("An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity" is consider...)
"An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity" is considered one of the greatest political satires ever written. The essay is as hilarious today as it was hundreds of years ago.
(Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four...)
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature.
(The originality, concentrated power and "fierce indignati...)
The originality, concentrated power and "fierce indignation" of his satirical writing have earned Jonathan Swift a reputation as the greatest prose satirist in the English language.
Gulliver's Travels is, of course, his world-renowned masterpiece in the genre; however, Swift wrote other, shorter works that also offer excellent evidence of his inspired lampoonery. Perhaps the most famous of these is "A Modest Proposal," in which he straight-facedly suggests that Ireland could solve its hunger problems by using its children for food.
Jonathan Swift was an Irish poet, political writer, and clergyman, who ranks as the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Best known for writing Gulliver's Travels, he was dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.
Background
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland, on November 30, 1667. His father, Jonathan Swift, an Englishman who had settled in Ireland, died a few months before Swift's birth. His mother was Abigail Erick (or Herrick) of Frisby on the Wreake.
Education
Thanks to his uncle, Swift received the best education that Ireland afforded, first at Kilkenny School and then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1686.
When violence broke out in Ireland in 1689, Swift was one of those Anglo-Irish who sought refuge in England. Before the end of the year he had found employment as secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat and man of letters living at Moor Park in Surrey. Here Swift stayed, off and on, until Temple's death in January 1699. Cordiality did not always mark the relations between the young man and his employer; more than once Swift gave up his post and returned to Ireland.
His earliest ventures were in verse. While the poems composed at Temple's are not uninteresting, Swift was conscious only of failure. Happily, he then turned to prose satire, and completed one of his greatest satiric works, A Tale of A Tub (1704). A Tale of A Tub appeared anonymously, scandalizing many but establishing Swift's reputation as a wit as his authorship came to be known.
After Temple's unexpected death Swift returned to Ireland and was appointed by the church authorities to the vicarage of Laracor, near Trim, County Meath. His first pamphlet, The Contests and Dissensions at Athens and Rome (1701), was an adroit statement of his theory concerning the proper balancing of political power between the crown and the two houses of Parliament.
Increasingly he had come to feel that the policies of the Whig ministry ran counter to the best interest of the Church of England, and when the Tories came to power in the autumn of 1710 Swift shifted allegiance to them. In the Examiner and in pamphlets like The Conduct of the Allies (1711) Swift defended the Tories and lent powerful support to their measures designed to end the current war with France.
His reward came in 1713 when he was made dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, rich preferment albeit not the English deanery or bishopric he had hoped for. In his Drapier's Letters (1724), in which he attacked certain monetary arrangements about to be imposed on Ireland by Walpole's Whig ministry, he established himself as the foremost spokesman of the Irish nation. But the most remarkable of the writings of this latter period are the purely literary ones; much of his finest verse was composed between 1720 and 1736, while Gulliver's Travels took shape in the years immediately preceding its triumphant publication in 1726.
By 1737 he began to fail physically, and five years later it was necessary to commit him to the care of guardians. On 19 October 1745, Swift, at nearly 80, died.
Initially, Swift was very much of a Whig both in political theory (as the pamphlets show) and in his party attachments, and it was as a Whig wit and man of letters that he was taken up by Addison and Steele, contributing to the latter's Tatler at the time it was launched in 1709.
Later the new Tory ministers, gauging Swift's powers as a political writer more accurately than had the Whig leaders, entrusted to him their journal, the Examiner. He became a Tory supporter. Swift was part of the inner circle of the Tory government.
Views
Swift was a rationalist in his belief that man is capable of living reasonably and decently if he will be guided by the common sense bestowed by God upon all of humanity. But Swift was also a complete realist in his perception of how far man falls short of realizing his potentiality. He has often been accused of dwelling exclusively upon the absurd and the revolting, of giving us not life but anti-life.
Quotations:
"As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold."
"Observation is an old man's memory."
"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others."
Personality
Swift was a man of influence and power. He suffered a stroke in 1742 and after that became increasingly quarrelsome.
Quotes from others about the person
Samuel Johnson: "Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves. His excellence is strong sense; for his humour, though very well, is not remarkably good. I doubt whether The Tale of a Tub be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his worldly manner."
Connections
There is a great mystery and controversy over Swift's relationship with Esther Johnson, nicknamed "Stella". Many, notably his close friend Thomas Sheridan, believed that they were secretly married in 1716; others, like Swift's housekeeper Mrs Brent and Rebecca Dingley (who lived with Stella all through her years in Ireland) dismissed the story as absurd.
Another lady with whom he had a close but less intense relationship was Anne Long, a toast of the Kit-Cat Club.
Father:
Jonathan Swift
Mother:
Abigail Erick
maternal grandfather:
James Ericke
Uncle:
Godwin Swift
grandmother:
Elizabeth (Dryden) Swift
Friend:
Thomas Sheridan
Friend:
Alexander Pope
Friend:
John Arbuthnot
Friend:
John Gay
References
Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel
John Stubbs’s biography captures the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakable attachment to an unmarried woman, his "Stella"; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all the answers.
2016
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
In this deeply researched biography, Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift’s life anew.