Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in covers the arc of the first half of Jonathan Swift’s life, offering fresh details of the contentment and exuberance of his childhood, of the support he received from his grandmother, of his striking affection for Esther Johnson from the time she was ten years old (his pet name for her in her twenties was “saucebox”), of his precocious entry into English politics with his Contests and Dissensions pamphlet, of his brilliant and much misunderstood Tale of a Tub, and of his naive determination to do well both as a vicar of the small parish of Laracor in Ireland and as a writer for the Tory administration trying to pull England out of debt by ending the war England was engaged in with France.
I do not share with past biographers the sense that Swift had a deprived childhood. I do not share the suspicion that most of Swift’s enmities were politically motivated. I do not feel critical of him because he was often fastidious with his money. I do not think he was insincere about his religious faith. His pride, his sexual interests, his often shocking or uninhibited language, his instinct for revenge – emphasized by many previous biographers – were all fundamental elements of his being, but elements that he either used for rhetorical effect, or that he tried to keep in check, and that he felt that religion helped him to keep in check. Swift had as firm a conviction as did Freud that we are born with wayward tendencies; unlike Freud, though, he saw both religion and civil society as necessary and helpful checks on those wayward tendencies, and he (frequently, but certainly not always) acknowledged that he shared those tendencies with the rest of us.
This biography, in two books, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in and Jonathan Swift: Our Dean, will differ from most literary biographies in that it does not aim to show how Swift’s life illuminates his writings, but rather how and why Swift wrote in order to live the life he wanted to live. I have liberally quoted Swift’s own words in this biography because his inventive expression of ideas, both in his public works and in his private letters, was what has made him a unique and compelling figure in the history of literature. I hope in these two books to come closer than past biographies to capturing how it felt to Swift himself to live his life.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Any decent biography of a writer will make you want to go back to the work, and Hammond achieves this.
The first study to consider here is the two-volume life of Swift by Eugene Hammond. These are magisterial volumes.
Intro
Contents
Preface
The Author to the Reader
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources
PART 1: 1667-1689: BLOWN IN TO IRELAND
1: Born to the Protestant Ascendancy, and to His Own Father
2: Kidnapped
3: Ill Treatment from His Nearest Relations?
4: A Playful but Well-Disciplined Schoolboy
5: Acquiring the Prejudices of Education
6: Parody, Humor, and the Satirical Tripos Tradition
PART 2: 1689-1699: PROLONGED ADOLESCENCE
7: Wholesale Protestant Flight
8: The Temples, and Bridget and Esther Johnson 9: Impressing Sir William with Good Penmanship, Skilled Oral Reading, and Being a Good Listener
10: The Battle of the Boyne
11: Befriending Ten-Year-Old Esther Johnson
12: Life Mastered at Age Twenty-Five
13: Choosing His Grandfather's Career over His Father's
14: Your First Job Is Almost Always a Bad One
15: An Equivocating Dodge from Marriage
16: For the Time Being, Writing Trumps Service to the Church
17: Respected Secretary, but Already on the Wrong Side of Thirty
PART 3: 1699-1704: WILLOWS, ACCOUNT BOOKS, TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR TWO WOMEN FORMERLY IN SERVICE
18: With the Help of Lady Giffard
19: Professional Independence
20: Jettisoning Jane Waring
21: Rescuing Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley from Lives of Service
22: Political Theory, Never Forgetting Human Nature
23: Building a Comfortable Life in Ireland
24: Making a Laracor Cabin a Home
25: Swift the Historian
26: Throwing the Dice with A Tale of a Tub
27: Woops! Rev. Tisdall Proposes to Esther Johnson
28: After Three Prefatory Pieces, the Preface
29: Rethinking Dante's Divine Comedy
30: Digressing to the Core of Our Being
31: The Tale in Context 32: The Spider and the Bee
33: Stirring Up Spirituality
34: Planting Minefields in Your Own Path through Life
PART 4: 1704-1710: AFTER A RURAL RETREAT WITH ESTHER JOHNSON: GAINING TRACTION IN THE ENGLISH WORLDS OF POLITICS AND OF LITERATURE
35: Serving the Irish Church
36: The Vicar of Laracor vs. the Freethinking Matthew Tindal
37: Union with the Wrong Dependent Kingdom
38: At the Age of Forty, a Career Jump-Start
39: Spilled Coffee
40: To Mischief Swift
41: The Coffee House Life
42: Sacrificing the Test Act for the First Fruits? 43: The Sensible Moderate's Manifesto
44: Inconveniencing Men of Quality
45: Swift a Projector?
46: Catching a Bit of the Spleen
47: The Injured Lady, Déjà Vu
48: The Queen's Bounty Redux
49: At Play
50: Breathing Space in Ireland
51: Family and Friends
PART 5: 1710-1711: POLITICAL AND PERSONAL EXHILERATION
52: Home: England or Ireland?
53: The Politics of September 1710
54: He Understands Me, He Likes Me, He Respects Me (I'm Pretty Sure)
55: Sir Matthew Dudley's Extraordinary Letter
56: Extending the Queen's Bounty to Ireland
57: Suddenly, an Examiner
58: The Art of Political Lying
59. Cuffing the Duke of Marlborough, Slicing the Earl of Wharton
60. A Lost Christmas
61. The Examiner Cross-Examined
62. The Will of the People
63. Character Trumps Politics
64. Mano a Mano with the Duke of Marlborough
65. "Short Sighs" for Hetty and Laracor
66. An Ill-Considered Collection
67. Whom Was Guiscard Trying to Kill?
68. I Begin to Be Heartily Weary
69. Exit, Declaring Victory
70. Walking for Health, Dressing for Court at the Vanhomrighs
71. Heat Wave
72. Relief: Rain, and a Holiday
PART 6: 1711-1713: SWIFT'S PEN (AT CONSIDERABLE COST TO SWIFT) TRUMPS MARLBOROUGH'S SWORD
73. Charismatic Jonathan
74. The Good Life at Windsor
75. Helping Jane, Distracting Critics of a Peace, and Some Wrong Steps
76. Every Ounce of Effort for a Peace
77. Twenty-Six Fatal Blackletter Lines
78. Tories and (Just Enough) Whigs Agree on a Peace
79. Success Sabotaged by the Shingles
80. Loyalty Test: Esther Johnson, Alice Hill, and Ester Vanhomrigh
81. Slouching Toward St. Patrick's
82. Tragic Climax
83. Denouement
PART 7: 1713-1714: ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH
84. Hessy's Letters Crowd the Laracor Cottage
85. A Man Fit to Serve the Church?
86. Self-Assuring Self-Portraits
87. More Fun than an Author Ought to Have
88. Twenty Guineas for a Conversion
89. Historiographer Royal
90. Wanted: For the First But Not for the Last Time
91. Bad Tory Behavior in Ireland
92. On Most Issues, We Now Agree
93. Political Immobility, Amateur Poetics
94. Swift's Inner Scream Becomes Intolerable
95. Refuge at Letcombe Bassett
96. Yet Another Declaration of Independence
97. Broken Confidence Deja Vu
98. (Almost) Historiographer
99. Oxford/Bolingbroke Infighting Goes Exponential
100. Four Days of High Drama
101. In the Wake of Queen Anne's Death
102. Swearing Allegiance without Enthusiasm
Bibliography
About the Author
