Swift, Jonathan

Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), clergyman, poet, satirist, and political writer. Born in Dublin, the son of an English‐born lawyer, Swift spent 1691‐9 in Moor Park, Surrey, as secretary to the retired diplomat Sir William Temple, with an interval as vicar of Kilroot, Co. Antrim, 1695–6. He became vicar of Laracor, Co. Meath, in 1700. A Tale of a Tub (1704), a religious allegory, lampooned Catholicism and dissent. In 1707 Swift returned to England to negotiate financial concessions (see first fruits and twentieth parts) for the Church of Ireland. Formerly an associate of leading Whigs, he became from 1710 a client of the Tory leader Robert Harley, for whose administration (1710–14) he, wrote highly effective propaganda, particularly against the continuation of war with France. Swift's efforts won him appointment as dean of St Patrick's cathedral, Dublin (1713), but not the English bishopric he hoped for, and the exclusion of the Tories from power after 1714 forced him back to Ireland.

During the 1720s Swift became a fierce controversialist on Irish issues, notably with A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), advocating a boycott of English goods, and the Drapier's Letters. Other pamphlets attacked English misgovernment of Ireland, along with the native vices of corruption, idleness, and exploitative and absentee landlordism. A Modest Proposal (1729), arguing that Ireland could escape from poverty by raising children for food, has been read variously as a reflection of Swift's misanthropy, as the ultimate indictment of England's oppression of Ireland, and as a frustrated reformer's abandonment of the Irish to the consequences of their own indolence and folly. Gulliver's Travels (1726) is a more broadly based satire on contemporary politics, religion, and literature.

Swift's abandonment of the Whigs was due partly to their failure to uphold the established church, whose defence against irreligion and dissent remained one of his main concerns, and partly to a belief that post‐revolution Whiggery had abandoned liberty for oligarchy. Much later he still insisted that he, and Harley, were ‘real’ Whigs (see commonwealthmen). The same concern for constitutional rights, intermixed with bitterness at his banishment to Dublin, inspired his Irish pamphleteering. As with other patriot writers, the liberties he defended were those of the Anglican minority, whose Englishness was throughout one of his central contentions.

Bibliography

Downie, J. A. , Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (1984)