A brilliant satirist - Jonathan Swift

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A brilliant satirist

Jonathan Swift, son of the English lawyer Jonathan Swift the elder, was born in Dublin, Ireland, on November , . He grew up there in the care of his uncle before attending Trinity College at the age of fourteen, where he stayed f 939e41j or seven years, graduating in . In that year, he became the secretary of Sir William Temple, an English politician and member of the Whig party. She proved his faithful and ideal companion as the letters posthumously collected in "A Journal to Stella". In , he took religious orders in the Church of Ireland and then spent a year as a country parson. He then spent further time in the service of Temple before returning to Ireland to become the chaplain of the earl of Berkeley. Meanwhile, he had begun to write satires on the political and religious corruption surrounding him, working on "A Tale of a Tub", which supports the position of the Anglican Church against its critics on the left and the right, and "The Battle of the Books", which argues for the supremacy of the classics against modern thought and literature. He also wrote a number of political pamphlets in favour of the Whig party. In he went to London to campaign for the Irish church but was unsuccessful. After some conflicts with the Whig party, mostly because of Swift's strong allegiance to the church, he became a member of the more conservative Tory party in .

Unfortunately for Swift, the Tory government fell out of power in and Swift, despite his fame for his writings, fell out of favour. Swift, who had been hoping to be assigned a position in the Church of England, instead returned to Dublin, where he became the dean of St. Patrick's. During his brief time in England, Swift had become friends with writers such as Alexander Pope, and during a meeting of their literary club, the Martinus Scriblerus Club, they decided to write satires of modern learning. After his return to Ireland, Swift became a staunch supporter of the Irish against English attempts to weaken their economy and political power, writing pamphlets such as "A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture", which urged a complete boycott of English imports, and "The Drapier's Letters", a series of pamphlets Swift wrote in an assumed character, M.B. Drapier, attacking the government's proposal for a new coinage which would have increased the poverty of Ireland.