Jonathan Swift was a man of contradictions. He was born in Ireland yet was embarrassed by the fact and maintained that he was English. As a clergyman he held in contempt anyone who threatened the dogma and sanctity of his church, but as one of the sharpest satirists of his day he railed against authority, skewering and shaming the proud, the vicious, and the hypocritical. He was severe and commanding in print and the pulpit yet convivial and sensitive in his personal relationships. He was fastidious about his personal hygiene—contrary to fashion, regularly bathing and changing his underwear—but dealt obsessively in his writing with dirt, decay, and bodily functions. He was a pessimist with little faith in humanity, who once believed life was a thing to be despised—and yet at the same time he saw his stock-in-trade, satire, as a means for improving society: “a publick Spirit, prompting Men of Genius and Virtue, to mend the World as far as they are able.”
In this magisterial biography, John Stubbs describes his subject as, at one and the same moment, “a stern authoritarian and a daring cultural bandit,” a divisive figure who “provoked admiration and resentment in equal measure.” Stubbs teases out Swift’s contradictions, lays bare his eccentricities and polarizing thoughts and deeds, and flags up the injurious myths that have surrounded and sullied the great essayist, poet, political pamphleteer, cleric—and, of course, author of Gulliver’s Travels.
After Swift’s death, his reputation plummeted, and in later years he was demonized by the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. By exhaustively examining both his life and work against seismic 18th-century Anglo-Irish upheavals, Stubbs provides a valuable, necessary corrective. If he doesn’t entirely soften Swift’s rough edges then he goes some way toward dispelling the perceived image of him as “a hater of the human.”
Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 to English parents. His father had died several months earlier from a disease caught from a “foul bed.” Not long after his birth Swift was abducted by his wet nurse and taken to Whitehaven in England. According to his autobiographical account—somewhat “questionable” for Stubbs—his mother sent orders “by all means not to hazard a second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it.” When he returned to Ireland, three years later, he was able to read the Bible—almost as mean a feat as “Man-mountain” Gulliver’s learning the language of Lilliput in three weeks. This Ireland-England return trip was not to be a one-off expedition for Swift: Stubbs notes that “emotionally as well as physically his life passed going back and forth between the two islands, a prisoner of the Irish Sea.”
Swift remained in Ireland for the main part of his education, underperforming at school in Kilkenny and limping towards a degree with manifest “Dullness and Insufficiency” at Trinity College, Dublin. At the age of 21 he left—or as Stubbs has it, “fled”—his homeland again for England, this time to Moor Park House in Surrey to work as private secretary for the retired statesman Sir William Temple. Aside from strengthening his affinity towards England, his stay there brought about two pivotal, character-shaping passions that would last a lifetime: First, he began writing, albeit not yet publishing; and second, he started a friendship that would become a relationship with Temple’s housekeeper’s daughter, Esther Johnson.
More to-and-fro was to ensue. In 1694, Swift departed Moor Park to be ordained in Dublin. Resuming life with the Temples two years later, he commenced tutoring the now-15-year-old Esther and produced his first major work, A Tale of a Tub, a parodic, digressive, yet wholehearted defense of the Established Church. After Temple died, Swift set sail for Dublin in 1699 with a new aristocratic patron, the Earl of Berkeley, and in the role of chaplain, looked after the earl’s family in their private devotions. London beckoned again, in 1701, where for over a decade Swift shone as a leading literary light—or as he described himself, “a person distinguished for poetical and other writings.”
Those other writings took the form of essays and pamphlets that amused and chastised. With scalpel-sharp wit, Swift cut away artifice and pretension to expose folly and vice, and with perfectly aimed blows he felled the pompous and corrupt high and mighty from their plinths. In 1710, he honed his craft at the Examiner, a regular polemical newspaper for the Tory government, and in 1714, helped found the Scriblerus Club, an association of prominent men of letters of the Augustan Age, whose members included Swift’s friends Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot.
Finally, when Swift was appointed dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, in 1713, the flitting backwards and forwards came to an end. He would have preferred a deanery in one of England’s principal cathedrals, but he took what he was offered and remained in Dublin until his death in 1745.
Not that those last years were entirely clerical ecclesiastical. After starting out appalled at the condition of “this beggarly city,” he gradually began to stand up for weak, impoverished Ireland and protest English oppression. A man who was known to many simply as “The Dean” in time earned the worthier title of “hero.” Gulliver’s Travels appeared in 1726, and blended within its tall tales and hijinks was ruthless state-of-the-nation criticism, condemnation for the horrors of imperialism, and despair at human depravity. Three years later, Swift produced the shorter, but more pungent, satire A Modest Proposal, in which an insane social reformer comes up with a way of providing for Ireland’s poor and hungry: “A young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled.”
Stubbs previously excelled with a biography of another literary cleric, John Donne, The Reformed Soul. His life of Swift is just as absorbing, the product of thorough research, shrewd analysis, and sympathetic treatment. The book only suffers when Stubbs opts to pan out and veer off, switching from portrait to panorama. He is right to contextualize Swift’s life with descriptive backdrops and informative backstories, but the drawback is that his subject is occasionally deafened by the roar of history, or lost completely to disquisitions on political strife and ecclesiastical struggle. Swift is born in chapter one but Stubbs leaves his childhood until chapter two, spending his first 30 pages navigating the lie of the land in Ireland and tracing the course of the Civil War in England.
Stubbs is at his most riveting when his focal point is Swift, “the Doctor and Dean, the terror of ministers and magnates.” Whether finding his feet as a writer, tearing strips off rivals, or withering in old age, Swift looms large—Brobdingnagian—on the page. Stubbs is particularly effective at evaluating Swift’s relations with women. Several “heart-blasting” letters show him savagely casting off female admirers—although Stubbs argues that Swift’s cruelty was a kind of crude kindness, a distancing mechanism, for he was not the marrying type. This didn’t prevent him from falling for, and becoming intimate with, Esther Vanhomrigh—the “Stella” in Swift’s Journal to Stella—and Esther Johnson, whom he nicknamed “Vanessa.” Stubbs describes Esther Johnson as “a stray comet, skirting Swift’s planetary system in an orbit that might prove destructive every time she reappeared.” Esther Vanhomrigh, assumed by some to be Swift’s mistress and others to be his secret wife, was “his chief comfort in a world that often exasperated him.”
People and place were the source of that exasperation, and Stubbs throws light on another gray area in Swift’s life: his hostility towards, and later grudging affection for, Ireland. Stubbs declares that Ireland was Swift’s “personal, emotional shorthand for all that was amiss with the circumstances of his life; a panoply of wrongs that included, incidentally, the sins of England.”
In Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, a sardonic, self-penned obituary published six years before he died, Swift reflects on his life and imagines others assessing his achievements and his legacy:
There is similar self-deprecation (and hints at oblivion) in A Tale of a Tub, when Swift notes that due to an overabundance of writers, all “hurryed so hastily off the Scene, that they escape our Memory, and delude our Sight.” Swift ruffled feathers and incurred wrath during his lifetime, and has been branded mad, misogynistic, and misanthropic since his death. But he has never escaped our memory, and Gulliver’s Travels has never been out of print. In this definitive biography, 350 years on from his birth, Swift remains stirringly, thrillingly alive.
Malcolm Forbes is a writer and critic in Edinburgh.
