Jonathan Swift

(1667 - 1745)

Timothy H. Wilson

Portrait of Jonathan Swift (1710)Charles JervasNational Portrait Gallery, London

Jonathan Swift was a master of "satire", which he defined in the following way: "Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it." We can also say that satire is a way of presenting and criticizing the follies of society while avoiding the censure of that society. We see a reference to this need for "political speech" early on in Gulliver's Travels: “People in Power [are] very watchful over the press” (28).

Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) finds a place on my list of 101 Greatest Books of the Western Canon. In addition, three of his other works are included in my list of 1001 Great Books of the Western Canon:

- A Tale of the Tub (1694-97)
- Battle of the Books (1697)
- A Modest Proposal (1729)

Course Materials

- On Swift's Gulliver's Travels

In this novel, Swift uses satire as a way to protest the developments of modernity that had taken place in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Swift does so in deference to an older tradition, one reaching back to Socrates and Plato. Our weakness in terms of virtue and reason is seen in sharp contrast with these ancient models.

In this sense, Swift takes the side of the “Ancients” in the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns”.