Swift by Carl Van Doren
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"Swift" by Carl Van Doren is a literary biography written in the early 20th century. It presents a penetrating portrait of Jonathan Swift as a proud, embattled cleric and satirist, tracing the making of his mind, his politics and church loyalties, and his fraught ties with Stella and Vanessa, while challenging the comforting misreading of him through Gulliver’s Travels. The opening of the biography argues that mankind has tamed Swift by turning
Gulliver’s Travels into a children’s toy, then sets the governing image of his life as “fire and ice.” It follows his injured pride amid genteel poverty, his English family’s Irish foothold, a childhood abduction to Whitehaven, and a sullen schooling at Kilkenny and Trinity marked by disdain for scholasticism, irregular conduct, and early health troubles (vertigo and deafness). Driven to England by the Revolution, he becomes Sir William Temple’s dependent at Moor Park, meets the child Esther “Stella” Johnson, flirts idly elsewhere, and struggles through bad Pindarics before renouncing poetry for satire. The narrative tracks his ordination, misery at the bleak living of Kilroot, the calculated end of his courtship with “Varina,” and his emergence as a satirist in The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub, forged from Temple’s Ancients-versus-Moderns quarrel and Swift’s cold view of human delusion. After Temple’s death and fruitless bids for preferment, he is parked at Laracor, defines his hard terms against marriage, brings Stella and Mrs. Dingley to Ireland under strict propriety, and rebuffs a rival suitor in a letter that clarifies his limits. The section closes with Swift moving between Dublin and London, scorning the coffee-house wits, publishing Temple’s works, and entering politics with a stern warning against popular tyranny—just before he flings his Tale of a Tub into the world. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 30028869 |
| Title | Swift |
| Original Publication | New York: The Viking Press, 1930. |
| Credits | Alan, Sean (@parchmentglow) and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PR: Language and Literatures: English literature |
| Subject | Authors, Irish -- 18th century -- Biography |
| Subject | Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745 |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 78641 |
| Release Date | May 9, 2026 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 1319 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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