Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  There have been several biographies since Ehrenpreis’s, of which the most ambitious is David Nokes’s Jonathan Swift, a Hypocrite Reversed (1985). The title comes from a comment by Swift’s friend Bolingbroke that he was a hypocrite renversé: with a horror of seeming to pretend to be better than he was, he let it appear that he was worse.13 Nokes’s book is subtitled A Critical Biography. Like Ehrenpreis, he is confident that he knows Swift’s real motives at every turn, but for him they are nearly always discreditable. A reviewer recently called his book “a story of Swift’s life told by an enemy.”14 What has apparently not been noticed is how heavily dependent Nokes is on Ehrenpreis, often deploying the same quotations in the same order, and for long stretches virtually paraphrasing his book. Victoria Glendinning’s brief Jonathan Swift (1998) is much more generous, but breezy and impressionistic, and makes little use of recent scholarship; she rightly calls it a selective “portrait” that focuses on personal relationships and only glances at Swift’s public career.15

  This book draws on discoveries that scores of researchers have made during the past thirty years about the details of Swift’s life. It also takes seriously some daring speculations about his family and his relationships that differ radically from the official story. Unlike a fictional mystery, Swift’s can’t have a pat ending, but some of the possible scenarios are at least as plausible as the official story—more plausible, in fact. And some very suggestive bits of evidence, recorded in out-of-the-way places and presented here, have never been fully assembled until now.

  Some of these ideas have been available for many years, but with the exception of Glendinning, biographers have dismissed or ignored them completely. They did so because they refused to consider anything that couldn’t be conclusively proved, and also because they saw them as marginal to Swift’s public life in politics and the Church. But to Swift himself, they were anything but marginal. A man of powerful emotions, he loved secrecy and disguise. Keeping his intimate relationships mysterious was an essential strategy of self-protection.

  It is no accident, too, that much of Swift’s writing was issued under assumed names: Isaac Bickerstaff; M.B., Drapier; Lemuel Gulliver. As with his gift for mimicry, he relished the game of becoming someone very different from himself as he appropriated a voice—people from the lower classes, politicians he despised, household servants, patrician ladies. And much more than playfulness was involved. Impersonating a different voice liberated the subversive side of Swift’s imagination, and that could be very subversive indeed.

  This book differs too from previous biographies in seeking not just to recount the events of Swift’s career, but also to bring him to life as a complex, compelling human being. Hidden though he wanted his inner life to be, he was anything but a recluse. “He always appeared to the world in a mask,” his godson Thomas Sheridan said, “which he never took off but in the company of his most intimate friends.”16 But with them he did take it off, and they all testified to his magnetic personality and infectious playfulness. Listening to Swift’s own words, together with those of his wide circle of friends, we can form an intimate acquaintance with him.

  In addition, rich contemporary descriptions of life in Ireland and England are available, and they bring back the sights, sounds, and smells of Swift’s world—he was acutely sensitive to them all. This book also has many more illustrations than is usual, often drawn from little-known sources, for as Alice said, “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” Pictures sometimes do more than words to give reality to the people and places Swift knew. Because small black-and-white reproductions of oil paintings look indistinct, contemporary engravings have generally been chosen. Instead of being segregated in a glossy section by themselves, they appear wherever the narrative will benefit from them.

  Swift still matters, three and a half centuries after his birth, because he was a great writer and a great man. If his political views were sternly conservative, it was because he feared anarchy in a turbulent era, and also because he was tempted by anarchic impulses within himself. His was a restless personality, embattled in what Sir Walter Scott called “the war of his spirit with the world.”17 When he felt mistreated he fought back fiercely, and because he could empathize profoundly with the mistreatment of others, he became the hero of an oppressed nation. What made him great was a resolute character and a probing, lucid intelligence. Looking back fifty years after Swift’s death, a philosopher and novelist convincingly called him “perhaps the man of the most powerful mind of the time in which he lived.”18

  Rather than narrating Swift’s life in a strict year-by-year sequence, this book at times takes up important issues and relationships in separate narratives. Since Swift’s views of human behavior, though not of English and Irish politics, changed very little throughout his life, his comments are not always quoted in connection with the occasions when he made them. Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, gathers up a wide range of his long-standing preoccupations. A chronology at the end of the book sets out the important dates.

  Spelling is modernized, and punctuation sometimes altered slightly for clarity.

  CHAPTER 1

  Beginnings

  VANISHED TRACES

  The story that Jonathan Swift told is that he came into the world on November 30, 1667, in the house of his uncle Godwin Swift, in a little Dublin alley known as Hoey’s Court. He was born there because his father had recently died at the age of twenty-seven, and his mother, Abigail, had moved in with her Swift relatives. The baby was named Jonathan, after his father. Abigail also had an eighteen-month-old daughter, Jane, and hardly any money.

  These, at least, were the facts as Swift understood them. But strangely, nothing is certain about his early years, including the date of his birth. The year may not even have been 1667. He was presumably baptized in the nearby parish church, St. Werburgh’s (which he pronounced “Warbrow’s”). But when he had the church register searched years later, there was no record of the baptism. This may or may not be significant; a colleague of his thought the omission must have been “due to the carelessness of the vestry clerk at that time.”1 On the other hand, it’s conceivable that he was baptized someplace else, and not necessarily in a church at all. Swift was told that his father had died seven months before his birth, “just time enough to save his mother’s reputation,” as he often remarked.2 But there is no official record of his father’s death either. We know only that his parents were married in 1664. It may even be that the baby’s real father was someone else, a startling possibility that Swift himself may eventually have suspected. There is no solid evidence for that, but if those concerned wanted to keep it secret, they could have made sure that there would be no evidence. And in fact many aspects of Swift’s early life are puzzling, to say the least.

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

  Hoey’s Court has vanished, too. If you go in search of Swift sites in Ireland, you will usually search in vain, and all that remains today of Godwin Swift’s house is a plaque on a wall that was put there in 1912: “In No. 7 Hoey’s Court (now demolished) about 100 feet NW of this spot, it is reputed that Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, was born on the 30th day of November 1667.” Whoever composed this was sufficiently well informed to use the word “reputed.”

  HOW THE SWIFTS CAME TO IRELAND

  Swift liked to say that he had been unluckily “dropped” in Ireland—a term from animal husbandry. He claimed that his birth happened in Dublin only because his widowed mother was too far along in her pregnancy to risk a sea voyage to her English home in Leicester. “As to my native country (as you call it), I happened indeed by a perfect accident to be born here, my mother being left here from returning to her house at Leicester, and I was a year old before I was sent to England; and thus I am a Teague, or an Irishman, or what people please, although the best part of my life was in England.”3 Abigail did have relatives in Leicestershire, and evidence has fairly recently been found to sug
gest that she may have been born in a village just outside the town of Leicester. Ehrenpreis guessed that her father was a clergyman named James Ericke who emigrated to Ireland in 1634, but another possibility is a butcher named Thomas Ericke (also spelled Herrick). If so, she was not the same age as her husband, as Ehrenpreis assumed, but ten years older.4

  3. Swift’s first neighborhood. To the left of the massive castle from which Ireland was governed, Hoey’s Court (which no longer exists) appears as a narrow passageway. Just above it is St. Werburgh’s, where Swift was presumably baptized.

  The Swifts were recent arrivals, four brothers in all, beginning in 1658 (two others remained in England). After the Restoration of 1660 brought an end to the Puritan rule that had succeeded the civil wars of the 1640s and ’50s, large numbers of Protestant English and Scots were encouraged to settle in Ireland, where they were awarded land that used to belong to Catholics. An English governor at the time compared the process to “flinging the reward upon the death of a deer among a pack of hounds, where everyone pulls and tears what he can for himself.” The brothers Swift, sons of a clergyman and seeking employment in Dublin as lawyers, arrived to pull and tear. It has been well said that they were Irishmen in the sense that Camus was an Algerian. Jonathan Swift would often observe that colonists in North America were regarded as still English, and that the Anglo-Irish ought to be as well.5

  Jonathan Swift the elder, our Jonathan’s father, was the youngest but the first to arrive. The oldest brother, Godwin, was thirty-nine when his nephew was born in 1667; William was thirty and Adam twenty-five. We know that in later years William sometimes gave his nephew financial help, more in fact than Godwin did. (Two other brothers had stayed in England and died young.) It used to be thought that Godwin was unusually generous toward his young nephew; Ehrenpreis says that Jonathan’s “early years were sheltered by an uncle’s hospitality,” and that his assistance “must have been an act of disinterested kindness.”6 But as we will see, there are good reasons to doubt this comfortable picture.

  KIDNAPPED?

  When Swift was about a year old, a remarkable event apparently happened. His wet nurse took him across the Irish Sea to Whitehaven, a small town on the northwest coast of England, and he remained there for several years with no contact with his family. Ehrenpreis calls this a kidnapping and says that the Swift family’s failure to get him back seems most peculiar.7 But was it?

  It was common for middle-class families to send their children out to wet nurses. Almost always the infant would live with the nurse, sometimes nearby, sometimes in a village far away. Not many parents visited the children regularly, and the infant’s first bonds would be formed with the nurse rather than the mother.

  Given the importance of the role, wet nursing was a well-paid occupation. Nurses were usually artisans’ wives with several children of their own. Weaning to “pap” (flour or breadcrumbs cooked in water) happened toward the end of the first year, but the stay with the nurse was normally much longer. For this reason, the nurse’s speech and education were considered important; it was she who would teach the child to talk, and even to read and write. She might remain a valued friend for years. When Alexander Pope’s nurse died, he erected a memorial in the local church:

  To the memory of Mary Beach who died Nov. 25, 1725, aged 78. Alex. Pope, whom she nursed in his infancy, and constantly attended for twenty-eight years, in gratitude to a faithful old servant erected this stone.8

  Thus it may have seemed perfectly normal for Swift to remain with his nurse. Here is the story as he relates it in the third person, in a brief autobiographical sketch:

  When he was a year old, an event happened to him that seems very unusual, for his nurse, who was a woman of Whitehaven, being under an absolute necessity of seeing one of her relations who was then extremely sick, and from whom she expected a legacy; and being at the same time extremely fond of the infant, she stole him on shipboard unknown to his mother and uncle, and carried him with her to Whitehaven, where he continued for almost three years. For when the matter was discovered, his mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage till he could be better able to bear it. The nurse was so careful of him that before he returned he had learned to spell, and by the time that he was three years old he could read any chapter in the Bible.9

  Whether or not Swift was exaggerating his precociousness, this shows that his nurse was literate. And since she was looking forward to a legacy, she was probably not poor. Most important, she was affectionate. What was unusual may not have been that she took the baby away, but that she gave no advance warning.

  Long afterward a friend of Swift’s, Laetitia Pilkington, reported the story with even greater emphasis on the affection:

  He was given to an Irish woman to nurse, whose husband being in England, and writing to her to come to him, as she could not bear the thoughts of parting with the child, she very fairly took him with her, unknown to his mother or any of his relations, who could learn no tidings either of him or her for three years, at the end of which time she returned to Ireland and restored the child to his mother, from whom she easily obtained a pardon, both on account of the joy she conceived at seeing her only son again, when she had in a manner lost all hope of it, as also that it was plain the nurse had no other motive for stealing him but pure affection, which the women of Ireland generally have in as eminent degree for the children they nurse as for their own offspring.10

  Still, the only evidence for what happened is what Swift himself was told, or said he was told. It has even been conjectured that the story was “one more elaborate fiction of Swift’s old age to extenuate the fact of his Irish birth.” A relative recalled that he enjoyed spinning yarns about this mysterious episode: “It gave occasion to many ludicrous whims and extravagancies in the gaiety of his conversation. Sometimes he would declare that he was not born in Ireland at all, and seem to lament his condition, that he should be looked upon as a native of that country; and would insist that he was stolen from England when a child, and brought over to Ireland in a bandbox.”11

  And then there is the letter written toward the end of his life, already quoted, in which Swift said, “I was a year old before I was sent to England.” So he might have been “sent,” not abducted. And we know nothing for certain about how he returned to Dublin—whether someone was sent to get him, or the nurse brought him back herself.

  And what about Uncle Godwin? By the time Jonathan was born, Godwin had been married four times, each wife bringing a generous dowry, and he was relatively well off. However, he had eight children of his own to support, and when those grew up, he acquired at least fifteen grandchildren. In addition, his financial affairs were starting to go downhill. Why would he have wanted to take on his late brother’s widow and two small children? Might he not have been glad to see the baby go to England? Perhaps he hoped it would be an inducement for Abigail to follow.

  At any rate, by the time Jonathan was in college, Godwin unquestionably disliked being responsible for his nephew, who in turn was bitter about the way his uncle treated him. “Sure it is,” Godwin’s grandson admitted with regret, “that Dr. Swift never loved his uncle, nor the remembrance of his uncle, to the hour of his death.” He didn’t care for lawyers as a class, either, though some of his good friends were lawyers. In Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver has to explain to the rational horses what it is that lawyers do. “I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves.”12

  ABANDONED

  When Swift was finally brought back to Dublin, what happened is surprising. His mother, Abigail, left for England, taking Jane with her and settling permanently in Leicester. In all likelihood she made the move because she was desperately broke. But why would she leave little Jonathan behind? Ehrenpreis suggests that she probably came back to Dublin to see him from time
to time, but there’s no evidence whatsoever for that, or indeed that Jonathan saw her at all before he moved to England himself at the age of twenty-one.13 He may not have minded much. Surely what hurt most at the time was not separation from the mother whom he would not even have recognized when he returned from Whitehaven, but from the nurse who loved and cared for him during his first few years.

  We don’t know the nurse’s name, or anything about the child’s life with her in Whitehaven, which was a fishing village with a dock from which Cumberland coal was shipped over to Ireland. But there must have been relatives and probably playmates. He may have felt more secure there than he ever did again, and it would have seemed like normal life to him until it abruptly ended. There would be more abrupt endings to come.

  Jonathan Swift was now effectively an orphan. We know that in later life he regarded family affection with suspicion, if not contempt. Gulliver clearly speaks for him when he reports that the Lilliputians “will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or to his mother for bringing him into the world; which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself, nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts in their love encounters were otherwise employed.”14 When Swift was living in London in his forties he had a close friend named Abigail Masham, who was the confidante of Queen Anne. Because her two-year-old son was dying, she was absent from court at a critical time, and Swift commented angrily, “She stays at Kensington to nurse him, which vexes us all. She is so excessively fond it makes me mad; she should never leave the Queen, but leave everything to stick to what is so much the interest of the public as well as her own. This I tell her, but talk to the winds.” It is remarkable, in fact, how seldom Swift mentioned mothers during the whole course of his life.15