Meet the Author
Jonathan Swift
Anglo-Irish · 1667–1745 · Satirist and clergyman
Portrait: Charles Jervas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Dublin-born satirist and dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral who wrote Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.
2 StoryBites Editions1 Big Book1 Speech or essay1 Full text
Why read Jonathan Swift?
Swift’s satire works by keeping a straight face. A Modest Proposal borrows the calm voice of a policy expert to suggest that poor Irish families sell their year-old children as food for the rich, so readers feel the cruelty of treating people as numbers. Read it to learn how a satirist can attack a target while his speaker never breaks character.
A life in six dates
- 1667Born in Dublin
- 1686Graduates from Trinity College Dublin
- 1704Publishes A Tale of a Tub
- 1713Becomes dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin
- 1726Publishes Gulliver’s Travels
- 1729Publishes A Modest Proposal
- 1745Dies in Dublin
Themes across the collection
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
British rule in IrelandLaws favored English interests and absentee landlords, and many Irish Catholics lived in deep poverty, the situation the essay attacks.
Economic projectorsPamphlets full of schemes and statistics for fixing Ireland’s economy were common, and Swift’s speaker parodies their tone.
Swift’s Irish pamphletsIn The Drapier’s Letters (1724 to 1725), Swift had already campaigned under a pen name against a patent to mint copper coins for Ireland.