Jonathan Swift
(1667–1745)

Jonathan Swift is recognized as the greatest English satirist. Swift's masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, was an instant bestseller when it first appeared in 1726–its popularity with adults and children alike has never waned. Swift was also one of the great masters of English prose. He summed up his values of clear, concrete diction and concise expression in a typically epigrammatic (and deceptively simple) definition of style: "proper words in proper places."

Swift was born in 1667 to English parents in Dublin, Ireland. He was educated at Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin. After earning his degree, he was employed in England by a kinsman, Sir William Temple, who was a retired diplomat. At Moor Park, Temple's estate, Swift first met a young servant girl named Esther Johnson, whom he nicknamed "Stella." The exact nature of their relationship is unknown, but it is clear that each had deep feelings for the other.

In 1694, Swift was ordained an Anglican priest. However, his hopes for promotion within the church through Temple's influence were disappointed. During the 1690s, he discovered his genius for satire by writing two works that were not published until 1704: A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. These satires poked fun at religious divisions and literary excesses–two themes that remained prominent in Swift's mature works.

Church business required Swift to divide his time between Dublin and London for more than a decade. During his London visits, he became acquainted with many leading writers and politicians, including the essayists Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, the poets Alexander Pope and John Gay, the playwright William Congreve, and the Tory leader Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford. In 1713, Swift was appointed Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, a post he occupied until shortly before his death.

In 1720, Swift published his first important political work on Ireland, whose economic oppression by the English increasingly preoccupied him. Four years later, in 1724, his series of pro-Irish pamphlets, The Drapier's Letters, made him a national hero. In 1726, Swift's literary reputation reached its zenith with the publication of his masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels. In this work, the bite of Swift's satire was tempered by charming fantasy and descriptions of exotic settings.

In 1727, Swift made his final visit to England. Two years later, he published his pamphlet A Modest Proposal, which, like the narrative Gulliver's Travels, is now regarded as one of the greatest satirical works in English literature. In A Modest Proposal, Swift uses the metaphorical notion of the English "devouring" the Irish as the basis for a savagely ironic denunciation of economic and political oppression.

Although Swift is often characterized as a misanthrope who hated humanity, he had a gift for friendship and was a generous supporter of charitable causes. His health declined drastically in his final years, and in 1742 he was declared insane–although his symptoms are now thought to have been those of Ménière's disease, a disorder of the inner ear. Swift died in 1745 in Dublin and was buried in St. Patrick's by the side of his beloved Stella.

Gulliver's Travels is the story of Lemuel Gulliver's four voyages to "remote nations of the world." Gulliver, who narrates the story, is a ship's surgeon; he is portrayed as a well-educated and decent human being. Each of these voyages takes Gulliver to a land of strange wonderment: the miniature kingdoms of Lilliput; Brobdingnag, the land where enlightened giants dwell; the flying island of Laputa, inhabited by overly speculative philosophers and scientists; and the country of the Houyhnhnms–a race of horses who live entirely by reason. Gulliver's Travels is regarded as a powerful satire on humanity and its institutions, and as a fascinating tale of voyages to imaginary lands.

Swift's full title for Gulliver's Travels reads as follows: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships. The title was designed–one assumes–to appeal to readers' growing appetite for accounts of distant, exotic settings and unusual incidents. Swift's work can be seen as an early, rather specialized example of the rise of a new genre in English literature: the travelogue. With their focus on entertainment and escapism, travelogues may be compared with the more recent literary form of science fiction.

Almost all the leading writers of Swift's age wrote travel books, starting with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). Defoe based his work, often called the first English novel, on the widely reported adventures of Alexander Selkirk. After running away to sea and quarreling with his captain, Selkirk had been put ashore on an uninhabited island, where he remained for five years.

Other notable travelogues of the century include Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), which contains some notable parallels to Voltaire's Candide (1759); Oliver Goldsmith's poem The Traveller (1764); Tobias Smollett's Travels Through France and Italy (1766); and James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). In the hands of eighteenth-century writers such as Swift and Samuel Johnson, travel literature often included elements of philosophy, satire, and fantasy.

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