The Tories had become a ruined party…
1726 CE
The Tories had become a ruined party and the career in England of Anglo-Irish pamphleteer Jonathan Swift had ended in August 1714 with the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George I.
Swift had withdrawn to Ireland, where he is to pass most of the remainder of his life.
After a period of seclusion in his deanery, Swift had gradually regained his energy and returned to verse, which he continues to write throughout the 1720s and early '30s, producing the impressive poem Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift, among others.
He had by 1720 also been displaying a renewed interest in public affairs.
In his Irish pamphlets of this period, he has come to grips with many of the problems, social and economic, now confronting Ireland.
His tone and manner vary from direct factual presentation to exhortation, humor, and bitter irony.
Swift blames Ireland's backward state chiefly on the blindness of the English government; but he also insistently calls attention to the things that the Irish themselves might do in order to better their lot.
Of his Irish writings, the Drapier's Letters (1724–25) and A Modest Proposal (1729) are the best known, and have earned him the status of an Irish Patriot.
The first is a series of letters attacking the English government for its scheme to supply Ireland with copper halfpence and farthings.
A Modest Proposal is a grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-spirited citizen suggests that Ireland's overpopulation and dire economic conditions could be alleviated if the babies of poor Irish parents were sold as edible delicacies to be eaten by the rich.
Swift's greatest satire, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, better known as Gulliver's Travels, had been published in November 1726.
It is uncertain when he began this work, but it appears from his correspondence that he was writing in earnest by 1721 and had finished the whole by August 1725.
Its success was immediate, with a total of three printings in 1726 and another in early 1727.
French, German, and Dutch translations had appeared in 1727 and pirated copies had been printed in Ireland.
Then, and since, it has succeeded in entertaining (and intriguing) all classes of readers.
Swift had returned to England once more in 1727 and stayed again with Alexander Pope, but the visit had been cut short when he received word that Esther Johnson, with whom he has maintained a close, but ambiguous, relationship, was dying.
Swift had rushed back home to be with her, and on January 28, 1728, Esther died.
Though he prayed at her bedside, even composing prayers for her comfort, Swift could not bear to be present at the end, but on the night of her death he had begun to write his The Death of Mrs. Johnson.
He was too ill to attend the funeral at St. Patrick's. (Many years later, a lock of hair, assumed to be Esther Johnson's, was found in his desk, wrapped in a paper bearing the words, "Only a woman's hair.")
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