Jonathan swift

Cover of the first edition of "The Travel of Gulliver", published in 1726.

Jonathan Swift (Dublin, November 30, 1667-ibid., October 19, 1745) was an Irish satirist. His best-known work, Gulliver's Travels, is a scathing critique of human society, in a style so characteristic that it has been dubbed 'Swiftian'. Club Member Scriblerus, published anonymously and under the pseudonyms Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier or Simon Wagstaff, Esq.

Biography

Of English parents, a modest lawyer and a housewife, Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin and was the posthumous son of his father, since he died shortly before he was born; he owed everything to the charity of his uncle Godwin, who was in charge of educating the boy in the midst of great poverty, since his mother left the child and returned to England. His family was related to numerous writers, especially his cousin John Dryden, who died 1700, and the former Francis Godwin (1562-1633), and more distantly and collaterally with Walter Raleigh and William Davenant; Even so, of all these, only a utopian and satirical writer like Francis Godwin left some mark on his work.

He learned to read at the age of three and liked to read aloud, especially passages from Plutarch. His mother got his uncle to pay for his studies in Kilkenny for eight years, although he had not learned the rudiments of Latin necessary for admission. Later he studied at Trinity College in Dublin without particularly standing out, in the midst of great emotional misery at because of his orphanhood, like Francisco de Quevedo, another great satirist, but also with material miseries: he only has a suit and a pair of shoes, torn apart, and the other students avoid the ragged company of the poor orphan student, who does not stand out as much as his brilliant cousin, the playwright and humanist Dryden. He neglects his studies, he is suspended once and finally, in fits and starts, he gets a degree of Bachelor of Arts with the mention of & # 34; by special grace & # 34; (His uncle Godwin's son financed Trinity College). more extreme misery.

At the age of nineteen, she got him the opportunity to work as secretary to a distant maternal relative, the English politician and baronet William Temple, a former diplomat and writer and friend of his uncle Godwin, bringing him his correspondence and accounts, for which he who moved to his residence at Moor Park, in Farnham (Surrey), England, in 1689. When Swift arrived there, he found an eight-year-old girl, the daughter of a merchant named Edward Johnson, intendant of Temple, who he had died young, and was commissioned to be his tutor. Some sources claim that she was actually Temple's illegitimate daughter, as he paid for her education in his own home. The reality, however, is that her widowed mother had been a close friend of Temple's sister and that is why she had taken care of her when she was orphaned as a goddaughter. According to the writer himself, this girl, Esther Johnson, would have been born on March 18, 1681; she would later reappear in Swift's life under the name of Stella; but the writer was always reluctant to publicly admit what kind of relationship he had with her and even if he had married or not. As time passed, Temple's confidence in his employee grew, so he came to intervene in increasingly complex and even public matters, because Temple still harbored political ambitions; Swift was even introduced to King William III; but Temple did not promote him, as he then regarded him as a mere but useful upstart.

During the ten years he was with Temple, one of the few people he respected, he continued his university studies and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1694; in that year, moreover, bored with his work and humiliated by his menial duties and the lack of promotion and opportunity in his distant relative's aristocratic and scholarly milieu, he left to take charge of the parish of Kilroot, in Northern Ireland, near Belfast. Two years later, in May 1696, Temple persuaded Swift to return to Moor Park to help him prepare his memoirs and letters for publication, which he did diligently, if not to his liking. from Temple's sister, who didn't like the indiscretions or some of her brother's memories. There he was reunited with the girl of yesteryear, already turned into a handsome 15-year-old girl, intelligent, sociable and popular; Swift had a crush, writing that she was "the most beautiful, graceful and pleasant woman in London." During this time Swift wrote his first work, The Battle Between Ancient and Modern Books, which, however, was not published until 1704; it dealt with a controversial issue that had also fascinated Temple, the dispute between ancient and modern; Swift takes the side of the former and defends Temple from the attacks that a work of his on that subject had aroused.

Swift was with Temple until he died in January 1699. In the summer of that year, he received and accepted the secretaryship and chaplaincy of the Earl of Berkeley; but, when he arrived in Ireland, he found that the secretariat had already been occupied by another. Still, he took over the churches of Laracor, Agher and Rathbeggan and obtained the Dunlavin prebend at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. In Laracor, four kilometers from Trim and thirty-two from Dublin, Swift preached to a congregation of just 15 people, which allowed her to cultivate his garden and devote himself to rebuilding the vicarage.

As chaplain to Lord Berkeley he spent much of his time in Dublin; in 1700 his cousin John Dryden died; Lord Berkeley decides to return to England in April 1701 and Swift accompanies him, after obtaining his doctorate in Divinity. · He then anonymously published his first political pamphlet, entitled A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome (1701), in defense of the whig party; but since they did not give him any position, he went over to the Tory . In 1704 he wrote The Tale of the Barrel , a satire that criticized his contemporaries and deeply disgusted Queen Anne, who considered it blasphemous; moreover, in The Windsor Prophecy Swift, with astonishing tactlessness, allowed herself to advise the Queen whom she should trust; she from then on she will be particularly adverse to him. Between 1703 and 1714 he had time to dedicate himself to his priestly functions, which gave him little work and in 1708 he even published a deeply acid theological work, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity / An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity , against contemporary critics of Christianity, especially Anglican, from freethinkers, deists, anti-trinitarians, atheists, Socinians and the so-called dissenters.

When he returned to Ireland, he was accompanied by Stella, now a 20-year-old. There is a great mystery surrounding Swift's relationship with Stella, not without controversy. Some claim that they secretly married in 1716, of which no definitive evidence has been found, although it cannot be denied that he felt a special affection for her. that he kept throughout his life and is attested to by the Journal to Stella / Diario para Stella (1762-1766), a collection of 65 of the letters he regularly addressed to her from London, sometimes even two in the same day, where he unburdened himself with absolute sincerity, telling him all the details of what he was doing in London; this diary is considered today one of the masterpieces of love literature in English and a mine of data about the time.

Between 1710 and 1714 he was an adviser to the tory government, which came to power precisely in 1710. During those years he became a very powerful and feared character for the causticity of his satirical humor, and thus published his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies in which he attacked the Whig government for failing to make peace with France in the War of the Succession of Spain, preparing public opinion for the peace of Utrecht, which was secretly (and illegally) negotiated by the tory party and signed in 1713. He also defended this government through the articles he wrote for the newspaper of which he was chief editor, The Examiner, from 1710 to 1714. At that time he frequented a gathering that he himself had founded together with the most acid satirical writers in England, the club Scriblerus. In the 19th century the novelist of realism Thackeray will say about him that he was fundamentally a resentful with a lot of talent:

He was an immense genius, a magnificent genius, dazzling of clarity, glowing of light and strength; he penetrated, knew and saw the most hidden thoughts, unmasked lies and hypocrisy; he guessed the most hidden motives and exposed the most shady thoughts of human beings; in short, he was a terrible and evil spirit.

Epitaph of J. Swift in the Cathedral of St. Patrick Dublin.

Indeed, misanthropy is the root of his writings, in which he proposed, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "discredit the human race". In 1713 his friends Lord Robert Harley, I. er Earl of Oxford, and Bolingbroke told him they obtained the position of dean of the Cathedral of Saint Patrick in Dublin. His career came to a halt at this point, as Queen Anne's hostility prevented him from making any further progress. Losing his intended bishopric with the fall of the tory party in 1714, he moved for good, very embittered and frustrated, to Dublin, where he lived with Esther Vanhomrigh, a young daughter of an important Anglo-Irish family, until she died in 1723. Swift invented the poetic name Vanessa for her, but she he hid his relationship or secret marriage with the other Esther ("Stella") who also resided in Ireland until she herself found out; he versified this love in Cadenus and Vanessa, which is also in a way a self-justifying claim in which the author appears under the anagram of decanus / deán. From this time are his anonymous pamphlets in defense of Ireland, shaken by periodic famines, against the economic abuses of the English; for example, the Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), which so incensed the British authorities that the printer, John Harding, went so far as to be prosecuted, although that pamphlet had only recommended that the Irish used the materials they produce rather than export them to England. More scandal and more dangerous for Swift was the one produced by his Letters from the Trapper (1724-1725), where he criticized the suspicious granting of a mint in Ireland to an Englishman, thinking that he would adulterate it and harm the the Irish economy. These pro-Irish pamphlets culminated in A modest proposal / Una modesta proposition (1729), an alleged study in political economy which, according to André Breton, "is the true initiator of black humor" and where it is postulated to solve the problem of the peasants who cannot feed their children because they cannot pay the rent of their lands to the inflexible English landlords by making them eat them:

A child will reach for the two dishes in a meal of friends... I grant that this food will be a little expensive, so it will be very good for the landlord class, since, having devoured most of the parents seem to have more rights over the children now. The meat of the children will be in season all year, but it will be more abundant in March, since, according to an eminent French doctor, being the fish a prolific food, more children are born in the Catholic countries after quartzma..., the markets will be more stocked, because the number of papistas children is almost three to one in this realm, which will bring another advantage: decrease the number of papistas children among us (J. Swift, A modest proposal1729).

He published all four parts of Gulliver's Travels anonymously in 1726, although the first two were probably written around 1720; it is a complex satire and his best-known masterpiece (another is the Tale of the Cask), but today it reads like a work for children, although it is in fact a satire against mankind, a parody of the usual travel books of the time and also a philosophical tale that greatly influenced those written by his contemporary, the Anglophile Voltaire (Micromegas, for example). One passage may suffice as an example of the style of this satire:

The judges are chosen from among the most skilled lawyers when they become old and lazy and thus have fought their entire lives against the truth and fairness that lie in the fatal precision of favoring oppression, perjury and fraud, to the point that I have seen several of them refuse a considerable amount offered as bribe by the party who worked according to justice in fear of insulting their profession... All decisions previously agreed upon against common justice and the general reason for the human race, under the name of precedents, are held by them to justify the most unjust opinions, and judges never fail to fail in accordance with them. (J. Swift, Travel of Gulliver, 1726, IV, 5).

However, the publisher Benjamin Motte altered the text when he considered it too offensive, especially in legal matters or in defense of Queen Anne. The work was a great popular success (it was reprinted three times in the same year, and another to the next, in which the French, German and Dutch translations were also printed, in addition numerous pirated editions were made), and immediately produced sequels, parodies and attempts at "cracking" that they were quickly forgotten; in 1728, the Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann composed a five-movement suite for two violins inspired by the book; but at first the most authoritative literary critic, stunned, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson "did not know what to say", until at last the work was accused of being excessively misanthropic. The original manuscript disappeared, but in 1735 an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, got hold of an authorized copy of the archetype, apparently revised by Swift without Motte's censorship, and printed it; this edition has added A letter from Captain Gulliver to his cousin Sympson where Swift complains about the cuts, additions and disfigurements of Motte and also the continuations and parodies. For this reason, this edition is considered the best to constitute the text. Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's boisterous Robinson Crusoe, it can be read as a systematic refutation of Defoe's optimistic account of human capacity. Swift wanted to refute the idea that the individual preceded society; he considered this a dangerous endorsement of the radical political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly finds himself with settled societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson. But Swift's primary intention was to deflate the pride of the Enlightenment: hence his criticisms were also directed at science.

In 1728 Stella died, five years after Vanessa, and Swift suffered a severe depression that further accentuated her disgust with mankind. His health was greatly affected by a mysterious disease, apparently neurological, since 1738: he suffered from absences, tinnitus, vertigo, memory loss and in 1742 a tumor in one eye that prevented him from even reading. He was aware of this, and it said "I am crazy". Already foreseeing his death, he wrote:

The time has come for me to break with this world: I will die rabid, like a rat poisoned in his hole.

He died on 19 October 1745, leaving most of his fortune to the poor and arranging for an insane asylum to be built at his expense. He is buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral near Stella and under an epitaph bearing he himself wrote in Latin: "Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, d[octor in] s[acred] T[eology] and dean of this cathedral, where fierce indignation can no longer lacerate the heart. Go your way, traveler, and imitate, if you can, this vigorous champion of liberty."

Notable aspects of his most famous works

Cover of "Cadenus and Vanessa"

His novel Gulliver's Travels had a determining influence on radical English authors such as William Godwin and Thomas Paine.

He is considered the originator of the female name Vanessa, which is very popular today. In 1713 he wrote a long poem, Cadenus and Vanessa, published as a book in 1726, containing an anagram and a neologism in its title. Cadenus is an anagram for Dean, Swift was dean/dean. The neologism is Vanessa, secretly referring to Esther Vanhomrigh. With the initials of her last name and her first name (Van- and Es-) she formed her nickname. There is no record of the name Vanessa before this.

Officially, the two moons of Mars (Phobos and Deimos) were discovered in 1877 by astronomer Asaph Hall, who was able to view them from the United States Naval Observatory near Washington. However, more than a hundred and fifty years earlier Swift had described them fairly accurately in Gulliver's Travels. The coincidences in size, distances, and speed of rotation with the satellites mentioned in the story are quite large, and yet, the optics available during Swift's lifetime did not allow us to see such small celestial bodies that are so close to Earth. sphere of Mars (see: serendipity).

Curiously, Voltaire (1694-1778) also mentioned the two satellites of Mars in his work Micromegas, a story published in 1752 that describes a being originating from a planet of the star Sirius, and from its companion planet Saturn.

Due to these coincidences, the two largest craters on Deimos (about 3 km in diameter each) were named "Swift" and "Voltaire".

Isaac Bickerstaff Hoax

In the 1708 edition of his almanac, John Partridge, a well-known astrologer of his day, sarcastically referred to the Church of England as "The Infallible Church", which attracted the attention of the clergyman Jonathan Swift.

Swift invented a false character, Isaac Bickerstaff, and published his famous Predictions for the Year 1708 under that pseudonym: vague, imprecise and erroneous, he will die exactly on March 29, so I recommend that you put your affairs in order.

Partridge published a letter in response claiming that this Isaac Bickerstaff was nothing more than a small-time astrologer eager for fame. On the 30th, Swift published another anonymous letter, in which the alleged author recounts how Partridge had fallen ill four days earlier and died at his residence at 7:05 p.m. m. on March 29. The letter was published by other writers and newspapers, who believed it to be true.

John Partridge was quick to deny the lie in a new letter. But to no avail: John Partridge's name was withdrawn from the official record, officially presuming him dead, and everyone believed he was indeed dead, including many admirers who gathered outside his house for a vigil., and even gravediggers who came to take charge of the funeral parlors of the famous astrologer.

From that point on, John Partridge's career took a nosedive and he had to stop publishing his almanac as sales fell. His detractors, of whom there were many (for Partridge had outraged both the followers of the Church and those whose death he had predicted, the anti-Whigs and those who thought astrology was complete hoax), continued with the hoax as revenge.

Swift last used the Bickerstaff pen name in 1709 with A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff. In it he provided alleged evidence of Partridge's death. One of them, which was "...impossible that no man alive could have written so much rubbish".

Main works

• The battle between ancient and modern books (The Battle of the Books), 1704
• History of a barrel (A Tale of a Tub- 1704.
• The Behavior of Allies (On the Conduct of the Allies1711.
• The ton tale1713.
• Letters from the trapero (Drapier's Letters), 1724.
• Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships / Travel to several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first surgeon and then captain of several ships, 1726, better known as Travel of Gulliver.
• A modest proposal to prevent the children of the poor of Ireland from being a burden to their parents or to the country (A Modest Proposal1729.

Other works

• The Journal to Sabu1710-1713.
• An Argument against Abolishing Christianity / An argument against the Abolition of Christianity 1708.
• A Proposal for Correcting... The English Tongue.
• The Lady's Dressing Room1732.
• The Intelligencer (with Thomas Sheridan).
• Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers 1707?
• Three Sermons/Prayers
• Cadenus and Vanessa(poem)
• The meditation of the broom 1710
• The benefit of Farting, 1722
• The Grand Question Debated1729.
• Verses on His Own Death1731.
• On Poetry, a Rhapsody1733.
• A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation1731.
• Instructions to servants / Directions to Servants1731, not finished.
• The educated conversation1738.
• Art of political lie / The Art of Political Lying, 1712 (Bilingual edition published by Ediciones Sequitur, Madrid, 2006. ISBN 978-84-95363-28-2)
• Subversive writings (1745)