Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Not until 1861 did a French specialist named Prosper Ménière finally identify the disease that now bears his name. Due to a disturbance of the labyrinthine canals in the inner ear, Ménière’s syndrome produces four classic symptoms, and Swift had them all: irregular attacks of “rotational vertigo” that can last for weeks; progressive hearing loss, especially in the lower frequencies; tinnitus (the roaring noise); and a feeling of fullness or pressure in the ears. It is common for sufferers to feel deep depression, and as the years went by and the symptoms worsened, that is indeed what Swift felt, lively and energetic though he had been in his prime. Referring to himself in a late poem, he lamented,

  That old vertigo in his head

  Will never leave him till he’s dead.19

  Johnson’s Dictionary, giving these lines as an illustration, shows that “vertigo” was then accented on the second syllable, “ver-TYE-go.”

  Swift’s malady did have one positive consequence, for he became convinced that exercise was beneficial, in an era when medical theory discouraged it and most people avoided it. At Moor Park, as he told Deane Swift long afterward, he would work for two hours and then take a break by running up to the top of a nearby hill and down again. “This exercise he performed in about six minutes; backwards and forwards it was about half a mile.” As he got older he stopped running but walked long distances and rode horseback frequently. When he was walking with Laetitia Pilkington in his sixties, a rainstorm drove them indoors. “The Dean then ran up the great stairs, down one pair of back stairs, up another, in so violent a manner that I could not help expressing my uneasiness to the good gentlewoman [his housekeeper] lest he should fall and be hurted; she said it was a customary exercise with him when the weather did not permit him to walk abroad.” For the rest of his life Swift’s doctors kept trying to persuade him to stop.20

  Swift had one trait that may deserve to be called neurotic, reflected in his resolving “not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.” His friend Patrick Delany gave the fullest description of how this manifested itself: “His hands were not only washed, as those of other men, with the utmost care, but his nails were kept pared to the quick, to guard against the least appearance of a speck upon them. And as he walked much, he rarely dressed himself without a basin of water by his side, in which he dipped a towel and cleansed his feet with the utmost exactness.” With this passage in mind Johnson said unsympathetically, “He had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear.”21

  It is hard to know how extreme Swift’s behavior was. As Glendinning says, few people in those days had the standards of hygiene that are usual today, and “to be clean was an idiosyncratic luxury.” Ehrenpreis makes a persuasive point, though: “Swift had in fact the classic traits of a compulsive personality. He made lists, he collected books, he saved money, he kept himself unusually clean; he was often obsessional.”22 Now that obsessive-compulsive disorder is well known, however, it is Johnson, whose friends all noticed his bizarre repetitive rituals, and not Swift who seems likeliest to have suffered from it. Only the cleanliness seems really suggestive in Swift’s case, and curiously, that was one trait Johnson definitely did not share, with his slovenly dress and disgraceful wig.

  More interesting psychologically is something Swift told a Leicester relative not long after settling at Moor Park: “A person of great honour in Ireland, who was pleased to stoop so low as to look into my mind, used to tell me that my mind was like a conjured spirit, that would do mischief if I would not give it employment.” The implication is that Swift’s mind was volatile and constantly humming, and needed to focus on specific tasks to keep it in balance. In a poem written at about the same time, he lamented his “fatal bent of mind, / Still to unhappy restless thoughts inclined.”23

  Yet motion was better than stasis, absolutely necessary in fact. When Swift’s cousin Thomas complained that he was feeling anxious about his prospects for employment, he replied, “I protest I cannot much pity your present circumstances, which keep your mind and your body in motion, and myself was never very miserable while my thoughts were in a ferment, for I imagine a dead calm to be the troublesomest part of our voyage through the world.”24

  A CAREER IN IRELAND

  It has been said that an eighteenth-century Englishman got his sense of identity from four sources: his family, his social rank, his property, and his occupation.25 In Swift’s case the first two were unimpressive and the third nonexistent. It would have to be in a career that he would achieve social standing. Apart from the law, the family profession of which he took a dim view, the obvious choice was the Church. He seems always to have thought of it as a career, not as a spiritual vocation. His friend and fellow clergyman Delany said that “he found in himself uncommon talents for writing and speaking in public,” and therefore chose the profession that would best reward them.26

  We don’t know at what point Swift made his decision, but in 1692 he took the preliminary step of acquiring an M.A., a prerequisite for ordination. In later life he liked to give the impression that he had actually studied at Oxford, rather than just stopping by to pick up a degree. “I had the honor to be for some years a student at Oxford,” he claimed forty years later. But in those days no extra work was required to earn the degree, just payment of a fee after an interview to confirm that the candidate’s work for the B.A. had been satisfactory.27 Accordingly, Swift spent a few weeks at Hart Hall (later Hertford College), collected the M.A., and returned to Moor Park.

  Two years had passed and Temple had still done nothing to help Swift find employment, even though he was helping his cousin Thomas, who showed up at Moor Park and was promised the “living” of Puttenham near Moor Park once its elderly rector died. That person was Simon Geree, brother of John Geree at Farnham, whose son John would long afterward publish his reminiscences under the initials C.M.P.G.N.S.T.N.S. In the meantime Thomas was serving as curate at another town further away.

  The Puttenham living was a royal appointment, so in this, at least, Sir William made use of his friendship with the king. It’s conceivable that Puttenham was offered first to Jonathan Swift and that he turned it down, since it had only a modest income of ₤70 a year.28 If he did so in the expectation of getting something better, he soon grasped that it was never going to happen. He would have to take his chances back home in Ireland.

  So in the summer of 1694 Swift stopped off in Leicester to see his mother and then sailed for Dublin. He expected to be ordained in September, but there was an embarrassing complication. Eight years had gone by since he took his B.A., and he was now twenty-seven, an unusually advanced age for ordination. Church rules required a testimonial confirming the “good life and behavior” of a candidate, and the Irish bishops he approached insisted on getting it. But Swift had evidently left Moor Park against his employer’s wishes, so that asking him for a recommendation was awkward in the extreme. Writing from Leicester to his cousin Deane, Swift said, “He was extreme angry I left him, and yet would not oblige himself any further than upon my good behavior, nor would promise anything firmly to me at all; so that everybody judged I did best to leave him.”29 But it was to Temple that he must now appeal.

  There was no help for it. “I shall stand in need of all your goodness,” Swift wrote abjectly, “to excuse my many weaknesses and follies and oversights” and to confirm that his departure was not “occasioned by any ill actions of mine.” Nokes calls Swift’s language here “strictly conventional,” but it may not have been. Swift could often be prickly, and he was surely aware that he sometimes gave offense. On the other hand, Elias thinks the groveling pose is overdone: “How low I am fallen in your Honor’s thoughts . . . all entirely left to your Honor’s mercy . . . all I dare beg at present from your Honor.” In Elias’s opinion, “a disgraced butler might have written in such terms and meant them. With Swift it is hard to avoid a sense of something angrier and more complicated going on.”30r />
  At any rate, Temple behaved generously and sent the testimonial without delay. In October Swift was ordained deacon, the preliminary step to the priesthood, in Christ Church Cathedral. It is extremely rare for a city to have more than one cathedral, but Dublin did, as a result of a quirk of history. Christ Church is the older, founded in the eleventh century. In the sixteenth century Henry VIII, owing to some sort of quarrel with Christ Church, converted a priory to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and it was there that Swift would be named dean in 1713.

  Christ Church was the seat of the archbishop of Dublin, and that was Narcissus Marsh, the former provost of Trinity whom Swift had greatly disliked when he was a student there. The feeling was no doubt mutual. So the ordination was performed instead by Bishop William Moreton of Kildare, who subsequently ordained Swift to the priesthood in January of the next year.31

  In his autobiographical fragment long afterward, Swift told an odd story about what happened right before he decided to be ordained. Sir William now had his father’s former title as master of the rolls in Ireland, which had become a sinecure that did not require him ever to go there. “Though his fortune was very small,” Swift said of himself in his third-person account, “he had a scruple of entering into the Church merely for support, and Sir William Temple, then being Master of the Rolls in Ireland, offered him an employ of about ₤120 a year in that office; whereupon Mr. Swift told him that since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the Church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland and take holy orders.”32

  What this apparently means is that Swift thought he would be suspected of getting ordained merely to secure an income, rather than from any sense of vocation. Even so, it’s hard to make sense of the story. Sheridan believed that Sir William really made the offer but intended it as an insult. Craik agreed: “As Temple no doubt expected, Swift refused. To have held a petty and subordinate post in the very law courts where some of his kinsmen had been, and where others still were, leading counselors, would have wounded his pride to the quick.” Ehrenpreis’s interpretation is that Temple was trying to keep Swift from leaving Moor Park, since “the memory of his son’s fate would have made protective measures appear kinder than efforts to give Swift independence.” That seems unlikely. Once again, Elias’s interpretation is the most persuasive: since Swift never once mentioned this alleged offer in the 1690s, in letters where it would normally have come up, it looks like a post facto attempt to describe his career choice as an expression of principle instead of as a fallback position when nothing else was working out.33

  The appointment Swift now received was disappointing in the extreme. He might have expected a parish in Dublin, or at least in the Anglo-Irish Pale close by. Instead, he got what he referred to in his autobiographical sketch as “a prebend in the north, worth about ₤100 a year.”34 In the north it certainly was.

  BURIED A LIVE IN KILROOT

  In March of 1695 Swift arrived at his first parish, Kilroot in County Antrim, ten miles east of Belfast and a hundred miles north of Dublin. The appointment was probably negotiated by his old tutor St. George Ashe, by now provost of Trinity College and soon to be promoted to bishop of Cloyne. It wasn’t much, but it was the best Ashe could manage.35 Close by was the town of Carrickfergus, the very spot where William III had landed five years previously, on his way to victory over James II.

  17. The Irish Sea. This 1695 map shows Carrickfergus, the town adjacent to Kilroot, lying within sight of Scotland. (At the inland tip of the bay, further west, Belfast was still just a small town.) To the southeast across the sea, Holyhead in Wales is the nearest port to Dublin.

  It was no accident that the king had chosen to go ashore in the north, for that part of Ireland was dominated by Protestants. Ever since the early seventeenth century a massive “plantation” campaign had populated the province of Ulster with Scottish Presbyterians, and during the 1690s forty thousand more of them arrived.36 They didn’t have far to travel: in clear weather the coast of Scotland, just twenty-seven miles away, could be seen from Kilroot.

  Kilroot formed part of a “union” of three parishes, as was common when Church of Ireland congregations were small, many churches in disrepair, and the income from a single parish not enough to support a priest. Technically, Swift was rector of Ballynure, ten miles away over the hills, and vicar of Kilroot and Templecorran. The only difference was in income, not duties.

  At Kilroot, although it gave its name to his position, the church had been in ruins for a century or more, and Swift may never have gone there except to bury people. The graveyard continued to be used right into the nineteenth century, but by then nothing remained of the church except a fragment of wall and a font, standing in the open air, in which rainwater collected that was reputed to cure warts. The other two villages did have churches, and he may have lived in Templecorran, but nobody knows. He may equally well have lived in Carrickfergus.37

  Swift’s first clerical appointment was thus to a place that barely existed and that had no church at all. And there were few parishioners in his other two villages, since Anglicans in County Antrim were a small minority. A bishop wrote at the time, “Some parishes have not ten, some not six, that come to church, while the Presbyterian meetings are crowded with thousands covering all the fields.” There wasn’t much incentive for an Anglican clergyman to labor diligently. Swift’s predecessor had been ejected for drunkenness and “incontinency of life.”38

  Presbyterians were Protestants, of course, but Swift regarded that as irrelevant—only the officially established Church had any rights. So far as he was concerned, people could believe whatever they liked, but they were obligated to support the Church of Ireland with their tithes, officially 10 percent of income, though no one ever paid that much. Needless to say, this regulation infuriated Presbyterians and Catholics, but Swift and his colleagues didn’t care. In an era when local government was minimal, it was the parish that was responsible for everything from road maintenance to poor relief, which is why Catholics and Dissenters were expected to contribute tithes to a Church they didn’t belong to.39

  Swift’s position was not very different from that of the tutor in Tom Jones, who declares belligerently, “When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.” In addition, Swift detested the Scots. Even before he got to Ulster he had described them in verse as “that discontented brood / Who always loudest for religion bawl,” and who “pine us like a chronical disease.” What especially enraged him was the memory of the rebels who killed Charles I and turned the nation upside down. When in later years he read a history of that period, he filled the margins with exclamations: “a Scotch dog,” “cursed Scottish hellhounds forever,” “a rogue, half as bad as a Scot,” “cursed, abominable, hellish Scottish villains everlasting traitors.” The only good he ever said of the Presbyterians was to acknowledge their work ethic, which he described in terms that foreshadow Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism: “These people, by their extreme parsimony, wonderful dexterity in dealing [that is, business], and firm adherence to one another, soon grow into wealth from the smallest beginnings.”40

  The Kilroot position did carry with it the prebend that Swift wanted, entitling him to a small income from the cathedral of the diocese of Connor. But even this was ludicrously minimal. The actual cathedral had originally been in Down, but after it was demolished in the sixteenth century, a parish church at Lisburn had to substitute for it. The bishop of Down and Connor seldom showed up in Ireland, and was known jokingly as the bishop of Hammersmith because he preferred to reside in that London suburb.41

  FIRST LOVE?

  At the outset, Swift’s prospects were bleak. As Sheridan put it, “He found himself situated in an obscure corner of an obscure country, ill accommodated with the conveniencies of life, without a friend, a companion, or any conversation
that he could relish.” But his sociable disposition soon generated friendships with local clergy and landowners. An especially good friend was the Reverend John Winder, who would become his successor at Kilroot. Another valuable acquaintance was Richard Dobbs, a former mayor of Carrickfergus, who gave him free use of his excellent library. Swift no doubt encountered Dobbs’s seven-year-old son, Arthur, who would grow up to be governor of North Carolina.42

  During Swift’s brief time at Kilroot he fell in love. Twenty-year-old Jane Waring, seven years younger than Swift, was the daughter of a deceased Church of Ireland clergyman named Roger Waring. Other members of her family still lived in Waringstown, the village their forebears had established, thirty miles west of Carrickfergus in County Down, and were prominent members of the local squirearchy. Swift’s contact with this family may have been due to his friendship at Trinity with two of Jane’s cousins. (His early biographers believed he had roomed with her brother, but that was erroneous.) But Jane was not as far away as Waringstown, for at this time she was living with her widowed mother in Belfast.43

  Swift liked to bestow romantic names on women, sometimes constructed anagrammatically from their actual names, and in the two letters to Jane that survive he calls her Varina. He even proposed marriage, or at least talked about it seriously. Previously, he had been contemptuous of anyone who got married without financial security, remembering his own parents, of course. When a Leicester relative was questioning him about his flirtations in that town, he wrote back indignantly, “Among all the young gentlemen that I have known to have ruined themselves by marrying (which I assure you is a great number) I have made this general rule, that they are either young, raw and ignorant scholars, who for want of knowing company believe every silk petticoat includes an angel, or else they have been a sort of honest young men who perhaps are too literal in rather marrying than burning, and so entail miseries on themselves and posterity by an overarching modesty.” This is the very first letter of Swift’s that has been preserved. The allusion is to St. Paul’s “It is better to marry than to burn,” a grudging concession that someone who can’t control his sexual desires would do better to marry than burn in hell.44