Jonathan Swift: The Grumpy Genius

Say the name Jonathan Swift and you might hear a faint chuckle roll across the centuries. The man behind Gulliver’s Travels wasn’t just some grumpy satirist with a powdered wig and a grudge. He was a literary pyromaniac who torched the vanities, hypocrisies, and political absurdities of his time with the gleeful precision of a watchmaker setting fire to the clock. Long before Twitter turned sarcasm into an Olympic sport, Swift had already perfected the art of the devastating one-liner and the absurd proposal.

Right, let’s begin where all the best trouble starts: identity. Swift wasn’t English. He was born in Dublin in 1667, which makes him gloriously Irish—at least by geography. In his head, he bounced between identities like a conflicted Eurovision contestant. Despite trying repeatedly to climb the greasy pole of English political favour, he was always pulled back to Ireland, like a sarcastic homing pigeon. England treated him like a clever colonial, useful but inconvenient. Ireland, on the other hand, held onto him like a bitter ex who couldn’t resist admiring his talent from a distance.

He had a sneaky habit of pretending not to write what he very clearly wrote. Anonymous pamphlets, scandalous political tracts, pamphlets that lit bonfires under polite society—Swift published them all without signing his name, but his fingerprints were everywhere. His 1729 horror-comedy of an essay, A Modest Proposal, which calmly suggested solving poverty by turning Irish babies into gourmet fare, was unsigned. As if anyone else could have conjured something so simultaneously deranged and surgically insightful. It screamed Swift from the very first sardonic bite.

Swift didn’t just invent weird lands in books—he actually travelled between real countries, which is impressive for someone living before budget airlines and baggage allowances. He ricocheted between Ireland and England like a one-man diplomatic incident, even doing time as secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park. Temple had a tidy garden, a decent library, and a daughter—or something like a daughter—named Esther Johnson. Little did he know, both the estate and the girl would end up tangled in Swift’s personal mythology like characters in one of his own allegories.

Ah, Esther Johnson. Or Stella, as Swift called her. Their relationship was one of the great 18th-century mysteries. He met her when she was still a child, and he was a much older, intellectually brooding presence in her life. Over time, their bond deepened into something too ambiguous for polite labelling. Were they lovers? Secretly married? Platonic soulmates with quills and powdered wigs? Nobody knows. Swift kept it vague. But the letters flew back and forth like literary missiles, and when she died, he unravelled in a way that suggests this wasn’t just a passing affection.

And then, because Swift never did things by halves, there was another Esther. Esther Vanhomrigh, or Vanessa, because of course she had to have a poetic nickname. Vanessa was younger, more infatuated, and far less emotionally self-contained. She adored him. She wrote letters full of torment and longing, which he responded to with awkward restraint or radio silence. When she finally discovered his ongoing connection with Stella, Vanessa lost her composure—and eventually her life. Before dying, she made sure Swift’s letters would be published. Because when your heart is broken by the most caustic man in literature, you might as well go out with a dramatic monologue.

Swift wasn’t exactly the life of the party. Which is a bit awkward, considering he held the very public, very sociable role of Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. He delivered sermons, shook hands, wore robes—but you could sense he’d rather be off in the corner, brooding over a sharp turn of phrase or plotting another anonymous broadside. He preferred solitary walks, gloomy introspection, and, naturally, vicious satire. He treated Dublin society like a bad dinner party where he couldn’t leave but made sure everyone felt just uncomfortable enough.

Politically, he was a Tory stuck in a Whig-dominated ecosystem, like a cat wearing a dog collar. He threw his lot in with the Tories, edited the Examiner, and gleefully skewered Whigs with prose so barbed it left bruises. His pen had the power of a rapier and the energy of a pub brawl. And he enjoyed it. He enjoyed picking apart ideologies, puffed-up nobles, clueless parliamentarians. You get the feeling he would have adored modern politics for all the wrong reasons.

Swift also had Ménière’s disease, a miserable affliction that mucked about with his balance and hearing. He called it his “giddiness,” which sounds like something out of a Victorian medical guide, but in reality, it left him dizzy, disoriented, and frequently furious. It amplified his natural irritability and turned him into a man permanently on the edge of grumbling thunder. If grumpiness were a sport, Swift would have been its undefeated champion.

Even in death, Swift refused to go quietly. His will was a final flourish of satire and social commentary. He left a significant portion of his estate to fund a mental hospital in Dublin—what became St Patrick’s University Hospital. His reasoning? He hoped to be buried among those society labelled mad, presumably because he found them more tolerable than politicians and literary critics. You have to respect the man’s consistency.

Gulliver’s Travels, his most famous work, wasn’t meant for bedtime. It’s not a children’s book. Swift would have spat out his tea if he’d seen it shelved next to picture books about talking caterpillars. What looks like a whimsical romp through lands of tiny people and talking horses is actually a razor-edged critique of British colonialism, scientific delusion, and the towering folly of human ego. It’s one long, intricate joke at humanity’s expense. And yet, because he packaged it in adventure, readers have kept misunderstanding it for centuries. Which is… deliciously ironic.

Let’s talk toilets. Yes, really. Swift had a thing about bodily functions—he couldn’t stand them. In one of his most infamous poems, The Lady’s Dressing Room, he rips the veil off feminine mystique with such vigour that generations of women have glared at him through time. The poem describes the behind-the-scenes horror of a woman’s beauty routine with almost scientific horror. Think Bridget Jones by way of a biology textbook and a heavy dose of misogyny.

And then there were the hoaxes. Swift loved a good prank, especially one that ruined someone’s day. In his Isaac Bickerstaff persona, he predicted the death of a rival astrologer, John Partridge. When Partridge inconveniently failed to die, Swift doubled down, publishing an obituary and arguing that Partridge was in fact dead and simply refusing to accept it. The public, of course, lapped it up. Swift had turned literary trolling into a fine art.

Now, the misanthropy. Swift didn’t just dislike people. He actively distrusted them. He famously said he loved individuals but hated mankind, which sounds gloomy until you realise how much humour he mined from that position. His writing teems with grotesque characters, exaggerated flaws, and societies built on madness. It’s misanthropy wrapped in satire and laced with wicked intelligence. He didn’t moan about humanity—he filleted it with style.

Naturally, he wrote his own epitaph. And naturally, it was in Latin. It’s carved into the stone floor of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and essentially says: Here lies Jonathan Swift, where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. In other words, the man finally ran out of people to be furious with. Or perhaps he simply accepted that no one else would do the job properly.

Jonathan Swift… The man who turned bile into brilliance, pain into prose, and petty grievances into cultural landmarks. He lived like a literary thunderstorm, loved with mystery, mocked with skill, and died surrounded by the kind of eccentric legacy that refuses to be flattened by time. You get the feeling Swift would’ve liked that. Or, at the very least, written a biting little verse about it.