Jonathan Swift

Born on 30 November 1667 in Dublin, seven months after his father’s death, Jonathan Swift was raised in poverty by his mother, Abigail Erick, and various relatives. His uncle Godwin Swift paid for his education at Kilkenny College and then Trinity College Dublin, where Swift received his degree only by “special grace” , a designation indicating marginal academic performance that stung him for years. He became secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey, where he met Esther Johnson, the “Stella” of his Journal to Stella, who would remain the central emotional relationship of his life, though the exact nature of their bond , whether they secretly married , has never been resolved. Ordained as an Anglican priest in 1695, he served as vicar of Kilroot and later as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin from 1713 until his death. A Tale of a Tub (1704) announced his genius for savage irony. The Battle of the Books (1704) mocked scholarly pretension. Gulliver’s Travels (1726), published anonymously, became an instant sensation , a work that reads as children’s adventure on the surface and as one of the most devastating satires of human nature ever composed beneath it. A Modest Proposal (1729), suggesting the Irish poor sell their children as food for the English rich, remains the supreme example of sustained ironic argument in English prose. Swift championed Irish economic independence through the Drapier’s Letters (1724–1725) and gave away roughly a third of his income to charity. In his final years he suffered from what was likely Ménière’s disease, causing vertigo and deafness, and spent his last three years in the care of guardians, barely able to speak. He died on 19 October 1745 and was buried beside Stella in St Patrick’s Cathedral.

When A Tale of a Tub appeared in 1704, its savage mockery of religious extremism read to Queen Anne as blasphemy, and she never forgave the author. Swift wanted an English bishopric. Instead, in 1713, the Church handed him the deanship of St Patrick's, in Dublin, the country he had always tried to leave.