Few books have ever piqued the public imagination quite as enduringly as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726. Naturally, today’s readers remain intrigued by satirical passages about European government and otherworldly discussions about human nature. Young readers in particular love to imagine being in the wondrous land of Lilliput, or taking a voyage with Gulliver to mythical islands like Brobdingnag, Laputa, and Glubbdubdrib.
When it comes to Swift, the Irish cleric and satirist who wrote this magical story, he was as complex and intriguing an individual as his best-known protagonist.
John Stubbs’s book Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel is a superbly written and researched examination of the literary figure. Stubbs, an Oxbridge-educated English historian, earned international acclaim for his two previous books, John Donne (2007) and Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War (2010). His latest massive tome is equally impressive, examining every detail that made Swift “the most notorious writer of his day, a giant personality in Georgian Britain and Ireland, and a champion or ‘avenger’—in his unusual and puzzling Latin word, a vindictator—of liberty.”
Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. His English-born father had died several months before, and his mother returned to England not long after his birth. After living with his nurse and her husband in Whitehaven, Cumbria, Swift returned to Ireland to live with his respected uncle Godwin’s family.
His childhood was “a time of chastisement and mortification,” according to Stubbs, since “he felt humbled
