The Barnes & Noble Review
Jonathan Swift lived from 1667 to 1745, dying just short of his seventy-eighth birthday. By then words had deserted the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. "His memory had been clouding for years," John Stubbs writes in this capacious biography, "and he lost the ability to find names." Swift's last words, reportedly to a servant, were "I am a fool." A fitting observation — clear, succinct, unsparing — from "the greatest of English prose satirists" as Ricardo Quintana called him in an introduction to the Modern Library edition of Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings.
It is for the imagined voyage of Lemuel Gulliver to Lilliput and beyond, of course, that Swift is best known. Though "A Modest Proposal" is more often quoted; this is the 1729 report in which a fictional bureaucrat explains how the surplus children of Ireland could be farmed for English diners: "A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends, and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will make a reasonable Dish." Like his compatriot Oscar Wilde, (how he would hate that comparison), Swift is a font of quotes. For example:
"He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."
" . . . after the first Bottle he is no disagreeable Companion."
"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."
"It is worse to need friends, than not to have them."
Such lines conjure up one Swift, the gimlet-eyed curmudgeon, while other writings reveal the misogynist, the egoist, the lover, the avenger. All of which materialize in Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel, John Stubbs's vigorous rendering of the Irish Anglican cleric who became the champion of an island that he detested and of a people whom he largely despised. "By the 1730s he was a hero and talisman in Dublin," Stubbs writes, "known commonly as 'the Patriot' while styling himself 'the king of the mob.' "But this radicalism, Stubbs emphasizes, "stemmed from . . . an extremely authoritarian, conservative outlook" according to which England's chief crime was not its colonization of Ireland but its exploitation of the kingdom.
This crucial distinction leads us into one political maze: There are many others. Swift, after all, lived in an empire that was convulsed by war and unrest, roiled by the Popish Plot and the Williamite succession, and much given to hanging, drawing and quartering. He jousted with battling Whigs and Tories, was a skillful courtier, an intimate of monarchs, a tormenter of the powerful. In addition, Swift's antecedents had been indelibly scarred by the brutality of the English Civil Wars. This is familiar ground for Stubbs (previously the author of Donne: The Reformed Soul and Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War), and his pithily elegant style makes it relatively easy going, even for the general reader. There may be a few detours too many — into the thickets of diocesan enmities, for example – but Stubbs enlivens his diligent narrative with occasionally startling portraits and images. Citing the perils of eighteenth-century childbirth, for instance, he writes that Swift's mother "faced the trial of the midwife's finger, as it searched her womb for a weak spot to tear the epidermis with a sharpened nail or thimble, and so speed up the birth." Then there is Queen Anne, on whom "seventeen pregnancies – all resulting in miscarriages or young deaths – took a heavy toll" and whose "anxieties grew in proportion to her corpulence and fragility." Indeed, women are central here, particularly the two with whom Swift was most intimate: Esther Johnson, his "Stella," and Esther Vanhomrigh, his "Vanessa." Scholars have for decades speculated on the relationships that inspired some of Swift's most playful and most passionate writing and Stubbs acknowledges the various opinions but wisely avoids embellishing them. When Swift writes to Esther Johnson "I wish my cold hand was in the warmest place," this biographer leaves it at that.
Stubbs does, however, return throughout the book to Swift the "near-abandoned, half-orphaned child" who at the age of three could read, at the age of six mastered Latin declensions and who later recalled his schooling as "Confinement ten hours' a day, to nouns and Verbs, the terror of the Rod, the bloody Noses, and broken Shins." The wounded child begets the sardonic genius? Stubbs knows better than to reduce his subject to such a cliché. He even concedes that Swift "ridiculed the idea of understanding writers through biography . . . the sort of approach recommended by idiotic 'moderns.' " No theory, certainly, can explain Swift — and at the end of this biography the reader may conclude that no one volume can contain him. There is simply too much there. The politics and religion (often interchangeable); the afflictions of the body, heart and mind; the enduring friendships with Alexander Pope, John Dryden (a distant cousin), John Gay, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison; the idea of England; the reality of Ireland. And all the words, even the last. For Swift, of course, wrote his own epitaph: Here lies the body
Of Jonathan Swift, S.T.D.,
Dean of this cathedral,
Where wild indignation
No more
Can tear his heart.
Go, traveller
And be like him, if you can,
Vigorous to his utmost
As liberty's avenger.
Anna Mundow, a longtime contributor to The Irish Times and The Boston Globe, has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications. Reviewer: Anna Mundow
The New York Times Book Review - James McNamara
In this excellent literary biography, Stubbs draws on extensive research to contextualize Swift's courtier's life within the hurly-burly of 18th-century foreign and domestic politics, also inspecting Swift's clerical life within the doctrinal struggles of the church…In his early chapters, Stubbs falls into a scholar's trap: oversharing hard-won research. He digresses too often, losing Swift in a blizzard of ancillary detail…That structural haze rapidly clears, however, and is redeemed by stellar prose, a firm narrative grip and nuanced historical and literary readings. Private yet performative, generous yet stingy, conservative yet rebellious, Swift was a knotty character. Stubbs brings an incisive intellect to the task of untangling him.
Publishers Weekly
10/03/2016
In this engaging, though at times excessively detailed, biography, Stubbs (Donne: The Reformed Soul) succeeds in portraying famed author Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) with all his contradictions. Swift, best known for Gulliver’s Travels, was an irreverent social critic and a moralist, the dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and “a socialite in the parlor.” Born in Dublin to displaced English parents, he would always insist he was English and, as Stubbs notes, saw no contradiction between urging the native Irish to Anglicize their language and customs and opposing English tyranny over Ireland. One of his day’s most prominent political writers, Swift supported the Anglican establishment yet felt an affinity with the poor, mentally ill, and oppressed, and his attitudes toward women could be, as Stubbs shows, both enlightened and repressive. Stubbs covers the English Civil War, which displaced Swift’s parents; the Glorious Revolution, which led Swift to move to England; and the ascension of George I, which sent him back to Ireland. He also touches on the animosity between Catholics and Protestants, the printing and bookselling industry, Swift’s literary peers, and much more. Stubbs’s descriptions are vivid, and his literary analyses exacting and thought-provoking, but one wishes he had been more selective in contextual detail. Nevertheless, Stubbs excels at showing how Swift became “the most notorious writer of his day.” Agent: Toby Eady, Toby Eady Associates (U.K.). (Jan.)
The Times
"One of the many virtues of John Stubb’s compendious, deeply researched and absorbing biography is that it illuminates the events not just of Swift’s life but of the world before and around him....In this superb biography, Stubbs succeeds in enabling us to understand the complexities and character of this greatest of writers."
Library Journal
01/01/2017
In 1688, Jonathan Swift was disciplined at Trinity College for insulting a junior dean and inciting tumults. He would continue that behavior for the rest of his life. This biography by Stubbs (John Donne: The Reformed Soul) places the tumultuous St. Patrick's Cathedral dean within his times, beginning with the role his loyalist grandfather played during the English Civil War. Through psychological probing of Swift's life, Stubbs also seeks to pluck out the heart of Swift's many contractions this book reveals: Irish patriot who denied his Irish birth; misogynist whom two women followed to Dublin; fastidious writer of scatological verses; conservative rebel, committed Tory who hated party politics; Anglophile who opposed English colonial rule in Ireland. Despite its length, this book does not supersede Irvin Ehrenpreis's three-volume work on Swift. Stubbs disappointingly offers little analysis of Swift's writings and seems tone deaf to the irony of Polite Conversation and Directions to Servants. VERDICT A generally sound if at times overlong introduction to Swift and his age, especially strong on historical and political background. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/16.]—Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro
MARCH 2018 - AudioFile
Derek Perkins narrates this biography of the author of GULLIVER’S TRAVELS with a distinguished air befitting a historical figure who genuinely wanted improve the culture he was living in. Listeners will enjoy the excitement and intrigue of Swift’s world while also appreciating Perkins’s matter-of-fact delivery. One is transported back to the early eighteenth century to discover that the problems and cultural issues of the time were not dissimilar to those we deal with today. Perkins is on par with his more famous literary subject as he describes with seeming ease and enjoyment a most interesting period in English life and literature. T.D. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-10-05
A resplendent biography of the “most notorious writer of his day.”There’s no shortage of books about the life of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), but this one might just dissuade others from writing another—if Leo Damrosch’s excellent 2013 biography didn’t already do so. (Stubbs acknowledges Damrosch’s achievement.) In this monumental biography, Stubbs (Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, 2011, etc.) presents a classic man-and-his-times narrative, recounting in remarkable detail the complex life Swift led as an orphan born in Dublin who lived mostly in England but returned to Ireland in 1713 as a “reluctant rebel.” He was fond of saying that he was “stolen from England when a child and brought over to Ireland in a band-box.” Stubbs’ Swift is a practical joker who rarely smiled and possessed a “commanding, patriarchal air.” Drawing extensively on Swift’s writings and the histories of the time, Stubbs recounts the author’s upbringing by a “well-connected family,” fine education, and employment in England as a secretary for a retired diplomat, Sir William Temple. It was then that he met the young Esther Johnson, who would be his friend for life and help him deal with his life-long vertigo, tinnitus, and nausea. Stubbs disputes rumors that he secretly married her. While in England, Swift demonstrated his “power as a fabulist” and master satirist, penning The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub. He begrudgingly returned to Dublin to serve as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he churned out anonymously written, scathing political pamphlets, the bleak and sardonic masterpiece A Modest Proposal, and Gulliver’s Travels, a “phenomenon.” Stubbs’ in-depth analysis of the vast cultural impact of Swift’s many works is impressive, as are his portraits of Swift’s literary acquaintances. This astute portrait of a complicated man who wanted to defend his homeland and to “vex the world rather than divert it” is truly masterful. A rich and sweeping story superbly told.
