Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. His mother’s husband, Jonathan Swift the Elder, had died several months previously, and partly as a consequence of this the identity of Swift’s father has been in question since his own lifetime. The most likely candidate is Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland. Swift was to live for ten years in the household of his son, Sir William Temple, a move for which no explanation is wholly satisfactory without consanguinity.
The small walled city of Swift’s birth, largely medieval in its streets and buildings, was dominated by Dublin Castle, the administrative centre of Ireland. The members of the extended Swift family were involved in the legal profession, then centred in the vicinity of Christ Church Cathedral. Jonathan Swift the Elder was a clerk in the King’s Inns of Court, which were located on the north side of the river Liffey, on Inns Quay, roughly where the Four Courts are today. The only bridge across the river was at this point, according to Bernard de Gomme’s map of 1673, though other bridges were constructed in the following two decades. The one immediately below Dublin Castle, Essex Bridge, led across the river to the centre of the much smaller areas of commercial activity on the north side. For much of the eighteenth century, Essex Bridge was the last before the open sea; downstream from it the river was crossed by ferries and immediately beside it stood the old Custom House. It was probably from the Custom House Quay that the infant Swift and his nurse, in mysterious circumstances, went aboard the trading vessel that brought them to Whitehaven, on the Cumbrian coast of England. Swift was to spend his first three years there. His mother, meanwhile, removed from Dublin to Leicester, her town of origin, and there is no record of mother and son living together except on later visits which the mature Swift paid to England.
Sir John Temple, by Cornelius Johnson
‘A Prospect of the Custom House and Essex Bridge, Dublin’, by J. Tudor, engraved by Richard Parr, 1753
Detail from a view of Whitehaven, Cumbria, by Matthew Read, engraved by Richard Parr, 1738
The age into which Swift was born was one of political and constitutional turbulence in both Ireland and England. Swift was born only seven years after the Restoration of Charles II. The return to monarchy brought back a generally liberal regime. Theatres opened again, and women were permitted to act in plays. The King had numerous mistresses and his court was pleasure-loving, though at the same time threatened by European powers, most immediately the Dutch, who dominated trade at sea.
James, Duke of York, and later King James II of England and James VII of Scotland, by Godfrey Kneller, mezzotint by J. Smith
Great issues were fought out in the century of Swift’s birth: the rights of monarchy, the strength of the law, the balance of power between central authority and the owners of land throughout the kingdom. But if one single matter remained critical throughout, it was Protestantism: its survival, its shape and character, its strength in politics and therefore in legislation, and its tolerance of diversity, both within its own broad house, and between itself and the Roman Catholic power structure in Europe, which asserted itself so forcefully in the last fifteen years of the century and had so powerful an impact in Ireland.
In England there was a great fear of Roman Catholic influence in high places, including the court. This was reinforced when the conversion to Catholicism of the King’s brother James, the Duke of York, was forced into the open, leading to his resignation as Lord High Admiral. James was the likely successor to his brother, and the shadow of his faith hung over the realm. There was no doubt, however, of the underlying strength of Protestantism. In Ireland the situation was different. It was not just ‘in high places’, as in England, that control over the growth of Roman Catholic power had to be exercised, but throughout the land-owning community. Protestantism had become part of the policing of the territory. Following the Restoration there was some relaxation of this, with confiscated land being given back to Catholics ‘loyal’ to the Crown, and with the re-assigning of further land to influential Protestants affected by this. But this part of the kingdom remained potentially volatile and a threat to the new-found stability.
The dominant political figure in Ireland at the time of Swift’s birth was the first Duke of Ormonde, ‘The Great Duke’. Born in London, the son of Lord Thurles and grandson of the eleventh Earl of Ormonde, in 1632 he succeeded to the earldom. Soon after the rebellion of 1641 he was appointed commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, and spent much of the next six years fighting first the Irish and later the Parliamentary forces. He was appointed Lord Lieutenant in 1643, and Chancellor of Trinity College in 1645. In 1647 he was compelled by Parliamentary pressure to leave Ireland; he returned the following year, but his defeat at the Battle of Rathmines drove him out again, and he followed Charles II to France in 1650. After the Restoration he was raised to the dukedom and resumed the office of Lord Lieutenant, which he held until 1669 and again from 1677 to 1685. He was widely respected for his strength and good looks, his dignified presence, his personal integrity and his unswerving loyalty to the throne.
James Butler, first Duke of Ormonde, by David Loggan, engraved by M. Van der Gucht
Ormonde’s ancestor, the eighth Earl of Ormonde, had founded the Kilkenny School, which Swift attended. Swift appears to have been in the wardship of his uncle Godwin Swift, a Dublin lawyer, who had a large family of his own, but seems to have had funds available to send Swift to school and university. The school term was essentially year-long, with short breaks at Easter, Whitsuntide and Christmas, possibly permitting Swift to travel occasionally to Dublin, but in reality confining his experience for this period to the gracious and prosperous town a hundred miles south-west of the capital. The school was reputedly expensive, though alternative views have been offered about this, and also about both its quality and standing. Surviving information, even that of Swift himself, leaves it unclear as to who decided on his education at Kilkenny School, and who paid for it. The same question arises over his attendance of Trinity College. In the late seventeenth century these two institutions were attended by well-to-do Protestants. But Jonathan Swift was not well-to-do.
Swift overlapped at school with William Congreve, three years his junior, whom he later knew in London. His Masters at the school were Edward Jones and Henry Ryder. Both were Cambridge men, and had been at Westminster School. They belonged firmly to the Calvinist tradition, and their teaching would have shaped Swift’s own Christian upbringing. Each went on to become a bishop in the Church of Ireland: Jones was Bishop of Cloyne and Ryder was Bishop of Killaloe.
There was both an Ormonde and a Calvinist association between Kilkenny College and Trinity College. The Duke of Ormonde watched over both institutions paternalistically, and in the case of the school he literally looked down on it from the windows of his castle in Kilkenny. He saw as natural the transition from the school to the university, which he regarded in turn as a ‘nursery for clergymen’ whose destiny it would be to staff the parishes of the Church of Ireland. The religious training in the Kilkenny School was similar in its traditions to Cambridge, where Puritan belief was strong through the seventeenth century.
Trinity College, when Swift entered it in April 1682, was well to the east of the centre of Dublin and essentially medieval in appearance, its buildings quite low and its layout dominated by the spire of an earlier Augustinian priory, which was a beacon for shipping coming up the Liffey. A series of formal squares was surrounded by unbroken low-roofed structures which included staff and student accommodation, and earlier buildings, none of which now survive, housed the library, chapel and examination hall, and the provost’s residence. Its setting was largely rural. There was reclaimed land north as far as the Liffey, but this was undeveloped. The old St Andrew’s Church, beside the Castle, had been demolished, and a new church, round and castellated in the style of the Templar churches in London and elsewhere, had been constructed on its present site; it was the only significant building between the College and the top end of Dame Street. St Stephen’s Green, to the south, was laid out, walled and ditched for protection, and those properties facing onto the enclosed green obtained by ballot, which led initially to buildings on the two sides nearest to the city. During the next forty years, as a result of a pincer movement of development, the College was embraced by the city and became an important focus of activity.
The significant people in Swift’s life at the time included his tutor, St George Ashe (1658–1718). A native of County Roscommon, Ashe graduated from Trinity College in 1676 and was elected Fellow three years later. His particular interest was in mathematics and experimental philosophy, and he became Professor of Mathematics. In a paper read in the early 1680s to the Dublin Philosophical Society, he argued in favour of the supreme value of mathematical study, ‘because quantity, the object about which it is conversant, is a sensible obvious thing, and consequently the ideas we form thereof are clear and distinct and daily represented to us in most familiar instances’.2
As a member of the Dublin Philosophical Society he was a friend of William Molyneux, whom he succeeded as secretary. Thanks to Molyneux’s friendship with John Locke, Ashe was in close touch with the latest ideas in philosophy, science and mathematics. Several decades later this found expression in the undergraduate course at Trinity, and was of great value to graduate students and fellowship candidates, including George Berkeley (1685–1753). Ashe became Bishop of Cloyne in 1695; he was translated to Clogher in 1697, and to Deny in 1717. But he always remained in close touch with Dublin University, and from 1702 to 1713 he was Vice-Chancellor. In 1692, when Trinity College was still recovering from the Jacobite occupation, he was appointed Provost. Although he held the post for less than three years, he had an important influence on the College’s intellectual atmosphere.
Swift of course came under the influence of many others during his time at Trinity College. There were two Provosts during his period there, Narcissus Marsh and Robert Huntington.
Narcissus Marsh (1638–1713), born in Wiltshire, was appointed Provost of Dublin University in 1679 with the backing of the Duke of Ormonde. He then became Bishop of Ferns, around 1683, and afterwards held in succession three archbishoprics, Cashel (1691–4), Dublin (1694–1703) and Armagh (1703–13). His enduring claim to fame was the magnificent library he assembled and left to the city of Dublin. Situated in its own building close to the Deanery of St Patrick’s, it became the main library consulted by Swift after his return from London in 1714 to take up the post of Dean.
Marsh disliked being Provost, finding the university ‘Very troublesome’ because of administrative duties and the ‘rude and ignorant’ students: ‘I was quickly weary of 340 young men and boys in this lewd and debauch’d town.’3 Swift loathed Marsh. His vituperative attack dates from many years later, and Irvin Ehrenpreis, quoting it, says it ‘might suggest a reaction against an adolescent awe of apparent saintliness and erudition’. But Marsh was of value and interest to Swift, in teaching him something of logic, and also, more indirectly, by being one of the founding figures of the Dublin Philosophical Society, along with William Petty and William Molyneux.4
Robert Huntington (1637–1701), Marsh’s successor as Provost, was also involved with the Society, the first formal meeting of which took place in his lodgings in 1684. To it he gave support, and made a modest philosophical contribution. He seems not to have influenced Swift in any way that called forth retrospective criticism. His involvement with Ireland was slight; he took the appointment reluctantly, stayed until the general flight of Protestants began in 1688, and then remained in England apart from brief visits, giving up the provostship in 1692, when he was replaced by St George Ashe.
Swift’s studies at Trinity College were greatly reinforced by his familiarity with the scholarly pursuits of the Dublin Philosophical Society. The two institutions represent the twin poles of his later education in Dublin. It is easy today to stress the absurdities with which individual members of the Society became involved. These furnished Swift with material to be included in his A Tale of a Tub, and in the third part of Gulliver’s Travels. But the members of the Society were seriously concerned with two absolutes of scientific research, unresolved to this day: how life began, and how the brain works. It would be wrong to suggest that the youthful Swift, still a student, would have treated either their scientific investigations, or their parallel teaching practices in the university, with intellectual disdain. Swift’s later satire was of a different scale and origin, and there is no evidence whatever that at this point in his life he was dismissive towards the curious, even extraordinary experiments and investigations pursued by these Society members.
Trinity College taught Swift language, logic, theology, mathematics, science, philosophy. His later reaction against many of those involved in his teaching, including Narcissus Marsh, should not be read back into his time as a student. We know enough of this to recognize normal recalcitrance, indifferent performance, waywardness and indolence, but no more.
Sir William Temple, by Sir Peter Lely, engraved by T.A. Dean
Notes
2 Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols, second edition (London, 1983), I, p. 52.
3 Quoted in Constantia E. Maxwell, A History of Trinity College (Dublin, 1946), p. 74.
4 The quote is from Ehrenpreis, I, p. 49. For a fuller account of Marsh in these respects, see Ehrenpreis, I, pp. 48–50.