Although Swift resents the lowly post, he learns much from Temple, who had brokered interna tional alliances as well as the marriage of William and Mary. At Moor Park, Swift meets his future love, Esther (“Stella”) Johnson, daughter of Temple’s widowed housekeeper.

1690Swift begins to show symptoms of what is probably Ménière’s disease; his doctors recommend a trip to Ireland to soothe his severe tinnitus, nausea, and vertigo. He returns to Surrey the next year. In the early years of this decade he writes odes and other poems.
1692Swift receives the degree of M.A. at the University of Oxford.
1695After being ordained as a priest in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, Swift is appointed vicar of Kilroot, near Belfast.
1696Swift returns to Moor Park to resume his duties with Temple. He begins to write A Tale of a Tub, a satire of “corruptions in religion and learning” and irrationality.
1699Temple dies, and Swift again returns to Ireland. Over the next ten years, he will travel to England on several occasions and become known as a writer.
1701Esther moves to Dublin. The War of the Spanish Succession begins; a complex European conflict that begins when Charles II, king of Spain and last of the Hapsburgs, dies with- out an heir, the war will last until 1714.
1702Trinity awards Swift a doctorate.
1704A Tale of a Tub and a shorter piece, The Battle of the Books, are published anonymously, to great popularity. In the latter, Swift argues for the superiority of the culture and literature of the ancients over those of the moderns. Isaac Newton’s Opticks appears.
1707- 1709The Act of Union with Scotland is passed in 1707. In England, Swift continues to write and publish various po litical pamphlets, including some by Isaac Bickerstaff, a pseu donym he sometimes uses.
1710The Tory party (generally affiliated with the aristocracy and the Anglican Church) comes to power. Disenchanted with the Whig party (linked with the landed gentry, merchants, and dissenting sects), Swift becomes a Tory; he works for En gland’s two leading statesmen, Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Swift takes the helm of the Tory journal The Examiner, which he edits until June 1711, and associates with eminent writers, including John Gay and Alexander Pope. Swift begins his Journal to Stella, let ters written to Esther Johnson that record his reactions to a rapidly changing world.
17122Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is published; it will be republished in expanded form in 1714.
17133Swift is appointed dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, a post he will hold for the rest of his life. Swift, Gay, Pope, and others form the Scriblerus Club.
1714Queen Anne dies. The accession of George I and the ascension of the Whig party cause Swift to retreat to Ireland.
1716Stella and Swift may have wed, but this is unconfirmed.
1719Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is published.
1724The Drapier’s Letters is published, criticizing the English gov ernment for its plan to debase the Irish coinage by devaluing the copper content of the half-penny; the work was instru mental in quashing the idea.
1726Gulliver’s Travels is published.
1728Esther “Stella” Johnson dies.
1729In the ironic A Modest Proposal, Swift’s narrator recommends a solution to overpopulation: selling the babies of the poor as food for the rich.
1731Contemplating the world’s reception of his death, Swift writes “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” and other poems.
1738The effects of Ménière’s disease continue to mount, and many observers think Swift is insane. His deterioration leads to mental infirmity until his death, and he is no longer able to look after his own affairs.
1745Jonathan Swift dies in Dublin on October 19. He is buried next to his beloved Stella. His remaining fortune is given to build the first mental hospital in Ireland.

Introduction

The Madness of Gulliver

In 1735, nine years after its original publication, Swift made a deliberate choice to restart Gulliver’s Travels by appending prefatory material to the volume. The present edition, like all modern editions of the Travels, begins with three completely concocted documents that did not exist for Swift’s first readers in 1726. Swift added an “Advertisement,” “A Letter from Capt. Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson,” and a note from “The Publisher to the Reader.” These prefatory supplements allow the reader of the Travels a first look at a Gulliver who is very different from the one offered in the original. What had been a breezy and plausible story of a young ship surgeon’s maiden voyage now begins with the ranting of an obviously disturbed older man, a man whose vocabulary and locutions betray a private world of “Yahoos” and “Houyhnhnms” and a set of paranoid convictions about life as an Englishman, a traveler, and a memoir writer.

After finishing the 1726 version, readers can easily conclude that Gulliver’s four voyages to strange places have driven him mad. But the 1735 edition signals readers that Gulliver wrote up all his voyages after, not before, his madness. Swift has Gulliver make an observation, in the letter to Sympson, that might serve an astute reader as a model for judging the whole. Gulliver complains that some of his readers “are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere fiction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia” (p. 8).

Such a prospect makes for a fascinating reading of the accounts of the four voyages and, indeed, explains some of the bits of information that Swift lets drop throughout.