Swift Thoughts

First published in 1983, Dean Swift is the concluding book in a series of three volumes providing a detailed exploration of the events of Swift’s life. The third volume follows Swift’s life and career from 1714 to 1745 and sets it against the public events of the age, paying close attention to political and economic change, ecclesiastical problems, social issues, and literary history. It traces Swift’s rise to becoming first citizen of Ireland and looks in detail at the composition, publication, and reception of Gulliver’s Travels, as well as many of Swift’s other works, both poetry and prose. It also explores Swift’s later years, his love affairs with Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, his complicated friendships with Pope, Lord Bolingbroke, and Archbishop King, and his declining health. Dean Swift is a hugely detailed insight into Swift’s life from 1714 until his death and will be of interest to anyone wanting to find out more about his life and works.

How do young scholars from the Arab world interact with English literature? Is literature relevant to their life? Can it help shape their reality? Is this affiliation new, or is there a pattern? This book poses some answers to these questions and more; it is ideal for university students and young intellectuals who seek further insight into world literature and literary theory. As this book shows, strong and courageous voices from the past, voices that transcend time and space, like Swift’s, must remain alive in the departments of English and world literature in this wasteland of globalization - a world dominated by cold science, materialism, and conflict. There is need for Swift to haunt us, for his ghost to wake us to the truth. Anarchist, anti-colonialist, nay-sayer, champion of the oppressed and conscious of the plight of women, Swift is the ultimate “therapeutic ironist”; what more can a pen do?

Explores the impact of the great satirist Jonathan Swift on other writers of the English Augustan tradition.

Jonathan Swift was the subject of gossip and criticism in his own time concerning his relations with women and his representations of them in his writings. For over twenty years he regarded Esther Johnson, "Stella," as "his most valuable friend," yet he is reputed never to have seen her alone. From his time to our own there has been speculation that the two were secretly married--since their relationship seemed so inexplicable then and now. For thirteen of the years that Swift seemed committed to Stella as the acknowledged woman in his life, he maintained a clandestine--but apparently also nonsexual--relationship with another woman, Esther Van Homrigh, or "Vanessa." Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women looks again at these much-examined relationships and at others that reveal Swift as a man who enjoyed the company of a number of women as pupils and as ministrants to his various needs. Swift, a man with a complex private life, was also a writer whose satiric portraits of women could be unsparing. While Swift often criticized women for frivolous pastimes and idle chatter, his most notorious texts on women image their bodies as loathsome: as he once wrote in a serious political tract, a woman is a "nauseous, unwholesome carcass." Such representations cross a line by showing a repugnance for women as a sex, the biological other. They have led, not surprisingly, to repeated charges of misogyny, an issue that Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women addresses at some length. This first book-length treatment of Swift and women comprehensively examines Swift's attitude toward women in all their manifestations in his work and life: as intimates, acquaintances, protégés, wives, mothers, nurses, disobedient daughters, young women who marry older men, and--finally--as poets and critics.

Thomas Swift married Elizabeth Dryden, niece of Sir Erasmus, the grandfather of the poet Dryden. By her he became the father of ten sons and four daughters. In the great rebellion he distinguished himself by a loyalty which was the cause of obvious complacency to his descendant. On one occasion he came to the governor of a town held for the king, and being asked what he could do for his Majesty, laid down his coat as an offering. The governor remarked that his coat was worth little. “Then,” said Swift, “take my waistcoat.” The waistcoat was lined with three hundred broad pieces—a handsome offering from a poor and plundered clergyman. On another occasion he armed a ford, through which rebel cavalry were to pass, by certain pieces of iron with four spikes, so contrived that one spike must always be uppermost (caltrops, in short). Two hundred of the enemy were destroyed by this stratagem. The success of the rebels naturally led to the ruin of this cavalier clergyman; and the record of his calamities forms a conspicuous article in Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy. He died in 1658, before the advent of the better times in which he might have been rewarded for his loyal services. His numerous family had to struggle for a living. The eldest son, Godwin Swift, was a barrister of Gray’s Inn at the time of the Restoration: he was married four times, and three times to women of fortune; his first wife had been related to the Ormond family; and this connexion induced him to seek his fortune in Ireland—a kingdom which at that time suffered, amongst other less endurable grievances, from a deficient supply of lawyers. Godwin Swift was made Attorney-General in the palatinate of Tipperary by the Duke of Ormond. He prospered in his profession, in the subtle parts of which, says his nephew, he was “perhaps a little too dexterous;” and he engaged in various speculations, having at one time what was then the very large income of 3000l. a year. Four brothers accompanied this successful Godwin, and shared to some extent in his prosperity. In January, 1666, one of these, Jonathan, married to Abigail Erick, of Leicester, was appointed to the stewardship of the King’s Inns, Dublin, partly in consideration of the loyalty and suffering of his family. Some fifteen months later, in April, 1667, he died, leaving his widow with an infant daughter, and seven months after her husband’s death, November 30, 1667, she gave birth to Jonathan, the younger, at 7, Hoey’s Court, Dublin.

Jonathan Swift, the essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric, is widely regarded as the foremost prose satirist of the English language, whose satirical novel ‘Gulliver's Travels’ remains one of the most enduring classics of English literature. This comprehensive eBook presents the complete works of Jonathan Swift, with numerous illustrations, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Swift's life and works * Concise introductions to the satires and other works * Images of how the books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * GULLIVER’S TRAVELS is illustrated with contemporary illustrations * Provides both the adapted 1726 and the authoritative 1735 versions of GULLIVER’S TRAVELS * Rare satires appearing for the first time in digital print * An exhaustive offering of political, religious and journalism works * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry * Easily locate the poems you want to read * Includes Swift's letters to ‘Stella’ - spend hours exploring the author’s personal correspondence * Features two biographies - discover Swift's literary life * Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse our other titles Please note: some obscure poems cannot appear in this eBook, being the result of more recent scholarship and so protected by copyright. Once these works enter the public domain, they will be added to the eBook as a free update. CONTENTS: The Satires A TALE OF A TUB THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS THE BICKERSTAFF-PARTRIDGE PAPERS THE SWEARER’S BANK GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, 1726 GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, 1735 A MODEST PROPOSAL AN EXAMINATION OF CERTAIN ABUSES A COMPLETE COLLECTION OF GENTEEL AND INGENIOUS CONVERSATION DIRECTIONS TO SERVANTS MINOR SATIRES The Sermons THREE SERMONS BROTHERLY LOVE AND OTHER SERMONS Other Religious Works LIST OF RELIGIOUS WORKS The Political Works DRAPIER’S LETTERS LIST OF POLITICAL WORKS The Historical Works THE HISTORY OF THE FOUR LAST YEARS OF THE QUEEN AN ABSTRACT OF THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND REMARKS ON THE CHARACTERS OF THE COURT OF QUEEN ANNE REMARKS ON LORD CLARENDON’S “HISTORY OF THE REBELLION” REMARKS ON BISHOP BURNET’S “HISTORY OF HIS OWN TIME” NOTES ON THE “FREEHOLDER” The Journalism CONTRIBUTIONS TO ‘THE TATLER’ CONTRIBUTIONS TO ‘THE EXAMINER’ CONTRIBUTION TO ‘THE SPECTATOR’ CONTRIBUTIONS TO ‘THE INTELLIGENCER’ The Poetry Collection THE POEMS OF JONATHAN SWIFT The Poems LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER The Memoir A JOURNAL TO STELLA The Biographies SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF DR. JONATHAN SWIFT by R. Phillips DEAN SWIFT by James McGee