Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Trinity students were constantly involved in troublemaking, rising at times to full-scale rioting. Their lives centered more on partying than on books, though Swift himself was a moderate drinker, and claimed he was never drunk in his life. A poet catalogued the contents of a typical student room at Trinity:

  Imprimis, there’s a table blotted,

  A tattered hanging all besnotted. . . .

  A penny pot and basin, this

  Designed for water, that for piss.

  A trencher and a College bottle

  Riding on Locke and Aristotle,

  A smutty ballad, musty libel,

  A Burgersdicius and a Bible,

  A prayer book he seldom handles,

  Item, a pound of farthing candles.47

  There are no portraits of Swift before the age of forty, which is roughly when the one reproduced here was painted (figure 7). It shows him in a clerical gown and an expensive periwig (this one cost £2 1/2). George Faulkner, Swift’s friend and Dublin publisher, gave the most extended description of his appearance: “The Dean was of middle stature, well made and comely, with very good regular features, an high forehead, handsome nose, large sparkling blue eyes very piercing (which had their luster to the last, although he read very much, but never made use of spectacles or glasses), an exceeding agreeable mouth, a fine regular set of teeth, and round double chin with a small dimple. His complexion a light olive, or pale brown.” The poet Alexander Pope was similarly struck by the eyes: “Though his face has a look of dullness in it, he has very particular eyes: they are quite azure as the heavens, and there’s a very uncommon archness in them.”48

  7. Jonathan Swift, by Charles Jervas, 1710.

  Thanks to a joking comment by Swift, we also know his height. When Julius Caesar was mentioned in conversation, a friend named Ambrose Philips suggested that he must have been “of a lean make, pale complexion, extremely neat in his dress, and five feet seven inches high,” all of which described Philips himself. Swift commented pleasantly, “And I, Mr. Philips, should take him to have been a plump man, just five feet five inches high, not very neatly dressed, in a black gown with pudding-sleeves.” That was the name of the puffy sleeves of a clergyman’s gown.49

  In that era of poor nutrition, average heights were much lower than today. On one occasion a description was posted of four soldiers who had deserted from the army, and the tallest of them was five feet six. The imperious Louis XIV was five feet five inches tall, William III only an inch taller than that, and Charles I barely five feet.50

  We know from Swift’s rhymes, incidentally, that he pronounced many words in the Irish way: meals rhymes with fails, weavers with savers, and so on. He was aware that the English looked down on Irishness, and he sometimes joked about it, punning for instance on the name of William Wood:

  Teague made a good pun by a brogue in his speech,

  And said, “By my shoul he’s the son of a beech.51

  In 1686, when he was nineteen, Swift was awarded his B.A. degree speciali gratia, “by special grace,” which seems to mean that he barely squeaked by. Patrick Delany, a close friend, said the shock of taking a humiliating degree was what spurred him to study eight hours a day for the next several years. Another friend, John Lyon, confirmed that speciali gratia indicated “some degree of dishonor,” and Patrick Delany flatly called it a “disgrace.”52 Swift may well have been the brightest student at Trinity for many years, and that was his problem.

  During the graduation ceremonies it was customary for a student known as the terrae filius, “son of the earth,” to interrupt with a derisive speech in barbarous Latin and indecent English. This would be produced as a collaborative effort by a group of students, and Swift almost certainly took part. The fragmentary scripts that have survived from that period are far from brilliant, but one passage suggests his later verse style, in which the vice provost appears as a “waddling doctor”:

  A wight inferior to none

  For ponderosity of bum.53

  It was probably at Trinity too that Swift sketched some notes for a project he never developed, a Kingdom of Absurdities that had glass bells with iron clappers, houses made of gunpowder with candles alight inside them, and exceptionally alarming privies: “There is a sort of flying insect in their jakes [privies], which has cruel teeth, and is fond of human testicles; so that when a man goes there upon his occasions, it is forty to one but he comes away without them. Nothing is so easy as to destroy those animals, and yet ask the reason why they do it not, they say it was their ancestors’ custom of old.”54

  Speaking of his Trinity years, Swift once declared that his uncle Godwin gave him “the education of a dog.” Ehrenpreis dismisses the story as incredible, but Sir Walter Scott heard the story from one of Godwin’s grandsons, who would have been likely enough to remember such a shocking statement, especially in view of the public occasion at which it was delivered: “Whittingham, the Archdeacon of Dublin, demanded insultingly at a banquet whether Swift owed his education to his uncle Godwin. Swift at first ignored the question, but when it was repeated, answered ‘Yes! He gave me the education of a dog.’ Grinning maliciously, Whittingham retorted, ‘Then you have not the gratitude of a dog,’ at which point the Bishop had to intervene to prevent them from coming to blows.”55

  Several commentators suggest that what Swift probably meant was that he was kept on a very meager allowance, which he doubtless was.56 His detestation of financial dependence encouraged a tendency to keep track of even the smallest expenses, and for the rest of his life everyone who knew him would notice this concern, which amounted really to an obsession. Yet he was far from being a miser, since he would give away much of his disposable income.

  One relative did come through, handsomely and unexpectedly. That was a cousin seven years older than Jonathan, Godwin’s son Willoughby, who by now was a successful merchant in Lisbon. Godwin’s grandson Deane Swift got the story from Willoughby’s daughter, and it deserves to be heard at length:

  It happened when [Jonathan] was at the University of Dublin that one day he was looking out of his window pensive and melancholy, his pockets being then at the lowest ebb, having spied a master of a ship gazing about in the college courts. “Lord,” thought he, “if that person should now be inquiring and staring about for my chamber, in order to bring me some present from cousin Willoughby Swift, what a happy creature should I be!” He had scarce amused himself with this pleasing imagination when the master of the ship, having come into his chamber, asked him if his name was Jonathan Swift. He told him it was. “Why then,” said the master, “I have something for you that was sent to you by Mr. Willoughby Swift;” whereupon he drew out of his pocket a large greasy leather bag, and poured him out all the money that it contained on the table. As the sum which he had now received was much greater than ever in his life he had been master of before at any one time, he pushed over without reckoning them a good number of silver cobs (for it was all in that specie) to the honest sailor, and desired he would accept of them for his trouble. But the sailor would not touch a farthing. “No, no, master,” said he, “I’ze take nothing for my trouble; I would do more than that comes to for Mr. Willoughby Swift.”57

  Ehrenpreis never mentions this story, though it seems well enough attested. Perhaps he felt that it highlights Godwin’s lack of generosity, which it certainly does.

  Willoughby’s kindness continued. Several years later Swift asked his cousin Deane (father of the biographer of the same name), who had been at Kilkenny with him and had gone to Lisbon too, to tell Willoughby “how extreme sensible of his goodness and generosity I am.”58 Quite possibly Godwin’s sons were embarrassed by the way their father treated their cousin. None of Swift’s biographers has pointed out that they must have grown up together in Hoey’s Court, more like siblings than cousins. Years later, when Willoughby’s daughter married a clergyman, Swift took him on as a curate and offered to lend him the huge sum of ₤800 to settle an onerous debt. He told the lawyer who was
involved in the affair, “He married the daughter of my near relation, for whom I had great kindness, and to whom I owe some obligations.”59

  REVOLUTION

  Charles II had been welcomed back to the throne in the Restoration of 1660, with an appetite for pleasure that gained him the nickname of the Merry Monarch. Swift was eighteen when the king died in 1685, as he wryly recalled late in life, when most of his friends were much younger than himself:

  He’s older than he would be reckoned,

  And well remembers Charles the Second.60

  Unluckily, Charles left no legitimate heir, though plenty of the other kind—fourteen children by seven mothers. As the poet Dryden wittily put it, he “scattered his maker’s image through the land.” When the king lay dying, his latest mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, insisted that a Catholic priest hear his confession and administer the last rites. Macaulay describes the strange group that gathered to say farewell: “His natural children were brought to his bedside, the Dukes of Grafton, Southampton, and Northumberland, sons of the Duchess of Cleveland; the Duke of Saint Albans, son of Eleanor Gwynn; and the Duke of Richmond, son of the Duchess of Portsmouth. Charles blessed them all.”61

  What had long been suspected was now certain: that ever since returning from exile in France, Charles had been a secret Catholic. His brother succeeded him as King James II, and James was not only openly Catholic but determined to re-Catholicize England. He set out to replace bishops, academics, and judges on a massive scale. Equally alarming to his Protestant subjects—who in England and Scotland made up 98 percent of the population—was that James wanted to create an authoritarian central government on the pattern of Louis XIV’s in France. Still, since he and his queen were childless, most people were willing to await the time when he would be succeeded by his daughter Mary, who had remained a Protestant and was married to the Protestant William of Orange, stadholder, or leader, of the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

  In June of 1688, however, the queen bore a male heir who took precedence over Mary, and events unraveled quickly. A group of highly placed nobles invited William and Mary to eject James by force, and public opinion was clearly in agreement. William actually had a claim of his own, since he was a grandson of Charles I as well as husband of James’s daughter. He was thus both second cousin and son-in-law to James.

  For a brief time the clergy of the established Church, whose appointments were conditional upon an oath of loyalty to the Crown, attempted to follow a policy of passive “nonresistance,” but as a noblewoman commented to a group of bishops, “You have made a turd pie, seasoned it with passive obedience, and now you must eat it yourselves.”62

  On November 5—Guy Fawkes Day—William of Orange landed with his army in Devonshire and prepared for battle. James was intimidated and irresolute, and gave up the fight after a couple of minor engagements in which little blood was shed. His support was rapidly melting away. The defection of John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, was an especially wounding blow. And then James’s other daughter, Anne, also went over to the rebels. “God help me!” the king cried, “my own children have forsaken me.”63 In December he left England forever, and would live and die in France.

  There was now intense debate about how to proceed. One faction wanted William to be named regent rather than king, but he refused to consider that solution and threatened to go home to Holland. In the end it was decided that James had effectively abdicated, leaving the throne vacant, and that it would be occupied jointly by William III and Mary II. After their deaths Mary’s sister Anne was to succeed as queen.

  In England the fighting was over. But in Ireland, where the Catholic majority still hoped to recover lands that had been confiscated over the years and given to Protestants, it was just beginning. Irish soldiers rallied to James’s cause, and he landed near Belfast with an army of continental mercenaries in March of 1689. It was the first time in three hundred years that a British king had set foot in Ireland, and he was serenaded in Dublin by pipers playing “The king enjoys his own again.”64

  Thus began what was known as the War of the Two Kings, William III and the deposed James II, who led their troops into battle at the Boyne River northwest of Dublin. William’s victory there has been celebrated ever since by the Orangemen of Northern Ireland. Despairing of success, James left his army in the lurch and went back to France for good. His sudden desertion of his Irish troops caused lasting bitterness, and they referred to him thereafter as Séamus an Chaca, “James the Shithead.” But the fighting dragged on for another whole year, ending only after the bloodiest battle in modern Irish history at Aughrim in July of 1691. The Treaty of Limerick finally brought peace, but throughout the island it had been a period of protracted violence, with brutality and pillage on both sides. When it was finally over, twenty-five thousand soldiers and countless civilians had died.65

  Swift thus came of age at a historical turning point of far-reaching significance. The stakes were frighteningly high: a person’s choices could ruin him forever, or make him rich and powerful. He was a keen observer of these events, but he didn’t watch them unfold in Ireland. In February 1689, just before James II landed, the fellows of Trinity College decided that “all those who thought fit to withdraw themselves from the College for their better security might have free liberty to do so.” Ten of the fifteen fellows did so, along with most of the students. James’s troops requisitioned the college as a garrison and prison, and according to its register, “the scholars were all turned out by soldiers, and ordered to carry nothing with ’em but their books.”66 At some point early in that year Swift had already followed the advice of the college and departed for Leicester, where his mother still lived. As far as we know, he had not seen her since he was a young boy.

  Meanwhile, immense changes were under way. It had been established at last that in times of crisis Parliament was supreme over the monarch, who could neither levy taxes nor dismiss a parliament without its own consent. These and other limitations of royal power were laid out in the Bill of Rights of 1689. In the Whig tradition, which saw British history as a progressive achievement of popular liberty, it was truly a Glorious Revolution. “This revolution, of all revolutions the least violent,” Macaulay wrote in 1849, “has been, of all revolutions, the most beneficent.”67

  Beneficent or not, the Revolution of 1688 was a decisive stage in the evolution of a modern society. Steve Pincus has argued in a comprehensive study that it even deserves to be called “the first modern revolution,” since James II and his opponents were all radical modernizers.68 Like Louis XIV, James wanted to develop a powerful centralized bureaucracy, and like Louis, he wanted to enrich his nation by extending its worldwide empire. The middle-class opponents who evicted him wanted the same things, but with authority based in Parliament rather than the throne, and with a focus on commercial growth instead of landed possessions. “The Revolution is looked upon by all sides as a new era,” Swift’s ally Bolingbroke wrote; “from thence we must date both king and people.”69

  Swift was now living in Leicester with the mother he scarcely knew. As his godson Sheridan pointed out, his prospects were far from bright. He had no money. He had emerged from the university with an undistinguished degree, and he had none of the powerful patrons who could help a young man to rise. However, he was fiercely ambitious, and a sense of great abilities kept down was a powerful motivator. “It is to those very circumstances, probably,” Sheridan commented, “that the world owes a Swift: to the want of money, want of learning, want of friends.”70 He would soon find a patron and he would acquire more learning. As for money, that would be a source of anxiety for the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Patron and Two Mysteries

  REUNION WITH ABIGAIL

  For the first time since he was a child, Swift sailed to England, setting out from Ringsend near Dublin, where the river Liffey enters the sea. He probably took a small packet boat, so called because it carried packets of mail
as well as passengers, and he would have landed either at Holyhead in Wales or Chester in England. Holyhead was the port nearest to Dublin, at the western tip of the island of Anglesea; Chester, on the river Dee, was seventy miles further inland. In later years he made the crossing many times and used both destinations.

  It is not easy today to appreciate how difficult crossing the Irish Sea could be. It might take as few as fifteen hours to cross, but it might also be necessary to wait a week for a favorable wind. Terrifying storms could blow up without warning in what a 1691 guidebook called “a violent and unruly sea.”1 Milton’s college classmate Edward King drowned there, as immortalized in Lycidas, and so did Wordsworth’s brother John, who was a professional sea captain. Today the trip can be made comfortably on a high-speed ferry named the Jonathan Swift (“travelling at a speed of 39 knots, your arrival time is as quick as 1 hour 49 minutes”).2

  Swift then traveled by road, quite possibly on foot, to the town of Leicester in the Midlands, ninety miles from Holyhead or seventy from Chester. There he settled down for several months with his mother. Whatever their relationship had been previously, they quickly became fond of each other, and in the coming years he would always stop off to see her when he made the trip from London back to Ireland. No doubt they wrote to each other as well, but no letters have survived, except for one draft that begins “Dear Mother” and then breaks off, used thereafter for miscellaneous notes on Swift’s reading.3 His sister, Jane, was living with their mother too, but his relations with Jane were always distant.