Jonathan Swift, "Master of Controversy"

john stubbs's subtitle eloquently captures a fundamental truth about Jonathan Swift, in many ways a deeply conservative man who was compelled by circumstances to take up his pen in bitter opposition to the establishment. Swift's halcyon years were 1710–14, when he served as leading propagandist for Queen Anne's last ministry and fancied himself a ministerial insider, a role that suited his ideological disposition far better than that of oppositional gadfly. F. P. Lock's conclusion rings true: "By temperament and conviction he was conservative and authoritarian; an accident of history made him a patron and champion of liberty" in the last quarter century of his active life.¹ Swift is best known now as the trenchant author of Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), as well as the Drapier who wrote so boldly against English exploitation and abuse of Ireland. In popular imagination, Swift is all rebel with little reluctance, a fearless advocate of liberty against tyranny; in reality, he more often expressed anxiety about populism than about absolutism, sounding warnings about the dangers of overmuch freedom and defending the prerogatives of the monarch and the Church of England.

Stubbs mostly seems to appreciate this inner conflict, as his titular epithet suggests, though he highlights it surprisingly little in his actual coverage of Swift's life and ideas. The reversal in Swift's political fortunes and political outlook after Anne's death and his exile to Ireland in 1714 is explained but not particularly emphasized—perhaps regrettable, given the centrality of that reversal to Swift's entire sense of the world and his place within it. In his final paragraph, Stubbs at last alludes to his chosen epithet, pointing out that, though Swift became a "fighter and an avenger," it never theless "took a lot to make him turn on England, the kingdom he always claimed as his rightful home" (639). Swift's rebellion, then, is in Stubbs's telling a matter of his position vis-à-vis the country into which he wished he had been born, and in which he had hoped to find a permanent home. Stubbs's account has comparatively little to say about the partisan battle between Whig and Tory, about Swift's devastating sense of loss when the Tories failed to consolidate their power in the wake of Anne's death, or about his frustrated response to Whig ascendancy in the early years of George I's reign. This is not, of course, a political biography, but understanding the true nature of Swift's "reluctant rebellion" requires serious engagement with those evolving political circumstances and his attempts—as late as Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift—to reckon with them.

That said, Stubbs's Jonathan Swift is an impressive piece of work. Swift has had more than his fair share of biographers, from Orrery (1751) to Irvin Ehrenpreis (1962–83) and, most recently, Leo Damrosch (2013) and Eugene Hammond (2016). Few fundamentals have gone uncontested. He has been described as a charitable benefactor and an egotist, as a conjured spirit and a hypocrite reversed; he is portrayed sometimes as a ruthless conqueror of the adoring Esther Johnson ("Stella") and Esther Vanhomrigh ("Vanessa"), and sometimes as a beleaguered but well-intentioned member of a love triangle only barely of his making. Biographers have disagreed about, among many other things, his relations with women, his religious convictions, his politics, and his mental health. The challenges for the biographer do not stop there. Swift was notoriously slippery and ironic, and even in that most intimate source, the so-called Journal to Stella, he is evasive. His own accounts of his life are many, and each is in its way untrustworthy. And because his vast canon comprises works that are highly topical, making his life and output comprehensible requires substantial explication of contextual circumstances—often political circumstances that are complex enough to leave even the best historians of the period a bit daunted. Stubbs has managed to offer a relatively full picture of...