Irish Roots: Swift’s personality shines in ‘Journal to Stella’

June 13th marks the 300th anniversary of the installation of Jonathan Swift as Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin. Although his political campaigning would eventually turn him into a hero for ordinary Dubliners, this occasion was very unpleasant for Swift and Dublin: his flock shouted abuse at him in the street and he himself felt “horribly melancholy”. Why?

Swift had spent the previous three years in London, sent there in 1710 by the Church of Ireland to lobby for a tax-break, the so-called “First Fruits”. When he arrived, he was an obscure 43-year-old Irish parson, armed only with a modest literary reputation and a razor-sharp mind. Less than two years later, by dint of some intense networking and a great deal of furiously partisan pamphlet-writing, he had not only got the tax break, but had managed to become an intimate friend of the most powerful Tories in the British government, and was even serving as their chief spin-doctor, a powerful political actor in his own right.

“Preferment”, then as now, was the usual reward for such service; Swift was pestered by his own acquaintances and friends wanting him to pull strings once his influence became known. He could confidently have expected to become a bishop. But the head of the Anglican Church, Queen Anne, thought his writings irreligious and opposed any such appointment. She had a point – Swift was a careerist clergyman and, it has to be said, anything but conventionally pious. However, the Deanship of St Patrick’s was in the gift of the Duke of Ormond rather than the monarch and, as the Tories’ grasp on power began to weaken, Ormond persuaded her to allow Swift to be parachuted into the position. Small wonder he was “melancholy” and his parishioners angry.

None of this would be of interest if not for Swift's writing. And some of his most wonderful writing describes precisely the events that led to the deanship. This is the so-called Journal to Stella , 65 letters written to his friend and protégée Esther ("Stella") Johnson in Dublin, starting when he arrived in Chester at the beginning of his mission in September 1710 and ending with a letter from Chester in June 1713, on the way back to Dublin.

They are much more than letters. “I will write something every day to MD [my dear], and make it a sort of journal; and when it is full I will send it, whether MD writes or no; and so that will be pretty; and I shall always be in conversation with MD, and MD with Presto [Italian for swift].” No doubt he held on to them because of their intimate, blow-by-blow account of the high politics and drama of the end of Queen Anne’s reign. As history, though, they are woefully one-sided, unashamedly partisan and partial. But as micro-history and spontaneous self-portrait they are superb.

Throughout, Swift pulls off the very difficult trick of imbuing the written word with all the immediacy and energy of real conversation – “Do you know that every syllable I write I hold my lips just for all the world as if I were talking?” – and the letters fairly fizz with the vividness of spontaneous speech. He throws out off-the-cuff character judgements – the Duke of Marlborough is “covetous as Hell, and ambitious as the prince of it,” and the Duke of Newcastle’s daughter is “handsome, and has good sense, but red hair”. He records his endless quest for dinner invitations: “a breast of mutton and a pint of wine”, and packs in detail of his everyday life: eating at three or four, having his head shaved, bitter complaints about the cost of periwigs, sedan-chairs, carriages and coal; “Two shillings more today for coach and chair. I shall be ruined”. He records his fear of the “Mohocks”, the London skinheads of their day, his strange fruit phobia, illnesses, dealings with printers, irritation with his servant, Patrick. And he has a lovely line in affectionate abuse: “rogues and lasses”, “tinderboxes”, “buzzards”, “sauci doxi” and, my favourite, “lazy sluttikins”. For all the mock irascibility, his affection for Stella is clear in every letter, and nowhere more than in the spectacularly infantile “little language” – “Nite, deelest” (“Night, dearest”).

One mystery solved by the Journal is how Swift succeeded in London. The sheer magnetism of the man's personality shines throughout. No doubt it was also felt by the dukes and earls, the courtiers and ladies-in-waiting, the politicians, intriguers and schemers.

For more on the celebrations of Swift's installation, see dublin.anglican.org/news. The Journal is free to download in multiple places, including Kindle.