Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  A close friend of Swift’s, Patrick Delany, commented long afterward, “His spirit was formed with a strong reluctance to submission of any kind.” But submission was what Sir William demanded. As he said himself in writing, subordinates needed to be handled with severity as well as kindness: “Whoever will be well served must compass it by the continual employment of those two general and natural governors of mankind, hope and fear.”27

  In addition to imperiousness, Temple had a short temper. His adoring sister acknowledged that he was troubled “by cruel fits of spleen and melancholy, often upon great damps in the weather.” The south of England is subject to damps. He was also tormented by gout, which deposits sharp crystals in the joints that cause exquisite pain. Diet was thought to be at the bottom of the disease, and in an essay on its management Temple recommended temperance, “that gives indolence of body, and tranquility of mind.”28 That was the Epicurean ideal, but he often failed to achieve tranquility.

  Even in good health, Temple could be difficult. He was notoriously vain, and Swift detested vanity. Years later, reading a historian’s account of these years, Swift filled the margins with abusive comments, but made no remark at all when he read the characterization of Temple, which suggests that he agreed with it: “Temple was a vain man, much blown up in his own conceit, which he showed too indecently on all occasions.”29

  Dr. Arbuthnot, Swift’s close friend in later years, told a story that must have come from Swift himself. Temple was once visiting a nobleman who showed him his pictures and other collections, and as they came to each of them, it would turn out that Temple had ones that were better. “Lord Brouncker at length very gravely replied, ‘Sir William, say no more of the matter. You must at length yield to me, I having lately got something which it is impossible for you to obtain, for my Welsh steward has sent to me a flock of geese; and these are what you can never have, since all your geese are swans.’” One can imagine that Temple required regular doses of flattery from his entourage. Joyce alluded to Swift in Finnegans Wake as Temple’s “private privysuckatary.”30

  A few documents survive from the Moor Park years that have been taken to prove that Swift worshiped Temple unreservedly, but all of them are open to other interpretations. In a letter in 1692, for instance, he made this remarkable assertion about Temple: “I never read his writings but I prefer him to all others at present in England, which I suppose is all but a piece of self-love, and the likeness of humors makes one fond of them as if they were one’s own.” The recipient of this letter was Swift’s cousin Thomas, who also spent some time at Moor Park. Thomas was eager to curry favor with Sir William, and Jonathan doubtless expected that this tasty morsel would be passed on to their employer. Actually, it was preposterous to claim “likeness of humors” since, as Elias says, he and Temple were temperamental opposites.31

  There is no way to know to what extent Swift was treated as an equal rather than as a member of the domestic staff, but one startling story was told later on by a member of the Temple family. According to Temple’s nephew Jack, who visited Moor Park and would eventually inherit it, “Sir William hired Swift, at his first entrance into the world, to read to him and sometimes to be his amanuensis at the rate of ₤20 a year and his board, which was then high preferment to him; but Sir William never favoured him with his conversation because of his ill qualities, nor allowed him to sit down at table with him.”32 The “ill qualities” presumably refers to a lack of social graces, with the implication that Swift had to eat with the servants.

  This was secondhand hearsay, since it came from the novelist Samuel Richardson, who remembered hearing it from Jack Temple. Richardson had a streak of malice and may have exaggerated the story for effect. It is also possible that Swift’s status in the household began like that and improved as time went on. Still, the social distance was very real. One of Temple’s Victorian biographers commented approvingly, “It was quite natural that, at first, the young clerk should not be admitted to any intimacy with his patron, or sit at his table.” As for the wages of ₤20, Elias studied Moor Park records and found that this was probably the correct figure. It would have left Swift with the same sense of financial pressure that he had endured back in Dublin, and we know that at Moor Park he was grateful for continued remittances from his uncle William and his cousin Willoughby.33

  There are a number of other clues to this difficult relationship. In his forties Swift remarked to Stella, “Don’t you remember how I used to be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons?” At that time Swift was becoming close to the brilliant young Henry St. John, soon to be named Viscount Bolingbroke, and he told Stella, “One thing I warned him of, never to appear cold to me, for I would not be treated like a schoolboy—that I had felt too much of that in my life already (meaning from Sir William Temple).”34 So Temple provoked unhappy memories of Kilkenny College, and perhaps also of Godwin Swift.

  Another reference may also evoke this period. When he had servants of his own, Swift was himself a demanding master, though also a fair-minded and generous one. For many years he amused himself by writing up a set of witheringly ironic “directions to servants,” urging them to cheat and thwart their employers in all sorts of ways. Among these, the instructions to the butler seem highly suggestive of Moor Park: “If an humble companion, a chaplain, a tutor, or a dependent cousin happen to be at table, whom you find to be little regarded by the master and the company, which nobody is readier to discover and observe than we servants, it must be the business of you and the footman to follow the example of your betters by treating him many degrees worse than any of the rest; and you cannot please your master better, or at least your lady.”35

  When Swift had been at Moor Park for less than a year, Temple tried to send him away. May of 1690 was the month when King William, feeling secure on his British throne, was setting out to fight James II in the battle of the Boyne. One of Temple’s friends, Sir Robert Southwell, was accompanying him and would stay on as the representative of the Crown in Ireland. As soon as he heard of this mission, Temple dispatched Swift to London with a letter to Southwell. We don’t know whether Swift saw its actual wording, but most likely not, since it was remarkably lukewarm:

  I venture to make you the offer of a servant, in case you may have occasion for such a one as this bearer. He was born and bred there (though of a good family in Herefordshire), was near seven years in the College of Dublin, and ready to take his degree of Master of Arts, when he was forced away by the desertion of that college upon the calamities of the country. Since that time he has lived in my house, read to me, writ for me, and kept all accounts as far as my small occasions required. He has Latin and Greek and some French, writes a very good and current [cursive] hand, is very honest and diligent, and has good friends though they have for the present lost their fortunes in Ireland, and his whole family having been long known to me obliged me thus far to take care of him.36

  “Obliged me thus far to take care of him” seems unenthusiastic. “Thus far” implies that one year was more than enough, and to call Swift a servant was hardly flattering, though Forster thought it might simply mean “someone you may wish to employ.”37

  Swift did indeed go back to Ireland at this point, but apparently Southwell wasn’t interested in employing him, and soon (there are few definite dates in these years) he returned to Moor Park. In his only mention of this trip, almost fifty years later, he said that he made it “by advice of physicians, who weakly imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his health.” He said nothing about Southwell.38

  14. “When I come to be old.” Scratching with a quill wasn’t easy, and in casual writing Swift could be rather slapdash.

  A final piece of evidence for Swift’s view of Sir William is a remarkable page of resolutions, headed “When I come to be old,” that he jotted down at the end of his Moor Park stay. They make fascinating reading:

&nb
sp; Not to marry a young Woman.

  Not to keep young Company unless they reely desire it.

  Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.

  Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.

  Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.

  Not to tell the same Story over and over again to the same People.

  Not to be covetous.

  Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.

  Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes, and Weeknesses.

  Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling Servants, or others.

  Not to be too free of advise nor trouble any but those that desire it.

  To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, & wherein; and reform accordingly.

  Not to talk much, nor of my self.

  Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.

  Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman, et eos qui hereditatem captant odisse ac vitare [and detest and avoid those who try to catch an inheritance].

  Not to be positive or opinionative.

  Not to sett up for observing all these Rules, for fear I should observe none.39

  A few of these resolutions reflect lifelong concerns of Swift’s, for example, the emphasis on cleanliness. But for the most part they suggest close and unsparing observation of his employer. Temple was peevish and morose, and very likely suspicious. He probably encouraged tattling servants to tell tales. He may well have been covetous, since he was unquestionably stingy. He scorned modern ways, talked about himself, boasted about his good looks and his exploits with women, welcomed flattery, and loved to impart opinions and advice. (Swift’s modern editor reads the word in the next-to-last entry as “opiniative,” but the correct reading may be opiniâtre, “stubborn.” In that case, Swift might be ironically invoking Temple’s vanity in speaking French.) As for expecting to be “beloved by a young woman,” is that a hint that his philandering wasn’t finished?

  Perhaps the oddest resolution is “Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.” Forster’s explanation is that “we do not fortify ourselves with resolutions against what we dislike, but against what in our weakness we have reason to believe we are only too much inclined to.”40 Yet nothing in Swift’s life suggests any such inclination. In Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians have a system that Swift clearly approved of. Infants are consigned to public nurseries, where “their parents are suffered to see them only twice a year; the visit is not to last above an hour; they are allowed to kiss the child at meeting and parting, but a professor, who always standeth by on those occasions, will not suffer them to whisper, or use any fondling expressions, or bring any presents of toys, sweetmeats, and the like.”41

  Sir William, however, was indeed drawn to children, as his sister recalled: “He had a very agreeable way of conversing with all sorts of people, from the greatest princes to the meanest servants, and even children, whose imperfect language and natural and innocent talk he was fond of.”42 There was probably something complacent about this easy geniality, which would have made it all the more galling that Temple didn’t treat Swift himself like that. Servants and children were no threat; the ferociously intelligent Swift was.

  Temple’s own children were all deceased by now. But there was one child at Moor Park of whom he was remarkably fond: the housekeeper’s daughter, little Hester Johnson.

  SWIFT’S STELLA

  In addition to his other duties at Moor Park, Swift acted as Hester’s tutor in reading and writing. Why was the daughter of the housekeeper, who was being trained as a maidservant, given a tutor at all? We don’t know why this arrangement was made, or how their relationship developed at first. What we do know is that as an adult she became his lifelong companion until her death in 1728, and that seventeen years after that Swift was buried by her side in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Nowadays Hester is usually referred to as Stella, the name Swift gave her much later in some affectionate poems. She signed her name Esther, though she had been christened Hester, and no doubt those were considered versions of the same name. Lady Giffard, whom she served as a servant when she was old enough, called her Hetty.43

  Swift was twenty-two when he met Stella, and she was nine. He was no Lewis Carroll (it’s been said of Carroll that his only two interests were formal logic and little girls, and he put them both into a single book). But he was unquestionably taken with Stella, and enjoyed tutoring her. Years later he reminded her that he had been her “writing master,” and among letters by Temple that he copied out for publication, there is one in a hand very like his but with variations that show it to be Stella’s. She made a few minor errors in transcription, all of which he corrected. In later years she remained grateful for Swift’s instruction, and in a poem for his fifty-fourth birthday she called him “my early and my only guide.”44

  On the day of Stella’s death, a heartbroken Swift sat down to record his memories from those first years: “She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen, but then grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London, only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection.” No authentic portrait survives, which has not deterred biographers from including various dubious portraits and calling them “Stella.” Since these clearly show a number of different women, it would be an arbitrary choice to pick any one of them.45

  When Stella was sixteen and visiting London with the Temples—whether as Lady Giffard’s servant or as a companion isn’t clear—Swift wrote to her from Moor Park in a way that shows they shared a playful wit. It also shows that he enjoyed life when the Temples were away:

  Loory [a parrot] is well, and presents his humble duty to my Lady [Temple], and love to his fellow-servant, but he is the miserablest creature in the world, eternally in his melancholy note, whatever I can do; and if his finger does but ache, I am in such a fright you would wonder at it. . . . Aeolus has made a strange revolution in the rooks’ nests; but I say no more, for it is dangerous to meddle with things above us. I desire your absence heartily; for now I live in great state, and the cook comes in to know what I please to have for dinner. I ask very gravely what is in the house, and accordingly give orders for a dish of pigeons, or etc. . . . We all keep home like so many cats.46

  Parrots do sulk when the person they’ve bonded with is away, and their claws do look like fingers, but it was a deft touch to imply that the bird and Stella were “fellow-servants.” She was clearly supposed to know also what Aeolus was the god of, and to appreciate the humor in literalizing “things above us.”

  In the note he wrote after Stella died, Swift recalled, “Some presents of gold pieces being often made to her while she was a girl, by her mother and other friends, on promise to keep them, she grew into such a spirit of thrift that in about three years they amounted to above two hundred pounds.” Perhaps this inspired the episode in which Gulliver gives a present to the nine-year-old Brobdingnagian girl who looks after him, which she puts in her pocket “to keep among other trinkets, of which the girl was very fond, as children at her age usually are.”47

  What exactly was Stella’s status at Moor Park? Her mother, the housekeeper Bridget Johnson, was paid the modest wage of ₤10 per year. She was hardly in a position to give her daughter ₤200 in gold pieces. Swift mentions “other friends” who also gave her presents, and it’s easy to suspect that the most important was Sir William Temple. In his will he left Stella property worth at least ₤1,000, an enormous sum for a servant’s daughter. Bridget got ₤20 plus half a year’s wages, and most of the staff got the latter only.48

  Why such extraordinary largesse to young Hester Johnson? Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, overlo
oked because in plain view, an essential clue has been available ever since 1757. However, it was published anonymously in a magazine, and under the bizarre initials C.M.P.G.N.S.T.N.S., so biographers naturally dismissed it. The one exception was Victoria Glendinning in 1998, who rightly took it seriously, but without realizing that the identity of the writer had already been convincingly established. In 1967, in a fine piece of detective work that unfortunately appeared only in an obscure University of Tulsa publication, a researcher was able to show that the author was the Reverend John Geree, a friend of Swift’s at whose Berkshire rectory he made a ten-week visit in 1714. At that time Swift referred to him in a letter as “an old friend and acquaintance whom I love very well.”49

  When the Reverend Geree was in his twenties, he actually lived with the Temple family at Moor Park (his father was rector of the church in neighboring Farnham), and he had personal memories of everyone there. Once this is known, his testimony becomes immensely valuable. Geree’s letter to the magazine begins by describing Stella’s mother. She was the widow of a merchant who imported goods from Holland, and came to Moor Park “in the character of a housekeeper.” This account—the only description we have of Bridget Johnson—has never been quoted before in any biography of Swift:

  She was a person of a surprising genius; few women ever exceeded her in the extent of her reading, none in the charms of conversation. She had seen the world; her address and behavior were truly polite; and whoever had the pleasure of conversing with her for a quarter of an hour were convinced that she had known a more genteel walk in life than her present situation confined her to. She was not so happy in her person as in her mind, for she was low of stature, and rather fat and thick than well-shaped; yet the imperfection of her shape was fully compensated by a set of fine features and an excellent complexion, animated by eyes that perfectly described the brightness of her genius.50