NOTE.
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1667, and died in 1745. His parents were English. His father died before he was born, and his mother was supported on a slender pittance by his father's brother. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and all through his early life was dependent on the generosity of others. His college career was not highly creditable, either from the point of view of manners, morals, or learning. After leaving college, he travelled through England on foot, and found employment with a relative of his mother's, Sir William Temple, in whose house was a noble library; and for two years Swift made up for some of his shortcomings by studying diligently therein. He went to Oxford in 1692, took a degree and was ordained in 1694. He was given a parish in Ireland, which he soon resigned, returning to the home of Sir William Temple, where he remained until the death of the latter in 1699.
Temple left Swift a legacy, and confided to him the editing and publishing of his works. This task completed, Swift went again to Ireland to another parish, and threw himself into political pamphleteering with great effect, one of the results of his exertions being the securing of freedom from taxation for the Irish clergy. He subsequently became Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, and for a period achieved great popularity owing to his powerful political writings.
While in what he called his "exile" he wrote Gulliver's Travels, which was at first published anonymously, the secret of the authorship being so closely guarded that the publisher did not know who was the author. Dr. Johnson characterized it as "A production so new and strange that it filled the reader with admiration and amazement. It was read by the high and low, the learned and the illiterate." In this work, Jonathan Swift appears as one of the greatest masters of English we have ever had; as endowed with an imaginative genius inferior to few; as a keen and pitiless critic of the world, and a bitter misanthropic accounter of humanity at large. Dean Swift was indeed a misanthrope by theory, however he may have made exception to private life. His hero, Gulliver, discovers race after race of beings who typify the genera in his classification of mankind. Extremely diverting are Gulliver's adventures among the tiny Lilliputians; only less so are his more perilous encounters with the giants of Brobdingnag.... By a singular dispensation of Providence, we usually read the Travels while we are children; we are delighted with the marvellous story, we are not at all injured by the poison. Poor Swift! he was conscious of insanity's approach; he repeated annually Job's curse upon the day of his birth; he died a madman.
There are numerous biographies of Swift; but probably the best characterization of the man and his life, rather than of his books, is to be found in Thackeray's English Humorists, and a closer study of the man and his works in Leslie Stevenson's "Swift," in Morley's English Men of Letters. The other biographies of him are: Lord Orrery Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1751; Hawkes, on his life, 1765; Sheridan's life, 1785; Forster's life, 1875 (unfinished); Henry Craik's life (1882). The best edition of Swift's writings and correspondence is that edited by Scott, 1824.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Redriff = Rotherhithe: then a Thames side village, now part of London.