Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Perhaps Swift would have agreed with Kafka that “the selfishness of parents—the authentic parental emotion—knows no bounds.”16 Kafka’s problem was an overwhelmingly dominant father. Swift never knew his father, was abandoned by his mother, and felt humiliated by the uncle who grudgingly raised him. There is no recorded comment of any kind about the aunt he must have known, Godwin’s fourth wife. A social historian remarks, “‘Walk me through your childhood home,’ we say, ‘for opening the creaky front door unlocks the library of memory.’”17 Swift slammed that door shut and locked it.

  A MYTHIC ANCESTOR

  Swift’s paternal grandfather, who had died nine years before he was born, became something of a hero to him. Swift always liked to personalize history, and he made the most of the Reverend Thomas Swift’s role in the English civil wars. Thomas Swift was vicar of Goodrich in Herefordshire, and although not wealthy, he was able to mortgage his estate for “three hundred broad pieces of gold.” Concealing the money in the lining of his waistcoat, he presented it to the beleaguered King Charles I. The result was martyrlike persecution. “He was plundered by the Roundheads six and thirty times (some say above fifty).” Jonathan may also have felt vicarious resentment of maternal mistreatment, since he had heard that Thomas’s mother was “a capricious, ill-natured and passionate woman” with “a good deal of the shrew in her countenance,” and that she disinherited her son “for no greater crime than that of robbing an orchard when he was a boy.”18 Swift loved fruit.

  His grandfather’s military exploits take up the longest single account in the brief autobiographical sketch that Swift wrote down when he was sixty. He reports with evident relish, “Mr. Swift having a head mathematically turned, he contrived certain pieces of iron with three spikes, whereof one must always be with the point upwards. He placed them overnight in the ford where he received notice that the rebels would pass early the next morning, which they accordingly did, and lost two hundred of their men, who were drowned or trod to death by the falling of their horses, or torn by the spikes.” Actually the spiked device, known as a caltrop, had been in use since the Middle Ages, and it wouldn’t have worked unless there were four spikes, not three. As a younger relative of Swift’s later commented, this story puts Thomas’s saintly sufferings in a rather different light: “It was undoubtedly for actions of this kind that he was considered by the fanatics in the character of a soldier, and deprived of his church livings, together with the profits of his estate, so very early.”19

  Late in life Swift told his friend Alexander Pope, “I am utterly void of what the world calls natural affection, and with good reason, because they [that is, his family] are a numerous race, degenerating from their ancestors, who were of good esteem for their loyalty and sufferings in the rebellion against King Charles the First.”20 Recalling the name of Goodrich, Pope once sent him some playful verses:

  Jonathan Swift

  Had the gift,

  By fatheridge, motheridge,

  And by brotheridge,

  To come from Gutheridge,

  But now is spoiled clean

  And an Irish Dean.21

  BOARDING SCHOOL BOY

  Born into the Anglican minority in Ireland that later became known as the Ascendancy, from a political point of view Swift had a relatively auspicious start in the world. Although Anglicans made up at most 10 percent of the Irish population, they were the only citizens allowed to vote, attend the university, or hold government office. They also owned most of the land, which had been confiscated from Catholics over the years. Another 15 percent were Presbyterian Dissenters. The remaining 75 percent were Catholics, regularly referred to by the Irish Parliament—whose members were all Anglicans, of course—as “the common enemy.”22

  Jonathan was sent to Kilkenny College, the best school in Ireland. He remembered having started there when he was six, but he was often muddled about dates; Ehrenpreis notes that the usual age of entrance was nine.23 Perhaps Swift just remembered it as distressingly early. This was an expensive education. It has been generally assumed that his uncle Godwin paid for the schooling at Kilkenny, but only one of his own sons went there. Why would Godwin choose to educate Jonathan at the expense of his own sons? Was there a patron in the shadows who wanted the boy to receive the best possible schooling? And if so, why? A possible answer to this puzzle will emerge later on.

  Seventy miles southwest of Dublin on the river Nore, Kilkenny had been a cathedral city and a center of Anglo-Irish power since the thirteenth century, though the cathedral had recently been trashed by the Puritans and wouldn’t be restored until the nineteenth century.

  After the Restoration, the Duke of Ormonde, newly raised to that high rank by a grateful King Charles II, worked to promote peace among the various factions. A visitor in 1680 called Kilkenny the pleasantest and most delightful town in the whole of Ireland. The surrounding region was heavily Catholic, as indeed most of Ireland was. Roughly 70 percent of Dubliners were Protestant, but only 20 percent were Protestant within the Pale, a British-dominated zone that extended from Dublin about forty miles to the west. Beyond that—literally beyond the pale—up to 90 percent of the people were Catholic. Kilkenny was unusual, however, for religious tranquility, and there were thriving tradesmen of three different faiths: Catholics (who lived in a section known as Irishtown), Huguenot refugees from France, and members of the established Church of Ireland.24

  The great Ormonde family (also spelled Ormond) presided over the town and County Kilkenny from its imposing castle. Replacing an earlier grammar school, the first Duke of Ormonde founded Kilkenny College to meet the needs of Protestant families that were otherwise “fain to send their children to Popish schoolmasters.”25 Catholics and Presbyterians were not admitted.

  The actual school Swift attended no longer exists. It occupied an Elizabethan building near the cathedral that was torn down when a replacement was erected in 1784 across the river.26 (Two centuries later, in 1985, the school migrated to its present quarters outside of town.) Kilkenny College was not a large institution; in 1686, four years after Swift left, there were just fifty-one students. The routine was rigorous. The boys had to get up at six and attend morning prayer, after which they had classes until eleven and again from one to five, ending the day with evening prayer. They did get the afternoon off on Thursday and Saturday, but catechism study was mandatory on Sunday, followed, of course, by church.27

  Education was essentially restricted to Latin and Greek, with few of the subjects we would now expect—no science, no mathematics, no history. The diarist Samuel Pepys went to St. Paul’s, one of the best schools in England, and afterward to Cambridge, but when he became a civil servant he had to hire a tutor to teach him the multiplication table.28 A centerpiece in the Kilkenny curriculum was double translation, in which the student would translate a passage from Latin into English or from Greek into Latin, set it aside for a while, and then try to put it back into the original as accurately as possible. This exercise gave insight into the differences between languages, since word-for-word literal translations are always clumsy and frequently ridiculous.29

  In later life Swift read Latin with ease and was grateful for this rigorous training, but not for the way it was enforced. When he was forty he remarked that it was common to sentimentalize one’s youth—“our memories lead us only to the pleasant side”—but that his experience of school had actually been pretty grim. “I formerly used to envy my own happiness when I was a schoolboy—the delicious holidays, the Saturday afternoon, and the charming custards [prohibited treats, perhaps?] in a blind alley; I never considered the confinement ten hours a day to nouns and verbs, the terror of the rod, the bloody noses and broken shins.”30 Beatings were indeed considered the best incentive to learn. Fielding gave Tom Jones a tutor called Thwackum, and Gibbon said that a school was “the cavern of fear and sorrow: the mobility of the captive youths is chained to a book and a desk. . . . They labour, like the soldiers of Persia, under the scourge.” Samuel J
ohnson did remark, though, “There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end, they lose at the other.”31

  Swift made a number of friends at Kilkenny, notably William Congreve, who would become a famous playwright while still in his twenties. Long after Congreve’s death Swift said that he loved him “from my youth” and that he was always “a very agreeable companion.”32 Another friend, though they eventually parted ways, was a cousin about his own age named Thomas Swift, a year or two older. Thomas had been sent to Ireland at the age of five after his clergyman father died in England. This, in fact, was another fatherless nephew that the Dublin Swifts had on their hands. Still another Swift cousin, Godwin’s son Deane, was three years older than Jonathan and was also at Kilkenny.

  It was at Kilkenny that Swift formed a lifelong fondness, amounting virtually to addiction, for a verbal game in which the words look like Latin but make sense in English when spoken. One example he later recalled was “Mi dux et amasti cum.”33 This turns out to mean “My ducks ate a masticum.” “Ate” was (and still is) commonly pronounced “et”; a masticum was medicine intended to be chewed.

  Hardly anything else is known about Swift’s years at Kilkenny, not even whether he spent the holidays at Uncle Godwin’s house or someplace else. Two anecdotes have survived. When he was past sixty he recalled gloomily, “When I was a little boy, I felt a great fish at the end of my line which I drew up almost on the ground, but it dropped in, and the disappointment vexes me to this very day, and I believe it was the type of all my future disappointments.”34 “Type” was a religious term: “that by which something is prefigured,” as Johnson defined it in his Dictionary.

  The other anecdote is more dubious. As told a century later by George Faulkner, Swift’s Dublin publisher, when he was dean of St. Patrick’s he offered advice to a young clergyman who had made an imprudent marriage and been cut off by his family. Faulkner’s account isn’t very clear, but the gist is that as a schoolboy Swift gave a man all the money he had, 1 shilling and sixpence, for a mangy horse that was about to be killed for its hide. He rode it around town for a while, envied by some of the boys and mocked by others, and only then realized that he had no way to feed it. “But the horse died immediately,” Faulkner concludes, “which gave the owner great relief.” After hearing this the young clergyman exclaimed, “Sir, your story is very good, and very applicable to me. I own I deserve it.”35 Of course, Swift might have just made the story up to put a point across—an unattractive one, if he was comparing an unwise marriage to buying a mangy horse.

  4. Kilkenny Castle. The castle rises above the river Nore, which was then navigable (if just barely) down to the sea at Waterford thirty miles to the south. It was here that Swift lost his fish.

  One Swift relic survived for a while in Kilkenny. Until the school was torn down in 1784, visitors were shown a desk on which he had carved his name in full, jonathan swift. The school desks were then bought by a local shopkeeper who used the boards as flooring for his shop.36 Nobody knows where they are today, if they exist at all.

  “THE EDUCATION OF A DOG”

  After leaving Kilkenny Swift was enrolled as a paying “pensioner,” together with his cousin Thomas, at Trinity College, Dublin. This happened on April 24, 1682, when he was fourteen, a quite usual age to enter college in those days, and it is the earliest documented date in his life. Like Kilkenny College, Trinity as he knew it no longer exists, though the modern Trinity College still occupies the same site. For that matter, the entire city of Swift’s youth has mostly vanished. St. Stephen’s Green was being developed, the large and elegant park around which handsome Georgian mansions would eventually rise, as Dublin grew to take on the aspect of a modern European capital. But during Swift’s youth it was still much like the congested, ramshackle medieval town it had once been.37

  Trinity College had been founded ninety years previously by Queen Elizabeth as a Protestant seminary. (There were no divinity schools as such, and a university degree was the prerequisite for ordination.) Not every graduate went into the ministry, but all students had to be members of the Church of Ireland; no Presbyterians need apply, and of course no Catholics either. Swift had been baptized and would make his career in the Church of Ireland, the officially established state Church, separate only bureaucratically from the Church of England; its bishops were appointed by the English Crown.

  5. The Dublin Custom House. Not many images survive of the Dublin Swift knew, even in later life. The custom house shown here, built in 1707 at the Essex Quay, was replaced by a grander structure in 1791.

  6. Map of Dublin showing Trinity College. The college, a mile east of Swift’s birthplace, occupies the area at the top, bounded by Grafton Street to the west and Nassau Street to the south. When this map was made in 1756, houses were in place around most of St. Stephen’s Green, but there were still open fields to the south and east.

  The subjects Swift loved best were history and poetry. But history wasn’t in the curriculum at all, and at Trinity, just as at Kilkenny, the emphasis in Latin and Greek was on grammar and composition. His godson Thomas Sheridan recalled that when he himself was at Trinity, “he asked me, ‘Do they teach you English?’ No. ‘Do they teach you how to speak?’ No. ‘Then,’ said he, ‘they teach you nothing.’”38 Sheridan said that on another occasion, “he told me that he had made many efforts, upon his entering the College, to read some of the old treatises on logic writ by Smeglesius, Keckermannus, Burgersdicius, etc., and that he never had patience to go through three pages of any of them, he was so disgusted at the stupidity of the work. . . . Swift asked [his tutor] what it was he was to learn from those books? His tutor told him, the art of reasoning. Swift said that he found no want of any such art, that he could reason very well without it.”39 (Burgersdicius, author of a logic textbook, would come in for derision in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.)

  In later years Swift often mocked this aridly formal style of education, which he described as “the art of being deep-learned and shallow-read.” Reasoning by syllogism seemed to him like arguing in circles: “Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.” In a joint satire written with friends he quoted actual examples of mind-numbing abstraction: “An praeter esse reale actualis essentiae sit aliud esse necessarium quo res actualiter existat? In English thus: whether besides the real being of actual being, there be any other being necessary to cause a thing to be?”40

  The provost of the college when Swift entered was Narcissus Marsh, a distinguished scholar, though not in disciplines that appealed to Swift. “I untied a difficult knot in algebra,” Marsh wrote in his diary, “for which I praise the Almighty”; and again, “After great study I had a good invention in conical sections, for which God’s Holy name be praised.” Before long Marsh became a bishop and resigned the provostship with relief. “I was quickly weary of 340 young men and boys in this lewd and debauched town, and the more so because I had no time to follow my always dearly beloved studies.” He rose eventually to be Primate of All Ireland, the archbishop at the head of the national Church, but Swift never thought much of him. Marsh did leave a bequest for a fine library, which was in place in the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral by the time Swift became its dean.41

  At some point Swift wrote a devastating character sketch of Marsh as a person with “neither friend nor enemy, without joy or grief,” whose sole passion was pedantry. “It has been affirmed that originally he was not altogether devoid of wit, till it was extruded from his head to make room for other men’s thoughts. . . . No man will be either glad or sorry at his death, except his successor.” Swift found Marsh personally repellent, too. Apparently he seldom bathed, “so that the most honourable place at his table is much the worst, especially in summer.”42

  Someone Swift did admire was his tutor, St. George Ashe, just ten years older than he, who became a lifelong friend. Swift didn’t share all of Ash
e’s interests, though. Like Marsh, Ashe was an enthusiastic member of the Dublin Philosophical Society, which conducted amateurish scientific experiments, some of which seem today like a complete waste of time. In Gulliver’s Travels Swift would describe researchers who kill a dog by pumping air into its anus, encourage pigs to root around in fields in order to save the cost of plowing (“they had little or no crop”), and breed sheep that grow no wool (“to propagate the breed of naked sheep all over the kingdom”).43 But some of the work of the Philosophical Society was genuinely valuable. Like many of his friends in later life, Swift failed to appreciate the potential promise of modern science.

  Swift’s academic performance was uneven. College records show that he got bene in Greek and Latin, male (“bad”) in philosophy, and negligenter in theology. In later years he showed no interest in theological dogma, regarded abstract philosophizing with contempt, and loved the classics. But male is not the worst mark he could have received; some of his classmates received pessime, or “worst,” and nearly half were mediocriter in omnibus, right across the board. Dickens’s friend John Forster, who wrote a biography of Swift, studied these results with scrupulous care and noted that only one student, a certain Thewles, got bene in omnibus, and he “has not been heard of since.” Swift liked to make the same point himself: “What becomes of all the fine boys one hears of in the world? Can anyone show me one of them grown up into a fine man?”44

  What Swift did indulge at Trinity was a love of socializing. A classmate recalled that “when he was a young man in the University of Dublin, he never understood one word of Stierius or Smiglesius. But—for cards and poetry!” Someone else remembered him as “remarkable for nothing else in College except for making a good fire.”45 In fact he was something of a rebel. There was compulsory chapel attendance three times every day (at six and ten in the morning, and four in the afternoon), with additional services on special occasions. It was necessary to get a pass to leave the college precincts, and even then one was permitted to leave for no more than two hours at a time. The records show, without giving details, that Swift was disciplined often for cutting chapel and for staying out in the town too long. But there is no evidence of the behavior that got two classmates expelled, “indecent conversation with women in Stephen’s Green, and of unseasonable walking in the night.” That sounds more like Joyce than Swift. Still, on one occasion he did take part in some sort of disturbance for which he was required to beg the dean’s pardon on bended knees.46