Jonathan Swift
1 book analyzed
Biography
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin to English parents and spent his life as an outsider in both cultures — too Irish for England, too English for Ireland, too political for the Church, too clerical for politics. He was Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral Dublin from 1713 until his death, a post he regarded as exile from the London political world where he had been a major figure in Tory propaganda under Harley and Bolingbroke. When the Tories fell in 1714, Swift was effectively banished to Ireland. He spent the rest of his life in Dublin writing some of the most devastating political satire in the language — the 'Drapier's Letters,' 'A Modest Proposal,' and Gulliver's Travels — from a position of enforced peripherality that gave him exactly the angle his satire required. He died after years of mental deterioration, possibly from Ménière's disease; his will left the bulk of his estate to found a lunatic asylum ('And he gave the little wealth he had / To build a house for fools and mad,' wrote Pope).