Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, into an Anglo-Irish family that had lost its money. Relatives paid his way through Trinity College in Dublin. He took holy orders in the Church of Ireland and then spent years in England as secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired English diplomat. That household showed him how power and patronage worked, and politics never let him go. Swift became one of the sharpest writers of his age, a man who used comedy to draw blood. In pamphlets and poems and mock-arguments he attacked pride and greed and cruelty wherever he found them. A Tale of a Tub mocked religious quarrels. A Modest Proposal coolly suggested the Irish poor sell their babies as food, so readers would feel the horror of how England treated Ireland. His great book, Gulliver's Travels, sends an ordinary ship's surgeon to islands of tiny people and giants and talking horses. Each voyage becomes a mirror held up to human folly. Swift ended his life as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, where he defended the Irish poor while growing bitter and ill. He died in 1745. His irony still stings because he aimed it at things we have not outgrown.