Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is one of Ireland’s greatest writers. He combined
a career as a clergyman with an interest in writing and politics. Nowadays,
we remember him best for having written the novel Gulliver’s Travels and for his political, satirical essay A Modest
Proposal. He was renowned for his entertaining and witty conversation
as well as for his writing. As a result, he was a popular guest in high-society
circles. Despite his powerful connections, he retained a sympathy for the condition
of the poor in Ireland. He was a holiday guest of the Acheson family at Gosford
Desmesne three times between 1728 and 1730 and wrote a number of poems based
on his experiences in the area.
INTRODUCTION
Jonathan Swift will possibly be best remembered for his authorship of the novel
Gulliver’s Travels. But to see only his writing is to ignore a part of
the riddle that made up the man. A confident satirical style, insatiable ego,
political ‘spin-doctoring’ and his bold claim to have no need of any woman are
all traits we associate with the writer. But behind this public persona was
a man plagued by insecurity and ill health. A man both revered and reviled,
his legend has continued to confuse and delight down through the ages.
CHILDHOOD DAYS
Swift was born in Dublin on November 30th, 1667. A year after his birth he
was ‘amicably kidnapped’ by his nurse and taken to Cumbria. On discovery of
his absence Swift’s mother wrote to the nurse and asked her to take care of
the boy until he was fit for a return journey. He was returned to Ireland aged
three and, he later claimed, could read any chapter from the Bible, a difficult
act for one so young.
Shortly after his return, Swift’s mother went to live in Leicester, leaving
Jonathan and his sister Jane in the care of their uncles, their father having
died seven months before Jonathan’s birth. In 1673 he was sent as a boarder
to Kilkenny College. Looking back, Swift said he had been wrong only to remember
the pleasant things and forget,
“The confinement ten hours a day to nouns and verbs, the terror of
the rod, the bloody noses and broken shins“.
In 1682 Swift, aged fourteen, entered Trinity College, Dublin. From the beginning
he was embarrassed of his poverty and seemed to show no enthusiasm for his studies.
He later wrote,
“He neglected his academic
studies, for some parts of which he had no great relish by nature, and turned
himself to reading history and poetry…he was stopped of his degree for dullness
and insufficiency”. [In his writings, Swift was in the habit of referring
to himself in the third person.]
Swift’s most recorded offence was non-attendance at prayers which were held
at 6am, 10am and 4pm. His Bachelor of Arts degree was completed in 1686 but
he barely scraped through. Although he continued to study for a Master of Arts
degree, he was brought before the Junior Dean for frequenting the town and causing
fights. Being forced to ask pardon from Owen Lloyd was a humiliation for Swift
but he exacted revenge twenty years later in a scathing literary portrait of
Lloyd and his wife.
APPRENTICESHIP
His studies at Trinity were interrupted by war as the deposed Catholic King
James attempted to regain the throne from the Protestant King William. Like
many Protestants, Swift feared a Jacobite victory and abandoned his studies.
In 1689 he moved to his mother’s house in Leicester and took up a secretarial
position with ex-diplomat and writer, Sir William Temple. It was there, at Moor
Park, Surrey, that Swift began to exercise his ambition to write. There, also,
he suffered the first bouts of giddiness and coldness of the stomach that would
plague him all his life. This condition has been retrospectively diagnosed as
Ménières Syndrome. Symptoms were brought about by a lesion in the labyrinth
of the ear, and included deafness, giddiness, oscillation of the eyeball and
sometimes loss of consciousness.
Following the victory of King William at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 Swift
returned to Ireland. He occupied his time by pursuing his desire to write, as
he communicated to a parson friend,
“There is something in me which must be employed, and when I am alone,
turns all, for want of practice, into speculation and thought”.
POLITICS AND THE CHURCH
To finance his endeavours Swift continued acting as secretary to Sir William
Temple, making three visits to Moor Park. However, before he made his last visit
Swift acquired a more permanent profession when he took Holy Orders. Contemporaries
and more recent biographers have continually called Swift’s devotion to the
church into question. We cannot speculate as to the state of his heart but Swift
was a talented man and there is no reason for believing he was anything but
an asset to the church. In 1700 he was appointed Vicar of Laracor in Co.Meath.
Two years later he paid for the title of Doctor of Divinity, a not uncommon
practice in those days.
Between 1704 and 1709 Swift spent much time in England on an official mission
from the church in Ireland to the court of Queen Anne. Although he never actually
met the Queen he was able to make valuable contacts within the court that, he
hoped, would help his career. Swift gained further notoriety when his ‘Tale
of a Tub’ was published in 1704. Although the work was published anonymously
Swift’s authorship was very quickly established, perhaps because he was also
the author of several political pamphlets at this time.
His interest in politics brought him into the realm of Tory politics and between
1710 and 1714 he was an active propagandist for the Tory party, not unlike spin-doctors
of the modern era. In fact his political evangelism was instrumental in causing
the downfall of the Duke of Marlborough and in influencing public opinion against
the war with France. Swift hoped to use his influential court friends to acquire
an influential and wealthy English Bishopric but with the death of Queen Anne,
and the subsequent disintegration of the Tories, his plans were dashed. The
best position his friends could obtain for him was Dean of St.Patrick’s Cathedral
in Dublin.
THE GOSFORD CONNECTION
Although the position was unlikely to have satisfied an ambition as keen as
Swift’s, it was nevertheless a prestigious appointment. If nothing else he used
it to inflate his own ego, surrounding himself with associates he could dominate
and cultivating friendships with various titled families and landed gentry.
One such was the Acheson family of Gosford Demesne, Co.Armagh. The acquaintance
was likely to have been through Philip Savage. The former Chancellor of the
Exchequer was a long-term friend of Swift and also father to Lady Anne Acheson.
Swift made three visits to the Acheson’s estate, the first of which was probably
in 1728. (England adopted a new calendar in 1752. This makes precise dating
difficult as some writers continued to use the old calendar while others adopted
the revised version.)
This first visit was intended to be a short summer holiday, with the planned
return set for Christmas of that year. But by the end of the summer Swift wrote
to his housekeeper to request a new periwig, gown and cassock. He seemed to
enjoy the company and wrote to a friend,
“Sir Arthur is a man of sense, and a scholar, has a good voice, and
my Lady is better; she is perfectly well bred, and desirous to improve her understanding,
which is very good, but cultivated too much like a fine Lady”.
We may question whether or not the Acheson’s enjoyed his visit to the same
extent. On each visit he brought with him at the least two horses and two dogs,
and inflicted upon the household such behaviour as to render his visit something
of a tyranny. In his poem ‘A Panegyrick On The Dean’, Swift, in the guise
of Lady Anne Acheson, makes reference to his varied exploits as, “Dean,
Butler, Usher, Jester, Tutor…” In other poems he mentions the orders
he gave for the cutting down of the old thorn bush, and the ill feeling this
caused. Still further it seems the eager Dean engaged in the construction of
toilet building to provide separate facilities for Ladies and Gents!
Despite this Swift stayed with the Acheson’s on two more occasions and in fact
purchased a plot of land on the estate with the intention of building a house.
However, there was a significant cooling of the relationship and the building
plans never came to fruition, a situation explained in his poem ‘The Dean’s
Reasons for not Building at Drapier’s Hill’. The poem suggests the Acheson’s had wearied of being the subject of his
wit and had made their offence perfectly plain, a fact Swift seemed to resent,
“For, why should I continue still
To serve a friend against his will?”
He continued to visit with Lady Acheson after she had left her husband and
gone to live with her mother in Baldoyle, but his connection with the Gosford
Estate was forever severed following his third stay in 1730.
There has been some suggestion that Swift based his most famous novel, ‘Gulliver’s
Travels’, on his experience of Gosford estate and the village of Markethill.
Much as we would like to claim this fragment of literary history it nevertheless
seems unlikely. If we are correct in the dating of his first visit, as 1728,
the novel was written two years before his first visit. Despite this Swift did
write about his experiences at the estate and it was during his time at the
estate that he wrote much of the volume ‘On Poetry – A Rhapsody’.
The following is a selection of the poems Swift wrote about his experiences
of the Acheson’s and Gosford:
THE MAN WHO MOVED THE PEN
The enigma of Jonathan Swift has persisted throughout the ages. According to Lord
Orrey Swift had,
“A natural severity of face,
which even his smiles could scarce soften, or his utmost gaiety render placid
and serene”.
Yet he was possessed of a lively sense of humour, albeit at the expense of
those around him. On one occasion Swift was occupied by composing a sermon for
the Sunday service at St.Patrick’s, but his efforts were frustrated by the noise
from a large crowd gathered outside the Cathedral. He was informed they had
congregated there as it was the best vantage point from which to watch a solar
eclipse. A discontented Swift dispatched his servant to announce that he had
cancelled the solar eclipse. Believing him powerful enough to perform such an
act the crowd dispersed, leaving Swift to finish his sermon in peace.
His theory about the art of conversation also sheds some light on the eccentricity
of the man. His philosophy was that each person at the table had the right to
speak for one minute. If after a few moments pause no one took on the conversation
the first speaker had the right to continue. No doubt the threat of being cruelly
satirised allowed Swift to dominate the conversation.
The satirical nature of Swift’s poetry suggests a confidence entirely lacking
in his private life. The lover of two women he nevertheless refused to commit
to either, or indeed acknowledge either one as his wife. Both women followed
him to Ireland and it seems knew about his relationship with the other. In his
correspondence with Hester Vanhomrigh and Esther Johnson, who he called Vanessa
and Stella, his handwriting displays uncharacteristic uncertainty. Indeed he
was given to writing in a long string of indecipherable capital letters. (eg.
MD MD MD FW FW FE ME ME ME LELE LELE LELE). It is likely Swift never intended
this correspondence to become part of public consumption but, during a bout
of illness he gave an unruly bundle of papers to his nephew Deane Swift, who
later became a biographer of his literary uncle. (On this occasion Deane is
a christian name, not an ecclesiastical title). Both of these women died in
the 1720’s leaving Swift alone and lonely. The desire for a change of company
and scenery is perhaps what brought him to the Acheson estate at Gosford.
THE LAST CHAPTER
Throughout his life Swift’s literary ambitions were never matched by his physical
stamina. Indeed by the 1730’s his health had deteriorated rapidly causing him
to write to a friend,
“I have lost half my memory and all my invention”.
For much of the rest of his life he was a recluse as his condition steadily declined.
Before his death he willed all his money to the building of St.Patrick’s hospital
for “idiots and lunatics”, a building which still stands today.
As befitted a Dean of the Cathedral, Swift was buried on the south side of the
Great aisle, beside a monument of Primate Narcissus Marsh. The black marble
slab that marks his resting place reads,
“Hic Depositum Est Corpus
Jonathan Swift, S.T.D.
Hujus Ecclesiae Cathedralis
Decani
Ubi Saeva Indignatio
Ulterius
Cor Lacerare Nequit
Abi, Viator
Et Imitare, si poteris
Strenuum pro virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem”.
Translated this means,
“Here lies Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of this Cathedral
Church, where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go Traveller,
and imitate if you can one who with all his might championed liberty”.
