Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

by Leo Damrosch

  Nevertheless, the next summer Sheridan tried to get Swift to visit again. “Well, when will you come down, or will you come at all? I think you may, can, could, might, would, or ought to come.” But Swift was through with traveling, and he was beginning to part ways even from his closest friends. In 1737 he stopped seeing Delany altogether, though it’s not known why.32 It may well be that in his increasingly impaired state, he was finding it just too hard to keep his friendships up.

  Sheridan turned fifty that year, suffering from severe asthma, which he treated by “whiskey with an agreeable mixture of garlic, bitter orange, gentian root, snakeroot, wormwood, etc.” On a visit to Dublin he fell ill and was unable to leave the deanery for several weeks. After he recovered, he apologized for the trouble he must have caused, and added, “I fear, Mr. Dean, I have been an expensive lodger to you.” Mrs. Whiteway spoke up and commented that Sheridan could easily resolve the situation by going to stay somewhere else. When Swift said nothing at all, Sheridan took it as his cue to leave, and they never saw each other again.33

  This breach might have been healed eventually, like others before it, but Sheridan didn’t have long to live. A year later, he drew up his will and then dined cheerfully with friends. When he dozed off at the table they went out for a walk, and when they returned an hour later they were shocked to find him dead. In after years, Swift had to acknowledge how much he missed his friend. One of his servants reported that he would repeatedly ask, “William, did you know Dr. Sheridan?” When William replied that he did, Swift would sigh heavily and say, “Oh, I lost my right hand when I lost him.”34

  91. Dean Swift, by Francis Bindon.

  In 1738 Swift wrote to Orrery, “I have been many months the shadow of the shadow of the shadow, of etc. etc. etc. of Dr. Swift—age, giddiness, deafness, loss of memory, rage and rancor against persons and proceedings (I have not recovered a twentieth part).”35 The decay is painfully apparent in a late portrait by Bindon.

  By now Swift was increasingly irascible, a symptom, perhaps, of advancing dementia. In one strange incident he got into a violent quarrel with a young cathedral prebendary named Francis Wilson. Wilson, who was secretly stealing money from Swift, took him for a carriage ride, got him drunk at a tavern, and then demanded to be made sub-dean. According to the man who was driving the carriage, when Swift refused, Wilson shouted, “You are a stupid old blockhead and an old rascal, and only you are too old, I would beat you, and God damn me but I will cut your throat!” If Wilson didn’t strike him at that point, he must at least have twisted his arm painfully, for when Swift got home one of his arms was black and blue. But by then he had already forgotten the incident, and wondered why Wilson was not present as he would normally have been.36

  Fearing total loss of his reason, Swift longed for death. Whenever he parted from a friend he would say, “Well, God bless you; good night to you, but I hope I shall never see you again.” Once he and a guest happened to move away from a huge mirror just before it fell from the wall and shattered. “Was it not a mercy,” said the clergyman, “that we moved from that spot the moment we did? For undoubtedly if we had stayed there any longer, we should both have been killed.” “I am sorry for it,” Swift replied. “I wish the glass had fallen upon me.”37

  As his condition deteriorated, Swift was well cared for by affectionate friends. Frequently on hand were his cousin Martha Whiteway and a surgeon named John Nichols, to whom her son was apprenticed. Her daughter, Anne Ridgeway, had been the deanery housekeeper ever since 1735, when Mrs. Brent died.

  Swift had no use for the rest of his relatives, except for occasional visits from young Deane Swift, son of a cousin of the same name. During his last stay at Cavan, Swift wrote to Mrs. Whiteway, “Your letters have been so friendly, so frequent, and so entertaining, and oblige me so much, that I am afraid in a little time they will make me forget that you are a cousin, and treat you as a friend.” She replied gratefully that she was “proud of being discarded from being a cousin.” Not long afterward he wrote to a judge for advice on a family debt he had been saddled with: “There is a rascally cousin of mine called John Swift, his father is my cousin german, called Mead Swift, as great a rascal as his son. He was a son of my uncle Godwin, as arrant an old rascal as either. . . . I was desired to be a trustee of the marriage settlement, along with a rogue of an attorney, one Kit Swift, another son of old Godwin.”38

  Godwin Swift was the uncle who had grudgingly supported Swift in his youth—possibly with a secret bequest from someone else—and whose role biographers have sentimentalized in a way that Swift himself never did. Referring to the whole pack of Swifts, he was contemptuous: “Those are of all mortals what I most despise and hate, except one Mrs. Whiteway and her daughter.”39

  The very last of Swift’s personal letters was sent to Mrs. Whiteway, and it is woundingly sad.

  I have been very miserable all night, and today extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am under both in body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture, but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few; few and miserable they must be. I am, for those few days, yours entirely, J. Swift. If I do not blunder, it is Saturday, July 26th, 1740. If I live till Monday I shall hope to see you, perhaps for the last time.40

  His remaining days were miserable indeed, but unfortunately not few. He still had five unhappy years to live.

  DEMENTIA AND DEATH

  By the fall of 1742 Swift’s disability was so advanced that his food had to be cut up for him. He would ignore it for an hour or so, and then eat while walking restlessly about. At one stage an acute infection, orbital cellulitis, caused an eye to swell alarmingly, and the pain was so great that he had to be forcibly restrained from tearing at it. The episode did provoke a moment of lucidity, as Mrs. Whiteway reported: “What is more to be wondered at, the last day of his illness he knew me perfectly well, took me by the hand, called me by my name, and showed the same pleasure as usual in seeing me. I asked him if he would give me a dinner; he said ‘To be sure, my old friend.’ . . . But alas! this pleasure to me was but of short duration, for the next day or two it was all over, and proved to be only pain that had roused him.”41

  By now, according to Faulkner, Swift “forgot all his friends and domestics, could not call any of them by their names, nor for clothes, food, or any necessaries that he wanted.” It was a second infancy. “He was treated like a newborn infant, being taken out of bed, dressed, led about the room by the servants and nurse-keepers, fed, undressed, and put into bed like the youngest child, and had the actions of one being fond of gold or silver toys, which he would play with or put into his mouth.” Word of Swift’s condition spread, and a bricklayer-poet from Drogheda came up with a memorable description: “Reason buried in the body’s grave.”42

  In July of 1742 a writ of De Lunatico Inquirendo was entered, appointing a committee to confirm “that the Rev. Doctor Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, hath for these nine months past been gradually failing in his memory and understanding, and of such unsound mind and memory that he is incapable of transacting any business or managing, conducting, or taking care either of his estate or person.” The committee reported that Swift was indeed incompetent and should be placed under guardianship. Dr. Lyon, the young colleague who had been helping with cathedral business, then moved into a room in the deanery and was charged with responsibility for Swift.43

  Swift’s last recorded words are tragic. Anne Ridgeway said that when he hadn’t spoken for an entire year, he was told that the usual bonfires were being lit to celebrate his birthday. He replied, “It is all folly, they had better let it alone.” During this final period Delany, who was coming to see Swift now that he couldn’t remember their quarrel, heard him “lamenting, in a manner that pierced me to the heart, that he was an idiot; that he was no more a human creature.
”44

  Mrs. Ridgeway was with Swift on St. Patrick’s Day, 1744, a year before he died. “As he sat in his chair, upon the housekeeper’s moving a knife from him as he was going to catch at it, he shrugged his shoulders, and rocking himself, said, ‘I am what I am, I am what I am.” Is it possible that some memory of the First Epistle to the Corinthians surfaced in his distressed mind? Paul says, “Last of all he [Christ] was seen of me also, as one born out of due time. For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all.”45

  Swift seems to have suffered a stroke not long before he died, and it was rumored that after he became completely helpless, the servants took bribes to let strangers come in and look at him. Picking up on this, and recalling that the Duke of Marlborough too had been incapacitated by a stroke, Johnson coupled Swift with the general he hated:

  From Marlborough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow,

  And Swift expires a driveler and a show.46

  The Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift had foretold the final moments, which arrived at last on October 19, 1745.

  Behold the fatal day arrive!

  “How is the Dean?” “He’s just alive.”

  Now the departing prayer is read.

  “He hardly breathes.” “The Dean is dead.”

  For three days Swift lay in an open coffin in the deanery. Someone who saw him recalled that “he had on his head neither cap nor wig; there was not much hair on the front or very top, but it was long and thick behind, very white, and was like flax on the pillow.” A few visitors managed to take away locks of hair, described charitably by Sheridan as “sacred relics.”47

  There was an autopsy, as Swift had also anticipated.

  The doctors, tender of their fame,

  Wisely on me lay all the blame:

  “We must confess his case was nice;

  But he would never take advice.

  Had he been ruled, for aught appears,

  He might have lived these twenty years,

  For when we opened him we found

  That all his vital parts were sound.”

  92. Memorial to Swift and Stella, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  The doctors who performed the autopsy were looking mainly for defects of the brain, and they didn’t find any; they wouldn’t have been able to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia. They did note a badly deviated septum, which a modern specialist thinks could have caused a Eustachian obstruction that triggered Ménière’s disease.48

  On October 22, Swift was laid to rest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, not far from Stella. Their graves are marked today by a pair of handsome brass plaques on the floor near the main entrance, but they weren’t always there. Originally Swift was buried ten feet away from Stella, and they only ended up in a single coffin a hundred years later. As for the brass plaques, Swift’s was installed soon after his death, but Stella’s wasn’t added until the early twentieth century. After that, in an ongoing tragicomedy, the plaques migrated from place to place in the cathedral, according to whether each successive dean felt that they belonged together or ought to be kept apart.49

  Swift left directions in his will for an epitaph in Latin, and it was duly engraved on a large black wall plaque. It should be read as he intended it, not as a prose statement but as a series of telling phrases. Here is the Latin original:

  Hic depositum est Corpus

  ionathan swift S.T.D.

  Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis

  Decani,

  Ubi sæva Indignatio

  Ulterius

  Cor lacerare nequit.

  Abi Viator

  Et imitare, si poteris,

  Strenuum pro virili

  Libertatis Vindicatorem.

  Obiit 19º Die Mensis Octobris

  A.D. 1745 Anno Aetatis 78º.

  Literally translated it reads thus (“S.T.D.” means Sacrae Theologiae Doctor):

  Here is deposited the body

  of Jonathan Swift S.T.D.

  of this Cathedral church

  the Dean

  where savage indignation

  can no longer

  lacerate his heart.

  Go, traveler,

  and imitate, if you can,

  a valiant champion

  of manly freedom.

  Translating loosely, Yeats wrote, “It is almost finer in English than in Latin: ‘He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more.’”50

  The Latin indignatio comes from the satirist Juvenal, and perhaps from the Bible as well: “Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger?” In his will, Swift used the word vindex, translated here as “champion.” It’s not clear why the word on the plaque is vindicator, whose meaning is closer to “avenger.”51 The challenge to the viewer is not in doubt: go and imitate if you can, but you probably can’t.

  93. Bust of Swift in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  94. Swift’s skull.

  Various proposals for a grand monument came to nothing, but twenty years later, when Swift’s publisher Faulkner died, his son donated a bust by Patrick Cunningham that had occupied a place of honor in their bookstore window in Parliament Street. People who knew Swift regarded it as an excellent likeness, and the bust is now mounted high on the wall of the cathedral above the plaque. In 1749, a more accomplished bust by the celebrated sculptor Roubiliac was placed in the Long Room of Trinity College. But Roubiliac never saw Swift, and must have had to imagine a three-dimensional image by looking at portraits.52

  There was a bizarre coda to come. In 1835, the river Poddle, which flows to this day in a tunnel beneath the streets of Dublin, overflowed into the cathedral. Repairs, which Swift himself had urged a century before, had to be made. His coffin was opened, and in accordance with the fad for phrenology, his skull and Stella’s made the rounds of Dublin learned societies. The episode was described by a distinguished physician, Sir William Wilde: “The University where Swift had so often toiled again beheld him, but in another phase.” The phrenologists concluded absurdly that the organs of wit, causality, and comparison were undeveloped, and also that “the portion of the occipital bone assigned to the animal propensities, philoprogenitiveness and amativeness, appeared excessive.”53 Perhaps Vanessa would have been able to confirm the truth of that.

  In due course the remains were properly reburied, but in a macabre touch that might have amused Swift, “the only portion not returned was the larynx, the ossified fragments of which were abstracted by a bystander, a countryman of Swift’s, and are now, we believe, in the city of New York.”54

  Stella’s skull provoked Sir William Wilde to a romantic effusion. “It is no great stretch of the imagination to clothe and decorate this skull again with its alabaster skin, on which the rose had slightly bloomed; to adorn it with its original luxuriant dark hair, its white, expanded forehead; its level, penciled eyebrows, and deep, dark, lustrous eyes; its high prominent nose; its delicately chiseled mouth and pouting upper lip; its full, rounded chin, and long but gracefully swelling neck.” Wilde confirmed what John Geree had remembered, sixty years after he knew Stella at Moor Park: “The teeth, which for their whiteness and regularity were in life the theme of admiration, were perhaps the most perfect ever witnessed in a skull.”55 Dr. Wilde was deservedly eminent in his profession, and could not have guessed that he would be later remembered, if at all, as the father of Oscar Wilde.

  Even this was not quite the last of it. In 1882 the cathedral was flooded yet again, and the floor was opened up once more for repairs. The sexton then placed a memorandum with the remains: “The coffin was cleaned of the mud and water that was in it, and a box made by a carpenter who was working at the time in the Cathedral. And the two skulls and the remains of Swift put in the box. And from two to three feet of concrete put over it.
I suppose never to be opened any more until the Great Day.”56

  A curious incident confirms how far from dated Swift still is. In 1969, a science writer read Gulliver’s Travels, assumed it was a recent publication, and decided to request permission to quote from it. He addressed his letter to “Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, Ireland.” The then dean, V. G. Griffin, sent this courteous reply: “Dr. Swift departed from here on 19th October, 1745. He left no forwarding address. Since that date, as far as I know, he has not communicated with friend or foe. Where he is at present, God only knows.”57

  Chronology

  1664

  Marriage in Dublin of Jonathan Swift senior and Abigail Ericke

  1667

  November 30, birth of Jonathan Swift

  1673

  Enters Kilkenny College (date not certain)

  1682

  Enters Trinity College, Dublin

  1685

  Death of Charles II, succeeded by James II

  1686

  B.A. from Trinity; continues to study there

  1688

  James II deposed in the Glorious Revolution, replaced by William III (William of Orange) and Mary II

  1689

  Goes to England, works for Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Surrey; meets nine-year-old Hester Johnson (Stella)

  1690

  James II defeated by William III in the battle of the Boyne in Ireland, flees to France

  1691

  Swift’s first poem still extant written, Ode to the King

  1692

  Ode to the Athenian Society published; M.A. degree at Oxford

  1694

  Ordained deacon in Dublin

  1695

  Ordained priest, appointed vicar of Kilroot

  1696

  Proposes marriage to Jane Waring (Varina); returns to Moor Park

  1699