Fierce indignation

In an autobiographical note written late in his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonishing anecdote from his childhood. When he was a baby in Dublin, he was put into the care of an English wet nurse, and one day she heard that one of her relatives back in England was close to death. Hoping for an inheritance, the wet nurse jumped on a boat back to Whitehaven in Cumbria, taking the infant Swift with her. ‘When the Matter was discovered,’ Swift wrote, ‘His Mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it.’ So the wet nurse kept Swift in England for two or three years, and by the time he returned home, Swift recalled, he could read the Bible from cover to cover.

Swift was a figure of great contradiction, as this massive new biography by John Stubbs makes repeatedly clear; and almost all can be summarised in this single strange story. There is the back and forth between England and Ireland. The child is a victim of adult whim and greed and fear; and yet the telling is wholly unsentimental. There is no Dickensian or Disney pathos here, but an unsparing familiarity with the foibles of the world.

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in November 1667, nine months after his father had died of syphilis. That he was born in Ireland made him, in the opinions of the time, Irish — ‘to his regret’, notes Stubbs; and Swift spent much of the first half of his life hating Ireland, because hating Ireland was what the English did, and Swift longed to be English. He was divided in all things. His father’s family were Royalists and colonists who had settled in Ireland, and on his mother’s side were Puritans, as if the English Civil War were still being fought in him.