Overview 

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)



A controversial clergyman, is the foremost prose satirist of English literature.

Attitude:

 A man of social charm and a friend of Addison, Pope, John Gay, and many other writers, Swift also had a darker side that led some scholars to think( wrongly) that his great satires were the products of a diseased mind. He was, however, a misanthrope; in a letter to Pope he wrote that though he loved individuals, he hated mankind in general.

Early prose works: 

During the years 1696-98 Swift wrote two important satires.

A Tale of a Tub(1696) burlesques church history and dogma in a narrative about three brothers: Peter ( standing for Roman Catholics), Martin (Lutherans or Anglicans), and Jack (extreme protestants). They each inherit coats , with the injunction that they are not to be altered in any way. They gradually disobey, finding fanciful excuses for adding shoulder-knots or gold lace, according to the current fashion(just as orthodox churchmen find ways to modify their doctrines). 

The Battle of the Books(1697) is a prose mock-epic that satirizes conflict between advocates of modern and of ancient literature. It opens with a dispute arising between a spider and a bee entangled in the spider's web. Aesop sums up in the dispute; the spider is like the moderns who spin their scholastic lore out of their  own entrails; the bee is like the ancients, who go to nature for their honey.

Journal to Stella(1710-13):  A volume of  intimate letters to Esther Johnson and her duenna, it gives vivid pictures of daily life in London and gossip about political intrigues. He is at his playful best writing, sometimes in baby language, to a woman whom he met as a child, educated, grew to love , and may have secretly married.

Gulliver's Travel (1726) :


Swift's most universal satire, and still popular today, it adopts the ancient device of an imaginary voyage, with Gulliver travelling to four " remote nations of the world," enabling Swift to approach the foibles to mankind from a fresh viewpoint. 

  • In part 1 Gulliver visit s Lilliput , where the natives are only six inches tall. Their foolish pretensions caricature the disputes of contemporary England.
  • Part 2 reverses the situation ---Brobdingnag  has natives sixty feet tall-- but again the pretensions and preoccupations of England and humanity in general are ridiculed.
  • In Part 3 Gulliver visits Laputa , a land where scholars and scientists are involved in esoteric and unimportant projects. 
  • In Part 4 , which is the most widely applicable satire, he visits the kingdom of the Houyhnhnms , intelligent horses who are beset by dirty, ignorant, and perverse human like creatures called Yahoos.
Features of Swifts's satires: 




  •  Universal, attacking all things human.
  • Elemental, gigantic power.
  • Bitter, almost insane scorn.
  • Clean-cut, precise style.
  • Coarse humor, tinged with irony.

Later occasional pieces: The best known is Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor people from being a burden to their Parents or Country(1729) . In this savage satire (in which he hoped to dramatize the misery of the Irish poor), he advocates selling Irish babies for food for the wealthy classes. The four-volume Miscellanies (1727-32), assembled by Pope from writings by the Scriblerus Club, is dominated by short essays by Swift.

Last Works: some of his most famous tracts and characteristics poems were written during his last years , in Ireland: The Grand Question Debated (1729) ; Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (1731) in which he reviews his life and work with humor; and the ironical directions to Servants(1731, published posthumously ).