Reviwe – Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a posthumous child born in Dublin, Ireland, of English parents and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Swift also benefited from associating with a man distinguished bothin public affairs and in literature. It is said that he secretly married Esther Johnson (Stella).
His growing literary reputation took him to London. 1710 he left the Whigs and joined Tory party. He became a major Tory journalist pamphleteer and satirist. In 1720 he became a great supporter of Irish interests against English exploitation. The death of Stella in 1728 deprived him of the tenderest attachment of his life.
Swift wrote The battle of books (1697) to defend Temple’s position of favoring the ancients, as against the modern authors in the controversy of the ancients and moderns. It is a mock-heroic prose account of the civil war that broke out among the books of Royal Library, but the amusing narrative serves chiefly as a setting for incident of spiders and the bee. The spider, representing the moderns, claim to be superior to the bee by the merit of originality whereas the bee is a mere plunder of flowers.
Swift regarded A tale of a Tub (1696) as his greatest work. The main section of it presents the allegory of three brothers who inherit from their father three suits of cloth (the Christian faith) and a will (the Scriptures) directing their use of the clothes. Swift ridicules the Dissenters by calling them Aeolists whose inspiration is wind. He also accuses the Anglican Church of having deviated from the pristine truth of Christianity.
In 1713, he was made the dean of St. Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin, and with the fall of Tory ministry, he left London and spent the rest of his life in Dublin. He championed the cause of the Irish. In 1724, with his Drapier’s letters which forced the government in London to withdraw its proposals for the new Irish coinage, he became the hero of the native population.
During his stay in London, swift kept a diary of intimate chat for the benefit of the Stella, which was posted fortnightly to Ireland. Three letters preserved and published as journal to Stella reveal his gentleness and humanity as well as his affections for Stella, to whom he confides his opinion of people around him and his authorship of anonymous political pamphlets.
In 1726, swift returned to London, where Gulliver’s Travels was published anonymously. Its original conception seems to have been part of the projects of the Scriblerus Club. It is divided into four books or voyages, but the third one was written last of all.
