Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, to English parents, in 1667. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford, he was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1795 and later served for more than three decades as Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. In 1704, he published the religious-themed A Tale of a Tub, the first of the trenchantly satirical works on which his reputation rests. Along with his friends Alexander Pope and John Gay, Swift helped make the eighteenth century a golden age of social and political satire in Britain. After a brief stint as a Tory pamphleteer in London, the self-styled Irish patriot returned to Dublin in 1714. In later years, he vented what he called his "savage indignation" in a wide range of literary registers, from the Rabelaisian humor of his masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels (1726), to the dystopian vision of infanticide in A Modest Proposal (1729). He died in 1745.