Jonathan Swift
1667–1745 · Ireland
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Jonathan Swift
Drew From(2)
who shaped Jonathan Swift
- The wild, riotous ancestor of Gulliver's giants-and-islands satire
- Rabelais supplied the form Swift inherited — the voyage among strange peoples, the comedy of scale — but where Rabelais overflows with appetite, Swift goes cold and surgical
- Coleridge fixed the lineage in a phrase: Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco — the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Read Rabelais and you hear what got dried out
via Robinson Crusoe
- Gulliver's Travels is in large part a send-up of Robinson Crusoe and the solemn traveler's tale Defoe had made fashionable
- That jab at travelers who detail every meal "as if the readers were personally concerned whether we fared well or ill" is a direct dig at Crusoe's earnest provision-keeping
- Knowing Defoe's straight-faced castaway first sharpens every parody — you see exactly what Swift is laughing at
Inspired(3)
who Jonathan Swift shaped
- Voltaire read Gulliver's Travels in English the year it appeared, met Swift in London, and called him "the Rabelais of England"
- Swift's recipe — a credulous traveler whose wanderings expose the follies of philosophy — runs straight into Voltaire's contes philosophiques (Zadig's Big- and Little-Endian quarrel borrows directly)
- Candide perfects the satirical-traveler form Swift had handed him, this time aimed at Leibnizian optimism
- Gulliver's Travels set the standard for English learned-wit satire that Sterne would build on a generation later
- The two are routinely paired as the great prose satires of the English 18th century — Swift's the model, Tristram Shandy the wild extension
via Devils
- Swift's satiric image of Gulliver opens one of the great Russian novels: on its first page, Dostoevsky likens the deluded liberal Stepan Trofimovich to Gulliver back from Lilliput
- A man "grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant" that he shouts at passers-by to get out of his way — Swift's deflating comedy borrowed to set the mocking tone of Devils
Portraits
The defining likeness: Jervas's c.1718 NPG 278 portrait of Swift in clerical robes as Dean of St Patrick's, the image reproduced on countless editions of Gulliver's Travels and in nearly every biography.
Charles Jervas, 1718
Jervas's earlier 1710 portrait (NPG 4407), the younger Swift of the Journal to Stella years; the second most-reproduced painted likeness after the 1718 robed version.
Charles Jervas, 1710
Famous Quotes
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
“And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
“I said the thing which was not.”
“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”
About Jonathan Swift
Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and cleric, considered the greatest prose satirist in English. Gulliver's Travels, his masterpiece, uses fantastical voyages to savage human folly and political corruption. He was also Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and a fierce advocate for Irish interests against English exploitation.