Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World Read online

  Jonathan Swift

  Jonathan Swift

  HIS LIFE AND HIS WORLD

  Leo Damrosch

  Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

  New Haven and London

  Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund and from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

  Copyright © 2013 by Leo Damrosch. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (US office) or [email protected] (UK office).

  Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Adobe Garamond type by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Damrosch, Leopold.

  Jonathan Swift : his life and his world / Leo Damrosch.

  pages cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-16499-2 (clothbound : alk. paper)

  1. Swift, Jonathan, 1667–1745. 2. Authors, lrish—18th century—Biography. I. Title

  PR3726.D27 2013

  828′.509—dc23

  [B]

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1. Beginnings

  2. A Patron and Two Mysteries

  3. “Long Choosing, and Beginning Late”

  4. Moor Park Once More

  5. The Village and the Castle

  6. London

  7. “A Very Positive Young Man”

  8. The Scandalous Tub

  9. Swift and God

  10. First Fruits

  11. The War and the Whigs

  12. Swift the Londoner

  13. At the Summit

  14. The Journal to Stella

  15. Enter Vanessa

  16. Tory Triumph

  17. Tory Collapse

  18. Reluctant Dubliner

  19. Political Peril

  20. The Irish Countryside

  21. Stella

  22. Vanessa in Ireland

  23. National Hero

  24. The Astonishing Travels

  25. Gulliver in England

  26. Disillusionment and Loss

  27. Frustrated Patriot

  28. Swift among the Women

  29. The Disgusting Poems

  30. Waiting for the End

  Chronology

  List of Abbreviations

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Illustrations

  1. Gulliver on Dollymount Strand

  2. Godwin Swift’s house, Hoey’s Court

  3. Map of Swift’s first neighborhood

  4. Kilkenny Castle

  5. The Dublin Custom House

  6. Map of Dublin showing Trinity College, 1756

  7. Jonathan Swift, by Charles Jervas, 1710

  8. Holyhead in 1742

  9. Map of Leicester in 1741

  10. Sir William Temple in his youth

  11. Moor Park in Temple’s time

  12. Moor Park today

  13. A page of Swift’s work as secretary to Sir William Temple

  14. “When I come to be old,”

  15. King William III

  16. Queen Mary II

  17. Map of the Irish Sea, 1695

  18. John Dryden

  19. Trim Castle

  20. Laracor Church

  21. Laracor Communion table

  22. Swift’s account book

  23. Lord Berkeley

  24. St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1695

  25. Map of part of Middlesex County, 1695

  26. Map of part of central London, 1720

  27. William Hogarth, The Second Stage of Cruelty

  28. Mackerel seller

  29. Frontispiece of A Tale of a Tub

  30. The preacher in his tub

  31. Bedlam

  32. Queen Anne

  33. Lord Somers

  34. The Duke of Marlborough

  35. The Duchess of Marlborough

  36. Lord Godolphin

  37. Lord Halifax

  38. Daniel Defoe

  39. William Congreve

  40. Richard Steele

  41. Joseph Addison

  42. Robert Harley, Lord Oxford

  43. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke

  44. A page from the Journal to Stella

  45. Dr. John Arbuthnot

  46. Alexander Pope

  47. Matthew Prior as a plenipotentiary

  48. St. Patrick’s Cathedral

  49. St. Patrick’s choir stalls and altar

  50. Swift’s movable pulpit

  51. Map of the Cathedral precincts

  52. Swift’s wine bottles

  53. Swift’s rushlight

  54. The Alexander McGee memorial

  55. Dr. Patrick Delany

  56. Dr. Thomas Sheridan

  57. Sir Robert Walpole

  58. Swift on horseback

  59. Map showing Naboth’s Vineyard

  60. Mullagh Lake, Quilca

  61. Stella’s pickaxe

  62. Stella’s cottage

  63. The remains of Stella’s cottage

  64. Stella’s ghost imagined by a Victorian artist

  65. Celbridge

  66. Letter from Vanessa to Swift

  67. Archbishop William King

  68. Lord Carteret

  69. Dean Swift

  70. Captain Gulliver

  71. Gulliver tied down

  72. Lilliput on the map

  73. Gulliver fighting the rat, by Willy Pogany

  74. A louse as it appeared to Gulliver

  75. Glumdalclitch, by Arthur Rackham

  76. Struldbruggs, by Arthur Rackham

  77. Yahoos pulling a Houyhnhnm, by Willy Pogany

  78. Pope’s villa at Twickenham

  79. Bolingbroke in middle age

  80. John Gay

  81. Alexander Pope

  82. A page from Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift

  83. Map of the road to Holyhead

  84. Memorial to Stella, St. Patrick’s Cathedral

  85. Dean Swift, by Francis Bindon

  86. A Modest Proposal, original 1729 edition

  87. Swift in informal attire

  88. Mary Pendarves

  89. Laetitia Pilkington

  90. Dean Swift’s well

  91. Dean Swift, by Francis Bindon

  92. Memorial to Swift and Stella, St. Patrick’s Cathedral

  93. Bust of Swift in St. Patrick’s Cathedral

  94. Swift’s skull

  Acknowledgments

  I want to express my gratitude to Robin Dublanc, expert copyeditor; to Jennifer Banks, whose editorial insight was invaluable in shaping this story; and to Joyce Van Dyke, whose imagination and advice improved every page of the book. My research and the acquisition of illustrations were generously supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  Prologue

  In the 1720s a brilliant and beautiful young woman was entangled in a troubled affair with a man twenty years older. She had fallen passio
nately in love with him in London, and when he moved home to Dublin she followed him there. He was strongly attracted to her but reluctant to commit himself, and he insisted they keep their relationship secret. They were apart much of the time and communicated by letter, and she was sometimes near despair when he seemed to be rejecting her: “I am sure I could have bore the rack much better than those killing, killing words of yours.” At other times, though, he did reply in the way she wanted. “Be assured,” he declared, “that no one on earth has ever been loved, honored, esteemed, adored by your friend but yourself.” Whenever he wrote like that, she would be joyful—“You are good beyond expression, and I will never quarrel again if I can help it.”1 For a time they met covertly once a week at someone else’s house in Dublin.

  In the letters they had a private code. The man suggested that “a stroke thus —— —— —— —— signifies everything that may be said.” In her letters from then on, the dashes flew thick and fast: “I have worn out my days in sighing and my nights with watching and thinking of ——, ——, ——, ——.”2 Only they knew what words were meant.

  Evidently, the word coffee was part of the same code. In a number of letters from the man over several years, “coffee” has a suggestive aura: “I wish I were to walk with you fifty times about your garden, and then—drink your coffee”; “I drank no coffee since I left you, nor intend till I see you again, there is none worth drinking but yours”; “Without health, you will lose all desire of drinking your coffee.” At one point the absence of her coffee is so disturbing that it interferes with his work as a writer: “I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe coffee once a week is necessary to do that.”3

  The man in this strange romantic story was Jonathan Swift, and the book he was trying to write was Gulliver’s Travels. He liked to be mysterious toward everyone, not just toward the young woman, and even those who knew him best were baffled by his contradictions. One friend said that his character was “exceedingly strange, various, and perplexed,” and another called him “my hieroglyphic friend.”4 He became a public figure of great distinction, dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and a champion of Irish rights, yet he was profoundly skeptical and he claimed to despise Ireland. He was a great writer, yet he almost never signed his name to his work.

  Even the basic facts concerning Swift’s origins are open to question. He inherited the name of a Jonathan Swift who died before he was born, but it is not entirely certain that that was his real father. His wet nurse abducted him from Dublin when he was an infant and took him to England with her; amazingly, his family let him stay there with her for several years. Why? When he was finally brought back to Dublin, why did his mother then leave for England herself, and why did he not see her again until he was an adult? After his mother left, an uncle in Dublin become his guardian and paid for an expensive education. So why did Swift despise his uncle and declare that he had been given “the education of a dog”?5

  It wasn’t just Swift’s childhood that was mysterious; his most intimate and enduring adult relationships were mysterious too. After college he spent ten years as confidential secretary to a distinguished retired diplomat in England in whose household there was a bright nine-year-old girl, the housekeeper’s daughter. The diplomat arranged to have his servant’s child tutored by Swift, and at his death she received an extraordinarily large bequest. As an adult she became Swift’s closest friend for the rest of her life, and she too moved to Dublin when he returned there. Even though they were apparently never together without a third party present, many who knew them were convinced that they were secretly married. But if they were married, why did it have to be secret? And how much did the close friend (or wife) know about her young rival with the coffee? Was it an actual love triangle, or only a virtual one?

  This man of mystery produced a book that became world-famous. Everybody recognizes the image of Gulliver tied down on the ground by a host of tiny people, even if they have not read the masterpiece from which it comes. A stunningly original fantasy, it is uncanny in Freud’s sense of that term: strange and yet familiar, absurd and yet believable. Many children, and many adults too, have loved Gulliver’s Travels. George Orwell, though he was critical of Swift’s politics, confessed that he read it over and over, and would put it on any list of “six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed.”6 To this day, at least two dozen publishers are keeping it in print, and it is a universal classic, its fame extending beyond the English-speaking world.

  But few know much about the man who wrote Gulliver’s Travels, or about the long-ago world that for him was the present moment. This book is an invitation to time travel, in quest of what a historian has called “the sensations of being alive in a different time.” Swift was alive during a time of revolutionary change, when a king was deposed in a sensational revolution, the modern political system came into being, and Britain became a world power. It was at that time that an Irish national consciousness was born, in opposition to control by England, and Swift’s was a crucial voice in forging it. “We should see certain men and women,” Yeats said, with Swift in mind, “as if at the edge of a cliff, time broken away from their feet.”7

  1. Gulliver on Dollymount Strand. A seventy-foot fiberglass model of Gulliver in Lilliput, constructed to correct scale, just east of Dublin. Swift would have loved this picture, not to mention the effigy, since he often rode his horse on this beach.

  Swift was known as a great talker. Unlike Samuel Johnson, described by Boswell as “talking for victory, and determined to be master of the field,” Swift was open and relaxed in conversation. And although his flow of humor was noted by everyone who knew him, it seldom took the form, as Johnson’s did, of quotable bon mots. “He was by no means in the class with those,” his relative Deane Swift said, “who pour down their eloquence like a torrent, driving all before it. Far from any desires of that sort, he equally loved to speak, and loved to hearken.”8

  Something of Swift’s style of talking comes through in his letters, often playful, at times angry. He complained to a former patron that he was wasting away in Ireland, and expected to die there “in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.” Especially revealing is the daily journal he kept during one extended period, sent in installments to the woman who was his closest friend, and whom he may have secretly married. He had a wonderful ear for the way people talk, and he loved to act out and impersonate: “I dined today with Patty Rolt at my cousin Leach’s, with a pox, in the city. He is a printer, and prints the Postman, oh ho, and is my cousin, God knows how, and he married Mrs. Baby Aires of Leicester. . . . I wish you could hear me repeating all I have said of this in its proper tone, just as I am writing it. ’Tis all with the same cadence with ‘oh hoo,’ or as when little girls say, ‘I have got an apple, miss, and I won’t give you some.’”9

  Numerous writers have pondered Swift’s life, but one biography in particular needs to be considered here: Irvin Ehrenpreis’s monumental Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, which filled two thousand pages by the time the third volume came out in 1983, two decades after the first. I was Ehrenpreis’s colleague for fifteen years at the University of Virginia, at a time when I had no notion of ever writing a life of Swift. Since then an outpouring of scholarship has thrown new light on many aspects of Swift’s career and writings, and has reopened serious questions that Ehrenpreis chose not to notice. Strangely, though a man of subtle irony himself, he insisted that literature always means exactly what it says, and that Swift’s thinking and life were massively conventional—his views on religion, politics, and love were all tepidly middle of the road.10

  Since for nonspecialists the Ehrenpreis biography may still seem authoritative, something must be said about its very real limitations. His grasp of details is encyclopedic, and he traces the week-by-week course of Swift’s career with complete assurance. It might seem, then, that his opinions about personalities and motives are equally authoritative, but in fact he indulges constantly
in invention without saying so. He tells us, for instance, that “Swift’s relatives trained him in an austere religion and a harsh morality,” that he was “harshly disciplined as a child,” and that he was “brought up to consider his essential character as naturally corrupt and to consider the corruption as rooted in his flesh.”11 Yet there is not the slightest scrap of evidence for a single one of these assertions. We know nothing whatever about Swift’s upbringing, or for that matter about the moral convictions of his relatives, except that as moderate Anglicans they were very unlikely to have held the beliefs Ehrenpreis attributes to them. This is pure projection on his part, laying the groundwork for a now very dated Freudian interpretation of personality, in which every relationship is translated into a single reductive pattern. An older man—even if just a few years older—must be a father figure, or else resented for not being one. A woman Swift’s age or older is a mother figure. And, inevitably, a younger woman is a daughter figure. These interpretations lead to startling distortions of Swift’s most important relationships, and they permit Ehrenpreis to ignore a mass of thought-provoking evidence, ambiguous though it may be, that raises important questions about Swift’s parentage and his sexual life.

  For Ehrenpreis not only presents his highly subjective interpretations as simple fact, he also omits a great deal of well-attested evidence. The puzzles surrounding Swift’s personal life were a subject of fascination to his contemporaries, including his closest friends, and many of them left striking anecdotes that Ehrenpreis ignores. He doesn’t discuss them in order to dismiss them; he doesn’t even mention them in passing; he simply ignores them. On the first page of his first volume he declares, “Those readers who look for my views on a long train of legendary Swiftiana will search in vain. Here, neither Swift nor Stella is made a bastard; Swift does not say, ‘My uncle gave me the education of a dog;’ Dryden does not say, ‘Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet;’ and Temple does not seat Swift and Stella at the servants’ table.”12 Every one of these “legendary” stories deserves consideration, and to categorize them as “Swiftiana” is to marginalize them unjustly. It is very possible that all of them are true, and at least two—Stella’s probable illegitimacy, and Swift’s relationship with the uncle who acted as his guardian—are of great importance in understanding his story. Together with many other pieces of evidence that Ehrenpreis ignores, they suggest a far more complex, enigmatic, and challenging Swift than the conventional character presented in Ehrenpreis’s biography.