Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels anonymously 300 years ago in October 1726. Everyone knows the story, tiny people preforming bondage on giants, plus talking horses.
Most people dont know it’s one long howl of rage at how England treated Ireland. He was a savage. Swift was born in Dublin to English parents, and for the first part of his career he wanted London and kept getting Ireland instead. He became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1713 and stayed there until his death in 1745. This city never let him go, and by the end he’d stopped trying to leave. The lad was a genius, but he was difficult to be mates with and he suffered terrible with mental and physical health issues. He’d severe vertigo, tinnitus, and his cognitive decline later in life was due to Meniere’s disease.
Swift was acutely aware of the stigma and terrible care surrounding mental illness, satirising his own legacy in his 1731 poem Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift but more on that in a second. The book itself Gulliver’s Travels has a Cavan connection cause Swift spent time around Swanlinbar and Mullagh visiting his uncle and a mate. The local folklore there has a giant farmer nicknamed Big Doughty supposedly which inspired Gulliver’s scale, and a night spent asleep by a cottage fire ended with local boys tying his hair to the chair similar to how the Liliputians staked him on the beach.
But its the Anglo-Irish and French politics, that had an unmistakable influence. Lilliput and Blefuscu going to war over which end of an egg to crack is Swift mocking the pettiness of English and French squabbling, and by extension the absurd laws heaped on Irish Catholics and dissenters at home. Laputa, the floating island that starves the land beneath it by literally blocking the sun, is Britain’s government hovering over Ireland with total indifference. And Lindalino, a city that rises up against the island and gets censored out of early British editions for the trouble, is Dublin in a very thin disguise.
Although published anonymously Swift wasn’t writing this totally disguised. Under the name “M.B. Drapier” he’d already talked all of Dublin into rejecting a rotten British coinage scheme with the Drapier’s Letters, and a few years later he’d publish “A Modest Proposal”, satirically suggesting the Irish poor sell their children as food, just to show England how it sounded when cruelty was dressed up as policy.
He left his fortune of about £12,000 to found what became St Patrick’s Hospital, Ireland’s first psychiatric hospital, which finally opened its doors in 1757 and is still treating people today. That poem I referenced earlier goes “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.” He was one of the good ones, and we must go for a jar with him in the DTM again soon.
He’s buried in St Patrick’s Cathedral under an epitaph he wrote himself. In Latin translated by W.B. Yeats as: “Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty.”
