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Unit 27: Swift: Thoughts on Various Subjects ...

In 1690, Sir William Temple, Swift’s patron, published An Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning Notes
a defense of classical writing (see Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns) holding up the
Epistles of Phalaris as an example. William Wotton responded to Temple with Reflections upon
Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) showing that the Epistles were a later forgery. A response by
the supporters of the Ancients was then made by Charles Boyle (later the 4th Earl of Orrery and
father of Swift’s first biographer). A further retort on the Modern side came from Richard Bentley,
one of the pre-eminent scholars of the day, in his essay Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris
(1699). However, the final words on the topic belong to Swift in his Battle of the Books (1697,
published 1704) in which he makes a humorous defense on behalf of Temple and the cause of the
Ancients.
In 1708, a cobbler named John Partridge published a popular almanac of astrological predictions.
Because Partridge falsely determined the deaths of several church officials, Swift attacked Partridge
in Predictions For The Ensuing Year by Isaac Bickerstaff, a parody predicting that Partridge would
die on March 29. Swift followed up with a pamphlet issued on March 30 claiming that Partridge
had in fact died, which was widely believed despite Partridge’s statements to the contrary.
According to other sources, Richard Steele uses the personae of Isaac Bickerstaff and was the one
who wrote about the “death” of John Partridge and published it in The Spectator, not Jonathan
Swift.
Drapier’s Letters (1724) was a series of pamphlets against the monopoly granted by the English
government to William Wood to provide the Irish with copper coinage. It was widely believed
that Wood would need to flood Ireland with debased coinage in order make a profit. In these
“letters” Swift posed as a shop-keeper—a draper—in order to criticize the plan. Swift’s writing
was so effective in undermining opinion in the project that a reward was offered by the government
to anyone disclosing the true identity of the author. Though hardly a secret (on returning to
Dublin after one of his trips to England, Swift was greeted with a banner, “Welcome Home,
Drapier”) no one turned Swift in. The government eventually resorted to hiring none other than
Sir Isaac Newton to certify the soundness of Wood’s coinage to counter Swift’s accusations. In
“Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (1739) Swift recalled this as one of his best achievements.
Gulliver’s Travels, a large portion of which Swift wrote at Woodbrook House in County Laois,
was published in 1726. It is regarded as his masterpiece. As with his other writings, the Travels
was published under a pseudonym, the fictional Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon and later a sea
captain. Some of the correspondence between printer Benj. Motte and Gulliver’s also-fictional
cousin negotiating the book’s publication has survived. Though it has often been mistakenly
thought of and published in bowdlerized form as a children’s book, it is a great and sophisticated
satire of human nature based on Swift’s experience of his times. Gulliver’s Travels is an anatomy
of human nature, a sardonic looking-glass, often criticized for its apparent misanthropy. It asks its
readers to refute it, to deny that it has adequately characterized human nature and society. Each
of the four books—recounting four voyages to mostly-fictional exotic lands—has a different theme,
but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Critics hail the work as a satiric reflection on the
shortcomings of Enlightenment thought.
In 1729, Swift published A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland
Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, a
satire in which the narrator, with intentionally grotesque arguments, recommends that Ireland’s
poor escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich: “I have been assured by a
very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is
at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food...” Following the satirical form, he
introduces the reforms he is actually suggesting by deriding them:
Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients...taxing our absentees...using [nothing] except
what is of our own growth and manufacture...rejecting...foreign luxury...introducing a vein of

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