jonathan swift biography pdf

Jonathan Swift

(1667-1745)

Who Was Jonathan Swift?

Irish author, clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift grew up fatherless. Under the care of his uncle, he received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College and then worked as a statesman's assistant. Eventually, he became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Most of his writings were published under pseudonyms. He best remembered for his 1726 book Gulliver's Travels .

Early Life and Education

Irish author and satirist Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland on November 30, 1667. His father, an attorney, also named Jonathan Swift, died just two months before he arrived. Without steady income, his mother struggled to provide for her newborn. Moreover, Swift was a sickly child. It was later discovered that he suffered from Meniere's Disease, a condition of the inner ear that leaves the afflicted nauseous and hard of hearing. In an effort to give her son the best upbringing possible, Swift's mother gave him over to Godwin Swift, her late husband's brother and a member of the respected professional attorney and judges group Gray's Inn. Godwin Swift enrolled his nephew in the Kilkenny Grammar School (1674–1682), which was perhaps the best school in Ireland at the time. Swift's transition from a life of poverty to a rigorous private school setting proved challenging. He did, however, make a fast friend in William Congreve, the future poet and playwright.

At age 14, Swift commenced his undergraduate studies at Trinity College in Dublin. In 1686, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to pursue a master's. Not long into his research, huge unrest broke out in Ireland. The king of Ireland, England and Scotland was soon to be overthrown. What became known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 spurred Swift to move to England and start anew. His mother found a secretary position for him under the revered English statesman, Sir William Temple. For 10 years, Swift worked in Surrey's Moor Park and acted as an assistant to Temple, helping him with political errands, and also in the researching and publishing of his own essays and memoirs. Temple was impressed by Swift's abilities and after a time, entrusted him with sensitive and important tasks.

During his Moor Park years, Swift met the daughter of Temple's housekeeper, a girl just 8 years old named Esther Johnson. When they first met, she was 15 years Swift's junior, but despite the age gap, they would become lovers for the rest of their lives. When she was a child, he acted as her mentor and tutor, and gave her the nickname "Stella." When she was of age, they maintained a close but ambiguous relationship, which lasted until Johnson's death. It was rumored that they married in 1716, and that Swift kept of lock of Johnson's hair in his possession at all times.

During his decade of work for Temple, Swift returned to Ireland twice. On a trip in 1695, he took all necessary requirements to become an ordained priest in the Anglican tradition. Under Temple's influence, he also began to write, first short essays and then a manuscript for a later book. In 1699, Temple died. Swift completed the task of editing and publishing his memoirs—not without disputes by several of Temple's family members—and then, grudgingly, accepted a less prominent post as secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley. After making the long journey to the Earl's estate, Swift was informed the position had been filled. Discouraged but resourceful, he leaned on his priestly qualifications and found work ministering to a pea-sized congregation just 20 miles outside of Dublin. For the next 10 years, he gardened, preached and worked on the house provided to him by the church. He also returned to writing. His first political pamphlet was titled A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome .

In 1704, Swift anonymously released A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books . Tub , although widely popular with the masses, was harshly disapproved of by the Church of England. Ostensibly, it criticized religion, but Swift meant it as a parody of pride. Nonetheless, his writings earned him a reputation in London, and when the Tories came into power in 1710, they asked him to become editor of the Examiner , their official paper. After a time, he became fully immersed in the political landscape and began writing some of the most cutting and well-known political pamphlets of the day, including The Conduct of the Allies , an attack on the Whigs. Privy to the inner circle of Tory government, Swift laid out his private thoughts and feelings in a stream of letters to his beloved Stella. They would later be published as The Journal to Stella .

'Gulliver's Travels' and Later Years

When he saw that the Tories would soon fall from power, Swift returned to Ireland. In 1713, he took the post of dean at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Although he was still in contact with Esther Johnson, it is documented that he engaged in a romantic relationship with Esther Vanhomrigh (whom he called Vanessa). His courtship with her inspired his long and storied poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa." He is also rumored to have had a relationship with the celebrated beauty Anne Long.

While leading his congregation at St. Patrick's, Swift began to write what would become his best-known work. In 1726, at last finished with the manuscript, he traveled to London and benefited from the help of several friends, who anonymously published it as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships — also known, more simply, as Gulliver's Travels . The book was an immediate success and hasn't been out of print since its first run. Interestingly, much of the storyline points to historical events that Swift had lived through years prior during intense political turmoil.

Not long after the celebration of this work, Swift's longtime love, Esther Johnson, fell ill. She died in January 1728. Her life's end moved Swift to write The Death of Mrs. Johnson . Shortly after her death, a stream of Swift's other friends also died, including John Gay and John Arbuthnot. Swift, always bolstered by the people around him, was now quite troubled.

In 1742, Swift suffered from a stroke and lost the ability to speak. On October 19, 1745, Swift died. He was laid to rest next to Esther Johnson inside Dublin's St. Patrick's Cathedral.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Jonathan Swift
• Birth Year: 1667
• Birth date: November 30, 1667
• Birth City: Dublin
• Birth Country: Ireland
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Jonathan Swift was an Irish author and satirist. Best known for writing 'Gulliver's Travels,' he was dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• University of Oxford
• Trinity College
• Kilkenny School
• Nacionalities
• Death Year: 1745
• Death date: October 19, 1745
• Death City: Dublin
• Death Country: Ireland

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• Last Updated: April 13, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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Early life and education

Years at moor park, career as satirist, political journalist, and churchman.

• Withdrawal to Ireland
• The success of Gulliver’s Travels
• Swift’s legacy

Why is Jonathan Swift an important writer?

What was jonathan swift’s family like when he was growing up, what is jonathan swift best known for.

Jonathan Swift

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Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish author who is regarded as one of the foremost prose satirists in the history of English literature . He wrote essays, poetry, pamphlets, and a novel. He often published anonymously or under pseudonyms, including Isaac Bickerstaff, and is noted for his use of ironic invented personas.

Jonathan Swift’s father, Jonathan Swift the elder, was an Englishman who had settled in Ireland after the Stuart Restoration and become steward of the King’s Inns, Dublin . He married Abigail Erick in 1664 and died in 1667, leaving his wife, baby daughter, and unborn son—the younger Jonathan—to the care of his brothers.

Jonathan Swift is best known for Gulliver’s Travels , which is a parody of a travel narrative. Published in 1726, it mocks English customs and the politics of the day. Swift is also well known for “ A Modest Proposal ,” a satiric essay published in 1729 that suggests living conditions in Ireland could be improved by butchering the children of poor Irish citizens and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords.

Jonathan Swift (born November 30, 1667, Dublin , Ireland—died October 19, 1745, Dublin) was an Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language . Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729).

Swift’s father, Jonathan Swift the elder, was an Englishman who had settled in Ireland after the Stuart Restoration (1660) and become steward of the King’s Inns, Dublin. In 1664 he married Abigail Erick, who was the daughter of an English clergyman. In the spring of 1667 Jonathan the elder died suddenly, leaving his wife, baby daughter, and an unborn son to the care of his brothers. The younger Jonathan Swift thus grew up fatherless and dependent on the generosity of his uncles. His education was not neglected, however, and at the age of six he was sent to Kilkenny School, then the best in Ireland. In 1682 he entered Trinity College in Dublin, where he was granted his bachelor of arts degree in February 1686 speciali gratia (“by special favour”), his degree being a device often used when a student’s record failed, in some minor respect, to conform to the regulations.

Swift continued in residence at Trinity College as a candidate for his master of arts degree until February 1689. But the Roman Catholic disorders that had begun to spread through Dublin after the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) in Protestant England caused Swift to seek security in England, and he soon became a member of the household of a distant relative of his mother named Sir William Temple , at Moor Park, Surrey. Swift was to remain at Moor Park intermittently until Temple’s death in 1699.

Temple was engaged in writing his memoirs and preparing some of his essays for publication, and he had Swift act as a kind of secretary. During his residence at Moor Park, Swift twice returned to Ireland, and during the second of these visits, he took orders in the Anglican church, being ordained priest in January 1695. At the end of the same month he was appointed vicar of Kilroot, near Belfast. Swift came to intellectual maturity at Moor Park, with Temple’s rich library at his disposal. Here, too, he met Esther Johnson (the future Stella), the daughter of Temple’s widowed housekeeper. In 1692, through Temple’s good offices, Swift received the degree of M.A. at the University of Oxford .

Between 1691 and 1694 Swift wrote a number of poems, notably six odes. But his true genius did not find expression until he turned from verse to prose satire and composed, mostly at Moor Park between 1696 and 1699, A Tale of a Tub , one of his major works. Published anonymously in 1704, this work was made up of three associated pieces: the “Tale” itself, a satire against “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning”; the mock-heroic “ Battle of the Books”; and the “ Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” which ridiculed the manner of worship and preaching of religious enthusiasts at that period. In the “Battle of the Books,” Swift supports the ancients in the longstanding dispute about the relative merits of ancient versus modern literature and culture . But “A Tale of a Tub” is the most impressive of the three compositions . This work is outstanding for its exuberance of satiric wit and energy and is marked by an incomparable command of stylistic effects, largely in the nature of parody. Swift saw the realm of culture and literature threatened by zealous pedantry, while religion—which for him meant rational Anglicanism—suffered attack from both Roman Catholicism and the Nonconformist (Dissenting) churches. In the “Tale” he proceeded to trace all these dangers to a single source: the irrationalities that, according to Swift, disturb humankind’s highest faculties—reason and common sense.

After Temple’s death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin as chaplain and secretary to the earl of Berkeley, who was then going to Ireland as a lord justice . During the ensuing years he was in England on some four occasions—in 1701, 1702, 1703, and 1707 to 1709—and won wide recognition in London for his intelligence and his wit as a writer. He had resigned his position as vicar of Kilroot, but early in 1700 he was preferred to several posts in the Irish church. His public writings of this period show that he kept in close touch with affairs in both Ireland and England. Among them is the essay “Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome,” in which Swift defended the English constitutional balance of power between the monarchy and the two houses of Parliament as a bulwark against tyranny .

In London Swift became increasingly well known through several works: his religious and political essays; A Tale of a Tub ; and certain impish works, including the “Bickerstaff” pamphlets of 1708–09, which put an end to the career of John Partridge, a popular astrologer, by first prophesying his death and then describing it in circumstantial detail. Like all Swift’s satirical works, these pamphlets were published anonymously and were exercises in impersonation. Their supposed author was “Isaac Bickerstaff.” For many of the first readers, the very authorship of the satires was a matter for puzzle and speculation. Swift’s works brought him to the attention of a circle of Whig writers led by Joseph Addison , but Swift was uneasy about many policies of the Whig administration. He was a Whig by birth, education, and political principle, but he was also passionately loyal to the Anglican church, and he came to view with apprehension the Whigs’ growing determination to yield ground to the Nonconformists . He also frequently mimicked and mocked the proponents of “free thinking”: intellectual skeptics who questioned Anglican orthodoxy. A brilliant and still-perplexing example of this is Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708).

A momentous period began for Swift when in 1710 he once again found himself in London. A Tory ministry headed by Robert Harley (later earl of Oxford) and Henry Saint John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) was replacing that of the Whigs. The new administration, bent on bringing hostilities with France to a conclusion, was also assuming a more protective attitude toward the Church of England . Swift’s reactions to such a rapidly changing world are vividly recorded in his Journal to Stella , a series of letters written between his arrival in England in 1710 and 1713, which he addressed to Esther Johnson and her companion, Rebecca Dingley, who were now living in Dublin. The astute Harley made overtures to Swift and won him over to the Tories . But Swift did not thereby renounce his essentially Whiggish convictions regarding the nature of government. The old Tory theory of the divine right of kings had no claim upon him. The ultimate power, he insisted, derived from the people as a whole and, in the English constitution, had come to be exercised jointly by king, lords, and commons.

Swift quickly became the Tories’ chief pamphleteer and political writer and, by the end of October 1710, had taken over the Tory journal, The Examiner , which he continued to edit until June 14, 1711. He then began preparing a pamphlet in support of the Tory drive for peace with France. This, The Conduct of the Allies , appeared on November 27, 1711, some weeks before the motion in favour of a peace was finally carried in Parliament. Swift was rewarded for his services in April 1713 with his appointment as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

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Jonathan Swift, a critical biography

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Poems & Poets

Jonathan Swift

Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, essayist, and political pamphleteer Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He spent much of his early adult life in England before returning to Dublin to serve as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin for the last 30 years of his life. It was this later stage when he would write most of his greatest works. Best known as the author of  A Modest Proposal  (1729), Gulliver’s Travels  (1726), and A Tale Of A Tub  (1704), Swift is widely acknowledged as the greatest prose satirist in the history of English literature.

Swift’s father died months before Jonathan was born, and his mother returned to England shortly after giving birth, leaving Jonathan in the care of his uncle in Dublin. Swift’s extended family had several interesting literary connections: his grandmother, Elizabeth (Dryden) Swift, was the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden, grandfather of the poet John Dryden. The same grandmother’s aunt, Katherine (Throckmorton) Dryden, was a first cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Sir Walter Raleigh. His great-great grandmother, Margaret (Godwin) Swift, was the sister of Francis Godwin, author of  The Man in the Moone , which influenced parts of Swift’s  Gulliver’s Travels . His uncle, Thomas Swift, married a daughter of the poet and playwright Sir William Davenant, a godson of William Shakespeare . Swift’s uncle served as Jonathan’s benefactor, sending him to Trinity College Dublin, where he earned his BA and befriended writer William Congreve. Swift also studied toward his MA before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced Jonathan to move to England, where he would work as a secretary to a diplomat. He would earn an MA from Hart Hall, Oxford University, in 1692, and eventually a Doctor in Divinity degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1702.

Swift’s poetry has a relationship either by interconnections with, or by reactions against, the poetry of his contemporaries and predecessors. He was probably influenced, in particular, by the Restoration writers  John Wilmot , Earl of Rochester and Samuel Butler (who shared Swift’s penchant for octosyllabic verse). He may have picked up pointers from the Renaissance poets  John Donne  and  Sir Philip Sidney . Beside these minor borrowings of his contemporaries, his debts are almost negligible. In the Augustan Age, an era which did not necessarily value originality above other virtues, his poetic contribution was strikingly original.

In reading Swift’s poems, one is first impressed with their apparent spareness of allusion and poetic device. Anyone can tell that a particular poem is powerful or tender or vital or fierce, but literary criticism seems inadequate to explain why. A few recent critics have carefully studied his use of allusion and image, but with only partial success. It still seems justified to conclude that Swift’s straightforward poetic style seldom calls for close analysis, his allusions seldom bring a whole literary past back to life, and his images are not very interesting in themselves. In general, Swift’s verses read faster than  John Dryden ’s or  Alexander Pope ’s, with much less ornamentation and masked wit. He apparently intends to sweep the reader along by the logic of the argument to the several conclusions he puts forth. He seems to expect that the reader will appreciate the implications of the argument as a whole, after one full and rapid reading. For Swift’s readers, the couplet will not revolve slowly upon itself, exhibiting intricate patterns and fixing complex relationships between fictive worlds and contemporary life.

The poems are not always as spare in reality as Swift would have his readers believe, but he seems deliberately to induce in them an unwillingness to look closely at the poems for evidence of technical expertise. He does this in part by working rather obviously against some poetic conventions, in part by saying openly that he rejects poetic cant, and in part by presenting himself—in many of his poems—as a perfectly straightforward man, incapable of a poet’s deviousness. By these strategies, he directs attention away from his handling of imagery and meter, even in those instances where he has been technically ingenious. For the most part, however, the impression of spareness is quite correct; and if judged by the sole criterion of technical density, then he would have to be judged an insignificant poet. But technical density is a poetic virtue only as it simulates and accompanies subtlety of thought. One could argue that Swift’s poems create a density of another kind: that “The Day of Judgement,” for example, initiates a subtle process of thought that takes place after, rather than during, the reading of the poem, at a time when the mind is more or less detached from the printed page. One could argue as well that Swift makes up in power what he lacks in density: that the strength of the impression created by his directness gives an impetus to prolonged meditation of a very high quality. On these grounds, valuing Swift for what he really is and does, one must judge him a major figure in poetry as well as prose.

Swift suffered a stroke in 1742, leaving him unable to speak. He died three years later, and was buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.

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Book contents

• Jonathan Swift in Context
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part I Personal
• Chapter 1 Biography
• Chapter 2 Friends and Family
• Chapter 3 Health and Sickness
• Chapter 4 Reason and Unreason
• Part II Publishing History and Legacy
• Part III Literary Background
• Part IV Genres
• Part V The External World
• Part VI Social and Intellectual Topics
• Further Reading

Chapter 1 - Biography

from Part I - Personal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2024

This chapter provides a biographical overview of Swift’s career. It reconstructs the contexts of Swift’s early life and career in Ireland and England and charts his friendships and allegiances. Swift’s public life was driven, as this chapter shows, by a ‘scribbling itch’ reflected in his twenty-eight crossings of the Irish Sea. But much about his private life remains obscure, not least his relationship with ‘Stella’ and ‘Vanessa’.

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• By Clive Probyn
• Edited by Joseph Hone , University of Newcastle upon Tyne , Pat Rogers , University of South Florida
• Book: Jonathan Swift in Context
• Online publication: 02 May 2024
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108917254.004

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Jonathan Swift’s Political Biography

Ian Higgins The Australian National University

David Oakleaf’s A Political Biography of Jonathan Swift (Pickering & Chatto, 2008) is a welcome addition to the publisher’s Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies series edited by J. A. Downie. Jonathan Swift was a master of the closely allied forms of political pamphleteering and satire. In this lucid and accessible book, Oakleaf offers an informed, nuanced, and generally careful account of the political life and works of this famous polemicist and satirist.

In Swift’s lifetime politics and aesthetics were intertwined, and Oakleaf observes how Swift’s literary triumphs were also political ones. The biography is based on primary and secondary sources that will be familiar to specialists. While it does not offer new information or a revisionist interpretation, this new biography of Swift is acute in emphasizing how the cultural memory, experience and anticipation of war, Swift’s Irish perspective on English affairs, and his identity as a minister of the established Episcopal Church of Ireland are central to his writing, inflecting his attitudes in affairs of church and state. The book properly insists on Swift’s prickly independence as a writer and points to the paradoxes of his political life. Swift struggled to define himself in relation to contemporary party politics without compromising his independence and it has proved notoriously difficult to place Swift on the political spectrum of his time. His rhetoric displayed an extremism that did not always reflect what appears, on the extant evidence, to have been his actual, more conservative political positions. This study draws on existing scholarly work to situate Swift in his historical context while indicating how this edgy, retro satirist still arrests attention and provokes readers today. As Oakleaf concludes: Swift’s “passions were . . . perhaps more extravagant than his positions, but his anger and the intensity of his horror at human oppression somehow allowed an intolerant sectarian cleric born in the seventeenth century to find voices in which readers today can address their own problems” (201). Swift’s satire has real targets and punitive intensity, but it is usually presumed not to be entirely negative; that it was part of Swift’s attacking purpose to imply positive alternatives to what the satire exposes and repudiates. A task for the political biographer is to try to identify what Swift’s political views and alternatives might have been.

The introductions to the standard twentieth-century edition of Swift’s prose works, edited by Herbert Davis and others, presented Swift as essentially a moderate in religion and politics, someone who avoided “the Extremes of Whig ” and the “Extremes of Tory ,” as Swift himself put it in his position statement of 1708, The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man . [1] Davis averted his attention from evidence of extremism. He was disturbed, for example, by Swift’s violent invective against Ulster Scots Presbyterianism, but opined that Swift’s immoderate attitudes on the subject were out of character. The contrast between such a modern reading of Swift’s political writing and the view of many contemporary Whig readers is stark. For them Swift was an extremist, “ a Divine that scatters Fire-brands, Arrows, and Death ,” as the Irish Whig Matthew Concanen put it in 1727, a Sinon fanning the flames within the walls of King George’s Whig realm. [2] While Oakleaf has written a fine book that can be highly recommended, it does tell a familiar modern story about Swift’s politics. Swift shares animosities rather than principles with those on the political extremes of Whig and Tory. Really, Swift was a moderate to be situated on the broad middle ground occupied by pro-Revolution Tories and constitutionally conservative Whigs (5, 44). He was a High Churchman and a Whig. Like the editor of this series, Oakleaf considers Swift’s well-known self-description as an Old Whig to be an accurate likeness (4). Swift wrote in the Sentiments that to “enter into a Party as into an Order of Fryars, with so resigned an Obedience to Superiors, is very unsuitable both with the civil and religious Liberties, we so zealously assert.” [3] Swift’s polemical writing and political statements, whether on the Whig or Tory side in affairs of Church and State, reflect a strong degree of idiosyncrasy and independence, as do the marginal annotations he made in books he read. However, I think that a High Churchman advancing Old Whig maxims against Whig government ought to have been given more scrutiny than is provided in this book.

Swift received preferment from the Whigs in the 1690s. He was a protégé of the Williamite Sir William Temple, received an Antrim parish under the Whig Lord Capel, and became a chaplain to another Whig, the Earl of Berkeley. However, Swift’s High Church confession, particularly his hostility to Dissent, seems to have been a problem for English Whigs, because although he solicited further preferment it did not materialize from the Whig side of politics. By 1710, Swift had gravitated to Robert Harley whose High Church allies included Francis Atterbury (an admirer of Swift’s writing who became his friend) and Thomas Lindsay (who, like Swift, began his political career with preferment from Lord Capel and ended it with the reputation of being a Jacobite). As Oakleaf shows, Swift wrote for the new Tory government because he believed in its causes, especially its aim of ending the war with France. The sometime-Whig was now a naturalized Tory. Appointed Dean of St Patrick’s by the Tories, Swift would remain loyal to the Tory government leaders in the worst of times after the Hanoverian accession. This enemy of parties did let slip that the Tories were “my party” in a letter to the High Church Tory leader Bishop Atterbury in 1717. [4]

Oakleaf says that even “as a Tory” Swift “worked best and most closely with Old Whigs like Harley, resisting the commitment to a more thoroughly partisan politics” (4). It might also have been noticed that when the Tories were in power, Swift collaborated with the High Tory Lindsay in a thoroughly partisan attempt to place Tories on the Irish Episcopal bench and in positions of influence. Swift was particularly concerned to purge Old Whigs from office. In a paper submitted to Harley, Swift marked out the famous Old Whig Robert Molesworth as “the worst” of the “very bad” Whig Privy Councillors, one of the principal targets in a desirable Tory party-political revolution in Ireland. [5] A defining characteristic of Old Whiggism is its anti-clericalism. In associating Swift in an essentialist way with Old Whig politics, Oakleaf does occlude what he elsewhere in the book contends is crucial for our understanding of Swift, that is, the political implications of his identity as a High Churchman.

Oakleaf comments that Swift’s “distrust of standing armies and preference for annual parliaments align him with his usual Old Whig stance,” but he notices that Swift felt that these principles were not fashionable among the Whigs. Swift wrote that “by advancing certain old whiggish principles . . . I have passed for a disaffected person” (162). Swift was right and deliberately ingenuous. In fact, hostility to standing armies and support for frequent parliaments were not always the Old Whig line. The Old Whig’s Cato’s Letters (1720–23), for example, fearing High Church counter-reformation and Jacobite counter-revolution admitted the necessity of standing armies and septennial parliaments. Molesworth supported Whig government measures such as an augmented standing army and a Septennial Act as necessary security for the Hanoverian succession. When Swift wrote as a Whig, publishing A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions (1701) and Temple’s Letters (1703), he apparently approved of a standing army and foreign military intervention. But in A Tale of a Tub , unpublished at this time, and in his later Tory writings and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift savages standing armies. Swift’s usually unqualified and destructive opposition to standing armies aligns him not with an Old Whig but with a consistent country Tory and Jacobite stance during his political lifetime. Similarly, support for annual parliaments was a Jacobite stance from almost the beginning of William III’s reign. The Jacobite Charlwood Lawton’s clandestine Some Reasons for Annual Parliaments, in a Letter to a Friend (1693), for instance, is a classic epitome of the Jacobite case, arraigning a despotic monarch and government. In 1693, William III was in breach of the Triennial Act of 1664, not having held a general election since 1690, and he was using his veto to prevent a Triennial Bill in 1693. Swift’s first experience of high politics was as an emissary for Temple attempting to persuade William III to accept the bill for three-year parliaments. Swift’s support for frequent and indeed annual parliaments, whether seen as Whig or as “disaffected,” might have been contextualized in line with the emphasis of this book on Swift’s Irish perspective. The Irish Protestant community had consistently desired annual parliaments as a constitutional right and as a means of limiting the duration of financial supply to the court administration.

One of the repetitions in Oakleaf’s book is the assertion that Swift supported the Glorious Revolution and was always committed to the Revolution settlement. Swift is seen as an uncomplicated Whig on this point. Swift’s views on the events of 1688–89 might have been scrutinized more in line with the importance Oakleaf accords to Swift’s High Church religious views, particularly his hostility to Protestant Dissent and especially to Scots Presbyterianism. And Oakleaf might also have attended more to Swift’s three kingdoms perspective. We have a contemporary Swiftian response to the Revolution in Ireland in his first published poem, “Ode to the King on His Irish Expedition”(1691). The poem reflects the fact of war and the breakdown of government. James II had abandoned the Anglican community of allegiance. William III was the military instrument to reconstitute the political authority of the ethnically English and the Church of Ireland as by law established. The poem applauds William’s victory against James II and Louis XIV in a war of kings, but Swift looks to William to address what is presented as the chronic problem in Ireland and suppress Ulster Scots Presbyterianism. It is highly questionable whether Swift supported the Revolution settlement in Scotland; indeed his sympathies seem to have been with the Jacobite counter-revolution there. In Sentiments , Swift says that for a Church-of-England man the abolition of episcopacy would be a scandal and calamity. In private marginalia Swift blamed William III for the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland in 1689 and praised the Jacobite leader Viscount Dundee as the best man in Scotland. Swift was the ghost writer of Memoirs of Captain John Creichton (1731), a sympathetic account of an Episcopalian Jacobite soldier who fought against the covenanters, and then against the Williamite revolution. Swift’s marginalia in histories of the time indicate that privately Swift regarded the Williamite Revolution as a premeditated usurpation. In England, Swift gives unqualified support to what the historian Mark Goldie has called the Anglican Revolution of 1686–88: the Church of England’s attempt through civil disobedience to thwart James II’s experiment in Roman Catholic and Dissenter absolutism by opposing his prerogative toleration of Roman Catholicism and Protestant Dissent. Revealingly, Swift approved the Whig Lord Somers when “pleading for the Bishops whom King James had sent to the Tower” but arraigned Somers for his Williamite Whiggism presented as a post-1689 Puritan political revival: “the old Republican Spirit, which the Revolution had restored, began to teach other Lessons: That, since we had accepted a new King from a Calvinistical Commonwealth, we must likewise admit new Maxims in Religion and Government” (quoted in Oakleaf, 49). Swift’s allegory of the Revolution in A Tale of a Tub (1704) presents Peter (Roman Catholicism) collaborating with Jack (Protestant Dissent) to dispossess Martin (the Church of England). After the Revolution, Jack is still dangerously at large with power.

Born after the Stuart restoration, in Charles II’s reign, Swift died in the year of the failed Stuart restoration attempt of 1745. The Stuart dynastic revolutionary alternative to the post-1689 settlement was a fact of Swift’s adult political life. The consonance of Swift’s political rhetoric with Jacobite polemic (which had appropriated the political ideologies of ancient constitutionalism and classical republicanism and was certainly not the Roman Catholic royalist absolutism of Whig caricature) gave Swift’s work a dimension of polemical provocation and seditious significance. Oakleaf acknowledges but also tends to occlude Jacobite connections reiterating that Swift had never taken Jacobitism seriously although the Tory party and ministry for which he wrote were suspected of Jacobitism. Actually, all we really know is that the evidence upon which a judgment on the subject might be made has been destroyed. Swift told Lady Elizabeth Germain in 1735 that when he was leaving England after the death of Queen Anne he had burned all the letters he had received from the Tory ministers over several years. The Duke of Ormonde had been alarmed by reports that Swift’s papers had been seized by the Whig authorities in 1715, but trusted that Swift’s prudence would prove his innocence. Technically, Swift’s correspondence with known adherents of the Pretender put him in breach of the treason statutes. Considering the fact that one could be charged with high treason and incarcerated for possessing letters from Charles Wogan, as had happened to the lawyer Francis Glascock in the 1720s, it is a rare good fortune that Swift’s famous correspondence with the Irish Catholic Jacobite exile has survived. Swift’s praise of the Irish Jacobite diaspora in his first letter to Wogan of 1732 is well known.

This book negotiates the received scholarly interpretations of Swift’s politics to give a discriminating account of the current state of knowledge. When it gives attention to the topical particularity of Swift’s writing it discloses an interesting and alarming political writer who does not fit into any simplifying modern historical categorization. The book is clearly written. The rather frequent use of exclamation marks in the book can be excused as the punctuation is certainly prompted by the subject of this biography!

[1]  Herbert Davis is the editor of the standard edition of Jonathan Swift’s prose works; some volumes were edited with other scholars. For characterizations of Swift’s religious and political moderation, see Davis et al., ed., The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift , 16 vols. (Oxford, 1939–74), 2:15–17 and 3:24. For Swift’s “Extremes of Whig ” and “Extremes of Tory ,” see The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man, With Respect to Religion and Government [1708], 2:25.

[2]  [Matthew Concanen,] “Mr. C——’s 2d Letter, being an Explanation of his First, of Sept. 8th,” Grub Street Journal 38 (24 September 1730), in The Grub-Street Journal, 1730–33 , ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar, 4 vols. (London, 2002), 1:1.

[3]  Swift, Sentiments , 2:24.

[4]  Swift to Bishop Francis Atterbury, 18 July 1717, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D. , ed. David Woolley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt, 1999–2007), 2:252.

[5]  Swift to Robert Harley, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D. D. , ed. F. Elrington Ball, 6 vols. (London, 1910–14), 4:243–44.

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