Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a writer and Anglican cleric. He was born, raised, and educated in Ireland. With the Glorious Revolution, he moved to England and became secretary to Sir William Temple, obtained an MA at Oxford, and took Holy Orders for the Church of Ireland. Following Temple’s death, he failed to secure an ecclesiastical appointment to his liking in England and so returned to Ireland, where eventually he became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. A friend of Thomas Sheridan, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot, he became one of the leading literary figures of the period. He is best known for his satirical essays and fiction, such as The Battle of the Books, A Tale of a Tub, and Gulliver’s Travels.
In this interview, Dr. Dutton Kearney will discuss his pick of five of Jonathan Swift’s books.
Dutton Kearney is an associate professor of English at Hillsdale College. He previously taught at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee where he was awarded Professor of the Year in 2008. He teaches eighteenth century literature, contemporary literature, and courses in theology and literature. He is the editor of the Ignatius Press edition of Gulliver’s Travels and has published several essays on Jonathan Swift. He is the director of Hillsdale College’s Visiting Writers Program and the director of the College’s new Creative Writing Honors Program.
- A Modest Proposal
by Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift - The Battle of the Books
by Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub
by Jonathan Swift - The Drapier's Letters
by Jonathan Swift
...and some additional recommendations... - Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-In and Jonathan Swift: Our Dean
by Eugene Hammond - Jonathan Swift: His Life and World
by Leo Damrosch
What were the main events of Swift’s life?
He was born in 1667. Just 20 years earlier, England had been embroiled in a civil war. In 1649, they killed the king. With the regicide, there was a vacuum of power and Cromwell stepped in. After Cromwell died, his sons took over but did not really know the art of governance. Suddenly, London was full of regret for having killed Charles I. His brother, Charles II, who had fled to France, was brought back for the Restoration of the Crown.
Swift was born seven years later. He grew up in the household of Sir William Temple, Charles II's Secretary of State.
The Restoration was meant to lay a firm foundation so that England could get on with its business. Unfortunately, Charles II was not an ideal king. He had eleven illegitimate children and did not live up to the high standards expected of a king.
Whenever there is disappointment, often the literature of the time will turn to satire.
In the previous generation, John Dryden had nurtured high hopes and was going to write the British epic. The expectation was that, with Charles II, England was going to get back on track after the Civil War and the regicide. That was not the case.
Swift, therefore, was moving into a period of political turmoil, stasis, and satire. He ended up becoming the greatest satirist in Britain and Ireland, if not the English language.
"As the Dean of St. Patrick's, he found that he had an enormous influence on politics: by making appeals to people’s conscience rather than by passing laws in parliament."
He sought positions in England and helped Sir William Temple in what we now call lobbying. However, he was not successful and settled for placements in Ireland. Are there any other significant events during his ecclesiastical career?
In that period, a man had three choices. He could go either to the court, the church, or the countryside.
In this last case, he would build a garden on his country estate, just as Swift's friend, Alexander Pope did on the estate he had bought with the money made from his translations of Homer.
Swift was friends with people in all areas and had his eye on becoming an Anglican bishop. He had friends in Lord Oxford, Viscount Bolingbroke, and in Dublin Castle, which is within walking distance of St. Patrick's Cathedral.
However, his hopes were dashed in 1712 with the death of Queen Anne.
As head of the Church of England, she would assign the bishoprics. Swift believed he would receive preferment and had asked Temple for assistance. However, that all collapsed with her death.
In the meantime, he had built many relationships over in Dublin Castle.
Ireland was a territory of Great Britain and did not have its own parliament or king. Everything was handled in London.
When he did not become a Bishop in England, he returned to Ireland reluctantly.
However, as the Dean of St. Patrick's, he found that he had an enormous influence on politics: by making appeals to people’s conscience rather than by passing laws in parliament.
" 'Gulliver' means to trick (gull) by means of the truth (vere). So, Lemuel Gulliver is one who is beloved by God (Lemuel) and who tricks by means of the truth. He tricks us about our very nature."
In many of these literary works, Swift engages in political and social debates of the day. Was he more of a political animal or a clergyman?
That is an interesting question.
We have nine of his sermons, maybe even twelve (the authenticity of three is questionable). There is not one joke in any of those nine sermons. There is no satire whatsoever. They are very straightforward.
It seems, therefore, that he had a genuine concern for the care of souls and did want to introduce any confusion in his sermons.
In satire, the whole point of the joke is to say the opposite of what you mean. He definitely did not do that in his sermons.
As to politics, there are instances, such as The Drapier's Letters in which he addresses a specific political situation. Gulliver’s Travels is more of a general satire and works toward a political philosophy.
So, he engaged a little in practical politics but resided more in political philosophy. Religion and the formation of the clergy were always dear to his heart.
Swift was a friend of various important English writers, such as Pope and John Gay. Where does Swift fit into the more general movement within English literature at that time?
For one thing, often he wrote anonymously.
Gulliver’s Travels was published anonymously. He got in touch with the publisher, George Faulkner, and dropped the manuscript off at his doorstep.
Faulkner made a fortune. However, Gulliver's Travels was written by Lemuel Gulliver.
Lemuel means one who is beloved of God and is pronounced Gulli-veer. We know this from Pope’s Dunciad, where 'drapier' and 'Gulliver' rhyme with one another.
'Gulliver' means to trick (gull) by means of the truth (vere). So, Lemuel Gulliver is one who is beloved by God (Lemuel) and who tricks by means of the truth. He tricks us about our very nature.
Swift takes this narrative device from Thomas More, whose Utopia is written by Raphael (i.e. a healer sent from God) Hythloday (i.e. a speaker of nonsense). So, Swift inserts himself within that satirical tradition.
He really rejoiced that his bishop, Archbishop Marsh, with whom he did not get along very well, told him one day that, in his opinion, Lemuel Gulliver was not a real person. Swift really ate that up.
He also published A Modest Proposal and The Drapier's Letters anonymously.
Swift was part of the literary movement of the day. He was not well-known to the public as, say, Pope, Arbuthnot, or Gay, whose The Beggar's Opera was a massive hit. However, he was the centre and locus of all these other individuals. He helped create this literary circle that dominated English literature until 1743 at least and whose influence lasted up until the Romantics.
As you have already mentioned, Swift was a political activist, satirist, and polemicist. However, he did not fit neatly into the political factions of the United Kingdom. He described himself as “a Whig in a politics” on account of his love for liberty, but a High-Churchman or a Tory on account of his religious beliefs. Was he a hybrid, with a foot in each faction?
Yes, but not in a manipulative way. Swift was always Swift, whereas the parties shifted a bit.
He was always a Tory in matters of religion because it cannot be changed. There has to be a hierarchy and the liturgy needs to be somewhat permanent.
In politics, he did love liberty. He probably prized it more than his other colleagues.
Liberty does not tend to flourish under a very strong monarch and a weak parliament. Swift liked the way in which Parliament could limit the king. The whole problem with Charles I was that, when the nobles would not give him money, he decided to just start appropriating it. That is why they pushed back and he was deposed and killed.
In one of his letters, Swift states that the king wants power, the nobles want money, and the populace wants freedom. In his view, we should keep these three in tension with one another.
It appears, therefore, that he shifts from Whig to Tory and then back again. Actually, he is striking a balance. The nobles want to increase their power and station. That would reduce the king's power and the people's liberty. So, there needs to be a corrective that rebalances that, and so on and so forth.
What were Swift’s views on the Catholic Church?
When he was ordained, he was not a fan of Catholics as a people. He wanted to be a bishop in England but was assigned, not to a city such as Belfast or Dublin, but to Carrickfergus, near Belfast.
As it turned out, he found that he could get along with the Anglicans and Catholics but not with the other denominations.
By the time he is assigned to be the Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, he has a good relationship with the Catholics. In fact, he ends up being their main representative in Ireland before London.
One thing to keep in mind is that, in many of his works, he writes expressively against papists.
According to A Modest Proposal, one of the benefits of people eating their child is that it will reduce the number of papists.
When he speaks of papists in the context of the eighteenth-century, he is not expressing a dislike of Catholics, Marian devotion, rosaries, or Mass-going. He is referring to those whose political allegiance is to the pope rather than the king and worries about insurrection.
Certain Protestant factions were strongly against Catholics for being Catholics. However, when it comes to Swift and his circle, especially in politics, anti-papism denoted a concern that Catholics would not obey the laws promulgated by the king.
There were reasons for this. There was the Popish Plot. This was revealed to be a hoax. Nevertheless, people were worried that there was going to a Guy Fawkes Part Two, with Catholics blowing up Parliament on the pope’s orders. This popular sentiment was used to maintain a sense of paranoia. However, Swift is making a political assertion, not a spiritual or religious one.
What drew you to become a Swiftie (of Jonathan, not Taylor)?
Well, I was a Swiftie up until Speak Now, but I am not sure what she is doing now. We lived in Nashville for a while and had a daughter who really enjoyed her. So, we went to one of her concerts.
I am a late convert from atheism. When I converted, I obtained a master’s in theology from the University of Dallas to find out what I had gotten myself into. The formation was wonderful.
One of my professors had written his dissertation on Henri de Lubac. He said that he really enjoyed reading the same Greek texts as De Lubac, but that reading the French was tough. He wished that he had chosen instead one of the ressourcement theologians who had written in English.
I thought that I should study someone who had written in English, knew the classics, and was funny. Swift checked all those boxes.
All the books that you have selected belong to the genre in which Swift excelled most: satire. How would you rate his poetry or epistolary writings, such as A Journal to Stella?
His poetry is okay. He told Alexander Pope, “You say in in two lines what it takes me eight to say.” He was right. He was not a great poet. John Dryden was his cousin and said, “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” That put a chip on Swift's shoulder. He did not like to admit the truth about his poetic abilities.
A Journal to Stella is fascinating. It is a personal, intimate letter to another individual.
His poems are not too bad. You can tell that he is working on them and crafting them. I should not dismiss all of them. There is “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” “On Poetry: A Rhapsody,” “The Beasts’ Confession to the Priest,” which is set up as a dialogue between body and soul. Then, he writes birthday poems to Stella. He can float in and out of innuendo, allusion, Latin, straightforward English, and shorthand. His poetry reveals a really playful side of him.
This morning, I read a letter from Pope. He tells how he and a friend went over to Dean Swift’s place to talk. Swift asked if they had come for a free dinner, as if the Dean of St. Patrick's were there to feed them. They protested that they just wanted to talk to him. “Fine,” he said, “Alright, we can get you two lobsters or just one.” He went through all the options and catalogued the cost of each with a straight face. Pope and his friend were shocked as he outlined all this. Then, he gave them money and told them to leave.
For Swift, this was just a grand joke. The problem with reading Swift is that he is very serious. He does not smile at all nor laugh at any of his jokes. You wonder whether he is joking.
He does this in his satires too because satire has a hint of truth.
Nor does he pour out his heart in a letter or A Journal to Stella. He is still playing around with a mask and a persona.
It may never be possible to get to the real Swift. Maybe you can 95-98% of his person, but he holds a lot close to the vest.
Swift is very much a writer who engages the debates and issues of the day. Nevertheless, he often seems to be criticising issues that are still to the fore today, 300 years later. Is this the case?
Definitely. I am teaching a course on A Tale of a Tub. Its basic argument is that there is a severe, theological problem with people’s understanding of the spirit, and that this theological problem has its origins in bad philosophy. People use the language of the immaterial to talk about the spirit but apply it and act as if the soul were material.
Swift traces this all the way back to the Presocratics, whose materialism is neutralised by Aristotle but reintroduced by Bacon. Descartes picks up on Bacon and then Hobbes picks up on that tradition. Swift is right in the middle of this.
He points out that, if the soul is made out of matter, we do not have a higher claim on our soul. Rather, we shall behave as if the here and now is all there is.
This is a fundamental problem or question. How you live depends very much on whether you believe your soul is material or rather the form of your body, immaterial, and something that is not really yours.
Someone like Dante will say, “If the body leads your soul, welcome to hell. If your soul leads your body, welcome to purgatory and heaven.”
This problem never changes. Swift was prescient in showing us the entire intellectual lineage of this movement.
In our age, we can no longer talk about the immaterial. We do not have the necessary vocabulary. In Swift’s time that vocabulary was in the act of disappearing.
1.
The first book you have selected is A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729). Swift satirises British policy and rationalist social theory by proposing, with a straight face, that the poor sell their children as food to the rich. Have you chosen this book first because it is disturbingly close to some current policies?
I have not even thought about that. In theory, it ought not to be because Ireland now has its own government.
I was thinking of abortion, which is widespread today.
A Modest Proposal is offered as an alternative to abortion. The poor had too many children. The way to eradicate abortion would be to consume the children who would have been aborted.
A Modest Proposal is not about abortion per se but the dignity of the human person. There is something good about the writer. He pretends to be this protector who writes for the universal improvement of mankind. He wants to help the Irish out. They have too many children, who turn into beggars and thieves. He offers an absurd policy to eradicate that problem.
As he often does in a satire, Swift literalizes a metaphor. Ireland did not have a political voice. Every decision was made in London. Due to high rents and a lack of opportunities, its population was starving to death. Through starvation, you eat yourself: your body eats itself. Swift literalizes that metaphor and proposes turning the children of the poor into a commodity.
This idea about children getting in the way of one’s financial gain has become a rationale for abortion as a form of birth control in our time.
However, Swift is not anticipating that this will happen because of widespread impoverishment. He is describing what goes on whenever we do not have any respect for those made in the image and likeness of God.
Over the course of the essay, he calls women breeders and compares them to sheep, cattle, and livestock. He takes away their humanity so that you just see them as matter, to be consumed for food.
The dignity of the human person is one of this essay’s subjects.
2.
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is no book for children, even though it is often treated as such or adapted for the screen. What are the main themes of Gulliver’s Travels?
Gulliver goes to a place where people are twelve times smaller than he. Then he goes to a place where they are twelve times larger. Thereafter, he goes to a place where everything is run on scientific materialism and a sort of Baconian rationalism. In the fourth part, there are the Yahoos, who are half man and half beast, and the Houyhnhnms (which means perfection of nature).
Are the Houyhnhnms an ideal, and the Yahoos the complete opposite of that ideal? Many believe that Swift was so angry about everything that was going on that he thought human beings are just Yahoos.
Much is taken out when it is adapted for children. There is a lot of dramatic fun to be had with a giant among little people, or a little person among giants. However, Part Three is difficult to adapt. So, it is often left out in the anthologies, where you only get Liliput, Brobdingnag, and the Houyhnhnms. Only recently, in the Norton. Anthologies, has Part Three been reinserted.
Swift published Gulliver’s Travels seven years after Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Is it a satirical critique of Dafoe’s travel writing and his defence of atomistic individualism and self-sufficiency?
Definitely. Swift began it as a tongue-in-cheek critique of Defoe’s scant attention to the offices of necessities. For example, where does one go to the bathroom on an isolated island? So, there is an overemphasis of that sort of thing in Gulliver’s Travels.
In one scene, there are also two whole paragraphs from a mariner’s manual on sailing. There is no real application, just a copy and paste.
Swift would have enjoyed the religious narrative of Robinson Crusoe. However, Swift wondered about what realistic travel writing would look like and he has a lot of fish to fry. He did not just accept Crusoe’s relationship with Friday, though Defoe's novel has been read as a novel about religious conversion.
Some read Robinson Crusoe as a proposal of a Hobbesian society, where self-reliant individuals build society contractually, without any antecedents. In other words, the individual takes precedence over society. Some read Swift as opposing this and arguing that societies, their culture, and history precede the individual.
Swift was a close reader of Hobbes’ Leviathan. His focus in on the individualism of a war of all against all. rather than the individual’s relation to society. He is all for individual flourishing.
3.
If Swift is, as you have described him, “the very last of the Renaissance humanists,” it is obvious on which side he is fighting in the next work you have selected: The Battle of the Books. Can you explain the battle to which the title refers: the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns?
The librarian at St. James’ Library puts Duns Scotus next to Aristotle. Then, it is gloves off. All the books end up dividing between the ancients and the moderns and start fighting with one another, say Homer against Dryden.
For example, Aristotle shoots an arrow at Bacon, who ducks, with the arrow going right over his head and piercing Descartes, who disappears into his own vortex. This is Swift’s way of saying that we still have Bacon with us.
In general, the ancients defeat the moderns across the board, especially when it comes to poets.
Interestingly, the godess of dullness chases down a translator of Horace, Thomas Creech. His translation of Lucretius was enormously influential. Swift, who could read the Latin on his own and did not really need it, loved it. However, Creech’s translation of Horace was not good at all. Creech pursues Horace on horse, but it is really the Goddess Dulness disguised as Horace. When Creech catches up, he is dispatched.
The reasons for reading an ancient text are one of the subtexts of The Battle of the Books.
Do we read it for its historical value? To know how people used to think, even though we have progressed beyond their beliefs?
If we historicize it, we take away its spiritedness: its capacity to talk to us, to say something to us now, to offer counsel and insight.
Swift believes in that capacity. The new dispensation, however, believes the moderns are better and brackets off all the ancients. This leads to the rise of the scholar.
I have an edition of John Ogilby's translation of Virgil’s Georgics. The opening page contains twelve lines of Virgil’s poetry. In subsequent editions, there are ony four lines because the verse is buried in footnotes.
The Battle of the Books asks who will mediate the ancients to us and how will they do so. If we do reduce the ancients to historical contingency, maybe the philosophical materialism, that we imagined had been dealth with by the Presocratics and Aristotle’s Metaphysics, will have a resurgence a constitute the foundation of a new materialism.
At the centre of The Battle of the Books is the allegory of the spider and the bee? Is it still pertinent today?
Yes, and a generation or two later Matthew Arnold thought so too.
I teach at Hillsdale College. We have a core curriculum that students embrace with varying degrees of joy. Two years of classes are already determined for them. However, laying that foundation is important.
The bee goes out into the field, takes a little pollen from this flower, a little from that one, learns the lay of the land, and then comes back. Then, we make honey and candles from what the bee has produced. The bee gives us sweetness and light because it has been learning from so many different sources. This is the image that Arnold uses in Culture and Anarchy.
The spider, on the other hand, does not want to venture outside or do anything. It can generate everything on its own. It weaves the exact same web, with the same pattern, over and over again. It hides in the shadows. However, it is good to familiarise yourself with something new.
Swift is using an ancient analogy, but this is what a liberal arts education is all about. You go and find things out. You learn how a chemist views the world, how a poet views it, and how a historian looks at it. Then, you put all those things together to make up your own sweetness and mind.
The spider, on the other hand, believes it knows everything already and does not need to learn anything.
This is an essential image of education and any kind of growth. You do not need to go after ideas that are contrary to what you believe, but you do need to always push yourself to know more than you already do.
4.
A Tale of a Tub tells the parable of three brothers: Peter, Martin, and Jack. These brothers represent Catholicism (St. Peter), Anglicanism (Martin Luther), and Dissenting Protestants (John Calvin or John of Leiden). Their father has left them a will (the Bible) and each a coat (the practice of the faith). However, they go against the will’s stipulation and alter their coats continually. There is a series of Digressions on the tale. Why should Catholics bother about reading this anti-Catholic allegory?
That is a great question. Being an Anglican, Swift promotes Martin, though the satire on Peter would have been funny even if Peter were not Catholic.
This is an important book not only on account of the parable of the brothers but also on account of the interspersed digressions.
These digressions are all about how one should read a text. While the work does not promote Catholicism, one should be a careful reader, like Martin.
Often, I assign papers on poems and ask the students where they got their information. Whenever students say that they did not draw on other sources but reflected on such-and-such an idea in the poem, I tell them that they should not do that but use the details of the poem to write their reflection or analysis.
Whereas Peter goes overboard and starts adding to the father's will, Martin tries to be a careful reader. Jack, on the other hand, is an anarchist. So, we can read Martin as the mean between two extremes.
The other interspersed sections and chapters are on how to read a text properly. Through the hack that is the narrator of the book, Swift is deliberately misreading texts all over the place.
Catholics can read the parable, therefore, as a warning. If the Word of God comes to us through Scripture and Tradition, then we should not be afraid of Tradition.Martin throws the baby out with bathwater, and sticks only to the will. Peter, on the other hand, goes off the rails. Though there is no example of how to combine Scripture and Tradition, Catholics should read it to see how the tale reveals the limitations of sola Scriptura.
What is the significance of the tub of the title?
It depends. Swift is always using words that mean several things.
A tub was a barrel that was thrown overboard to distract whales and prevent them from overturning a ship.
The allegory is that of the ship of state being attacked by Leviathan (i.e. Hobbes). It is about working out a strategy to keep the Leviathan at bay and to distract it from overturning the ship of state.
However, a 'tub' was also a pulpit. As such, it was raised up.
Over the course of the book, Swift shows the effects that philosophical materialism has on theology.
If we believe that the soul is made out of atoms, then it is neither the form of our body, nor immortal, nor made by God, nor returns to him, but is procreated and decays. Then, it is just matter, to be manipulated like any other bit of matter.
To determine the make-up of the spirit, Swift looks to Scripture. The Hebrew word is ruach (air, breath) and the Greek word is pneuma (spirit). In this case, air is the archē (principle) of the soul.
Now, the Presocratic philosopher Anaximenes said that air is the archē (principle) of all things. So, materialists have resurrected Anaximenes and the worship of air.
As the tub stands above one, the materialist will want to be underneath the tub when the preacher preaches. In that way, the preacher’s words will fall upon you and you shall become holier, through physical contact with the air of the words. Air is made out of atoms and contains all the holiness that one needs.
This materialist theology becomes very outrageous very quickly.
Those are the two meanings of the tub. If we read the allegory of Peter, Martin, and Jack in light of this, the book is about the meanings of texts and how we interpret words.
Some overinterpret, like Peter, and some go rogue, like Jack, whereas Martin tries to follow the father’s will.
"He may not have been a Catholic, but he was always a friend to justice, and any Catholic who is a friend to justice is a friend of Swift’s."
5.
The Drapier’ s Letters (1724) was a series of pamphlets in which Swift, posing as a shopkeeper, protests against William Wood’s royal patent to mint copper coins for Ireland. Most believed that Wood intended to flood the market with debased coinage. Swift’s pamphlets were successful in thwarting Wood’s plans. Why is this work still worth reading?
We are still in the midst of quantitative easing. Printing mounds and mounds, piles and piles of money, increases inflation. At least in Swift’s day, ha’penny coins were made out of a precious metal. Each was really worth half a penny.
Wood obtained a government contract in London but the Irish had no recourse. He was going to mint £100,000 of various coins, flood the market, and thereby raise inflation.
In response, Swift takes on the persona of a drapier, a curtain maker.
The drapier says that we cannot allow this to happen. He states that if a customer offers him William Wood coins in payment, he will throw them back in his face. That was close to insurrection.
The drapier argues that, besides the debasement of currency, the Irish are already poor and have no way of getting themselves out of this hole.
Swift published these letters anonymously. After the second letter, Wood offered a £250 reward to anyone who would turn the drapier in. That was an enormous amount of money for people living in poverty. However, no one said anything. No one at all turned Swift in. He wrote a third and a fourth letter. Eventually, Wood withdrew his application and Swift became a national hero.
Here was a man who came to Ireland unwillingly. He had been born there but wanted to be a bishop in England. Only when those doors were shut for him did he go to Ireland. He was assigned to Dublin and accepted that he was where he was meant to be and set about doing as much good that he could. That took on different forms. However, he was focussed on correcting injustices. The whole basis of our Catholic social teaching is the preferential option for the poor. Swift makes that option in A Modest Proposal and The Drapier's Letters. He may not have been a Catholic, but he was always a friend to justice, and any Catholic who is a friend to justice is a friend of Swift’s.
6. & 7.
You have also recommended two biographies: Eugene Hammond’s two-volume biography and that of Leo Damrosch. Can you explain why these are good biographies and what Eugene Hammond means with the subtitle of the first volume of his biography, ‘an Irish blow-in’?
He gives it this subtitle because Swift comes in like a wrecking-ball, as a as it were. He had a domineering personality.
Hammond’s two-volume biography is about 1200 pages long. Damrosch's is more of a popular biography and is much shorter. Nevertheless, it is really good and impressed me greatly.
The first part of Hammond's biography is on the young upstart; the second part is on ‘our Dean.’
Swift was not only the Dean of St. Patrick's, who lived austerely. He was also the Dean of Dublin: the man who represented the people in The Drapier's Letters and A Modest Proposal. He was a dean for all of Ireland, and not just for the Anglicans who were under his pastoral care.
