Swift

In Old English swift meant quick, and it attached to a man the way a description does before it hardens into a name: the fleet runner. English surnames of this class were formed from some aspect of the individual, a trade, a father's name, a birthplace or a physical feature, and at first they were not inherited at all. By 1400 most English families, and those of Lowland Scotland, had settled into hereditary surnames, and the byname froze into a family name. A description of that kind could be earned separately by separate men, so it hardened into a surname in many unconnected households at once, and most people called Swift are not kin to one another.

What matters for Swift is that the name is English rather than Gaelic. It carries none of the O or Mac machinery that governs most Irish surnames. Swift reached Ireland by migration rather than by anglicisation, and it arrived late: the Yorkshire Swift line settled in Dublin in the 1660s, and almost everything the name means in Ireland flows from that single seventeenth-century move.

Jonathan Swift the elder came out of the Yorkshire Swifts and crossed to Dublin in the 1660s, where he worked as an attorney and clerk to the Irish King's Inns. He died in his late twenties. Seven months later, on the thirtieth of November 1667, his son was born at 7 Hoey's Court in Dublin, a posthumous child carrying his dead father's name.

The boy was raised by his uncle Godwin Swift and sent to Kilkenny College, the leading Protestant Irish grammar school of the period, where William Congreve was a schoolfellow. At fifteen he entered Trinity College Dublin and took his BA by special grace in 1686. The political collapse of 1688 pushed him across the water without funds, and in 1689 he took service as private secretary to Sir William Temple, the retired Whig diplomat and gentleman-essayist, at Moor Park in Surrey. He stayed there until 1699, and Temple's library set the direction of his next decade.

He took priest's orders in the Church of Ireland in the mid-1690s and held the small prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast, for two years. A Tale of a Tub, composed in the 1690s and published anonymously in 1704, took the religious controversies of the Reformation and made them the subject of sustained narrative satire, the first work in English to do it. The Battle of the Books, published the same year, put the ancient-against-modern literary quarrel into mock-heroic form.

Between 1710 and 1714, under the Tory ministry of Robert Harley and Henry St John, Swift was the government's central pamphleteer. He edited the Examiner from late 1710 and wrote The Conduct of the Allies in 1711, which helped force the Treaty of Utrecht and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. He sat at the heart of the literary club, the Scriblerians, alongside Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot and Lord Bolingbroke.

The ministry fell in 1714 and Swift went back to Dublin, to the Deanery of St Patrick's Cathedral he had been appointed to in 1713. He held it for the remaining thirty-two years of his life, and from it turned his prose on the constitutional treatment of Ireland by the British government.

That government granted William Wood, a Wolverhampton ironmonger, a patent to mint copper halfpence for circulation in Ireland. Between March and December of 1724 seven pamphlets appeared anonymously in Dublin over the signature M. B. Drapier, attacking the patent and mobilising Irish public opinion so effectively that it was withdrawn in 1725. That was the first successful constitutional resistance by Irish opinion to a British ministerial decision, and careful Irish political historians treat the Drapier's Letters as the founding text of modern Irish political journalism.

Lord Lieutenant Carteret offered three hundred pounds for the Drapier's identity. Every printer in Dublin knew whose it was, and by the tradition the reward was never claimed by any printer or person in the city; the convention of the Dublin print trade held until Swift's death in 1745.

Swift carried the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels to London himself and published it anonymously in October 1726. The first printing sold out in a week, four more followed inside the year, and the book has not been out of English-language print since; it has been translated into over two hundred languages and stands as the central work of English-language satire of the long eighteenth century.

A Modest Proposal followed in 1729: seven pages on the condition of the Irish poor, delivered in the deadpan voice of a public economist who proposes that their children be sold as food. It is the most anthologised single satirical essay in the language. Verse ran alongside the prose, from Cadenus and Vanessa in 1726 to the Verses on the Death of Dr Swift in 1731, a late poem on his own posthumous reputation, with the Polite Conversation, the Irish Tracts and the sermons of the deanery besides.

He died at the Deanery on the nineteenth of October 1745, in his seventy-eighth year, after a long decline of senility and depressive illness. He was buried in the south aisle of his own cathedral, ten yards from the high altar, 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 saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit, where savage indignation can no longer tear the heart. Yeats's translation of it hangs in the Long Room at Trinity. His estate went to found St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill, the first specialist mental hospital in Ireland; it opened in 1757 and continues today.

Foulksrath began as a fortified, moated dwelling built in 1349 and occupied by the De Frene family; the castle is thought to take its name from Fulco De Frene. The Purcells, relatives of the De Frenes, raised the present tower in the early fifteenth century, and a family of Purcell peasant farmers was still living in the grounds in 1777. In that year castle and lands were let to Thomas Wright, whose family occupied the place until 1861.

The Swifts, relatives of Jonathan Swift, were associated with Foulksrath from at least 1857, and, according to John Gibb writing in the Old Kilkenny Review in 1948, the family bought it outright in 1898. In 1946 An Óige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association, bought Foulksrath from the Swifts with community support and ran it as a hostel until it closed in 2009. The four-storey tower still stands, with most of its bawn wall, its ancillary buildings and the remains of the moat; it is now privately owned.

The name kept working in Ireland after the Dean. Theophilus Swift (1746-1815) was an Irish poet and writer; Francis Swift (1827-1892) an Irish dean; the Irish politician John Gordon Swift MacNeill (1849-1926) carried Swift as a middle name. Patrick Swift (1927-1983) was an Irish painter and art critic who worked also as illustrator, editor and magazine founder, and Colette Swift (born 1973) rode as an Irish road cyclist.

In England the name is on record before the Dublin branch existed, in families with no connection to it. Jasper Swift, an English archdeacon, died in 1620; Samuel Swift (1659-1718) sat as an English politician; Owen Swift (1814-1879) fought as a British bare-knuckle prizefighter; Sarah Swift (1854-1937) was an English nurse and nursing administrator; Rigby Swift (1874-1937) served as a British barrister, judge and politician; Frank Swift (1913-1958) played as an English footballer; and Graham Swift (born 1949) writes as a British novelist and poet.

The emigrant Swifts made their own weight in America. Zephaniah Swift (1759-1823) was a chief justice, law professor and diplomat; Joseph Gardner Swift (1783-1865) an army officer and superintendent of the United States Military Academy; Lewis A. Swift (1820-1913) an astronomer; and Gustavus Franklin Swift (1839-1903) the founder of the Swift and Company meatpacking plants. The American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (born 1989) stands a long way from Hoey's Court.