Jonathan Swift
1667–1745 8 entries
Biography
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist and clergyman, one of the greatest satirists in the English language. Born in Dublin in 1667, a few months after his father’s death, he studied at Trinity College Dublin and then served in England as secretary to the statesman Sir William Temple, in whose house he met Esther Johnson, the Stella of his letters. In 1704 he published A Tale of a Tub, a satire on the quarrels of the churches, together with The Battle of the Books. From 1710 he was the leading writer of the Tory government in London and edited its weekly paper, The Examiner, and in 1713 he was made Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
Back in Ireland he became a fierce champion of the Irish against English rule, above all in The Drapier’s Letters and A Modest Proposal, which coolly suggests that the poor sell their children as food for the rich. In 1726 he published Gulliver’s Travels, the voyages of a ship’s surgeon to Lilliput, Brobdingnag and other strange lands, a mockery of human pride and politics that children have loved ever since. His sharpest short sayings are gathered in his Thoughts on Various Subjects. He died in Dublin in 1745, leaving most of his fortune to found a hospital for the mentally ill, and his epitaph says that savage indignation can no longer tear his heart.
- Aphorisms 8