Jonathan Swift's satire and irony in eighteenth-century Ireland

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.

MAJOR WORKS AND TONE

Swift's major works are satirical -- he wrote a number of satirical poems, but also the great prose satires Gulliver's Travels, The Tale of A Tub, The Battle of the Books, and "A Modest Proposal." It is worth noting, however, that his major technique in satire was one of parody. Gulliver's Travels is written as a parody of a travelogue, written by the Captain Lemuel Gulliver in his voyages to different far-off countries -- the title page credits it as the work of Gulliver himself. It is reported that Swift was extremely pleased when an elderly sea-captain read the book and claimed that he had once met Gulliver and knew the man was a terrible liar! Tale of a Tub and Battle of the Books, Swift's earlier satirical works, are written as a parody of scholarly literature -- in fact, after Tale of a Tub was