Jonathan Swift originally published all his works under pseudonyms or anonymously, and is thought to have written an essay about the benefits of flatulence, and another one about human excrement signed “Dr Shit.” [1]
Best known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift was a prolific writer, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He is regarded as one of the foremost prose satirists in the English language.
His masterpiece, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, is better known as Gulliver’s Travels. First published in 1726, it was an immediate hit and retains its popularity for its humorous depiction of human foibles and its adventurous fantasy. Swift once stated that “satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” He commented on the attitudes and policies of his day with originality and forcefulness that influenced later novelists such as Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, and George Orwell.
In 1738 Swift began to show signs of illness and in 1742 appears to have suffered a stroke, losing the ability to speak, realizing his fear of becoming mentally disabled (“I shall be like that tree,” he once said, “I shall die at the top”). He died on 19 October 1745, at nearly 80, and was buried in his own cathedral.
The bulk of Swift’s fortune was left to establish a hospital for the mentally ill, originally known as St Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, which opened in 1757 and still exists today as a psychiatric hospital.
Swift’s life was written by Samuel Johnson in The Lives of the Poets in 1781. John Ruskin named him as one of three people who were the most influential for him, and George Orwell named him as one of the writers he most admired, despite disagreeing with him on almost every moral and political issue.
Swift was, and remains, one of the most popular and readable authors of the eighteenth century, an author of humour and humanity, who is as often enlightening as he is ironical.
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