Jonathan Swift: Our Dean details the political climax of his remarkable career—his writing and publication of The Drapier’s Letters (1724), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729)—stressing the relentless political opposition he faced and the numerous ways, including through his sermons, that he worked from his political base as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, psychologically as well as physically just outside the Dublin city walls, to attempt to rouse the Irish people to awareness of the ways that England was abusing them.
This book faces squarely the likelihood that Swift had a physical affair with Esther Vanhomrigh between 1719 and 1723, and reassesses in the light of that likelihood his conflicting relations with Esther Vanhomrigh and Esther Johnson. It traces the many loving friendships with both men and women in Ireland that sustained Swift during the years when his health gradually failed him, enabling him to continue indefatiguably, both through his writings and his authority as Dean of St. Patrick’s, to contribute to the public welfare in the face of relentless British attempts to squeeze greater and greater profits out of their Irish colony. Finally, it traces how Swift’s political indignation led to his treating many people, friends and enemies, cruelly during the 1730s, even while his humor and his ability to make and attract new friends sustained themselves until his memory finally failed him in 1742.
This biography, in two books, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in and Jonathan Swift:Our Dean, comes closer than past biographies to capturing how it felt to Swift himself to live his life.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources
PART 1: 1714—1720: TEACHING KNIGHTLEY CHETWODE HOW TO BEHAVE
1. Beached on the Liffey
2. Anneantissement, Then Resilience
3. Settling In
4. Hessy in Dublin
5. Truly Home
6. "The Public Wind Full in My Teeth"
7. Surveillance
8. Unalloyed Kindness
9. Jacobite?
10. From Mentee to Mentor
11. How Do You Combat Unlimited Power?
12. Swift as Chief Executive Officer
13. Clear, Practical Advice
14. Political Sermons of the 1720s
15. Trying, Despite the Political Odds, to Get the Right People into the Right Places
16. The Esther-Swift-Esther Triangle Tests All Three of Its Vertices
17. Forty-Seven-Year-Old Swift and Twenty-Six-Year-Old Pope
18. Swift's Web of Sustaining Irish Friends
19. The Earl of Oxford Walks Out of the Tower
20. A New Generation of Friends
21. From Essentially Cheerful to Essentially Angry
22. Trying to Let Go of the Earl of Oxford
23. Coffee
24. Reaffirming Respect for Esther Johnson
25. Restoking the Publication Fires
PART 2: 1720—1726: "I ATTEMPTED TO RISE, BUT WAS [AT FIRST] NOT ABLE TO STIR"
26. Struggling with Illness
27. Free Again to Speak?
28. In the Shadow of Molly's Decline, Hessy Living a Half-Life with Swift
29. True to Both?
30. Looking for a Course
31. The First European Microlender
32. Chief Justice Whitshed and Robinson Crusoe Beget Gulliver's Travels
33. Keeping Hessy at a Distance to Concentrate on Gulliver's Travels
34. Fair to Middling Poems, and an Elegy for the Duke of Marlborough
35. A Humbling Year: 1723
36. A Fourth Vanhomrigh Succumbs to Consumption
37. Getting Away
38. Reaffirming Commitment to and Respect for Esther Johnson, This Time Doing it Well
39. Christmas at Quilca, Steeped in the Mindset of Gulliver's Travels
40. Standing Up to British Presumption
41. "One [Deaf] Man in his Shirt" Refusing to Be Intimidated
42. Against All Odds, Stymying Wood and Walpole
43. Wielding Pickaxes, Digging Peat, Re-Courting (and Sealing his Love for) Esther Johnson
44. David Fells Goliath
45. Preparing for England, 1726
PART 3: 1726—1728: CHOOSING ESTHER JOHNSON OVER PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITY IN ENGLAND
46. Tete-a-Tete with Sir Robert Walpole
47. Caring for Esther Johnson
48. A Voyage to Lilliput
49. A Voyage to Brobdingnag
50. A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan
51. A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
52. Aftermath
53. What Did Swift Believe?
54. In Ireland while Gulliver's Travels Began to Do Its Work
55. Last Visit to England
56. Swift's Literary Career Capped with Accolades in Paris (Not)
57. Choosing Patty Rolt over Alexander Pope
58. King Lear with a Sense of Humoron the Heath at Holyhead
59. Returning to Esther Johnson, and in Consequence, to Ireland
60. Losing Esther Johnson in Her Prime
PART 4: 1728—1731: PREMATURE VERSES ON THE DEATH OF DR. SWIFT
61. Even Without Esther Johnson, Deciding to Stay in Ireland
62. Sarah Harding Redivivus
63. The Intelligencer—Full Talent and Vigor, But Unsustained
64. Eight Months with the Achesons
65. Without Esther Johnson and Archbishop King, Ungoverned
66. Rough Drafts for A Modest Proposal
67. Drapier's Hill
68. A Modest Proposal and a Stunningly Modest Response
69. OK, if Nobody Will Listen...
70. The Triumfeminate and the Pilkingtons
71. Libels and Epistles
72. Swift's First (But Not His Last) "Freedom of the City" Fiasco
73. Final Visit to a Couple about to Separate
74. Ghost Writing for Captain Creichton
75. Letters and Fun
76. Snow White (Laetitia Pilkington) and the Seven Dwarfs (Ten Clergymen)
77. Incendiary in Politics, Loving as a Friend, but Sometimes Confusing the Two
78. Let's Try a Comic Poem about My Death
PART 5: 1732—1745: INTERNAL MONITOR NOT ALWAYS ENGAGED
79. The Bishops Get Their Due
80. Be Wary of Presbyterians, But More Wary of Americans
81. Everybody Poops
82. Fully Home in the Deanery
83. Financial Security
84. Life with Laetitia Pilkington, 1732—1733
85. Fighting Robert Walpole through Local Elections
86. With No Parliament in Session, Life Is Good in Dublin
87. Parliament Returns
88. Swift's Better Business Bureau
89. Capping an Otherwise Successful Year by Being Threatened by an MP
90. Stepping Aside for the Next Generation
91. Still Able to Rise to the Occasion
92. The Good Martha Whiteway
93. Disagreeable Quilca, Agreeable Martha Whiteway
94. One More Hopeful Young Man Taken
95. Jailed Printers Revive Swift's Pen
96. Difficult, but Still with a Sense of Humor
97. Badges for Beggars
98. Publishing the History of Queen Anne's Ministry (Not)
99. Humility Recommended and Practiced
100. Distorting the Record
101. Swift's Guide to Domestic Guerilla Warfare
102. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
103. Swift's Will
104. Last Glimpses of Swift
105. Loving Care: John Lyon, Martha Whiteway, Anne Ridgeway
106. Our Dean
Bibliography
About the Author
