Swift, JONATHAN, Dean of St Patrick's, and the greatest of English prose satirists, came of a Yorkshire clerical family on his father Jonathan's side, while his mother was Abigail Erick of Leicestershire. He was thus related to two English poets, as a Swift to Dryden—for his grandmother was niece to the poet's grandfather, and as an Erick or Herrick to the author of the Hesperides. Jonathan Swift was born on 30th November 1667, seven months after his father's early death, at 7 Hoey's Court, which formerly stood near the Castle at Dublin. The only other child was his elder sister Jane. Left with the miserable provision of twenty pounds a year, his mother returned to her family in Leicester, leaving her son's education to the care of his uncle Godwin Swift, who sent him at the age of six to Kilkenny School (then the best in Ireland), where he had Congreve for a schoolfellow, and in 1682 entered him at the age of fourteen at Trinity College, Dublin. His college career was desultory, probably wild, and certainly unsuccessful; and he only obtained his degree speciali gratiâ in 1686. Two years later the turmoil of the Revolution drove him to England, where in 1689 he was received as secretary into the household of the distinguished statesman Sir William Temple (q.v.)—a distant connection of his mother—at Moor Park in Surrey. His proud and independent nature, however, rebelled against the subserviency of the occupation, and after declining a captaincy of horse offered him by William III., who visited Temple's house, and also a clerkship in the Irish Rolls Office tendered by his employer, he left Moor Park for Dublin, where he took orders (deacon, October 1694; priest, January 1695), and was presented by the Lord Deputy to the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast, of the value of £100 a year. Country obscurity soon proved even less to his taste than waiting upon a great man's literary inspirations, and he was not sorry in 1696 to resign his prebend and accept Temple's invitation to return to Moor Park and help him with his papers. By this time Hester Johnson (born at Sheen, 13th March 1681)—immortalised by Swift under the name of Stella—the daughter of a gentlewoman who acted as companion to Lady Giffard, Temple's widowed sister, had grown up into a charming, beautiful, and intelligent girl, and the kindly solicitude of the young Irishman who guided her education was developing into the enduring affection which became the happiness of their two lives. Swift remained at Moor Park till Temple's death in 1699, when he received a legacy of £100 and the privilege of publishing Sir William's posthumous works (which he brought out between 1700 and 1720). His long residence in the house of a cultivated man of the world, despite the subordination that chafed his sensitive pride, had been useful to him. He had found leisure to study; he read enormously in classical and historical literature; he had been brought into personal relations with the king and the ministers, and had learned the business of the politician, which he was soon to practise with signal success. Moreover, the quiet retirement of Temple's house and the solitude of his Irish cure had given him time to produce a masterpiece and a brilliant tour de force—the Tale of a Tub, and the Battle of the Books. The former is held by some critics to be the greatest of Swift's satires; in style and as an artistic whole it certainly stands first. In none of his works is the satire more pointed, the thought more vigorous, the language more nervous and sustained. The cant of religion, the pretensions of letters, the hypocrisies of every form of false virtue or genins are exposed with the keen enjoyment of the iconoclast; the mask is torn from the solemn shams of the world amid derisive laughter. The young genius rejoices in its strength, and spares nothing in its destructive work; and to many minds there is something repellent and sacrilegious in its handling of time-honoured beliefs and institutions, though no profanity was intended. The Battle of the Books, an admirable travesty of the idle controversy then waging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle, and Bentley, concerning the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers, is a much slighter work, but full of exuberant vitality and humour. Both were published anonymously, like almost all Swift's works, in 1704.
Soon after Temple's death, failing in his application to the court for preferment, Swift became secretary to Lord Berkeley, one of the Lords Deputies to Ireland, and his wit enlivened the society of Dublin Castle by such jests as the Petition of Mrs Frances Harris (1700), in verse, and the parody of Boyle, A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1704), in prose. After being disappointed of the deanery of Derry, he was given the vicarage of Laracor, near Trim, in West Meath, in 1700, and presented to a prebend in St Patrick's Cathedral; and in 1701 he took his doctor's degree at T. C. D. From 1701 to 1710 he divided his time between Laracor and London, where he was employed on ecclesiastical business by the Archbishop of Dublin, and where he contrived to live for half each year on £60. His reputation as a wit, and his suspected authorship of the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books (to say nothing of his earliest publication, the Dissensions in Athens and Rome, a defence of Lord Berkeley, 1701), assured his position in society and in the clubs and coffee-houses, where he constantly spent his evenings with Addison, Rowe, Prior, Congreve, and every one else worth meeting, and found himself ever more and more in request. He now wrote his humorous squibs on the unlucky almanac-maker, Partridge, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, and vindicated his position and opinions as a churchman (sorely damaged by the free speaking of the Tale of a Tub) in the Argument to Prove the Inconvenience of abolishing Christianity, the Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Sentiments of a Church of England Man (all in 1708). At Laracor he busied himself with improving the vicarage, church, glebe, and garden, of which he was fond. 'I stayed above half the time,' he says, 'in one scurvy acre of ground, and I always left it with regret.' The regret was heightened by the circumstance that 'Stella,' who had come to Ireland with her companion, Rebecca Dingley, by Swift's advice, after Temple's death, passed much of her time between Trim and Dublin.
For the next three years, from September 1710 to June 1713, Swift was chiefly in London, incessantly engaged in political work. The Whigs had done nothing for him, and he detested their war-policy and their views on the church establishment. The Tories, on the other hand, were full of civility and deference, and longed to win his pungent pen to their cause. Moreover, Swift was personally attracted by the character of Harley, the Lord Treasurer, and a warm friendship soon sprang up between these utterly dissimilar natures. So Swift abandoned his neutral position and became a Tory, and taking over the editorship of the Examiner, which had languished in its early days under Bolingbroke and Atterbury, converted it into a deadly weapon of attack against the Whigs. Swift's Examiners, thirty-three in number (November 1710 to June 1711), may almost be said to have created the 'leading article' and established the power of the press. They are not remarkable for rhetoric or eloquence, but are simple plain trenchant statements of policy and criticisms of opponents, such as the honest country squire could understand, and would have made himself if he had known how. The backbone of Swift's policy was denunciation of the war party as a ring of Whig stockjobbers, who cared nothing for the country, but out of self-interest played into the hands of the Emperor and the Allies. He urged this view, together with his firm belief in the landed interest and the establishment, in numerous brief and telling skits and broadsides in prose and verse, besides several elaborate argumentative pamphlets, such as the Advice to the October Club (1712); Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712); and the Public Spirit of the Whigs, a crushing reply to Steele's Crisis (1714); but nowhere so ably and forcibly as in his political masterpiece The Conduct of the Allies, published on November 27, 1711, of which the second edition was sold out in five hours on December 1, and a seventh edition reached in the new year. These writings undoubtedly contributed to the overthrow of Marlborough and the conclusion of the peace of Utrecht in 1713. Among slighter satires of this time may be mentioned The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician's Rod (1710), directed against Godolphin, and the Windsor Prophecy (1711). Swift was also engaged preparing his History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne, a laboured production, which was not published till much later; and he also wrote, under his own name, a Proposal for correcting, &c. the English Tongue (1712), which includes the oft-suggested notion of a national academy of letters. His life during these three eventful and laborious years is minutely recorded in his wonderful Journal to Stella, the most faithful and fascinating diary the world has ever seen, in which all his hopes and fears, his daily work and occupations, his growing influence with ministers, everything in short that he did and all that he thought, are set down in perfect honesty and with no thought of publication, but only for the sympathetic interest of his life-companion Hester Johnson. High affairs of state mingle with playful tenderness and the sweet familiarity of the 'little language,' with a natural charm and frankness which make the Journal unique.
Swift's reward for his unwearied labour on behalf of the Tory administration was poor enough. He had throughout kept his independence, and declined to accept the pay of the government like a hired hack. He waited for ecclesiastical preferment; but the queen would not bestow a bishopric on the author of the Tale of a Tub. At last in the evil days that preceded the fall of the ministry he was given the Deanery of St Patrick's at Dublin (April 1713), though he would rather have been sent anywhere else. A year later the crisis came; Harley (now Earl of Oxford) resigned, the queen died, the Whigs came into office, and
Swift's prospect of political influence in London was gone forever.
A romantic episode in his London life had been the passion he inspired in Esther Vanhomrigh (b. 14th February 1692), whom in his usual fashion he called 'Vanessa,' a young girl whom he grew to know intimately at her mother's house in London in 1709-13. He had a fatal habit of playing the mentor to women without looking to the consequences, and there can be no doubt that he behaved with little circumspection in his relations with Vanessa. When he went to Ireland she followed him, and lived sometimes at Dublin and sometimes at a place she had inherited at Celbridge. Whether Swift was married to 'Stella' or not (and there is no satisfactory evidence for the alleged marriage in 1716), the presence of 'Vanessa' in Turnstile Alley, and of Stella in Ormond Quay, on the other side of the Liffey, must have been extremely embarrassing to the solitary tenant of the Deanery between the two; and there is no doubt that he tried to repress Vanessa's passion. She died of a consumption in 1723, and by her testamentary directions Swift's metrical version of their romance was published, with the title Cadenus [i.e. Decanus] and Vanessa (1726). But what his real relations were with the two women, why he did not marry, or, if he did eventually go through the mere ceremony with 'Stella,' as the legend tells, why he kept his marriage a profound secret, and why they never lived together, remain mysteries still, in spite of more than one plausible explanation. The theory that he believed himself tainted with hereditary madness, supported by the fact that he suffered from mysterious attacks in the head due to a disease in the ear, appears to furnish the best clue to his determination to abjure the privilege of fatherhood; and another reason for his abstinence, compatible with this, has been deduced from the fact that he seems to have never experienced the ordinary emotion of passion. Whatever his passing feeling for 'Vanessa,' there can be no doubt that he was devotedly attached to 'Stella' to her dying day (28th January 1728), and that in all senses but one few women have been better loved.
When his hopes of further political work in England were demolished by the accession of King George and the Whigs, Swift, now a man of forty-seven, retired to his deanery, and with the exception of two journeys to England in 1726 and 1727, and occasional visits to friends in Ireland, remained there for nearly thirty years. But political influence and activity were essential to his masterful nature, and accordingly he devoted his energies to the wrongs of Ireland, which were then very real indeed. He did this from no love of the land of his exile, nor out of sympathy with the true Irish: he considered Dublin merely 'a good enough place to die in,' and his voice was raised chiefly on behalf of the narrow Ireland of the Englishry. He defended Ireland only out of 'a perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression' wherever it was found. Nevertheless his ungracious mediation and his unpalatable home-truths bore marvellous fruit throughout the country; he created and guided popular opinion and for a while made it a power; and the generous impulsive populace worshipped him. His Irish tracts (of which the famous Drapier's Letters, 1724, directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper currency known as 'Wood's halfpence'; the Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, 1720; and the audacious Modest Proposal for utilising children as articles of food, 1729, are among the best examples) possess all the merits of his style and method, his inflexible logic, his delightful reductions to absurdity, his burning passion, his tremendous scorn, and his unsparing virulence in attack. He brought the law upon his printer more than once, but he won the day. 'Wood's halfpence' were suppressed, and the Lord-lieutenant had to confess good-humouredly that he governed 'by permission of Dr Swift.'
Besides his Irish tracts, a good deal of light verse—never rising to the level of true poetry, and often exceedingly coarse—and his Polite Conversation (1738), a witty parody of small-talk, and Directions to Servants, a savage satire on menial incapacity, Swift's Irish period is notable for the completion of the most famous of all his works: Gulliver's Travels appeared in 1726, and was immediately in the mouth of all the world. This immortal satire needs no description or criticism. In it we see Swift's genius in its full maturity, less impetuous and fiery than in the Tale of a Tub, but sterner, more earnest, more majestic in its scorn. It is the terrible earnestness of Swift's indignation at the cant and shams of the world that gives his work its unique force and fire. But with all its deadly satire Gulliver is a wonderful story-book, and its daring fancy joined to a strange sobriety and plausibility, its bizarre situations, its inherent possibility, and its delightful playfulness make it a classic favourite with children, as well as men, to whom the scourge is more apparent than the jest. Swift's style is here seen in its perfection; pointed and direct, simple, masculine, absolutely free from affectation, logical and lucid, it always says just what it means, with never a word wasted; its shafts hit the mark fair in the centre with unerring precision.
Of his life during his later years a record is found in his voluminous correspondence with English friends like Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke, and his Irish crony, Dr Sheridan, to name no more. As letters alone they are quite admirable; but as biographical materials they are priceless. No man was sauncher in his friendships than Swift, and in spite of his bitter moods he hardly ever lost a friend. They were all he had to live for after 'Stella's' death, except his duties and charities among the poor in the Liberties of St Patrick, where he was adored. His life had become very lonely and sad, and he dwelt in constant dread of that mental overthrow which he felt was coming. In 1740 his brain disease drove him to the verge of madness, but after two years clouded by periods of unspeakable torment he sank into a helpless, speechless lethargy, and so gradually faded out of life. The long misery and despair, and lonely exile, and final torpor came to an end 19th October 1745, when the most commanding intellect of his time passed from its dreary prison of imbecility to where, in the words of his own epitaph, his seva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit; and the body of the great dean was laid beside 'Stella,' in the same grave, in the cathedral over which he had reigned for thirty years.
The standard edition of the Works of Swift is Sir Walter Scott's (19 vols. Edin. 1814; 2d ed. 1824), which includes most of what was valuable in the earlier collected editions of Hawkesworth and Sheridan, but which stands in need of a thorough revision. Numerous selections from his works have been made; amongst them are those by the present writer, in two volumes, Prose Writings and Journals and Letters (Parchment Library, 1884 and 1885), with introductions, criticisms, and notes, which have been used in this article; by W. Lewin (Camelot Classics, 1886); by H. Morley (Carisbrooke Library, 1889-90); and H. Craik (Clarendon Press, 1892). John Forster published the first volume of an exhaustive Life in 1875; that by Henry Craik (1882; new ed. 1894) became the standard. See also the short Life by Leslie Stephen (1882); the Life by Churton Collins (1893); Moriarty, Dean Swift and his Writings (1893); and R. Ashe King, Swift in Ireland (1896). The evidence for the supposed marriage with Stella has been sifted with a lawyer's acumen in Blackwood's Magazine, May 1876, by J. Paget, who decides against it. For separate editions of Swift's works, and where preserved, see Notes for a Bibliography of Swift, by the present writer (1884). Portraits of Swift are to be seen at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, by Jervas, at the Deanery of St Patrick's, at Howth Castle, in Lord Orrery's Remarks, and in Nichol's edition of the works.