Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin, son of a steward of the King’s Inns in Dublin, he was educated at Kilkenny School, and TCD. In 1689, disgusted with the policy of preferment of Catholics being practised in Dublin by James II’s Viceroy, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, and anxious for his future, he left Ireland and became personal secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat, who had helped arrange the marriage of William and Mary. He lived with him at Moor Park, Surrey, where he met Esther Johnson (Stella), then a young girl, a life-long friend and companion.
 At Moor Park Swift studied and wrote a series of Pindaric Odes during 1690-91 before returning to Dublin where he took holy orders in 1694. He was then appointed to Kilroot, Co Antrim, an overwhelmingly Presbyterian area, where he began A Tale of A Tub (1704), an attack on religious extremism, before returning to Moor Park. When Temple died in 1699 Swift moved again to Dublin, where he served as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, and obtained the vicarage of Laracor, Co Meath, the following year.
 While in London in 1701, he published Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome a political essay written to gain the attention of the Whig ministry, supporting a system of checks and balances in government.
 In 1707 he wrote The Story of the Injured Lady (1746), protesting that the Union between England and Scotland of that year was a betrayal of Protestant Ireland in favour of dissenting Scotland. He also began negotiations in London on behalf of the Church of Ireland in its attempts to resist additional taxation; Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man argues against extremism, over-zealous reformation, and for church independence.
 Over the next two years, he made friends with Addison and Steele, and wrote several satirical pieces for the Tatler, including the Bickerstaff Papers (1708), an attack on projectors and schemers, using Swift’s favourite device, an obviously fraudulent spokesman, in this case an astrologer. In the autumn of 1710, he was courted by the new Tory ministry, and began the Journal to Stella (1766-68). Over the next three years, Swift worked as a party-writer for the Tories, taking on the editorship of The Examiner (1710-11), a weekly propaganda paper, and writing major essays defending government foreign policy, such as The Conduct of the Allies (1711).
 While in London he met Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he later named ‘Vanessa’ [see ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’], and published anonymously Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1711). He was also introduced to Alexander Pope and enjoyed the literary company of the Scriblerus Club. However, after three years of dedicated service Swift reluctantly accepted the Deanery of St. Patrick’s, having hoped for an English post. In August 1714, he left for Dublin and took up residence in the deanery, where he stayed until his death.
 After six years of relative silence, Swift produced A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), the first of many anonymous pamphlets by the new Dean on Irish affairs, in which he challenged English assumptions about Ireland’s colonial status. He also began work on Gulliver’s Travels, parts of which he showed to close friends, including Vanessa, who died in 1723.
 In 1720, he wrote ‘The Description of an Irish Feast’, his translation of ‘Pléaráca na Ruarcach’ by Aodh Mac Gabhráin one of the circle of Gaelic scholars gathered around Seán O Neachtain in Dublin. According to folklore, having heard the Irish sung to him to music by Carolan he asked Mac Gabhráin to translate the Irish from whose literal version Swift worked.
 In 1724 his work on the Travels was interrupted by the controversy over Wood’s half-pence, to which Swift contributed the famous Drapier’s Letters, earning him the contemporary title of ‘Hibernian Patriot’, and the freedom of the city of Dublin.
  In 1726 he visited London with a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, which was published in October of that year. This represented the climax of his literary career, after which he suffered many disappointments and losses, none worse than the death of Stella in 1728. A Short View of The State of Ireland, published in that year, expresses deep pessimism in relation to Ireland’s unstable economy.
 Swift continued to write polemical pamphlets on Ireland, the most bitter of which, A Modest Proposal, appeared in 1729. He spent increasing amounts of time with friends outside Dublin, especially with Thomas Sheridan at Quilca, Co. Cavan. Together they produced The Intelligencer (1729), a weekly paper on literary, economic, and social topics, reflecting Swift’s intimate knowledge of Irish, and especially Dublin, life.
 In the 1780s Swift wrote many pamphlets defending the rights of his own Church and attacking Dissent. With the author’s assistance, George Faulkner published the first edition of Swift’s Works in 1735.
 In 1736, Swift published one of his last major poems, ‘The Legion Club’, a satirical attack on the Irish parliament. In 1742, he was declared ‘of unsound mind and memory’, and for the next three years he was looked after by close friends. When he died he left part of his legacy for the establishment of St. Patrick’s Hospital for the mentally ill.

Swift’s literary career is most remarkable for the way in which his artistic energy both served and transcended ideological conservatism. In nearly everything he wrote, he was mindful of the public and political responsibility of the writer. As a clergyman, he regularly used his literary talent to defend the material and constitutional interests of the Established Church.
 Reared and educated within a strict Anglican tradition, his essential and abiding loyalities were to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and its constitutional guarantee of mixed government by which monarch and parliament assumed a cooperative sovereignty. His political principles, as he outlined them in A Letter from Dr Swift to Mr Pope (written in 1722, but not published until 1741), were those of a moderate yet critical Tory, a position which best seemed to unite and protect his civil and religious values.
 In what may seem hypocritical to a modern reader, Swift always rejected the principle of legal toleration for religious dissenters such as Presbyterians, as well as for Roman Catholics, yet could write some of his most aesthetically satisfying work out of this intransigence. Religious dissent, of all kinds, represented a dangerous form of political disloyalty and subversion.
 His artistic humour was usually able to transform this hostility into outlandish satirical form as with A Tale of a Tub, even though his skills at literary impersonation often led critics to attribute the vices being exposed to Swift himself. He was most skilful at concealing his own views by mocking those of others. Through satire, parody and other kinds of literary impersonation, Swift diverts attention away from his own limited yet consistent principles towards the distortion of reason and sanity which he detects in his enemies.
 Swift’s ambiguous art is reflected in the anonymous and pseudonymous forms he habitually employed. He very rarely spoke in his own voice, or signed his name to anything he wrote. This was largely a stylistic preference, but was often a legal safeguard, especially when he was engaged in contemporary satire. Some of his most memorable works, such as Gulliver’s Travels or A Modest Proposal, are based solidly on the ironic exploitation of a seemingly innocent persona whose character eventually becomes part of the satirical strategy of rebuking the reader’s complacency. In The Drapier’s Letters the mask of a Dublin tradesman is used both to protect the Dean’s identity and to provide a rhetorical platform for the author’s criticism of English rule.
 If there is such a thing as the ‘essential’ Swift, it could be argued that he is at his best in the essay or pamphlet, especially those written in a polemical or ironic spirit, such as his Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708), in which he uses his favourite tactic of allowing a fool to conduct unwittingly an idiotic defence of the unreasonable.
 Swift wrote over sixty pamphlets on Ireland, finally despairing of the effectiveness of such appeals, and yet never stopped writing until sickness forced him into silence. His literary personality was aggressive in temperament, classical in taste, inventive in form, and highly-disciplined in style. Swift’s elusive literary identity may be linked to his ambivalent sense of national loyalty.
 Although he repeatedly referred to himself as ‘an Englishman born in Ireland’, he came to feel increasingly alienated from, and vengeful towards, England. Historically, he voiced and shaped the values and ambitions of Protestant Ireland [see Protestantism], even though, as in the Drapier’s Letters, he could use the rhetoric of the ‘Whole People of Ireland’.
 Swift advocated the abolition of the Irish language, which he associated with barbarism, and viewed the Catholic peasantry as ‘mere hewers of wood and drawers of water’. Yet this ultra-conservatism rarely defended the existing political order, especially in Ireland, where he frankly encouraged constitutional and legislative independence.
 It would be quite misleading and inappropriate, however, to characterize him as a ‘nationalist’, as many subsequent commentators have done. Swift’s politics were of a very different age, and never amounted to a coherent theory. [BS]
 

Bibliography: For editions of his work, see Herbert Davis et al., eds, The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 16 vols (1939-68); Harold Williams, ed., The Poems of Jonathan Swift, 3 vols. (1937 rev. 1958); The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, 5 vols. (1963-5) Vols 4 and 5 rev. D. Woolley (1972); and Joseph McMinn, ed., Swift’s Irish Pamphlets (1991). The standard biography is Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age (3 vols. 1962-83), but see also O. W. Ferguson, Jonathan Swift in Ireland (1962); Caroline Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (1982); and McMinn, Jonathan’s Travels (1994).

The Drapier’s Letters (1724-25), a series of seven pamphlets by Jonathan Swift, written during 1724-5, in which he assumed the guise of the ‘Drapier’, a Dublin shopkeeper, in order to protest at England’s treatment of Ireland as a ‘depending Kingdom’. This famous controversy began with an economic and legal dispute over the grant of a patent to William Wood, an English enterpreneur, to mint half-pence for Ireland. Not having been consulted, public opinion in Ireland denounced the scheme, and Swift turned the affair into a question of Ireland’s constitutional status. During 1724, he wrote and published five pamphlets on the issue: A Letter to the Shopkeepers, A Letter to Mr Harding, Some Observations upon a Report, A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland, and A Letter to Lord Viscount Molesworth. A sixth pamphlet, A Letter to the Lord Chancellor Middleton, was written in that year, but withheld for legal reasons. In 1725, a final pamphlet, An Humble Address to both Houses of Parliament, was written but shelved when it was learned that the government had withdrawn Wood’s patent in the face of the Drapier’s successul campaign. These last two pamphlets were first published in 1735, by George Faulkner. Throughout the controversy, Swift used the plain-spoken Drapier to unite Protestants against a system of rule which seemed to treat Ireland as a colony. The major theme of the Letters became legislative independence under the Crown, with the Drapier reminding his audience that ‘by the Laws of GOD, of NATURE, of NATIONS, and of your own Country, you ARE and OUGHT to be as FREE a people as your Brethren in England’. This declaration was seized upon by the authorities as seditious; the printer, John Harding, was arrested, and a reward offered for disclosure of the author. A complicated, even farcical, legal battle ensued, but the case was abandoned. Swift’s role as the Drapier earned him a reputation as a patriot. He was granted the Freedom of the City of Dublin, and his pamphlets provided later generations with a rhetoric of Irish constitutional independence.

Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a prose satire by Jonathan Swift originally entitled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World . Written in Ireland and carried by Swift to London, it was published pseudonymously following a fictional correspondence between ‘Richard Sympson’, a supposed cousin of Gulliver, and Benjamin Motte, the unsuspecting printer. The purportedly autobiographical narrative is conducted by Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon, who tells of his voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms. Intended as a political satire addressed to the contemporary English audience, it also allowed Swift to elaborate his views on the relation between reason and civiliisation. The Travels appeared in a corrupt version until 1735, when George Faulkner produced a satisfactory text in Dublin largely due to Swift’s cooperation.
 Gulliver travels first to Lilliput (Part I), where the diminutive inhabitants refer to their visitor as the ‘Man-Mountain’. The satirical plan of this section focuses especially on the especially on the long-standing feud between England and France, which correspond to the neighbouring kingdoms of Lilliput and Blefescu. If at first Gulliver is impressed by the Lilliputian social order, which seems virtuous and reasonable, he soon becomes disillusioned by its petty factionalism. After he is falsely accused of high treason he escapes to Blefescu, whence he returns home. Although the section most often edited for children, the treatment of physicality here shows Swift’s scatological humour, as when Gulliver extinguishes a fire in the Queen’s palace by urinating on it. In Brobdingnag (Part II), the perspective is reversed: Gulliver is diminutive and the Brobdingnagians gigantic.
 The main features of this adventure are Gulliver’s revulsion at the magnified details of human anatomy and his defensive account of English and Continental politics. At the royal court he is regarded as a freak whose outlook is considered no less laughable than his stature. The account he gives of England grows increasingly ironic as he unintentionally exposes the irrationality and barbarism of his culture, all the time convinced that he is making a good impression. The king concludes, however, that Gulliver represents ‘the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth’.
 After two years, Gulliver leaves Brobdingnag through a misadventure and makes his way to England, which he now sees as Lilliputian. On his next journey he visits the flying island Laputa and neighbouring Lagado and Luggnagg (Part III). Laputa’s inhabitants are obsessed with astronomical speculations involving music and mathematics which Gulliver finds incomprehensible. At Lagado’s Academy of Projectors - a satire on the Royal Society - he finds manic researches going on at the hands of scientists, one of whom is trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. He also meets the immortal Struldbrugs, who in their gloomy exhausted resignation influenced Samuel Beckett’s fictional characters. More topical and episodic than the rest, this was the last section of the Travels to be written and includes allusions to campaign against Wood’s half-pencewhich Swift successfully combatted through The Drapier’s Letters.
 The manuscript also told how Lindalineo (Dublin) successfully resists the efforts of the flying island to crush the lawful resistance to Laputan rule by literally crushing the objectors, but this was by both Motte and Faulkner for fear of prosecution. On his last voyage (Part IV), Gulliver visits the land of the horses, or Houyhnhnms, who live by the dictates of reason and whose language is the ‘perfection of nature’. Having listened to Gulliver’s account of European politics in general they decide that he is a Yahoo, the vilest form of life in their country. Gulliver is banished and eventually returns to England, where the impression made on him remains so strong that he prefers the company of horse to that of his own family. Swift’s apparent recommendation of the reasoned order which the horses represent, and his disturbing portrait of the degraded yahoos, has been seen as a deeply pessimistic judgement on human nature. See Breon Hammond, Gullivers Travels (1988).

A Modest Proposal (1729) a pamphlet by Jonathan Swift on Ireland, written during the summer of 1729, when he was staying with friends at Markethill, Co. Armagh, and published in October by Sarah Harding, widow of the printer of the Drapier’s Letters . In form and tone it resembles a conventional philanthropic appeal to solve Ireland’s economic crisis, but Swift’s anonymous speaker suggests what seems a barbarous plan, to cannibalize the nation’s children. Confident of his success and integrity, he anticipates and dismisses all humanitarian and financial objections, urging many practical advantages. The climax of the pamphlet’s savage irony is reached when the speaker rejects a list of alternative schemes, recognisably those of Swift himself, as ‘Expedients’. A Modest Proposal is a masterpiece of rhetorical irony, a disturbing fiction which marks the end of Swift’s pamphleteering role on national affairs after a decade of passionate involvement.

A Tale of a Tub (1704), a prose satire by Jonathan Swift on religious fanaticism, probably begun in 1696, when he was vicar of Kilroot, Co. Antrim. It tells the story of three brothers, Peter (Catholicism), Martin (Anglicanism) and Jack (Dissent), representing the main branches of the Christian Church, with five digressional episodes satirising various ‘modern’ absurdities, such as pedantic scholarship and puritanism. The father leaves his coat to the three boys, saying they must not alter it, but all three do, and fall out in the process. Swift’s life-long obsession with religious fundamentalism and dissent began with the Tale, which seems to have been strongly influenced by his residence in Kilroot, an overwhelmingly Presbyterian area. However Rome is fiercely attacked for its arrogance and its teaching on transubstantiation, and the Church of England, while celebrated as the most perfect ‘in Discipline and Doctrine’ is treated with Swiftian irreverence. The Tale is meant to divert attacks upon the ship of state and religion by using the old seaman’s trick of throwing an empty tub into the sea to distract marauding whales.

A Short View of the State of Ireland (1728), a pamphlet by Jonathan Swift attacking those who seek political favour by pretending that Ireland is a prosperous nation. In systematic fashion, he lists those supposed conditions of a healthy economy, and then proceeeds to show how, despite her abundant natural resources, Ireland is kept in poverty by its own apathy and England’s punitive legislation. Absentee landlords who spend their Irish rents in England are bitterly denounced, as is a government which has stripped the country of its forests for export, hampered foreign trade, and discourgaed tillage in favour of grazing. Written two months after Stella’s death, this is the first of a series of deeply pessimistic pamphlets on Ireland’s increasingly hopeless state. It was reprinted in The Intelligencer, a weekly paper begun by Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan in 1729.

‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may be know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.’

‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, and not enough to make us love one another.’

‘[U]tterly rejecting and renouncing everything wearable that comes from England [...] burn everything that came from England, except their People and their Coals.’

‘For in Reason, all Government without the Consent of the Governed, is the very Definition of Slavery: But, in fact, Eleven Men well Armed will certainly subdue one Single Man in his Shirt.

‘Looking upon this world as absolutely desperate, I would not prescribe a dose to the dead.’

‘It is a mistake of wise and good men that they expect more Reason and Virtue from human nature, than [ ... ] it is in any sort capable of.‘