Jonathan Swift
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Contents
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1. Life
2. Works
3.
Achievements
4. The story
of Gulliver's
Travels
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1. Life




Family background and education
Relations with Sir William in England
whigs
Social activities Tories
Irish exile
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Family background and education

Jonathan Swift (1667 ～
1745) was born in
Ireland of English
parents and, after
studying at Trinity
College, Dublin, he
entered the household of
Sir William Temple, a
retired diplomat, as a
secretary.
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Relations with Sir William in
England

His relations with Temple were close but
difficult, and Swift left at one point to
become an Anglican parish priest in
northern Ireland. Upon his return to
England he remained with Temple until the
latter's death, helping prepare Temple's
works for publication and writing his own
remarkable first volume of satire, which
included A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of
the Books.
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Social activities

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In 1707 Swift was sent by the Church of Ireland to seek financial
benefits from Queen Anne; during his years' stay in London, he
became accepted as a man of letters. When he returned to
London in 1710, he left the Whigs and gave his support to the
Tory ministry of Robert Harley, later Earl of Oxford, on the
grounds that the Whigs might sell the church short in their
encouragement of Dissenters. For most of the four years that
followed, Swift became a principal spokesman and propagandist
for the Tories. He became a leading spirit in the Scriblerus Club
with Pope, and he was able to win patronage for friends in
difficulty, Addison among them.
With the fall of the ministry, Swift (who had been appointed
Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, in 1713) began his long
Irish exile. He became in some measure an Irish patriot, trying to
stir the Irish to self-respect and to resistance against English
exploitation.
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2. Works

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In 1726, he publicized Gulliver's Travels, which
contained his strong political satire, and he had a
hand in encouraging both Gay's Beggar's Opera and
Pope's Dunciad in the following years. Throughout
his lifetime Swift created a body of distinctive
poetry. At the end, a disease of the middle ear
disturbed his sense of balance; he was cared for by
others until his death.
Swift's important works include The Battle of
the Books; A Tale of a Tub; The Drapier's Letters, A
Modest Proposal and Gulliver's Travels.
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3. Achievements
The greatest
ironist
Master of
English prose
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His
characteristic
device
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The greatest ironist

Swift is the greatest ironist in English
literature, and he has as a result been
accused of all the malevolence and
blindness that resentment can invent. He
does not allow man much comfort or dignity,
and he cruelly reduces grand pretensions to
systematic follies and mechanized brutality.
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His characteristic device

In fact, Swift's characteristic device is to invent
some rational basis for the behavior that men fall into
unthinkingly or self-indulgently; by rationalizing folly,
by finding eloquent arguments for the unspeakable,
Swift divorces intention (usually noble) from
achievement (somewhat shabbier) and shows what
one would have to intend if one were to undertake
deliberately what men in fact accomplish. So the most
important characteristic of his writing is that his
satire is usually masked by an outward gravity and an
apparent earnestness which renders his satire all the
more powerful.
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Master of English prose

Swift is one of the greatest masters of
English prose. He is almost unsurpassed in
the writing of simple, direct, precise prose.
His style is really “ proper words in proper
places. ” Clear, simple, concrete diction,
uncomplicated sentence structure, economy
and conciseness of language mark all his
writings.
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