Jonathan Swift, son
of the English lawyer Jonathan Swift the elder, was born in Dublin,
Ireland, on November 30, 1667.
He grew up there in the care of his uncle before attending Trinity College
at the age of fourteen, where he stayed for seven years, graduating
in 1688. In that year, he became the secretary
of Sir William Temple, an English politician and member of the Whig party.
In 1694, he took religious orders in the
Church of Ireland and then spent a year as a country parson. He
then spent further time in the service of Temple before returning
to Ireland to become the chaplain of the earl of Berkeley. Meanwhile,
he had begun to write satires on the political and religious corruption
surrounding him, working on A Tale of a Tub, which
supports the position of the Anglican Church against its critics
on the left and the right, and The Battle of the Books, which
argues for the supremacy of the classics against modern thought
and literature. He also wrote a number of political pamphlets in
favor of the Whig party. In 1709 he went
to London to campaign for the Irish church but was unsuccessful. After
some conflicts with the Whig party, mostly because of Swift’s strong
allegiance to the church, he became a member of the more conservative
Tory party in 1710.
Unfortunately for Swift, the Tory government fell out
of power in 1714 and Swift, despite his fame
for his writings, fell out of favor. Swift, who had been hoping
to be assigned a position in the Church of England, instead returned
to Dublin, where he became the dean of St. Patrick’s. During his
brief time in England, Swift had become friends with writers such
as Alexander Pope, and during a meeting of their literary club,
the Martinus Scriblerus Club, they decided to write satires of modern
learning. The third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels is
assembled from the work Swift did during this time. However, the
final work was not completed until 1726,
and the narrative of the third voyage was actually the last one
completed. After his return to Ireland, Swift became a staunch supporter
of the Irish against English attempts to weaken their economy and
political power, writing pamphlets such as the satirical A
Modest Proposal, in which he suggests that the Irish problems
of famine and overpopulation could be easily solved by having the
babies of poor Irish subjects sold as delicacies to feed the rich.
Gulliver’s Travels was a controversial
work when it was first published in 1726.
In fact, it was not until almost ten years after its first printing
that the book appeared with the entire text that Swift had originally
intended it to have. Ever since, editors have excised many of the
passages, particularly the more caustic ones dealing with bodily
functions. Even without those passages, however, Gulliver’s Travels serves
as a biting satire, and Swift ensures that it is both humorous and
critical, constantly attacking British and European society through
its descriptions of imaginary countries.
Late in life, Swift seemed to many observers to become
even more caustic and bitter than he had been. Three years before
his death, he was declared unable to care for himself, and guardians
were appointed. Based on these facts and on a comparison between Swift’s
fate and that of his character Gulliver, some people have concluded
that he gradually became insane and that his insanity was a natural
outgrowth of his indignation and outrage against humankind. However,
the truth seems to be that Swift was suddenly incapacitated by a
paralytic stroke late in life, and that prior to this incident his
mental capacities were unimpaired.
Gulliver’s Travels is about a specific
set of political conflicts, but if it were nothing more than that
it would long ago have been forgotten. The staying power of the
work comes from its depiction of the human condition and its often
despairing, but occasionally hopeful, sketch of the possibilities
for humanity to rein in its baser instincts.
