Jonathan Swift
(1667–1745)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, adapted by Humphrey Carpenter
Theatr Clwyd, 1995
Even in his time, Jonathan Swift was an enigma. An Anglican clergyman who seemed to take little joy in his religion, he was regarded as a hero by the Irish, even though he himself called them a nation of “beggars, thieves, oppressors, fools and knaves”. He was labelled a misanthropist because the most satirical of his writings exude a ferocity which is unsettling even for their period, but at the same time he enjoyed tender relationships with several gentlewomen and at his death it was discovered he had given away two thirds of his modest income to help the poor and insane. His most famous book is both a playful spoof on contemporary travellers’ tales and a coruscating attack on the worst aspects of his fellow men. He was neither fully Houyhnhnm or Yahoo, but only a man with elements of both in his own character could have conceived of either.
He was born on 30 November 1667 into an English family which had settled in Dublin in the 1640s. His father died before he was born, and the oldest of four uncles, Godwin Swift, subsequently provided him with “the education of a dog” first at Kilkenny Grammar School and then at Trinity College, Dublin, from where he graduated in 1686. Following the accession of William and Mary to the throne in 1688, Swift moved to England where he became private secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat and leading liberal, whose estate at Moor Park in Surrey provided him with a life of elegance and stimulating companionship. Under these auspices Swift hoped to secure for himself an English bishopric, but in this he was destined for lifelong disappointment.
In 1690 he suffered his first attack of Menière’s disease, an ailment unrecognised at this time which caused giddiness, vomiting and deafness. The symptoms were to keep returning throughout his life, and it was this which weighed down his spirits and which possibly led to the accusations of madman and misanthrope which were to be levelled against him later. On this occasion his doctors advised a change of climate, and for a while Swift was installed in the parish of Kilroot near Belfast. But compared to Moor Park the living was provincial and uninspiring. He returned to Temple’s service until that man’s death in 1699.
By now Swift was deeply immersed in politics, writing pamphlets and essays, and even during a brief stint as Vicar of Leracor north of Dublin in County Meath, he kept his finger on the pulse of politics in the mainland. The year 1701 saw him back in London now as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, where he wrote a pamphlet supporting the Whigs. In 1704 the publication of A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books secured his reputation as a satirist of great originality and force.
The Whigs were currently in the ascendant and formed the intellectual establishment. In the first decade of the 18th century Swift proved himself a useful and valuable friend to Godolphin’s ministry, and he was also on good terms with the writers Steele, Addison and Congreve. However, he was shortly to fall out with the Whigs over religious reform, and when Godolphin himself fell from power in 1710, the incoming Tories welcomed Swift’s pen. He now began to rub shoulders with Queen Anne’s physician Dr Arbuthnot, the Tory leaders Oxford and Bolingbroke, and he also became a member of the influential Scriblerus Club along with the poet Alexander Pope and John Gay who would later write The Beggar’s Opera.
Swift’s attacks on corruption and the abuse of power continued – he was particularly scathing of the Duke of Marlborough’s “warmongering” in Europe – but his outspokenness precluded any permanent church post. Queen Anne’s advisers the Duchess of Somerset and the Archbishop of York had called A Tale of a Tub profane, and when the Queen died in 1714, Swift had no alternative but to take up the appointment of Dean to St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin – “a long, melancholy prospect”.
The Tories fell at the same time. Within a year Oxford was imprisoned and Bolingbroke exiled to France on suspicion of treason. Swift remained loyal to them, dangerous or even foolhardy though that may have been, and many have chosen to see a tribute to them in the Lilliput section of Gulliver’s Travels, where the giant hero Gulliver is tormented by petty and inconsequential Whiggish persecutors.
A man of principle first and last, Swift’s Englishness did not prevent him fighting for the rights of the oppressed Irish amongst whom he lived. Ireland had traditionally suffered neglect and decay at the hands of the English – rebellions had always been swiftly put down with bloody force, and the place was kept perpetually poor through lack of investment. Like the American colonies, the Irish suffered direct rule and taxation from London while enjoying none of the advantages. They had been denied their rights as free men, and it was this that fired Swift’s anger.
He was among the first to take up the cudgels in the matter of ‘Wood’s halfpence’. In 1722 a William Wood had taken out a patent to mint coinage for Ireland but there was an outcry at its poor quality, not to mention the fact that the Irish themselves had not been consulted. Swift write a series of pieces under the pseudonym MB Drapier (The Drapier Letters) which were instrumental in causing the new Whig leader Sir Robert Walpole to withdraw the coinage three years later. And it was an Irish theme which was to fuel the argument of his most vitriolic satire of all, the infamous A Modest Proposal of 1729. In a calm, measured and logical way it sets out the reasons and method by which famine can be averted in Ireland by feeding the children of the poor to the families of the rich.
Although Swift himself never married, he was not at all indifferent to the opposite sex. In 1695 he had proposed to a parishioner at Kilroot named Jane Waring, but he was rejected. (Five years later the girl had changed her mind but so had he.) The two most famous women in his life provided longer-term relationships of apparently similar intensity. Esther Johnson whom Swift called ‘Stella’ was a girl in Temple’s household at Moor Park whom he helped educate. While away in Ireland he kept in daily contact with her, and when in England he kept up an intimate journal, sharing with her his innermost thoughts. He was devastated by her early death and could not bring himself to attend her funeral.
His other great love, ‘Vanessa’, was Hester Vanhomrigh, the eldest daughter in a London household which stood at the centre of Anglo-Irish society. She followed him to Ireland in 1714 but he, unable to return her passion in the same manner, fended her off as gently as possible. She died in 1723 after they had shared many stormy scenes together.
Swift anticipated another storm over the publication of Gulliver’s Travels, but luckily for him any political fallout was immediately swamped by the book’s commercial success. In this work he set out to fire a broadside at all aspects of human vice and folly, and in particular to cut down to size those who for too long had wielded too much power with too little accountability. Politically he was playing with fire, but the deceptively oblique parallels with actual personalities were sufficiently subtle to give delight to the many before they could cause irrevocable offence to the few.
Composed over a four-year period, the book’s strengths lay in its imaginative power, its sense of irony, and a bold, straightforward style whose clarity Swift constantly monitored by reading passages aloud to his servants. On 14 August 1725 he was able to place his tongue in his cheek and write “I have finished my Travells… they are admirable things and will wonderfully mend the world” – but he still took elaborate precautions against being identified as the author. First he had the manuscript transcribed and then had the copy delivered incognito to the publisher Motte at dead of night. It came out on 28 October 1726, but Motte was taking no chances either and had bowdlerised the text. Swift’s friend Charles Ford oversaw the second edition (though in fact it was the fourth, as the first three sold out in the first year), yet still Swift was not satisfied. The first edition to include all his corrections and restore all the cuts was that printed by Faulkner in Dublin in 1735.
Gulliver’s huge popular success, no less then Swift’s relief at escaping prosecution for the vilification it contained, was a small sop to his declining years. For some time his debilitating disease had been recurring with increasing severity and in 1742 he was declared no longer capable of conducting his own affairs. Still, he lingered on until 19 October 1745 in pain and isolation, an ultimately sad and widely misunderstood man. He was buried in his own cathedral in Dublin.
On his death it was found that a third of his income had been set aside for the building of an insane asylum, but even in this act of philanthropy Swift the satirist had the final word. In an ode called On the Death of Dr Swift he had written:
He gave the little wealth he had,
To build a House for Fools and Mad;
And shew’d by one Satyric Touch,
No nation needed it so much.
As this was a production aimed at children, I provided a colouring-in page. It was obviously done at the last minute, because I clearly used no references at all. Note, for instance, the impossible variety of tropical and Scandinavian vegetation, designed, no doubt, to reflect the world-ranging content of the book.
