Jonathan Swift (Author of Gulliver's Travels) edit data Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, The Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift published all of his works under pseudonyms — such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier — or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire; the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. Biography of Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels Biography of the Jonathan Swift 30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745 Jonathan Swift Biography Home A Modest Proposal Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1667, and died in 1745. His parents were English.

His father died before he was born, and his mother was supported on a slender pittance by his father's brother. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and all through his early life was dependent on the generosity of others. His college career was not highly creditable, either from the point of view of manners, morals, or learning. After leaving college, he travelled through England on foot, and found employment with a relative of his mother's, Sir William Temple, in whose house was a noble library; and for two years Swift made up for some of his shortcomings by studying diligently therein. He went to Oxford in 1692, took a degree and was ordained in 1694. He was given a parish in Ireland, which he soon resigned, returning to the home of Sir William Temple, where he remained until the death of the latter in 1699. Jonathan Swift - A Video Biography Childhood Jonathan Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, and was the second child and only son of Jonathan Swift and wife Abigail Erick. Swift arrived seven months after his father's untimely death. Most of the facts of Swift's early life are obscure, confused and sometimes contradictory.

It is widely believed that his mother returned to England when Jonathan was still very young, then leaving him to be raised by his father's family. His uncle Godwin took primary responsibility for the young Jonathan, sending him with one of his cousins to Kilkenny College. Youth In 1682 he attended Dublin University (Trinity College, Dublin), receiving his B.A. in 1686. Swift was studying for his Master's degree when political troubles in Ireland surrounding the Glorious Revolution forced him to leave for England in 1688, where his mother helped him get a position as secretary and personal assistant of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Farnham. Temple was an English diplomat who, having arranged the Triple Alliance of 1668, retired from public service to his country estate to tend his gardens and write his memoirs. Gaining the confidence of his employer, Swift "was often trusted with matters of great importance." Within three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III, and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments.

Jonathan Swift When Jonathan Swift took up his residence at Moor Park, he met Esther Johnson, then 8 years old, the fatherless daughter of one of the household servants. Swift acted as her tutor and mentor, giving her the nickname "Stella", and the two maintained a close but ambiguous relationship for the rest of Esther's life. Jonathan Swift left Temple in 1690 for Ireland because of his health, but returned to Moor Park the following year. The illness, fits of vertigo or giddiness—now known to be Ménière's disease—would continue to plague Swift throughout his life. During this second stay with Temple, Swift received his M.A. from Hertford College, Oxford in 1692. Then, apparently despairing of gaining a better position through Temple's patronage, Swift left Moor Park to become an ordained priest in the Established Church of Ireland and in 1694 he was appointed to the prebend of Kilroot in the Diocese of Connor, with his parish located at Kilroot, near Carrickfergus in County Antrim. Jonathan Swift appears to have been miserable in his new position, being isolated in a small, remote community far from the centres of power and influence.

While at Kilroot, however, Swift may well have become romantically involved with Jane Waring. A letter from him survives, offering to remain if she would marry him and promising to leave and never return to Ireland if she refused. She presumably refused, because Swift left his post and returned to England and Temple's service at Moor Park in 1696, and he remained there until Temple's death. There he was employed in helping to prepare Temple's memoirs and correspondence for publication. During this time Swift wrote The Battle of the Books, a satire responding to critics of Temple's Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1690). Battle was however not published until 1704. On January 27, 1699 Temple died. Jonathan Swift stayed on briefly in England to complete the editing of Temple's memoirs, and perhaps in the hope that recognition of his work might earn him a suitable position in England. However, Swift's work made enemies of some of Temple's family and friends who objected to indiscretions included in the memoirs. His next move was to approach King William directly, based on his imagined connection through Temple and a belief that he had been promised a position.

This failed so miserably that he accepted the lesser post of secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices of Ireland. However, when he reached Ireland he found that the secretaryship had already been given to another. But he soon obtained the living of Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan, and the prebend of Dunlavin in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. At Laracor, a mile or two from Trim, County Meath, and twenty miles (32 km) from Dublin, Swift ministered to a congregation of about fifteen people, and had abundant leisure for cultivating his garden, making a canal (after the Dutch fashion of Moor Park), planting willows, and rebuilding the vicarage. As chaplain to Lord Berkeley, he spent much of his time in Dublin and traveled to London frequently over the next ten years. In 1701, Swift published, anonymously, a political pamphlet, A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome. Writer In February 1702, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College, Dublin.

That spring he traveled to England and returned to Ireland in October, accompanied by Esther Johnson—now twenty years old—and his friend Rebecca Dingley, another member of William Temple's household. There is a great mystery and controversy over Swift's relationship with Esther Johnson nicknamed "Stella". Many hold that they were secretly married in 1716. During his visits to England in these years Swift published A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704) and began to gain a reputation as a writer. This led to close, lifelong friendships with Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot, forming the core of the Martinus Scriblerus Club (founded in 1713). Jonathan Swift became increasingly active politically in these years. From 1707 to 1709 and again in 1710, Swift was in London, unsuccessfully urging upon the Whig administration of Lord Godolphin the claims of the Irish clergy to the First-Fruits and Twentieths ("Queen Anne's Bounty"), which brought in about £2,500 a year, already granted to their brethren in England.

He found the opposition Tory leadership more sympathetic to his cause and Swift was recruited to support their cause as editor of the Examiner when they came to power in 1710. In 1711, Swift published the political pamphlet "The Conduct of the Allies," attacking the Whig government for its inability to end the prolonged war with France. The incoming Tory government conducted secret (and illegal) negotiations with France, resulting in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ending the War of the Spanish Succession. Jonathan Swift was part of the inner circle of the Tory government, and often acted as mediator between Henry St. John (Viscount Bolingbroke) the secretary of state for foreign affairs (1710–15) and Robert Harley (Earl of Oxford) lord treasurer and prime minister (1711–1714). Swift recorded his experiences and thoughts during this difficult time in a long series of letters to Esther Johnson, later collected and published as The Journal to Stella. The animosity between the two Tory leaders eventually led to the dismissal of Harley in 1714.

With the death of Queen Anne and accession of George I that year, the Whigs returned to power and the Tory leaders were tried for treason for conducting secret negotiations with France. Also during these years in London, Swift became acquainted with the Vanhomrigh family and became involved with one of the daughters, Esther, yet another fatherless young woman and another ambiguous relationship to confuse Swift's biographers. Swift furnished Esther with the nickname "Vanessa" and she features as one of the main characters in his poem Cadenus and Vanessa. The poem and their correspondence suggests that Esther was infatuated with Swift, and that he may have reciprocated her affections, only to regret this and then try to break off the relationship. Esther followed Swift to Ireland in 1714, where there appears to have been a confrontation, possibly involving Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh died in 1723 at the age of 35. Another lady with whom he had a close but less intense relationship was Anne Long, a toast of the Kit-Cat Club. Maturity Before the fall of the Tory government, Swift hoped that his services would be rewarded with a church appointment in England.

However, Queen Anne appeared to have taken a dislike to Swift and thwarted these efforts. The best position his friends could secure for him was the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin. With the return of the Whigs, Swift's best move was to leave England and he returned to Ireland in disappointment, a virtual exile, to live "like a rat in a hole". Once in Ireland, however, Swift began to turn his pamphleteering skills in support of Irish causes, producing some of his most memorable works: Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), Drapier's Letters (1724), and A Modest Proposal (1729), earning him the status of an Irish patriot. While in what he called his "exile" he wrote Gulliver's Travels. In 1726 he paid a long-deferred visit to London, taking with him the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels. During his visit he stayed with his old friends Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot and John Gay, who helped him arrange for the anonymous publication of his book. The secret of the authorship being so closely guarded that the publisher did not know who was the author. Dr.

Johnson characterized it as "A production so new and strange that it filled the reader with admiration and amazement. It was read by the high and low, the learned and the illiterate." In this work, Jonathan Swift appears as one of the greatest masters of English we have ever had; as endowed with an imaginative genius inferior to few; as a keen and pitiless critic of the world, and a bitter misanthropic accounter of humanity at large. Jonathan Swift was indeed a misanthrope by theory, however he may have made exception to private life. His hero, Gulliver, discovers race after race of beings who typify the general in his classification of mankind. Extremely diverting are Gulliver's adventures among the tiny Lilliputians; only less so are his more perilous encounters with the giants of Brobdingnag. Much of the material reflects his political experiences of the preceding decade. For instance, the episode in which the giant Gulliver puts out the Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it can be seen as a metaphor for the Tories' illegal peace treaty; having done a good thing in an unfortunate manner.

First published in November 1726, it was an immediate hit, with a total of three printings that year and another in early 1727. French, German, and Dutch translations appeared in 1727, and pirated copies were printed in Ireland. Swift returned to England one more time in 1727 and stayed with Alexander Pope once again. The visit was cut short when Swift received word that Esther Johnson was dying and rushed back home to be with her. On 28 January 1728, Esther Johnson died; Swift had prayed at her bedside, even composing prayers for her comfort. Swift could not bear to be present at the end, but on the night of her death he began to write his The Death of Mrs. Johnson. He was too ill to attend the funeral at St. Patrick's. Many years later, a lock of hair, assumed to be Esther Johnson's, was found in his desk, wrapped in a paper bearing the words, "Only a woman's hair." Death became a frequent feature in Swift's life from this point. In 1731 he wrote Verses on the Death of Dr.

Swift, his own obituary published in 1739. In 1732, his good friend and collaborator John Gay died. In 1735, John Arbuthnot, another friend from his days in London, died. In 1738 Swift began to show signs of illness, and in 1742 he appears to have suffered a stroke, losing the ability to speak and realizing his worst fears of becoming mentally disabled. ("I shall be like that tree," he once said, "I shall die at the top.") To protect him from unscrupulous hangers on, who had begun to prey on the great man, his closest companions had him declared of "unsound mind and memory." However, it was long believed by many that Swift was really insane at this point. In his book Literature and Western Man, author J.B. Priestley even cites the final chapters of Gulliver's Travels as proof of Swift's approaching "insanity". In part VIII of his series, The Story of Civilization, Will Durant describes the final years of Swift's life as such: "Definite symptoms of madness appeared in 1738.

In 1741 guardians were appointed to take care of his affairs and watch lest in his outbursts of violence he should do himself harm. In 1742 he suffered great pain from the inflammation of his left eye, which swelled to the size of an egg; five attendants had to restrain him from tearing out his eye. He went a whole year without uttering a word." In 1744, Alexander Pope died. Then, on October 19, 1745, Swift died. After being laid out in public view for the people of Dublin to pay their last respects, he was buried in his own cathedral by Esther Johnson's side, in accordance with his wishes. The bulk of his fortune (twelve thousand pounds) was left to found a hospital for the mentally ill, originally known as St. Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, which opened in 1757, and which still exists as a psychiatric hospital. Biographies of Jonathan Swift Thackeray's English Humorists, and a closer study of the man and his works in Leslie Stevenson's "Swift," in Morley's English Men of Letters.

The other biographies of him are: Lord Orrery Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1751; Hawkes, on his life, 1765; Sheridan's life, 1785; Forster's life, 1875 (unfinished); Henry Craik's life (1882). The best edition of Swift's writings and correspondence is that edited by Scott, 1824. Jonathan Swift and 'Gulliver's Travels' | Great Writers Inspire Jonathan Swift and 'Gulliver's Travels' by: Cover from a 1943 Comic of Gulliver's Travels Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons Authorship, Originality, and Publication History The notion of authorship is (as ever) problematic in Gulliver's Travels. This is evident in two ways: the publication history of the work reveals the extent to which Swift lost control of the production over the Travels: the first edition of the Travels was heavily and illicitly doctored by its printer.

the author's obsessive harping on the idea of veracity, verisimilitude, and authenticity that characterises Gulliver’s account Gulliver's Travels began life not as the work of a single man, but as a group project. The idea originated with the Scriblerus Club, a group including Swift, John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Arbuthno. The Scriblerus Club was a group of writers and wits devoted to satirising what they perceived as the folly of modern scholarship and science. They invented an author and pedant called Martinus Scriblerus, and wrote an imaginary biography of him, which was finally published in 1741, as The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. However, parts of the memoirs were written in the early years of the 1720s, and Pope says that Gulliver's Travels was formed from a hint in the memoirs. If you actually read the memoirs as they appeared in 1741, you'll see that chapter 16 describing the travels of Martinus bears a close resemblance to the travels of Gulliver.

If the Travels were initially generated by the Scriblerians interest in mocking pedantry and contemporary science, it was Swift alone who fleshed out the narrative of a Scriblerus character sent off on a series of imaginary journeys. From Swift's correspondence, we know that the main composition of Gulliver began around the end of 1720, and was finished in the autumn of 1725. It was not a good time for Swift. While writing A Tale of a Tub, Swift thought he could realise his ambitions for a rise within the church, and the Tory leaders with which he had aligned himself were in the ascendancy. By the time he started work on Gulliver's Travels things looked bleaker. He had failed to obtain any Church preferment in England, and he had been forced instead to accept a lowly deanery in Ireland. The Tory government had fallen, and his friends and allies impeached by the Whigs. Gulliver's Travels was in part a virulent attack on the Whig ministry that Swift blamed for these circumstances.

Portrait of Alexander Pope by Jean-Baptiste van Loo [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons Swift saw the book as politically explosive, and therefore as something that he had to present and position quite carefully in order to avoid prosecution. He secretly sent the manuscript to a publisher, Benjamin Motte. Accompanying the manuscript was a letter asking Motte if he would publish Gulliver's Travels signed by Gulliver's imaginary cousin, Richard Sympson. Sympson is the author of the prefatory letter to Gulliver's Travels. So already there is a distinct blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction: in his real life dealings with his publisher, Swift hides behind a fictional figure that later appears within the work itself. Motte was keen to publish Gulliver's Travels, and it came out in October 1726, very quickly – in fact, so quickly that Swift was unable to correct proof copies of his work before it appeared in print. When it did appear, he discovered to his horror that not only was it full of misprints, but also that Motte had deliberately altered the text of several passages, cutting out or toning down the sections he thought were too dangerously outspoken.

Swift was outraged at this invasion of his authorial rights. While many of the misprints were corrected in the next edition, it was not until 1735, that Motte's heavy editing of Gulliver's Travels was removed, then it appeared in Dublin publisher George Faulkner's multi-volume edition of Swift's works. Despite Swift's fury, Motte's 1726 edition of Guliver's Travels was a huge success. The first impression sold out within a week. Within three weeks, ten thousand copies had been sold. Gulliver's Travels was the talk of the town. Swift's correspondence from the time is jubilant about its success, but also makes joking references to the fact that he didn't write it. So here already we have a rather strange set of relationships established between Swift and the authorship of Gulliver's Travels. First the book starts out as the product of several minds, a group project. Then it becomes Swift's own, but one from which he distances himself by pretending that its really by its fictional narrator, Gulliver, and brought to the publisher by Gulliver's fictional cousin, Sympson.

Then the book is published, and rather than getting Swift’s own version of Gulliver's Travels, the London literati get a version bowdlerised by the publisher. Nonetheless, it is a hit, and Swift revels in the success of 'his' book; yet he continues to pretend that it's not 'really' by him. By 1726, the notion of authorship of Gulliver's Travels is a tricky business. Fact, Fiction, and Authenticity Gulliver's Travels also reveals some strange overlap between fact and fiction. Swift pretends that Gulliver is the author of his travels. And Gulliver himself is obsessed with defending the authenticity of the travels as factual account of his own real life experiences: in a letter from Captain Gulliver, which prefaces the travels, he says: 'If the Censure of Yahoos could any Way affect me, I should have great reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my Book of Travels a meer Fiction out of Mine own Brain'.

This concern is emphasised in the letter from the publisher to the reader: 'There is an Air of Truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the Author was so distinguished for his Veracity, that it became a Sort of Proverb among his Neighbours as Redriff, that when any one affirmed a Thing, to say, it was as True as if Mr Gulliver had spoke it'. This concern that the reader should accept the truth of the fiction continues to be apparent once we get into the travels proper: describing the King of Brobdignag's Kitchen, Gulliver says: 'But if I should describe the Kitchen-grate, the prodigious Pots and Kettles, the Joints of Meat turning on the Spits, with many other Particulars; perhaps I should be hardly believed; at least a severe Critick would be apt to think I enlarged a little, as Travellers are often suspected to do…'. This emphasis on the trueness of the account presented works in part as a parody of emergent traditions in contemporary prose and prose fiction. Those of you who’ve read any of Daniel Defoe's fictions will know that they are always prefaced with professions of authenticity.

Moll Flanders begins: 'The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine'.<.cite> Defoe is attempting to define the veracity of his account in opposition to the fictionality of contemporary romance fiction. But the narrators of romance fiction also stressed that their accounts were genuine fact: the narrator of novelist Eliza Haywood's prose fiction The British Recluse (1722) begins her story by saying: 'The following little History (which I can affirm for Truth, having it from the Mouths of those chiefly concerned in it) is a sad Example of what Miseries may Attend a Woman'. As those of you who have read either Moll Flanders or The British Recluse will know, there isn't anything all that plausible or realistic about the events that occur in these 'true' fictions. The emphasis on authenticity comes hand in hand with a heavy dose of sensationalism.

1803 etching by James Gillray, The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver as King George III and Napoleon respectively [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons In a highly competitive book market, this sensationalism became ever and ever more outlandish, as authors struggled to surpass one another in novelty and singularity. In some ways, Gulliver's Travels satirises the competing commitment to sensationalism and truth claims that characterised contemporary successful prose fiction. It stretches the plausibility of the 'life and surprising adventures' genre to its limit, by attempting to pass off as private history an account that is palpably fantastical. Gulliver's Travels and Travel Writing But the emergent novel wasn't the only genre marked by these defences of authenticity. They are also found in contemporary travel writing. Swift's use of the name Sympson in his negotiations with his publisher, and his creation of this Sympson as a fictional cousin of Gulliver's, links him to Captain William Sympson, the equally fictitious author of A New Voyage to the East Indies (1715).

A New Voyage asserted in bold terms the autobiographical nature of its account, but was in fact plagiarized from an earlier travel book. Gulliver's Travels derived much of its popularity from the contemporary readers' enthusiastic consumption of travel compilations and the records of journeys and voyages. Swift himself owned a number of accounts by famous travel writers, including the sixteenth century such as travel writers Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and William Dampier. There is a sustained imitation of various travel accounts in Gulliver's Travels: the description of the storm in Book II closely copies the style of a seventeenth narrative called Mariners Magazine by Captain Samuel Sturmy. Swift places the locations of his fictitious voyages in regions visited by one of the most famous travel writers of the period: the pirate, explorer and author William Dampier. Dampier produced an account of his 1699 expedition to Australia, then known as New Holland, which had appeared as a two part account called A Voyage to New Holland published in 1702, and A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland published in 1709.

Lilliput is supposed to be between Van Dieman's land, which was Tasmania, and the northern coast of Australia. The land of the Houyhnhnms in Book 4 is just south west of Australia. Gulliver's Travels also exploits some of the potential for absurdity that was evident in travel accounts. In contemporary travelogues, one way in which authors attempted to emphasize the authenticity of their account was by representing islands in woodcuts as they would appear if they were seen through a telescope. Having no sea shown on them, and cut off at the base, they in fact look as if they’re flying through the air. When Laputa flies over Balnibarbi, Swift literalizes the comic potential of the travel narrative and its illustrative apparatus. Another important aspect of the travel narrative satirised by Gulliver's Travels is its function as a form of reflection on contemporary European society. Travelogue's observations about new nations and experiences could be used to interrogate domestic culture and mores, not always to their advantage. And this aspect of the growing interest in the new world that wasn't just confined to travel-writing.

Contemporaries were fascinated by the possibility that a savage could be noble, revealing by contrast the corruption of a 'civilised' voyager (Consider Aphra Behn's Oroonoko). Gulliver's progressive disillusionment with his own society, and his preference for the civilised world of the Hounymnyms in the final book, represents this contemporary vogue taken to an extreme: by the end of the fourth book, Gulliver returns to England and can only tolerate the company of horses, and he stuffs his nose with lavender and rue to cut out the smell of mankind. Map of Lugnagg from the 1726 edition of Gulliver's Travels [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons And as a story, Gulliver's Travels both capitalises on the commercial vogue for travel writing, and shares some of the excitement of a real travellers tale. We aren't just distanced readers enjoying the irony of the satire – one of the things that has made the Travels into a children's classic is that on a basic level of plot and story, we want to know what Gulliver finds, and what happens next. But the Travels are also a parody.

And Gulliver is a splendid liar, masquerading as a purveyor of genuine experiences. Swift draws on the rhetoric of veracity to undercut the truth claims found in contemporary prose and prose fiction. The irony of this satire is that underwriting Gulliver's Travels is the implicit assumption that this fictional world can in fact tell us the truth about the 'real' world of contemporary English society and politics, for the narrative works as a form of allegory. Swift draws on a tradition developed through Thomas More's Utopia, and the satiric narratives of Rabelais and Cyrano de Bergerac: the tradition of describing fantastic countries that satirise contemporary clerics, politicians, and academics. Like all allegories, these mock-traveller's tales gesture towards the true state of things by telling a lie, or in the Hounynyms' phrase, 'telling the thing that is not'. So Gulliver's Travels is a fictional tale masquerading as a true story, yet the very fictionality of the account enables Swift author to reveal what it would not be possible to articulate through a genuine account of the nation.

Allegory and Meaning Allegory provides an interpretative framework within which a 'true' set of values or ideas can be communicated, as one narrative gestures toward another which is not directly perceivable or communicable. Allegory does this via a series of equations or equivalences. For example, in A Tale of a Tub, Martin equals Anglicanism, Peter equals Catholicism, and their quarrel equates to the Reformation. The trouble with Gulliver's Travels is that the allegory does not remain constant: the frame of reference shifts, making it hard to decipher the ultimate reality toward which it points. For example, it is never entirely clear for who or what the figure of Gulliver stands. At some points Gulliver is a cipher for Swift himself: in the second chapter of the book of Lilliput, Gulliver gives an account of the way in which his excrement has to be carried off in a two wheelbarrows by the Lilliputians.

He explains his justification for this detail: 'I would not have dwelt so long upon a Circumstance, that perhaps at first sight may appear not very Momentous; if I had not thought it necessary to justify my Character in Point of Cleanliness to the World, which I am told, some of my Maligners have been pleased on this and other Occasions, to call in Question'. This clearly seems to operate as a reference to previous attacks on Swift, whose writings, especially A Tale of a Tub, had been attacked as filthy, lewd, and immodest. Gulliver's self defence operates as Swift's own self defence in the face of existing criticisms of his work. But at different points Gulliver serves as a cipher for other historical figures. For example, at one point he comes to stand in as a figure for Swift's friend, the disgraced Tory leader Lord Bolingbroke. When Gulliver is arrested by the Lilliputians and forced to stand trial, Gulliver decides to escape rather than testify.

Justifying this apparently cowardly decision, he says: 'Having in my Life perused many State-Tryals, which I ever observed to terminate as the Judges thought fit to direct; I durst not rely on so dangerous a Decision, in so ciritical a Juncture, and against such Powerful Enemies'. Here Swift, via Gulliver, offers a defence of Bolingbroke's decision not to stand trial over his part in the Jacobite Atterbury plot of April 1722. We read, in this context, Gulliver's reasoning as an allegorical figuration of Bolingbroke's part in recent political history. But can allegory function in this way? Gulliver's Travels invites interpretation as an allegory, but the allegorical framework is constantly shifting, making it hard to pin down exactly to what version of 'reality' the fiction relates. Who is Gulliver? Is he Swift? Bolingbroke? Locke? Dampier? Ever since the book was first published, readers have tried to 'fix' an interpretative system for decoding the topical satirical focus for the Travels.

Just two weeks after Gulliver's Travels came out, newspapers were advertising A Key, Being Obervations and Explanatory Notes, upon the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver (1726), which offered all the necessary identifications for unpicking Swift's satire. Some of these offered genuinely relevant readings of individual figures (for example, Flimnap as Walpole), but in attempting to offer a systematic explanation of the whole book in terms of topical comment, it revealed just how hard it is to tie much of the Travels down. While there is substantial pointed topical satire, the targets of Swift's attack keep changing. One moment he comments on Whig politics in 1720s, and the next he widens out to embrace all human folly. The changes of perspective afforded by our unreliable narrator are almost dizzying, and they make it hard to establish a sense of proportion. This confusion of perspective, and sense of the difficulty in establishing relative values is something that is reflected in Gulliver's own difficulties in measuring what he sees around him.

For example, in 'Voyage to Brobdignag', he writes: 'I was an Hour walking to the end of this Field; which was fenced in with a Hedge of at least one hundred and twenty Foot high, and the Trees so lofty that I could make no Computation of their Altitude'. When Gulliver arrives back home again, his sense of perspective, of what is the norm, has so altered that he is flummoxed by the size of the members of his family: 'My Wife ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her Knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my mouth'. 'Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer' by Richard Redgrave, 1836 [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons Interpretation and Objectivity One way of looking at these crises of interpretation in Gulliver's Travels is to consider them alongside the empirical philosophy of John Locke, of which Swift was critical. In his 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' (1690), Locke attempted to investigate the formulation and workings of systems of knowledge.

In broad terms, Locke's essay attacks the idea of imagination as the key to knowledge, in favour of recognising that the mind acquires knowledge through direct experience, empirically: '…Men, barely by the use of their natural faculties, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any innate impressions, and may arrive at certainty without any such original notions or principles'. At the core of Locke's philosophy is the argument in which Locke describes the mind at birth as a tabula rasa – a wax tablet as yet unmarked by the impressions that experience will write on it. Experience is something that the mind cannot refuse, and at a basic level, the mind is marked by the initial sensation of the object perceived. From those markings, we use sense and reason to build up a system of knowledge. What we know then, is derived from connections made between perceived experiences – not from any innate wisdom or understanding. Locke's theory provoked a debate about what was real. His idea of the materialism of objects external to the body seemed opposed to any sense of inner reality. In Locke's philosophy of knowledge, reason is elevated above spiritual revelation.

For a staunch Anglican like Swift, it seemed to offer a defence or intellectual basis for deism, or atheism. Although Locke's Essay was initially intended to provide an investigation of the nature of religious belief, many Anglicans thought Locke was creating an epistemology that cut God out of the equation. Portrait of John Locke by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1697 [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons We could read Gulliver's troubles in understanding what he sees as a parody of Locke’s philosophy of human understanding. Gulliver looks to the material world around him to gain a sense of knowledge. There is a great deal of emphasis on what he sees, and a real striving to attain some kind of objectivity, to record his impressions accurately. However, his impressions and his sensory apprehension of those worlds do not help him to gain knowledge. He looks at the trees around him to get a sense of scale, but they do not help. One of the central parts of Lockeian philosophy was that knowledge was not purely derived from sense data, but that man used reason to work out the connections between the ideas received through experience.

However, although Gulliver tries to measure one object against another to establish a correct perspective, he remains unable to establish a secure view of the world. In a broader sense, Gulliver should be able to calibrate moral behaviour by using his external experiences of the people that he meets on his travels as a body of knowledge from which he can derive a sense of an ideal society. In terms of Lockean empiricism, it is significant that Gulliver has no inbuilt, preformed sense of spiritual or inner revelation. All he has is what he sees, and he uses that to define his own moral philosophy. But the philosophy he arrives at by the end of the book is one which is profoundly misanthropic and patently ridiculous: when he returns home after his voyage to the Hounynyms, he has concluded that he wants to live with horses, and make canoes out of humans. Swift offers us a mind which has indeed been imprinted with what it experiences from the senses, but which is unable to configure these experiences into a useful and meaningful worldview.

The ultimate result of all Gulliver's experiences is a profound disorientation: because he has no innate sense of himself and his own values, he merely tries to internalise the perceptions and value systems of the cultures that he finds himself in, none of which quite match with his own needs. While evaluating Gulliver's final philosophy, it is important to bear in mind that book 4 wasn't the original ending to the book. Swift originally proposed to have the third book last. This essay is only the beginning of an attempt to situate some of the salient features of Gulliver's Travels in the context of existing texts and ideas, and to consider how the fantastical world described by Swift's maverick traveler might relate to wider concerns about the relationship between authenticity and authorship, and authenticity and truth. Gulliver's Travels: Biography: Jonathan Swift | Novelguide Gulliver's Travels: Biography: Jonathan Swift Total Votes: 34273 Biography The satirist Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667, in Dublin, Ireland, the second child and only son of English immigrants, Jonathan Swift (a lawyer) and Abigail.

He was born just seven months after his father's death. Little is known about Swift's early years, but it is believed that his mother returned to England when he was very young, leaving him to be raised by his father's family. His uncle took responsibility for the boy and sent him to Kilkenny Grammar School. At the age of fourteen he enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received his B.A. degree in 1686. Swift was studying for his master's degree when political unrest prompted him to leave Ireland for England in 1688. He obtained the position of secretary to the English politician and member of the Whig party Sir William Temple, at his country house, Moor Park in Hertfordshire. At Moor Park, he formed the closest relationship of his life with Esther Johnson, the fatherless eight-year-old daughter of one of the household servants. Swift became her tutor and mentor, and the two remained friends for the rest of her life. Swift nicknamed her "Stella" and his letters to her were posthumously published as the Journal to Stella. Legends circulated that the two were secretly married in 1716, but there is no proof of this.

In 1694, Swift was ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland and worked as a country parson in Northern Ireland. In 1696 he returned to Moor Park, where he remained until Temple's death in 1699. He took up a post in Ireland as chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley. In 1709 he went to London to campaign for the Irish church, but was unsuccessful. Here he became friends with the English satirist and poet Alexander Pope and other writers, and they formed a literary club, the Martinus Scriblerus Club, to satirize the abuses of modern learning. Book III of Gulliver's Travels was later to result from this project. Though Swift had written pamphlets in support of the Whig party, he fell into conflict with the party and changed his allegiance to the Tory party in 1710. Swift began to publish satires on political and religious corruption, including A Tale of a Tub (1710). All of Swift's writings were published either anonymously or under pseudonyms, including Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, and M.B. Drapier.

During his time in London, Swift cultivated a close friendship with a second fatherless young woman, Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he nicknamed "Vanessa." As her feelings for him grew more intense, Swift backed away, claiming in a long poem he wrote for her in 1713, "Cadenus and Vanessa," that he only wanted friendship, not romantic love. This did not deter her, and she later followed him to Ireland to live. He visited her there, but maintained a distance. When the Tory government fell from power in 1714, Swift's writings lost popularity and he went to Dublin, where he became Dean of St Patrick's. In 1726 Swift published Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The World, which later became known as Gulliver's Travels. It was so controversial that it was not published in a full, uncensored version until ten years later. Alexander Pope stated, "it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery," and it is widely believed that it has never been out of print since then. The British author George Orwell declared it to be among the six indispensable books in world literature.

Swift took up the cause of the impoverishment of Ireland by England, and wrote pamphlets such as the satire A Modest Proposal (1729), in which he suggests that the problems of famine and overpopulation in Ireland could be solved by selling the babies of poor Irish people as food for the rich. Swift's friends remarked that he grew increasingly bitter with age. Three years before his death in Dublin on October 19, 1745, he was declared unable to care for himself. Some biographers believe that he was incapacitated by a stroke. He was buried next to Esther Johnson, as he requested. He bequeathed his money to found a hospital for the mentally ill, St Patrick's Hospital in Dublin. As of 2006, it still exists as a psychiatric facility. Swift wrote his own obituary, "Lines on the Death of Dr Swift," which contained the following lines: "He gave the little wealth he had / To build a house for fools and mad, / And showed by one satiric touch / No nation needed it so much."

Question: Who was the author of 'Gulliver's Travels'?
Answer: Jonathon Swift