Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish clergyman who spent his thirties in London writing for the Tory ministry, hoped for an English bishopric, and was sent back to Dublin as Dean of St Patrick’s, where he stayed for the rest of his life and became Ireland’s defender against English policy. A Tale of a Tub made his name, Gulliver’s Travels made him immortal, and A Modest Proposal is the most savage twelve pages in English. The Journal to Stella shows the private man. He left his money to found a madhouse, since, he wrote, no nation needed one so much.