Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was born in 1667. His father, a Protestant Englishman who moved to Dublin during a period of increasing English settlement in Ireland, died just months before Swift was born. Despite this, and thanks to the generosity of a few relatives, Swift received the best education possible in Ireland. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, received a Master of Arts degree from Oxford, in England, and was eventually ordained as an Anglican priest. As a young man, Swift shuttled between Ireland and England often. During this period he became increasingly invested in English politics. He gained notoriety for his impassioned essays on religion and all matters of domestic and foreign policy, and for his works of biting satire. A Tale of a Tub (1704), his first major prose work, mocked intellectual pedants and religious fanatics alike. In 1713 Swift was appointed as the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and in 1714 he settled permanently in Ireland. Swift was sympathetic to the plight of Irish Catholics under English rule, and wrote frequently in defense of their cause. His frustration with the political situation in Ireland culminated in A Modest Proposal (1729), a bitter and darkly hilarious satire of English indifference to the suffering of the Irish poor. Today, Jonathan Swift is most remembered for Gulliver’s Travels (1726), his complex, fantastical parody of utopian literature and early-modern travel narratives. He died in 1745.