BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
Fierce indignation
Dean Swift’s biting satire is as necessary today as it
was 300 years ago, according to Daniel Swift (no relation)Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel
by John Stubbs
Viking, £25, pp. 739
In an autobiographical note written late in
his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonish-
ing anecdote from his childhood. When he
was a baby in Dublin, he was put into the
care of an English wet nurse, and one day
she heard that one of her relatives back in
England was close to death. Hoping for an
inheritance, the wet nurse jumped on a boat
back to Whitehaven in Cumbria, taking the
infant Swift with her. ‘When the Matter was
discovered,’ Swift wrote, ‘His Mother sent
orders by all means not to hazard a second
voyage, till he could be better able to bear
it.’ So the wet nurse kept Swift in England
for two or three years, and by the time he
returned home, Swift recalled, he could read
the Bible from cover to cover.
Swift was a figure of great contradic-
tion, as this massive new biography by John
Stubbs makes repeatedly clear; and almost
all can be summarised in this single strange
story. There is the back and forth between
England and Ireland. The child is a victim
of adult whim and greed and fear; and yet
the telling is wholly unsentimental. There is
no Dickensian or Disney pathos here, but
an unsparing familiarity with the foibles of
the world.
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in
November 1667, nine months after his
father had died of syphilis. That he was born
in Ireland made him, in the opinions of the
time, Irish — ‘to his regret’, notes Stubbs;
and Swift spent much of the first half of his
life hating Ireland, because hating Ireland
was what the English did, and Swift longed
to be English. He was divided in all things.
His father’s family were Royalists and colo-
nists who had settled in Ireland, and on his
mother’s side were Puritans, as if the Eng-
lish Civil War were still being fought in him.
Dublin was a chaotic and dirty city, and
Swift studied at Trinity College, and then
travelled to England to work as privatesecretary for the elderly statesman Sir Wil-
liam Temple. He took orders as an Anglican
priest, and went back to Ireland as a private
chaplain in 1699; he returned to London to
work as a government polemicist and then
finally settled in Dublin in 1714, when he
became Dean of St Patrick’s cathedral.
Stubbs recounts the hurly-burly of early
18th-century politics, the endless and often
incomprehensible struggles between Whigs
and Tories, high church and low, and locates
Swift exactly in this world: as a political
man, engaging in controversies over the
coinage and the tax on hemp. At one point
Swift defuses a letter bomb which was
intended for the Lord Treasurer, but this is
a rare moment of excitement. He seems to
spend most of his time writing pamphletswith boring titles. ‘In 1723 Swift published
a pungent tract on a question of ecclesiasti-
cal management,’ Stubbs gamely writes, and
there is a lot of this sort of stuff.
He was a man of his time, in his eccen-
tricities and habits: he distrusted fruit, which
he believed would make him ill, and thought
he could cure his tinnitus by riding a horse.
But it is precisely those things which sep-
arate him from his age which make him
interesting and often admirable. He was
right about so many things. He distrusted
cats; he changed his underwear frequently,
against the fashion of the day; he was sym-
pathetic towards the mad, and gave money
for their care; he loved wine and paid his
servants well.
This is not meant to make him sound
cuddly, for he was a deeply difficult figure,
and most difficult for what Stubbs coyly
calls ‘Swift’s problems with women, sexual-
ity and the body’. His romantic life — if we
may call it this — was dominated by long
and probably unconsummated relation-
ships with two women called Esther. Swift
met Esther Johnson when she was eight,
and he was in his early twenties; he called
her Stella, and wrote to her while they were
apart, and lived close by her when he could.
The second Esther was the daughter of a
wealthy Dublin merchant, and Swift called
her Vanessa. Some said he had secret liai-
sons with these two, and perhaps even
secret children; Stubbs is uninterested in
such gossip.
But that which sets Swift most starklySwift was right about so many things.
He distrusted cats, loved wine and
paid his servants well