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Jonathan Swift

A compendium of notes

Jonathon SwiftJonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 - October 19, 1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer and satirist.

Jonathan Swift was born, after his father had been dead for seven months, to an English mother, and educated by his Uncle Godwin. After a not very successful career at Trinity College, Dublin, he went to stay with his mother, Abigail Erick, at Leicester.

Soon afterwards an opening to work for Sir William Temple presented itself. In 1689 Swift went to live at Moor Park, Surrey, where he read to Temple, wrote for him, and kept his accounts. Growing into confidence with his employer, he "was often trusted with matters of great importance." Within three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III, and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments.

When Swift took up his residence at Moor Park, he found there an eight-year-old little girl. She was the daughter of a merchant named Edward Johnson, who had died young. Swift says that Esther Johnson was born on March 18, 1681 — she was later known as Stella and would later feature largely in Swift's life.

By 1694 Swift had grown tired of his position, and finding that Temple, who valued his services, was slow in finding him preferment, he left Moor Park in order to carry out his resolve to go into the Church. He was ordained, and obtained the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast.

In May 1696 Temple induced Swift to return to Moor Park, where he was employed in preparing Temple's memoirs and correspondence for publication. During this time Swift wrote The Battle of the Books, which was, however, not published until 1704. On his return to Temple's house, Swift found his old playmate grown from a sickly child into a girl of fifteen, in perfect health.

In the summer of 1699 Swift was offered and accepted the post of secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices, but when he reached Ireland he found that the secretaryship had been given to another. He soon, however, obtained the living of Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan, and the prebend of Dunlavin in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

At Laracor, a mile or two from Trim, and twenty miles from Dublin, Swift ministered to a congregation of about fifteen persons, and had abundant leisure for cultivating his garden, making a canal (after the Dutch fashion of Moor Park), planting willows, and rebuilding the vicarage. As chaplain to Lord Berkeley, he spent much of his time in Dublin. When Lord Berkeley returned to England in April 1701, Swift, after taking his doctor's degree at Dublin, went with him, and soon afterwards published, anonymously, a political pamphlet, A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome.

When he returned to Ireland in September he was accompanied by Stella — now twenty years old — and her friend Mrs. Dingley. There's a great deal of mystery and controversy over Swift's relationship with Stella. Many hold that they were secretly married in 1716. Although there has never been definite proof of this, there is no doubt that she was dearer to him than anyone else, and that his feelings for her did not change throughout his life.

Swift was politically active between 1707 and 1710, successfully petitioning the English government on behalf of the Irish bishops for the surrender by the Crown of the First-Fruits and Twentieths, which brought in about 2500 pounds a year. As a result he became more and more intimate with the Tory leaders and increasingly cool towards his older acquaintances.

Swift received the reward of his services to the Government — the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin — in April 1713. Swift was back again in the political strife in London in September, taking Oxford's part in the quarrel between that statesman and Bolingbroke. On the fall of the Tories at the death of Queen Anne, he saw that all was over, and retired to Ireland, not to return again for twelve years. In 1713 he co-founded the Scriblerus Club.

In 1723 Swift became engrossed in the Irish agitation which led to the publication of the Drapier's Letters, and in 1726 he paid a long-deferred visit to London, taking with him the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels.

On January 28, 1728, Stella died. Swift could not bear to be present, but on the night of her death he began to write his very interesting Character of Mrs. Johnson. He was too ill to be present at the funeral at St. Patrick's, but afterwards, a lock of her hair was found in his desk, wrapped in a paper bearing the words, "Only a woman's hair."

Swift continued to produce pamphlets that reflected a growing misanthropy, epitomized by A Modest Proposal (1729), in which he "suggested" the Irish unburden themselves of their numerous children — and break the cycle of poverty in the process - by selling them to the rich as food! Despite his irony, however, he showed many kindnesses to people who needed help. He seems to have given Mrs. Dingley fifty guineas a year, pretending that it came from a fund for which he was trustee.

The mental decay which he had always feared — "I shall be like that tree," he once said, "I shall die at the top" — became marked about 1738. Paralysis was followed by aphasia, and after acute pain, followed by a long period of apathy, from which death relieved him in October 1745. He was buried by Stella's side, in accordance with his wishes. The bulk of his fortune was left to found a hospital for idiots and lunatics.

Swift wrote his own epitaph, which William Butler Yeats translated from the Latin:

  Hic depositum est corpus
  JONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.
  Huyus Ecclesiae Cathedralis
  Decani
  Ubi saeva indignatio
  Ulterius
  Cor lacerare nequit
  Abi Viator
  Et imitare, si poteris
  Strenuum pro virili
  Libertatis Vindicatorem
  Obiit 19 Die Mensis Octobris
  A.D. 1745 Anno Ætatis 78


Yeats' translation:

  Swift has sailed into his rest.
  Savage indignation there
  cannot lacerate his breast.
  Imitate him if you can,
  world-besotted traveler.
  He served human liberty.





Notable Works
• The Battle of the Books (1704)
• A Tale of a Tub (1704)
• Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers (1707?)
• The Journal to Stella (1710-1713)
• The Intelligencer (w Thomas Sheridan) (1710-????)
• On the Conduct of the Allies (1713)
• An Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1711)
• A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712)
• Gulliver's Travels (1726)
• A Modest Proposal (1729)
• The Lady's Dressing Room (1732)
• Cadenus and Vanessa (poem) (1726)
• The Grand Question Debated (1729)
• Verses on His Own Death (1731)
• A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1731)
• Directions to Servants (1731)
• On Poetry, a Rhapsody (1733)
• Three Sermons and Three Prayers (1744)

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Our Marchants on th'Exchange doe plott
To encrease the kingdoms wealth by trade;
 At Gresham Colledge a Learned Knott
Unparallel'd designes have layd
To make themselves a Corporation
 And know all things by Demonstration.

Joseph Glanvill

Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet. -- Dryden

For a time, he dictated the political opinions of the English nation. -- Dr Johnson

I have long been weary of the world, and shall for the small remainder of my days be weary of life. -- Jonathan Swift

By what I have gathered from your own relation ... I can only conclude 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. -- King of Brobdingnag, Gulliver's Travels

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Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), writer, satirist, political pamphleteer, author of Gulliver's Travels.
Swift was born in Dublin (30 November 1667), educated at Kilkenny School and Trinity College, Dublin.

Swift served his political apprenticeship under the Whig statesman, Sir William Temple. Swift was secretary to Sir William at Moor Park, Farnham 1689-1694, 1696-1699. The intervening years Swift spent in Ireland, where he was ordained and received the small prebend of Kilroot. On the death of Sir William, Swift returned to Ireland, where he was given the prebend of St Patrick's, Dublin. It was at Moor Park that Swift met his beloved Stella to whom he dedicated his journal.
Swift's political career spanned forty years and three monarchs - Queen Anne, George I and George II. At the height of his political career, Swift was able to order Ministers around, his pen was the mightiest sword in the land and justly feared.

Swift's fall from grace can be traced to the blocking of his appointment as Bishop of Hereford, and his acceptance of St Patrick's in Dublin. Henceforth Swift was to be exiled to the backwater of Ireland. It was from Ireland that the disillusioned Swift launched Gulliver's Travels, his blistering satire on the corrupt English establishment.

Gulliver's Travels (1726) was published in great secrecy. Even the publisher did not know who the author was. It was dropped of at his house from a hackney carriage under the cover of darkness. Gulliver's Travels was an immediate success, Voltaire (1694-1778), who was at the time living in England, translated it into French and made it known across the Channel.

Gulliver's Travels was Swift's savage attack on those who had abandoned him. It was not only the corrupt politicians who were attacked, he did not spare philosophers, teachers and entrepreneurs who promoted scams (the South Sea Bubble had burst a few years before the publication of Gulliver's Travels). In the intervening two centuries there has been little advancement. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are but two of the many unscrupulous politicians who could be named, the Moonies and other religious cults flourish, FreeServe, an Internet company that has little if anything of intrinsic value or merit, has recently been valued in excess of a $1 million in advance of its rumoured share flotation, corporate criminality reaps vast rewards and goes unpunished.

Swift was not the only one to launch such attacks. In 1701, jobbers of the East India Company tried to rig parliamentary elections and take over the Bank of England, two decades later the South Sea Bubble burst (1719-20). Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), who was twice declared bankrupt and died hiding out in Cripplegate from creditors, wrote a series of pamphlets attacking jobbers and their fellow travellers, Villainy of stock-jobbers detected (1701), Political History of the Devil (1726), 'the trade of soul-selling, like our late more eminent bubbles', Life of Jonathan Wild (1725), General History of Pyrates (1724), History of Pyrates(1728). In London, 1722, a murderer considered his crimes to be a trifle compared with those of the Directors of the South Sea Bubble; 'To cut Men's heads off is but a trifle to them'. No longer was wealth to be based on men's honest toil, instead on unsubstantiated opinion and trickery.

Daniel Defoe (Villainy of stock-jobbers detected, 1701):

These People can ruin Men silently, undermine and impoverish by a sort of impenetrable Artifice, like Poison that works at a distance, can wheedle Men to ruin themselves, and Fiddle them out of their Money, by that strange and unheard of Engines of Interests, Discounts, Transfers, Tallies, Debentures, Shares, Projects and the Devil and all of Figures and hard Names.

Daniel Defoe (History of apparitions, 1727):

Could souls come back to demand redress of grievances ... what confusion would Exchange Alley and the Exchange of London be in! What distraction would it make in all the affairs of life! and how soon would the men who amassed immense wealth, anno 1720, disappear ... and sink under the guilt of their own good fortune.

Daniel Defoe (Review, Vol 4, No 107, 18 October 1707):

It would make a sad Chasm on the Exchange of London, if all the Pyrates should be taken away from among the Merchants there, whether we be understood to speak of your Litteral or Allegorical Pyrates ... if all thee should be taken off the Exchange, and rendezvous'd ... Bless Us, what Crowding ther'd be when they meet!

Jonathan Swift's works include, The Tale of a Tub (1704), The Battle of the Books (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726), Journal to Stella (written 1710-11). Gulliver's Travels was the only work for which he was paid, for which he received the princely sum of 200.

Swift was a generous man, a third of his income went to charity, another third went to establish a foundation for the insane - St Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles (opened 1757). Whilst he had political authority he used his position to advance the cause of those less fortunate than himself.

In the last years of his life Swift slowly went mad, and in his last years his affairs had to be handled by a trust. Swift died 19 October 1745, and was buried side by with his beloved Stella in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

Esther Johnson, called Stella by Swift, was the daughter of the housekeeper to Sir William Temple at Moor Park. Swift first met her when she was eight and taught her to read.

Swift was a founder member of the Scriblerus Club (c 1713). Other members included Pope, Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell, Congreve, Lord Oxford, Atterbury. Gulliver's Travels may have had its origins in the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, designed to ridicule 'all the false tastes in learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough, that had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously in each'. Although a joint effort, the work is thought to have been written mainly, if not entirely by, Arbuthnot, as an attack against 'false tastes in learning'. The travels of Martinus Scriblerus correspond quite closely with those of Gulliver. The Memoirs were published in the second volume of Pope's prose works (1741), but the work is incomplete and only the first volume has survived to today. From their collaborations together, Gay got the idea for The Beggar's Opera (1728).

John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), physician to Queen Anne, Fellow of the Royal Society, close friend of Jonathan Swift, acquaintance of Gay and most of the literary figures of the time. Together with Swift, Gay and others he was a founder of the Scriblerus Club. Arbuthnot published a number of political pamphlets, the best known being 'The History of John Bull', a collection of pamphlets issued in 1712, and included in Poe and Swift's Miscellany of 1727. Arbuthnot was the principal author of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, which may have inspired Swift to write Gulliver's Travels.

It was as secretary to Sir William Temple (1628-99) that Swift served his political apprenticeship. Essayist and statesman, son of Sir John Temple (1600-77), educated at Bishop Stortford School and Emanuel College, Cambridge, Sir William served as an envoy at Brussels (1666), where at The Hague he negotiated the Triple Alliance between England, Holland and Sweden (1668). He also helped to arrange the marriage between William of Holland and Mary. He left politics and went into retirement disillusioned by 'the uncertainty of princes, the caprices of fortune, the corruption of ministers, the violence of factions, the unsteadiness of counsels and the infidelity of friends'. He wrote a number of political essays including, 'Essay Upon the Present State of Ireland' (1668), 'Observations Upon ... the Netherlands' (1672) and 'The Advancement of Trade in Ireland' (1673). Sir William Temple lived at Moor Park, Farnham.

Following his move from Sheen, Sir William Temple lived at Moor Park on the outskirts of the ancient market town of Farnham (Surrey, England). Today, Moor Park is in need of repair and appears to house some form of training establishment. The North Downs Way runs nearby. A public footpath runs through the grounds of Moor Park, parallel to the River Wey, and eventually leads to the ruins of the Waverly Abbey, a Cistercian Abbey that inspired Sir Walter Scott to write the Waverley novels. The footpath runs past the caves thought to have once been inhabited by the witch Mother Ludlam.
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