Biographical Report on Author Artist

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Satire and Irony in Dublin

LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT

Jonathan Swift is widely regarded as the greatest writer of satire in English literature. Yet it is crucial for understanding Swift's satire to know that he was not really English. Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, to a family that originally had emigrated from England -- for this reason, he is generally described as "Anglo-Irish." Swift did his university studies in Dublin at Trinity College, graduating in 1686. From here he became the personal secretary to a politician and writer, Sir William Temple, and moved to England. Political machinations, however, hampered Swift's advancement in a political career -- instead he would end up taking a position in the Protestant Church of Ireland, ultimately rising to the position of Dean at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

Swift's career encompassed both literature and politics. As a wit and satirist, he was close friends with some of the greatest writers of the day -- most notably the English poet Alexander Pope. Like Pope, Swift was greatly concerned with the literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, and would use classical greatness as a way of cutting the pretensions of his contemporaries down to size. This type of "neo-classical" satire is typified by Swift's early literary successes, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, published together in one volume in 1704. His most famous work, Gulliver's Travels, would be published in 1726 -- it is a generalized satire on human behavior, by depicting other human societies (of miniature people and of giants, of mad scientists, and finally an island populated only with talking horses and human-like savage apes called Yahoos). Swift's political satire was occasioned by the difficult situation between England and Ireland -- his most famous work in this vein is the essay "A Modest Proposal" from 1729, which satirized the English exploitation of Ireland by suggesting that perhaps the English could sell and eat the babies of impoverished Irish people for food.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The historical context of Swift's satire hinges largely upon the situation between England and Ireland in this time period. Swift was born not long after the Restoration, which was when England became a monarchy again, after a brutal Civil War and a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. Because the Civil War had religious causes, Cromwell had been extremely brutal in his treatment of Ireland and Irish Catholics in particular. When Swift was 21 years old -- in 1688 -- the English Civil War nearly began again, when King James II converted to Catholicism. The events of 1688, known as the "Glorious Revolution," would affect Swift's life deeply -- the Dutch Protestant William of Orange was invited by England's Parliament to take the throne, and William pursued James II to Ireland, where brutal fighting occurred until James was defeated in Ulster at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. What followed was known as the "Protestant Ascendancy" in Ireland, where English Protestants began to colonize and exploit Ireland in earnest.

The policies of the English government put Swift in a difficult position. Although he himself was a Protestant, he was certainly no religious bigot -- his closest friend, the poet Alexander Pope, was a Roman Catholic. Swift was outraged at the inhuman treatment that the Irish would receive at the hands of the English -- this occasioned not only the satire of "A Modest Proposal" but also Swift's finest hour as a serious and political writer, in a set of anonymous pamphlets known as "The Drapier's Letters" of 1724-5. These were written in opposition to a policy by the English government, in which the English government sold the right to print money in Ireland to a rich Englishman. The financial situation would have been disastrous to the inhabitants of Ireland, and so Swift -- despite his respectable position as a clergyman in Dublin -- published a series of anonymous pamphlets, written to oppose the exploitative financial policy. The English government considered the "Drapier's Letters" to be subersive enough that a bounty was placed upon the head of the anonymous author. It is worth noting that Swift's epitaph in Saint Patrick's Cathedral (written by himself) considers this to be his most important work, describing Swift as "Libertatis Vindicatorem," Latin for "The Champion of Liberty."