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Portrait of Jonathan Swift

Literature · Novelists

Jonathan Swift

1667–1745 · Anglo-Irish

Augustan satire; Scriblerus Club

Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, was the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) turn savage irony on human pride, politics and the English treatment of Ireland.

How to spot them

  • ▸Lemuel Gulliver's voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms
  • ▸Yahoos, Struldbrugs, and the Big-Endians versus the Little-Endians
  • ▸A Modest Proposal: the poor Irish should sell their babies as food
  • ▸Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin; 'Stella' (Esther Johnson) and 'Vanessa' (Esther Vanhomrigh)
  • ▸Epitaph on 'savage indignation' (saeva indignatio), later rendered in verse by Yeats

Key works

Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Satirical voyages of ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver among tiny, giant, scientific and horse peoples

A Modest Proposal (1729)

Deadpan pamphlet proposing that impoverished Irish families sell their children to be eaten

A Tale of a Tub (1704)

Satire on religious excess and modern learning, published with The Battle of the Books

The Battle of the Books (1704)

Mock-heroic battle of Ancients and Moderns in a library, featuring the spider and the bee

The Drapier's Letters (1724–1725)

Pamphlets that defeated 'Wood's halfpence', a patent to mint copper coins for Ireland

Journal to Stella (1710–1713 (letters))

Intimate letters from London to Esther Johnson, published posthumously

Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1731)

Ironic poem imagining his friends' and enemies' reactions to his death

Key ideas

  • Satire as a mirror in which 'beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own' (preface to The Battle of the Books)
  • Gulliver's final voyage contrasts rational horses (Houyhnhnms) with bestial humans (Yahoos) to attack human pride
  • Laputa and the Academy of Lagado mock abstract and impractical science

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Dublin; educated at Kilkenny School and Trinity College Dublin
  • •Served as secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Surrey, where he met Esther Johnson ('Stella')
  • •Appointed Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, in 1713, and buried there
  • •Member of the Scriblerus Club with Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot and others
  • •As 'Isaac Bickerstaff' (1708) he predicted the death of the almanac-maker John Partridge, then insisted it had happened
  • •Lilliputian quarrels over which end to break an egg gave computing the term 'endianness'
  • •The Struldbrugs of Luggnagg are immortal but go on ageing
  • •The word 'yahoo' comes from Gulliver's Travels
  • •His will funded St Patrick's Hospital in Dublin for the mentally ill

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources