anonymously over the signature M. B. Drapier, fought the government's grant of an Irish copper-coinage patent to the Wolverhampton ironmonger William Wood and so forced the withdrawal of the patent, the first successful constitutional resistance by Irish opinion to a British ministerial decision, and made the Drapier's name (which everyone in Dublin knew to be Swift's) the standing emblem of Irish public conscience.

He published Gulliver's Travels in October 1726, anonymously, having brought the manuscript over to London himself; the book sold out its first printing in a week, was reprinted four times in the first year, has not been out of English-language print since, and is today the central work of English-language satire of the long eighteenth century, translated into over two hundred languages. In 1729 he published A Modest Proposal, the seven-page satirical pamphlet on the condition of the Irish poor that proposed, in the deadpan voice of a public economist, that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food, the most-anthologised single satirical essay in the English language. He wrote also through the period the lyric Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1731), the great late satirical poem on his own posthumous reputation, and the Modest Defence of Punning, the Polite Conversation, the Irish Tracts and the sermons of the Dublin deanery.

He died at the Deanery on the nineteenth of October 1745 in his seventy-eighth year and was buried in the south aisle of his own cathedral beside his closest friend, Esther Johnson (the Stella of the Journal to Stella). He had written his own epitaph in Latin and had it cut into the wall above the grave: Ubi sæva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit, where savage indignation can no longer tear the heart. Yeats's translation of the epitaph hangs in the Long Room of Trinity. Gulliver's Travels remains the central work of English-language satire of its century, the Modest Proposal is on every undergraduate course in English literature in the English-speaking world, and the Drapier's Letters are remembered in Dublin as the foundational text of Irish public opinion. The Swift name in modern English-language letters carries the weight of the Dean of St Patrick's who put the conscience of Hanoverian Ireland and the model of English-language political satire into the same prose.