Jonathan Swift, son of the English lawyer Jonathan Swift the elder, was born in Dublin, Ireland, on November 30, 1667. He grew up there in the care of his uncle before attending Trinity College at the age of fourteen, where he stayed for seven years, graduating in 1688. In that year, he became the secretary of Sir William Temple, an English politician and member of the Whig party. In 1694, he took religious orders in the Church of Ireland and then spent a year as a country parson. He then spent further time in the service of Temple before returning to Ireland to become the chaplain of the earl of Berkeley. Meanwhile, he had begun to write satires on the political and religious corruption surrounding him, working on A Tale of a Tub, which supports the position of the Anglican Church against its critics on the left and the right, and The Battle of the Books, which argues for the supremacy of the classics against modern thought and literature. He also wrote a number of political pamphlets in favor of the Whig party. In 1709 he went to London to campaign for the Irish church but was unsuccessful. After some conflicts with the Whig party, mostly because of Swift’s strong allegiance to the church, he became a member of the more conservative Tory party in 1710.
Unfortunately for Swift, the Tory government fell out of power in 1714 and Swift, despite his fame for his writings, fell out of favor. Swift, who had been hoping to be assigned a position in the Church of England, instead returned to Dublin, where he became the dean of St. Patrick’s. During his brief time in England, Swift had become friends with writers such as Alexander Pope, and during a meeting of their literary club, the Martinus Scriblerus Club, they decided to write satires of modern learning. The third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels is assembled from the work Swift did during this time. However, the final work was not completed until 1726, and the narrative of the third voyage was actually the last one completed. After his return to Ireland, Swift became a staunch supporter of the Irish against English attempts to weaken their economy and political power, writing pamphlets such as the satirical A Modest Proposal, in which he suggests that the Irish problems of famine and overpopulation could be easily solved by having the babies of poor Irish subjects sold as delicacies to feed the rich.
Late in life, Swift seemed to many observers to become even more caustic and bitter than he had been. Three years before his death, he was declared unable to care for himself, and guardians were appointed. Based on these facts and on a comparison between Swift’s fate and that of his character Gulliver, some people have concluded that he gradually became insane and that his insanity was a natural outgrowth of his indignation and outrage against humankind. However, the truth seems to be that Swift was suddenly incapacitated by a paralytic stroke late in life, and that prior to this incident his mental capacities were unimpaired.
Religious Belief: Swift was a clergyman, a member of the Church of Ireland, the Irish branch of the Anglican Church; and as such he was a militant defender of his church in the face of the threats to its continued existence posed by Roman Catholicism at home in Ireland and in England, where Swift and his peers saw the Catholics as threatening not only the Anglican Church but the English Constitution. Swift was conservative by nature: he instinctively sought stability in religion as in politics, but stability which insured personal freedoms. So far as he was concerned, religion, morality, and politics were inseparable: he consistently attacked theological attempts to define and limit orthodoxy. He believed that the divisive tendencies of Mankind had promoted the general decay of Christianity itself, which had lost its original clarity, simplicity, and coherence.
He adhered to the tenets of the Anglican Church because he had been brought up to respect them; the Church of Ireland was the church of his social class and his own ambitions were involved in its success; and he saw the Church as a force for rationality and moderation. He believed that in Man God had created an animal which was not inherently rational but only occasionally capable of behaving reasonably. It is our tendency to disappoint that he rages against: his works embody his attempts to maintain order and reason in a world which tended toward chaos and disorder, and he concerned himself more with the concrete social, political, and moral aspects of human nature than with the abstractions of philosophy, theology, and metaphysics.
Politics seems to have been of interest to Swift early in his career because it affected the strength and stability of the Anglican Church of which he was a member. The restoration of the Catholic monarchy was a real threat during his lifetime which he feared would result in the loss of the liberties, privileges, and freedoms. Between the Restoration and James II's final flight to France, it had appeared likely, to Swift's social class that the English monarchy might relapse into a religious and political despotism. William of Orange, proclaiming himself the defender of English freedoms, landed in England with 15,000 troops, while James, his popular support evaporating, fled to France. The Revolution made English constitutionalism much more secure: the powers of the monarchy were limited, those of parliament were strengthened. Respect for the civil and religious liberties of the loyal subject was strongly emphasized. Early in his life Swift was a member of the Whig party. The Whig government's flirtation with the Dissenters helped to drive him into the Tory camp, at time when it seemed to be a change to advance his career. When Queen Anne died and the Tory Government fell, he lost forever the chance of religious preferment in England which he had coveted for so long. The political pamphlets, however, which he ultimately produced while he lived in Ireland, made him popular. Those tracts and satires like "A Modest Proposal" was a way he defended the interests of his church and his class, against which he increasingly recognized as English colonialism. He was idolized by a people the vast majority of whom, since they were Roman Catholics, he would have denied religious and political freedom. After his death he became a national hero and, more importantly, was perceived as having been a nationalist leader--which, in a real though limited sense, he certainly was.