Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  As she found her final dissolution approach, a few days before it happened, in the presence of Dr. Sheridan, she addressed Swift in the most earnest and pathetic terms to grant her dying request. That as the ceremony of marriage had passed between them, though for sundry considerations they had not cohabited in that state, in order to put it out of the power of slander to be busy with her fame [that is, reputation] after death, she adjured him by their friendship to let her have the satisfaction of dying, at least, though she had not lived, his acknowledged wife. Swift made no reply, but turning on his heel walked silently out of the room, nor ever saw her afterwards during the few days she lived. This behavior threw Mrs. Johnson into unspeakable agonies, and for a time she sunk under the weight of so cruel a disappointment.37

  Martha Whiteway, the cousin who cared for Swift in his last years, also got the story from Dr. Sheridan. As she recounted it, however, it was Swift who wanted to acknowledge the marriage and Stella who refused:

  Before [Sheridan] gave her the sacrament for the last time, she talked largely to him on her intimacy with the Dean. She said she well knew how much her character had suffered: that what the world said had no effect on her because she knew herself his wife, but his being unable to acknowledge her as such had torn her mind until her body was unable to support life. That about three months before her death, he had offered and pressed her to let him acknowledge the marriage, which was all the satisfaction that was then in his power. She answered that it was then too late for her to enjoy the only honour she had ever wished; that her own conduct freed her from any fears of hereafter, and as she was now past the world’s farther censures, it would do her no service. Thus died a woman whose merit deserved a better fate.

  Is either version of this story true? And if so, how strange that it should echo an equally ambiguous final breach between Swift and Vanessa, five years previously! At any rate, the relationship between Swift and Stella ends as it began, in impenetrable privacy. Perhaps the last word should go to an old lady who lived, long afterward, in the cottage between Trim and Laracor that may have been Stella’s. “Some says she was his wife, and some says she wasn’t, but whatever she was, she was something to him.”38

  Two days after Stella died, Swift wrote, “This is the night of the funeral, which my sickness will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed into another apartment, that I may not see the light in the church, which is just over against the window of my bedchamber.” The detail is woundingly revealing; he wouldn’t look at the light, but he could well imagine the paving stones opened up and the coffin lowered beneath the cathedral floor. Lyon commented that as dean he would have been obliged to conduct the service himself.39

  LIVING ON

  In her will, signed and dated a month before her death, Stella identified herself as “Esther Johnson, of the city of Dublin, spinster.” There were generous bequests to her mother and sister, and money to support a chaplain in Dr. Richard Steevens’s hospital, with the thought-provoking proviso “that the said chaplain be an unmarried man at the time of his election, and so continue while he enjoys the office of chaplain to the said hospital; and if he shall happen to marry he shall be immediately removed from the said office, and another chosen in his stead.”40 Perhaps this stipulation reflects Swift’s belief that unless a clergyman had independent wealth, he would be a fool to weigh himself down with dependents. He always urged young colleagues not to hurry into marriage, and Sheridan was a case in point of someone with too many mouths to feed.

  One clause in particular has excited curiosity: “I bequeath to Bryan M’Loghlin (a child who now lives with me, and whom I keep on charity) twenty-five pounds, to bind him out apprentice as my executors or the survivors of them shall think fit.” Nothing more is known about this boy, and there were apparently rumors that Swift might have been the father, though if that were true the bequest would surely have been more generous. Probably he was just what the will said he was.

  More remarkably, “my friend, Mrs. Rebecca Dingley,” got only “my little watch and chain, and twenty guineas”—a slender enough reward for thirty years of companionship. A servant named Robert Martain got £10 “in consideration of his long and faithful service,” and Swift received “my strongbox, and all the papers I have in it or elsewhere.” No one knows what those papers were, or whether he destroyed any of them.

  One proviso in particular shows the enduring influence of Swift. The money intended for Dr. Steevens’s projected hospital was to be carefully invested in land, and the value of the land judiciously improved—the language, indeed, may well have been drafted with Swift’s help.

  It is likewise my will that the lands purchased by the said thousand pounds shall be let, without fine, to one or more able tenants for no longer term than forty-one years, at a full rent, with strict penal clauses for planting, enclosing, building, and other improvements; and that no new lease shall be granted till within two years after the expiration of the former lease; and then, if the tenant hath made good improvement and paid his rents duly, he shall have the preference before any other bidder by two shillings in the pound; provided that in every new lease there shall be some addition made to the former rent, as far as the land can bear, so as to make it a reasonable bargain to an improving tenant.

  The executors of Stella’s will were Sheridan and three other friends.

  In the will Stella declared, “I desire that a decent monument of plain white marble may be fixed in the wall over the place of my burial, not exceeding the value of twenty pounds sterling.” A white marble tablet did eventually appear in St. Patrick’s, identifying Hester Johnson as Stella, “justly admired and respected, by all who knew her, on account of her many eminent virtues, as well as for her great natural and acquired Perfections.” No one knows who composed this, but it wasn’t Swift. Lyon says, “The executors indeed waited for an inscription which he promised to write.”41 But he never did it.

  84. Memorial to Stella, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Among Swift’s effects, after his own death, was a lock of hair in an envelope on which he had written, “Only a woman’s hair.” Scott, who saw it, saw this as an instance of “striving to veil the most bitter feelings under the guise of cynical indifference”; Leslie Stephen thought it expressed “indignation at the cruel tragicomedy of life.”42 Nobody seems to have noticed that no name is given. For all we know, the hair could have been Vanessa’s.

  Stella died before Orrery entered the Swift circle, but when he was working on his biography he solicited recollections from Martha Whiteway, the cousin who cared for Swift in his final years. According to Mrs. Whiteway,

  The Dean’s grief was violent and lasting. He shut himself up for a week even from the sight of his servant, who was not permitted to make his bed, and took so little nourishment that his friends feared for his life. For many years after, he never named her, and to the last of his understanding [that is, until his final dementia], never without a sigh. He kept two public days [open house for guests] in every week from the time he was made Dean until her death, but then dropped it, and never cared after to see more in his house than a few select friends.43

  Swift had known Stella for thirty-eight years, and for the past twenty-seven, apart from his stays in England, he had seen her almost every day of their lives.

  CHAPTER 27

  Frustrated Patriot

  SWIFT THE CELEBRITY

  In the years following his English trips and Stella’s death, Swift’s life settled into a general sameness, with few notable events. In his capacity as dean, he was deferred to throughout Dublin. “His reputation for wisdom and integrity was so great,” Sheridan said, “that he was consulted by the several corporations [that is, incorporated guilds] in all matters relative to trade, and chosen umpire of any differences among them, nor was there ever any appeal from his sentence. . . . He assumed the office of Censor General, which he rendered as formidable as that of ancient Rome.” Lord Carteret, who stayed on as
lord lieutenant until 1730, remained on excellent terms with Swift, and afterward wrote to him, “I know by experience how much that city thinks itself under your protection, and how strictly they used to obey all orders fulminated from the sovereignty of St. Patrick’s.” At another time Carteret said, “When people ask me how I governed Ireland, I say that I pleased Dr. Swift.”1

  Swift once compiled a long list of noble actions recorded by historians, among which was an occasion when a theater audience in Rome rose in homage when Virgil came in. It was especially flattering, therefore, when he arrived at Trinity College for a commencement ceremony and everyone spontaneously stood up.2

  85. Dean Swift, by Francis Bindon.

  The best portrait of Swift in his later years was by Francis Bindon. Swift wrote to Sheridan in 1735, “I have been fool enough to sit for my picture at full length by Mr. Bindon for My Lord Howth. I have just sat two hours and a half.”3 The scroll in the portrait reads “The Drapier’s fourth letter to the whole people of Ireland.” It would have delighted Swift to know that an adaptation of this likeness would one day appear on the Irish £10 note. He would probably have been less pleased to see the pound give way to the euro.

  Swift’s reputation for wit extended far beyond Dublin. He once had himself shaved by a village barber, who amused him with facetious chatter. When the man found out who his customer was he turned pale, fell on his knees, “and entreated the Dean not to put him into print; for that he was a poor barber, had a large family to maintain, and if his Reverence put him into black and white he should lose all his customers.” Swift laughed delightedly, promised not to do it, and gave him a big tip.4

  With the pronunciation of “dean” as “dane,” Swift even became a character in folklore. In a series of tales about Jack (or Paddy) and “the Dane,” a clever servant is rewarded for his wit by Swift. None of the tales had any basis in actual events, and Swift appears mainly as a straight man setting up Jack’s (or Paddy’s) punch lines.5

  Though he had become Ireland’s champion, Swift remained contemptuous of the Irish people for valuing personal comfort more than freedom from oppression. To the end of his days he regarded his confinement to Dublin as a cruel blow:

  With horror, grief, despair, the Dean

  Beheld the dire destructive scene:

  His friends in exile, or the Tower,

  Himself within the frown of power;

  Pursued by base, envenomed pens

  Far to the land of slaves and fens.

  Lest any reader should miss the point, he added in a footnote, “The land of slaves and fens is Ireland.”6

  Just a year after the triumph of the Drapier, Swift dated a letter from “wretched Dublin in miserable Ireland,” and described himself as “the Dean of St. Patrick’s sitting like a toad in a corner of his great house, with a perfect hatred of all public actions and persons.” In Yeats’s deft aphorism, “Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself.”7

  It needs to be emphasized, however, that when Swift called the Irish slaves, he was referring to servile behavior, not to innate inferiority. Answering a letter from an Irish émigré in Spain, Swift expressed real sympathy for his countrymen. The exploits of the “Wild Geese,” Catholic soldiers of fortune who emigrated after the defeat of James II, “ought to make the English ashamed of the reproaches they cast on the ignorance, the dullness, and the want of courage in the Irish natives—those defects, wherever they happen, arising only from the poverty and slavery they suffer from their inhuman neighbours, and the base corrupt spirit of too many of the chief gentry.” Swift added that during his travels in Ireland, “I have found the poor cottagers here, who could speak our language, to have much better natural taste for good sense, humour, and raillery, than ever I observed among people of the like sort in England. But the millions of oppressions they lie under, the tyranny of their landlords, the ridiculous zeal of their priests, and the general misery of the whole nation, have been enough to damp the best spirits under the sun.”8

  In conversation with a friend—probably Delany, who told the story—Swift demanded to know “whether the corruptions and villainies of men in power did not eat his flesh, and exhaust his spirits.” When the reply was negative, he asked in a fury, “Why—why—how can you help it, how can you avoid it?” His friend replied calmly, “Because I am commanded to the contrary: ‘Fret not thyself because of the ungodly.’ This raised a smile, and changed the conversation to something less severe and sour.”9

  Swift relished the esteem in which he was held. Celebrations, with bells ringing and bonfires, commemorated his birthday each November 30. Taverns sprang up called the Drapier’s Head, with signs showing Swift in clerical garb, and ships were christened the Drapier. He was quick to take offense if he ever felt undervalued. In 1730 the Dublin Corporation voted to give him a gold box (“the value thereof not to exceed 25 pounds”) as a freeman of the city, and Cork paid him the same compliment, offering a silver box rather than gold. But neither one was inscribed, and Swift was deeply offended. In his remarks to the lord mayor and aldermen of Dublin, he declared that he had done Ireland much service. He had obtained remission of First Fruits for the Church; he had lent his own money to tradesmen and thereby rescued “above two hundred families in this city from ruin”; and with the Drapier’s Letters he had saved the nation from cynical exploitation by England. In short, it seemed only proper “that an inscription might have been graven on the box, showing some reason why the city thought fit to do him that honour.”10

  As for the silver box, Swift returned it to Cork, with the comment that the city should present it to “some more worthy person whom you may have an intention to honour, because it will equally fit everybody.” After it was inscribed and re-sent, he accepted it, but it is mentioned sarcastically in his will: “I bequeath to Mr. John Grattan, Prebendary of Clonmethan, my silver box in which the freedom of the city of Cork was presented to me; in which I desire the said John to keep the tobacco he usually cheweth, called pigtail.”11

  THE DEAN IN HIS DOMINION

  At the cathedral and in the surrounding Liberty of St. Patrick’s, Swift ruled supreme. He told Pope in 1733, “I am Lord Mayor of 120 houses; I am absolute lord of the greatest cathedral in the kingdom; am at peace with the neighboring princes, the Lord Mayor of the city and the Archbishop of Dublin; only the latter, like the King of France, sometimes attempts encroachments on my dominions.”12 In 1729 death had come for Archbishop King; this reference is to his unworthy successor.

  For most bishops Swift felt indifference or contempt; they were Whig mediocrities, notorious for neglecting their duties. One of the exceptions, Archbishop Bolton of Cashel, lamented that “a true Irish bishop has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat, rich, and die.” The bishop of Elphin, who owed his appointment to impressing aristocrats with his skill in watercolors, hardly ever visited his diocese, and the bishop of Clonfert spent the last decades of his eighty-eight years in hopeless senility while his diocese was governed by his wife.13

  An Irish peer remembered Swift’s deadpan comment when someone complained about these appointments: “Ye are in the wrong to blame his Majesty before you know the truth. He sent us over very good and great men, but they were murdered by a parcel of highwaymen between Chester and London, who slipping on their gowns and cassocks here pretend to pass for those bishops.”14

  Swift took a strong interest in the financial plight of his Dublin neighbors, especially the weavers, whom repressive trade regulations condemned to poverty. Over the years he lent large sums of money, with the proviso that he be paid back in installments. As Craik observes, he believed that lack of self-reliance contributed to Ireland’s suffering, and he wanted the people he helped to feel like independent businessmen, not recipients of charity. In a sermon on “doing good,” he observed that “the very example of honesty and industry in a poor tradesman will sometimes spread through a neighbourhood, when others see how successful h
e is.” Fifty years later, the younger Sheridan said that many families “owed the foundation of their fortunes to the sums borrowed from this fund.”15

  Swift also made a constant practice of giving money to beggars. To avoid arrest for vagrancy, they usually had little odds and ends for sale, and he invariably overpaid, “for every halfpenny-worth, at least sixpence, and for every pennyworth, a shilling.” He made a point of keeping coins in various denominations in different pockets, so that he would always have something to give.16

  Perhaps it was in order to keep his distance from the beggars that Swift gave several old women satirical nicknames. “He called them his mistresses,” Orrery said, “and carried his friends frequently to visit and relieve them in the streets. He named them Stumpanthe, Fritterilla, Ulcerissa, Cancerina and Fourleganda. Stumpanthe had lost one of her hands. Fritterilla was lame and made apple fritters for shoe boys. Ulcerissa was full of sores. Cancerina had a sore breast. Fourleganda went upon her arms and knees.”17

  Several hospitals were founded in Dublin during this period, and Swift decided to leave his own fortune to establish a hospital for the insane, who were wandering the streets with no support system at all. There was no thought of tactful euphemisms, and in his will Swift called them “idiots and lunatics.” At the end of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift he said sarcastically,

  He gave the little wealth he had

  To build a house for fools and mad,

  And showed by one satiric touch

  No nation wanted it so much.

  The “satiric touch” was presumably Swift’s last great satire, A Modest Proposal. But his bitterness in no way extended to the afflicted residents of St. Patrick’s Hospital, as it came to be known. A history of the hospital emphasizes the sincerity of his concern for the mentally ill, and says that the foundation “was very far from being a satire in stone.”18