swift1 1

Jonathan Swift1667-1745

Jonathan Swift

Swift was born in Ireland in 1667

Jonathan Swift


He received a BA from Trinity College, Dublin in 1686

Jonathan Swift



He received an MA from Oxford in 1692

Jonathan Swift




He became an Anglican priest in 1695

Jonathan Swift





He was granted a Dr. of Divinity degree from Trinity in 1702

Jonathan Swift






He was active in the early debates of the political parties in England—Whigs and Tories

Jonathan Swift






He was active in the early debates of the political parties in England—Whigs and Tories

Swift is famous for his satires:

Tale of a Tub (1704)

A Modest Proposal (1729)

Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels

Four “books”—four voyages:

Lilliput

Brobdingnag

Laputa

Houyhnhnms

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels is a parody of the genre of “travel narrative”

During the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these tales of voyages of exploration and colonial adventure were extremely popular:

Christopher Columbus

Amerigo Vespucci (for whom “America” is named)

Sir Walter Raleigh

Captain John Smith

More’s Utopia also parodies the genre, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest invokes the genre

Travel narratives are often sometimes “utopian”—Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels also parodies More’s Utopia

Jonathan Swift

Lemuel Gulliver’s four voyages can be seen as a satirical exploration of

the human condition: What does it mean to be a human being?

The name “Gulliver” may suggest that he is “gullible”

Gulliver’s first voyage, to Lilliput:

Gulliver encounters a land of tiny people. According to Stuart Sherman,

editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature Vol. 1c:

The diminutive citizens of Lilliput represent human small-mindedness

and petty ambitions. Filled with self-importance, they Lilliputians are

cruel, treacherous, malicious and destructive.

(Longman Anthology, p. 2531)

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s second voyage, to Brobdingnag, a land of giants:

In Brobdingnag Gulliver is reduced to the size of a Lilliputian.

According to Stuart Sherman:

He is humbled by his own helplessness and, finding the huge bodies

of the Brobdingnagians grotesque, he realizes how repulsive the

Lilliputians must have found him. When Gulliver gives the wise king

of Brobdingnag an account of the political affairs of England—which

manifest hypocrisy, avarice and hatred—the enlightened monarch

concludes that most of the country’s inhabitants must be “the most

pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to

crawl upon the face of the Earth.”


Jonathan Swift

Sherman concludes:

Throughout Gulliver’s Travels that which is admirable is held up to

expose corruption in the reader’s world, and that which is deplorable

is identified with the institutions and practices of contemporary

Europe, particularly Britain.

. . .

With brilliantly modulated ironic self-awareness, Swift’s painful

comedy of exposure to the truth of human frailty demonstrates that

there is no room for the distortions of human pride in a world where

our practices are so evidently at variance with our principles. Swift

advances no program of social reform, but provokes a new

recognition—literally, a re-thinking—of our own humanity.


Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels : Book IV

Gulliver’s crew mutinies and puts him ashore on an unknown island

Jonathan Swift



The island turns out to be inhabited by the “Houyhnhnms”--creatures who look like horses but are more civilized and intelligent than humans, in Gulliver’s view

Jonathan Swift



The island turns out to be inhabited by the “Houyhnhnms”--creatures who look like horses but are more civilized and intelligent than humans, in Gulliver’s view

The island also has “Yahoos”—creatures who look like humans but are sub-human in intelligence, savage and disgusting

swift1 1

Education