Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift is best known to the world as author of Gulliver's Travels - an exhilarating and comprehensive satire of human society, which ironically became a children's classic - and was known to his contemporaries as a political pamphleteer, propagandist for Tory ministries, and a reluctant Irish patriot. But as Professor Jeffares shows in this essay, a full portrait must include the disappointments of Swift's career as a church-man, and the complexity of his relations with the women he knew as 'Varina', 'Stella' and 'Vanessa'. Swift's early readers thought him irreligious and misanthropic, although he was Rector of Laracor. In the nineteenth century, Thackeray still deplored his 'imprecations against mankind' and called parts of his work 'furious, raging, obscene'. The works discussed in this essay still provoke such strongly felt responses, not least because his criticisms are true and universal. In A Tale of A Tub, The Battle of the Books and Gulliver, Swift directed his passionate indignation against corruptions in Church, State and Learning, and while his loyalties were with the Tory interest, his corrosive irony was turned impartially against blind authority, militarism (in the person of the Duke of Marlborough), colonialism as his Irish compatriots experienced it, and humbug, pride and self-deception wherever he found it. As Professor Jeffares demonstrates, Swift's weapons were his own wide learning, his native passion, and most of all a prose style which in its lean and vigorous quality served equally the vivid depiction of human suffering, the exuberant play of his poems and private letters, or the searing ironies of the political pamphlets and prose satires.

A. Norman Jeffares is Professor of English at the University of Stirling. He is author and editor of many books including, among his work on Anglo-Irish literature, Fair Liberty Was All His Cry (1967), and Swift: Modern Judgements (1968).