Portrait of Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervasapart is his writing, and the women here
are hardly heroines. The poem ‘A Beauti-
ful Young Nymph Going to Bed’, written in
1634, pictures a courtesan undressing:Then, seated on a three-legg’d chair,
Takes off her artificial hair,
Now, picking out a Crystal eye,
She wipes it clean, and lays it by.
This might look like old-fashioned misogyny,
and Stubbs accepts that it may be partly this,
but he also argues convincingly that Swift
is here forcing his male readers to reflect
upon ‘the way they define the women they
find beautiful’. The true topic of the poem is
the deception permitted and embraced by
society. It is not exactly a feminist work, but
it is a philosophical one.
Swift’s major theme was the limitation of
each man’s reason. This is the grand joke of
his great novel Gulliver’s Travels, which was
published in 1726, about a merchant who
gets repeatedly lost at sea and washes up onislands inhabited by giants, or tiny people,
or speaking horses. ‘Swift’s implication, a
startling one for a clergyman of his dogmat-
ic stamp, is that no objective measure exists,’
writes Stubbs: ‘The strapping six-footer of
one country is an insect in another.’ When
Gulliver arrives in Lilliput, he recounts
almost immediately how he managed to
‘discharge the Necessities of Nature’, andalso what he was fed by the race of tiny peo-
ple: 20 wagons full of meat, and ten more
full of ‘Liquor’. We are each made fools by
our bodies. In Brobdingnag, where the grass
is 20 feet high and it takes Gulliver an hour
to walk across a field, he is attacked by two
giant children and a cat, and then in Laputa,
the kingdom of absurd reason, he is served amathematical meal: ‘a Shoulder of Mutton,
cut into an Equilateral Triangle; a Piece of
Beef in a Rhombus.’
Rampant appetite is the topic of his
most vicious work. A Modest Proposal for
Preventing the Children of Poor People
From Being a Burden to Their Parents or
Country was inspired by decades of Eng-
lish policy which kept Ireland poor, and in
it the anonymous speaker sets out a sim-
ple scheme for the aid of the starving Irish.
‘A young healthy Child well Nursed is at a
year Old a most delicious, nourishing, and
wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roast-
ed, Baked, or Broiled,’ he advises. The sat-
ire works because it is so perfectly logical. If
the English wish to treat the Irish as cattle,
then why not consider them as food? This is
Swift’s great quality as a satirist: he saw it all
so sharply, with what the Victorian novelist
Thackeray called ‘a fatal clearness’.
Although I am no relation of Jonathan
Swift, I have for the obvious reason always
felt a little like he was my imaginary great-
great-grandfather. On some level, Swift
was grandfather of us all, and we need his
works in our age of fundamentalism and
appetite, for surely we are living still in
what he called a confederacy of dunces. Just
because he was so serious does not mean he
was not funny, and the jokes are the centre
of the satire. He also said: ‘He was a bold
man who first ate an oyster’ (he was right
about so many things). Jonathan Swift was
not always a charming writer, but he was a
necessary one.His romantic life was dominated by
long, probably platonic relationships
with two women called EstherGETTY IMAGES