This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

Swift was one of the most prolific pamphleteers and journalists of his lifetime. One of Swift’s great strengths as a pamphleteer was his keen awareness of what might be described as his target readership. Appreciating that it is easier to confirm rather than alter readers’ opinions, Swift played on the prejudices of his readership. This chapter untangles the numerous and varied polemical strategies that Swift harnessed in his political writing, including ‘parallel history’, hyperbole, and character assassination. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of A Modest Proposal (1729), suggesting that here Swift employed many of the same polemical devices that he had used during his years as a pamphleteer.

For Swift, sickness and health were personal, moral, and political. This chapter focuses on Swift’s articulation of disgust, in particular the disgust towards the female body that readers encounter in poems such as ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1732) and ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed’ (1734), as well as Gulliver’s revulsion at the monstrous Brobdingnagian breast. Swift depicted a sickeningly dirty world for a culture and class for whom politeness, civility and refinement were associated with cleanliness. In their own disgust and repulsion at Swift’s filthy rudeness, readers resist his satire’s collapse of dichotomies. The moral and the physical converge in his work as antinomies of health and sickness collide with oppositions of purity and filth.

From the start of his career, Jonathan Swift was caught up in debates about the relative value of ancient and modern cultures. Swift’s first masterpieces, ‘The Battel of the Books’ and A Tale of a Tub (both pub. 1704), were brilliant satirical interventions on the side of ancient cultures against the moderns. This chapter unpicks the density of allusion in these works, explaining how they relate to the broader ‘quarrel’ between the ancients and moderns. A final section traces the legacy of this dispute in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Swift invokes ancient Sparta as a model for social integrity.

This chapter introduces the so-called ‘profession of letters’ during Swift’s lifetime: an idealised mode of study that included reading and conversing as much as publishing. Like his friend Alexander Pope, Swift defined his writing against a culture of production dependent on cheap popularity, the machinations of booksellers, and government bribery. Swift took aim against this culture in A Tale of a Tub (1704), which bristles with paratexts parodying standard-issue front matter. Unlike Pope, who implicitly acknowledged his status within the commercial print culture of the early eighteenth century, Swift, this chapter argues, always maintained ambivalence towards the literary marketplace.

Swift corresponded with over two hundred of his contemporaries across England and Ireland from a wide variety of social backgrounds and situations. Some of his very best letters are written to women friends, most significantly, Esther Johnson (Stella) and Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa). His letters include first-hand accounts of the last four years of English and Irish politics and commentary on the publication of his major works. They also provide painful insight into the declining health of his later years, as when he writes of his ailments in brutally honest terms. This chapter explores the surviving archive of Swift’s correspondence and the evolving style, character, and contents of these documents.

This chapter provides a helpful primer to Swift’s relationship with the early eighteenth-century book trade. The first section focuses on the formats, sizes, prices, and lengths of Swift’s works, most of which were first published separately and not in anthologies. The second section examines imprints, in particular those of ‘trade publishers’, and how these imprints could be used as cover for anonymous and risky publications. The third and final section looks at the issue of copyright and how it shaped Swift’s decisions when publishing in London and Dublin. As the chapter shows, Swift showed loyalty to book-trade members who showed loyalty to him, including those in Ireland.

Throughout his long career, Swift produced a wide range of what we might advisedly call familiar verses. This chapter begins by looking at the light-hearted poems that Swift wrote for a small, private readership, in which he jests with self-mockery and absurdity. The second section explores the poems that Swift wrote during his stints at Market Hill. Light verse can be serious, this chapter argues, and Swift’s best writing can be both amusing and weighty.

During his lifetime, Swift was a national figure in Ireland: the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Drapier, the Hibernian Patriot. Following his death, Swift became an inescapable presence in the thought of Irish writers of many different political persuasions. This chapter charts Swift’s posthumous reputation in Ireland. Whereas English writers such as Thackeray and Macaulay denied Swift’s Irish identity altogether, many Irish writers claimed Swift as one of their own. This chapter presents a broad survey of how Swift’s Irishness has been received by Irish writers including Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Austin Clarke, Bendam Kennelly, and Derek Mahon.

Swift wrote the most widely reprinted and profound fictional travel account in all literature. This chapter suggests that Swift’s Anglo-Irish status, and repeated travel between England and Ireland, shaped his perspective on travel. The first section of the chapter focuses on Swift’s own travels across the Irish Sea and on Irish roads. The second section looks into the Grand Tour and Swift’s reading of travel narratives. The third section shows how Swift’s reading of first-hand travelogues shaped the larger structure of Gulliver’s Travels. Swift is typical of his period in regarding travel writing as equally enlightening and suspect. He is atypical in being uncertain about his own place in the world, both geographically and professionally. However, it is that very uncertainty that grants Swift the ironic distance necessary to transform the popular form of the travel narrative into a timeless commentary on the human condition.

Swift was, in modern parlance, a Dubliner: he was born in the Irish capital, died there, and for more than half of his life kept his principal residence there. But he was bitterly critical of the urban world around him, repeatedly declaring his preference for the Irish countryside or for English hospitality in place of the depressing reality of life in the heart of Dublin. This chapter explores Swift’s troubled relationship with the city of his birth, looking at its social and political make-up during his lifetime, and how he portrayed the city in his writings.

This chapter focuses on Swift’s reception in eighteenth-century Germany. The first section focuses on German translations of A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels; an eight-volume anthology of Satyrische und ernsthafte Schriften von Dr. Jonathan Swift was published between 1756 and 1766, which helped secure Swift’s place in the literary canon. Alongside these translations were creative imitations, which are the focus of the second section. The strongest contender for the title of ‘German Swiftʼ, this chapter argues, is Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, better known as Jean Paul (1763–1825), who would jocularly describe himself as a thief who had freely pilfered from the Dean’s quarry.

This chapter explores Swift’s vexed relationship with political partisanship. Swift was both a participant in and a commentator on party politics and this chapter considers both his participation and his commentary. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first sets out the political background during Swift’s years in England and considers his role as a pamphleteer and journalist. The second examines his gloomy assessment of partisanship, which remained a common feature of his writing from beginning to end. The third and final section traces the legacy of Swift’s writings on party – particularly his notion of a ‘national party’ – through the writings of his friend and political ally Lord Bolingbroke.

The chapter charts the topography of English imaginative writing in the period leading up the publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726. A substantial opening section focuses on works for which Swift’s literary circle were responsible, including works by his fellow Scriblerians as well as Matthew Prior, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele. The three following sections focus, respectively, on significant publications in prose, poetry, and drama that Swift would have noticed.

Swift’s world was a material one, influenced by his experiences of the institutionalisation of British imperialism, mercantile capitalism, science, medicine, philosophy, the book trade, party politics, and aesthetics. This chapter focuses on a single category of material culture of especial importance in Swift’s writings: consumer goods. The early part of this chapter sets out the essential background on the ‘consumer revolution’ in the early eighteenth century, before addressing its influence on Swift’s writings: in particular the pamphlets concerned with Irish manufacturing, and his fascination with the material culture of women’s dressing rooms.

Swift obviously built his writings on some of the traditions of high culture, such as the classical literature of Greek and Rome, but he also drew on an alternative heritage deriving from less august sources. This chapter provides a concise account of the uses Swift made in his writings of some topics and forms that stood outside the mainstream of polite literature in his day. This includes sections on his hoaxes and parodies; his interactions with the material and practices of Grub Street; his use of the street ballad form; his treatment of daily, chiefly urban, life; and his description of popular entertainments in Gulliver.

This chapter explores the uneasy relationship between Gulliver’s Travels and scholarship on the development of the English novel during the eighteenth century. The chapter argues that to approach the miscellaneous Gulliver’s Travels with a rigid and absolute conception of genre is to overlook Swift’s engagement with a range of new and old fictional modes. Placing Swift in context means recognising the doubtful applicability to Gulliver of retrospectively formulated assumptions about the novel, including consistency of character. The final section of the chapter looks beyond Gulliver to consider the novelistic qualities of A Tale of a Tub and the lesser-known Memoirs of Capt. John Creichton.

Despite his reputation for misanthropy, Swift was a clubbable man. Many of Swift’s writings emerged from his associational contexts. This chapter begins with a section on the clubs that shaped Swift’s early writings, including the Kit-Cat and the October Club. The next section shifts to the two clubs of which Swift was a member, the Saturday Club and the Brothers Club, and the activities he engaged in as a member. The final section looks at the meetings of the Scriblerus Club and its association with Robert Harley. Swift’s involvement with clubs was shaped by his enthusiasm to be considered one of the ministerial elite, but in time the expense and size of the Brothers Club faded his enjoyment. In the Scriblerus meetings he found a much cosier association in which shared literary interests were more important than political allegiance and in which real and lasting friendships could flourish.

This chapter disentangles some of the threads that linked history, demography, and ethnicity in Swift’s imagination. The first part of the chapter looks at the predominant theory of English ethnicity during Swift’s lifetime: the notion that the modern English people were direct descendants of the Anglo Saxons, who were themselves descended from the Gothic peoples of antiquity. The second part considers Swift’s attitude towards the native Irish people. And the final section addresses the treatment of the Yahoos in the fourth voyage of Gulliver’s Travels, in which, it seems, conventional racial tropes dissolve into broad-bottomed misanthropy.

This chapter examines Swift’s complex relationship to colonialism. Arguing that we cannot understand Swift’s anti-colonialism as part of what we might think of as some kind of progressive or liberatory project, the chapter explores the seeming inconsistency of his contemptuous attitude towards colonised peoples (particularly the ‘Savage Irish’). The colonisation and oppression of Ireland, and his complex position as both beneficiary and subject of it, is important to Swift’s writings. But this background also makes it difficult to pin down precise ideological positions or find straightforward political analogies or critiques in his works. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of Gulliver’s Travels, situating it in the broader context of debates around colonialism