‘Chiefly Disgusted with Modern History’: Swift and the Past

Everyone knows that Jonathan Swift advocated eating poor children in Ireland, though nowadays not everyone knows how or why. Similarly, that he wrote Gulliver’s Travels is obvious, but that he depicted the English Reformation as a feud over how to eat an egg is receding from popular consciousness. One might think that the language’s greatest satirist – and the European writer who, before Voltaire, prescribed ridicule as the only adequate response to globalisation – would enjoy a bit of a revival in an era of global religious militancy, rampant political corruption, and vast economic inequality. But it is easier and more popular to criticise others than oneself. Swift, like Gandhi (who admired his work), insisted on self-examination and self-correction. He was a moralist and, more than that, a cleric, and all too aware of the danger that radical action might inadvertently aggravate rather than relieve oppressions. His popularity will continue to suffer accordingly – despite the profound rewards of witnessing his misanthropy.

Swift’s reputation enjoyed a boom in the twentieth century when totalitarianism needed combating. Orwell was the greatest but not the only writer to recognise his effectiveness in this regard as one aspect of a mercurial, and by no means liberal-democratic, understanding of politics. Swift was never really lionised like one of his heroes, Sir Thomas More, but like More his faults have come under the revisionist microscope in the postmodern era. While More had (limited) involvement in actual religious persecution, Swift had none, but his rhetoric in defence of monarchy and established religion was highly inflammatory and that, for scholars like F. P. Lock and Ian Higgins, has been enough to indict him as a ‘reactionary’ or ‘extremist’. The ensuing debate has generated vibrant scholarship for over three decades now, and with Ashley Marshall’s Swift and History: Politics and the English Past it shows no sign of abating.

Almost all scholars agree that Swift’s profound gift for political satire and invective benefited from his passionate engagement with history, ancient and modern, and his dexterity in adapting it for immediate polemical purposes. He fumed with resentment over his grandfather’s sufferings as a royalist under the oppressions of the ‘Fanatics’ during the civil war – his animosity towards Puritanism and republicanism was not merely intellectual. These and similar passions fired his interpretations of Greek and Roman history as well as the European wars of religion, the development of English law, and the English conquest of Ireland. The subject of Swift and history has thus prompted several valuable short studies, but only now has it received book-length attention. The stakes are high, for Swift himself connected his love of history with his political identity. ‘Having been long conversant with the Greek and Roman authors, and therefore a lover of liberty I found myself much inclined to be what they called a Whig in politics’, he wrote, looking back over a decade to his entrance into public life, having become one of the most notorious Tories of his age.¹ Therein lies the crux of the interpretative challenge: not, as Marshall rightly insists, whether he we should call him Whig or Tory, but how precisely he fits into the ideological matrices in an era characterised by the emergence of party politics, which he despised.

Marshall is certainly up to the challenge. She has a thorough knowledge of Swift, his corpus and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, history, and politics. With her careful reconstruction of his moment in time, motivations, and audiences, she exemplifies the current vitality of literary history and historically informed criticism. Her writing is engaging and direct, and she brings independent judgement to every topic she addresses. Her argument is never timid and rarely gets lost in the details. And make no mistake, Swift provides enough material. His fragmentary history of England is shorter and more amateurish than Milton’s, but arguably better written and even less widely read or studied...