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Hierophant Knowledge :: Notes :: On Literature :: Various Sources

JAMES JOYCE  

The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses

by Kevin Birmingham

The New York Review of Books 

It’s Still a Scandal!

Adam Thirlwell

One small scene from the annals of heroic modernism is the moment when, in the winter of 1921, the French novelist and critic Valery Larbaud gave the world’s first-ever talk on James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, at Shakespeare & Company, an Anglophone bookstore and lending library in Paris, run by a young American woman called Sylvia Beach. The book had still not been published—and Joyce was not well known. No critic had examined his work in depth, and not many of even the most literary people in England or America had heard of him. But in the last two or three years, Larbaud explained, Joyce had acquired an “extraordinary notoriety”—he had become the literary equal of Freud or Einstein. His name was an alluring rumor. Those who had read his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially those who had managed to read his new novel Ulysses, as serialized in the New York magazine The Little Review, all agreed.

And yet, Larbaud had to admit:

If you ask a member of the (American) Society for the Suppression of Vice: “Who is James Joyce?” you will receive the following reply: “He is an Irishman who has written a pornographic work called Ulysses which we have successfully prosecuted when it appeared in the Little Review in New York.”

For what had happened to Flaubert and Baudelaire, said Larbaud, had happened to Joyce. His art had been deemed obscene. Larbaud’s proposal, therefore, was to “try to describe the work of James Joyce as precisely as possible.” And then he began his lecture, using notes prepared by Joyce himself.

“All men should ‘Unite to give praise to Ulysses’; those who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders,” wrote Ezra Pound a few months later, after the novel was finally published—by Shakespeare & Company, in its first venture as a publishing house. But you can only truly praise something you understand, and no one was quite certain what Ulysses was. Joyce’s novel created a vast transatlantic tremor of anxiety. Pound called it a “super-novel,” and even Joyce had problems of definition. In a letter to another of his supervised interpreters, Carlo Linati, he called it an “epic,” an “encyclopedia,” and most charmingly a “maledettissimo romanzaccione” (fucking novelosaurus). Only the gargantuan proportions were sure.

Should it have been so difficult? This novel has a story, after all. The date is June 16, 1904. The setting is Dublin. And the hero is Leopold Bloom—a devoted husband to his wife Molly, with whom he has one daughter. Jewish by race, Christian by baptism, and atheist by inclination, Bloom is really a believer in reason and science: he is the everyman of the democratic twentieth century. He works in the newspaper world as an advertising salesman. Calmly he goes about his business on this sunny day in June—cooking breakfast, attending a funeral, having lunch, negotiating with a client, sitting on the beach—wandering in Dublin, just as Ulysses once wandered in the Mediterranean during his long journey home.

The difference is that this Ulysses is avoiding his home: for he knows that Molly has an appointment that afternoon with the dapper Blazes Boylan—ostensibly to discuss a singing tour, but probably to consummate their flirtation. And so he pauses in pubs and bars, encountering a cast of kibitzers and schlemiels that includes, in particular, Stephen Dedalus, student of philosophy, with dreams of literary glory, whom the avant-garde reader would remember from A Portrait of the Artist, just as that reader would recognize many characters from Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories.

It’s true that a story that takes place over one day, without the usual sequence of grand events, was not an obvious genre. But this was the new avant-garde invention. It was not so arcane. As early as 1914, Ezra Pound had praised the stories in Dubliners precisely for this refusal of plot: “Life for the most part does not happen in neat little diagrams and nothing is more tiresome than the continual pretence that it does.” But then, the absence of plot was not the only problem. There was also the craziness of the technique.

Joyce’s novel employed the largest range of styles—a series of rapid innovations—ever seen in a single novel. Its first impression on the startled reader was a kind of intellectual blur. Most notorious was Joyce’s lavish use of the technique that became known, following Larbaud’s lecture, as interior monologue. This kind of thing:

A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand. Chapped: washing soda. And a pound and a half of Denny’s sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers allowed.

All the usual demarcations—between dialogue and thought and description—were now jumbled. (Joyce appropriated the technique from a minor nineteenth-century novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés, by Édouard Dujardin.) However, the technique could be gradually understood by the patient reader. True, one episode, set in a newspaper office, was interrupted with headlines, and a later episode, in a saloon bar, where songs were being solemnly recited, came with its own overture, but the committed reader could cope. Late in this day’s afternoon, however, a flamboyant range of styles took over: sports journalism, sentimental fiction, and even a sequential historical pastiche of English prose style. “I understand that you may begin to regard the various styles of the episodes with dismay,” Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver, his most devoted patron and editor of The Egoist, which had serialized Portrait,

and prefer the initial style much as the wanderer did who longed for the rock of Ithaca. But in the compass of one day to compress all these wanderings and clothe them in the form of this day is for me only possible by such variation which, I beg you to believe, is not capricious.

And this manic variation culminated in a final chapter where Bloom’s wife Molly, lying in bed, thinks to herself, with almost no punctuation, in a free flow of domestic, dirty associations: “I know every turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit….” This was the extra problem with Ulysses. Joyce’s stylistic one-man band included a linguistic obscenity that had not been used before so casually or comprehensively in literature. This not only upset the critics; it upset the lawyers, too.

And of course it’s easy to laugh at the critics, just as it’s easy to laugh at the lawyers. Look at them handle this masterpiece! At the end of 1922, Sir Archibald Bodkin, the director for public prosecutions, wrote a legal opinion explaining why Ulysses was to be banned in Great Britain. He had only read the last chapter, and was “entirely unable to appreciate how those pages are relevant to the rest of the book, or, indeed, what the book itself is about.” And yet, he concluded, there was “a great deal more than mere vulgarity or coarseness, there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity.”

Yes, it’s easy to laugh at the lawyers. But what if the lawyers were right? For the question that still needs to be answered, I think, is whether the arguments over the novel’s obscenity and obscurity were just temporary historical effects or whether they point to the essence of Joyce’s originality. Or at least, that is the question raised by Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book. Birmingham is a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, and he has written a detailed account of the gestation, publication, and legal battles of Ulysses—a compendium of raw materials that can also point toward why Ulysses, nearly one hundred years later, is still the romanzaccione of the future.

2.

A novel written in English around 1918 had a transatlantic legal problem. In the UK, there was the Obscene Publications Act, which defined as obscene any publication whose tendency was “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Such a wide definition created a potentially giant category, in pursuit of which were ranged the police, customs officers, and the postal service, aided by the London Society for the Suppression of Vice, and its successor, the Vigilance Association. In the US, there were three laws: the Comstock Act, named after the vice crusader Anthony Comstock, which banned the circulation of any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, print or other publication of an indecent character”—and was pursued with vigor by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), first by Comstock, then by his successor, John Sumner; the Tariff Act, which banned the importation of obscene material; and the Espionage Act, passed in June 1917, which criminalized “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” In other words, as Birmingham writes:

The Post Office was in a position to ban the circulation of several of the novel’s chapters for being both obscene and anarchistic. In fact, the government’s reaction to Ulysses reveals how much nineteenth- century ideas about obscenity shaped twentieth-century ideas about radicalism.

This is Birmingham’s central insight. The anxiety about language was both sexual and political: it reflected a general fear of obscene, revolutionary subversives. Even if the most famous target of such fear was a radical movement of one: a hypereducated Irish novelist, living in Trieste, then Zurich, then Paris—who was pursued in the modernist epic Birmingham describes, with its vice crusaders, heroic editors, book-leggers, and dopey customs officers.

Before Ulysses, both Joyce’s previous books had caused crises of publication, jeopardized by reneging printers and publishers frightened of prosecution. It was Ezra Pound, who discovered Joyce thanks to a tip from W.B. Yeats in 1913, who acted as his fixer. (“Demon pantechnicon driver, busy with removal of old world into new quarters”—this was how Wyndham Lewis described Pound: a removal company for modernism.) Pound put Joyce in touch with Harriet Shaw Weaver and her magazine The Egoist; and when every printer in London refused to continue with Joyce’s work it was Pound who turned to The Little Review for Joyce’s new venture—Ulysses.

The Egoist, The Little Review…: the little magazines are another chapter in the epic chronicles of modernism. The Little Review was edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap out of their Greenwich Village apartment. (Ulysses was supported by a series of women: Shaw Weaver, Anderson and Heap, and finally Sylvia Beach.) In May 1917, Pound became the magazine’s foreign editor. Soon, Joyce began sending Pound Ulysses for serialization.

The demon driver understood the legal problems. At first, he was defiant: “I suppose we’ll be damn well suppressed if we print the text as it stands. BUT it is damn wellworth it.” On receiving the fourth episode, however, where Leopold Bloom calmly defecates, Pound made significant deletions—acting, like many other contemporary editors, as a pre-censor, before the text had been published.

Even Pound’s carefulness, however, had limits. The first ban of The Little Review from the US mail came in January 1919, for a fleeting moment of nostalgic sexual reverie: “Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright.” The May 1919 issue was banned for smaller problems of student conversation—like one proposed title:

Everyman His Own Wife

or

A Honeymoon in the Hand

(a national immorality in three orgasms)

by

Ballocky Mulligan

In January 1920, the problem was now political—a character’s barroom description of Queen Victoria as “the flatulent old bitch that’s dead.”

And then, that autumn, the fourth and most substantial legal action against Ulysses began. The avant-garde reader discovered Bloom resting on the beach, toward sunset. He watches a girl, Gerty MacDowell, sitting in the distance. There are fireworks in the sky. Gerty leans back to watch, exposing her underwear. And Bloom, watching her closely, masturbates.

In his epic of world description, Joyce had gone too far.

The New York atmosphere in 1920 was high on surveillance and terror—the police’s “Red Raids” and retaliatory anarchist bombings—when John Sumner, the head of the NYSSV, bought the September issue of The Little Review at the Washington Square Book Shop. Two weeks later, a warrant was issued for the arrest of the bookstore’s owner on charges of selling obscene works. Those charges were soon transferred to Anderson and Heap, the magazine’s editors. The trial eventually took place in February 1921. Representing The Little Review was John Quinn—a powerful lawyer who was also a modernist patron. His central defense was that since Ulysses was “cubism in literature” its obscenity could be excused by its obscurity: since who could be corrupted by something he or she didn’t understand? The judges were unconvinced. Heap and Anderson were fined $100, the issue was banned—and Ulysses became definitively unpublishable.

A possible solution, used by other banned books, both the purely literary and the purely pornographic, was a private edition, sold not on the open market but to a list of subscribers. This was the plan agreed on by Sylvia Beach. She had never published a book before, but she had met Joyce when he moved to Paris, and Shakespeare & Company was the local center of Anglophone modernism. Also, the trial had made Ulysses famous—and Beach wanted her own fame, too. Her publicity campaign proudly exploited the glamour of the banned:

ULYSSES suppressed four times during serial publication in “The Little Review” will be published by “SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY” complete as written.

Valery Larbaud’s lecture at the bookshop in December 1921 was a further stage of prepublicity. Finally, on February 2, 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, Ulysses was published.

The sequel to this story, told with detailed sprightliness by Birmingham, is a long decade of bans, smuggling, struggles against piracy (and macabre intensifications of Joyce’s eye problems, which have their own separate, gruesome interest). Sir Archibald Bodkin banned the book in Britain. Samuel Roth, a notorious rogue publisher in New York, put out pirated editions. And so it became inevitable that a final trial would take place—this time provoked not by the novel’s attackers but by its defenders, desperate to end its ban and publish it legally. The case was masterminded by Bennett Cerf at Random House—he had signed a contract with Joyce, taking over from Sylvia Beach—and civil liberties attorney Morris Ernst.

In May 1932, an incriminating copy of Ulysses was planted on a boat coming into New York. Unfortunately, the customs officials were so overworked that they waved it through, for safe delivery to Random House—so Ernst had to take the parcel back and demand its immediate seizure under the Tariff Act. The book was passed to Sam Coleman, the chief assistant DA in the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. It was a masterpiece, Coleman concluded, but also definitively obscene. However, wary of the publicity, he wanted his superior, George Medalie, to make the final decision. Medalie decided to prosecute: he had no choice.

The case was heard on November 25, 1933, with Judge Woolsey presiding. Ernst’s defense was that literature, by definition, could never be obscene. And Joyce’s novel was pure literature—its single loyalty was to depicting the vast infinity of human consciousness: its giant associations and lapses of attention. It was a courageous argument, and a persuasive one. Joyce’s subject, wrote Woolsey in his summing up, was “the screen of consciousness,” onto which were projected not just impressions of the present moment, but also a whole frieze of memories and associations. It was some of the most accurate literary criticism Ulysses had so far received. Random House published its edition on January 25, 1934—almost twelve years after the first two copies had been delivered from the printer to Sylvia Beach, waiting at the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

3.

But what kind of object is it, really, this super-novel? An international bricolage—with its postage stamps and packing tape still visible. Just think of its giant range! There are obscene moments in this novel, absolutely, but then there are also soft domestic occurrences, like a cup of tea at breakfast (“The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea”), and shimmering intellectual conversations. “The supreme question about a work of art,” a character comments, “is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas.”

There is piety at a funeral or in a church, and also gossip, and drunk political argument. Most of all there is the largest range of the mind’s activities that had so far been seen in a novel: reveries, meditations, miniature passing regrets and cadenzas of wishful thinking, like Bloom’s endearing efforts to imagine the ideal advertisement. All of which are described with the infinite synthesizer of Joyce’s talent, equally happy not just with obscenity but also with puns in Latin and French, and his panoply of pastiche styles.

To place too much emphasis on Joyce’s legal battles with the censors, therefore, to range this hyperindividualist among his contemporary beatniks and free speech activists, seems too earnest, too retrospectively neat—as if all of Joyce’s sprezzatura was motivated by an exhibitionistic exasperation at outmoded legalities. It reduces the million elements of a multifarious novel into a single constricting pattern. The reader, after all, who tries to plot a reading of Ulysses according to the sketch map of its officially obscene elements—a random swear word, a sexual reverie—will soon give up in mute despair.

And yet: this novel is a scandal. It is still a scandal, nearly a century after its first publication. For something is missing in Ulysses—which could be called romanticism, or the ideal, or the metaphysical; and its absence is the deep reason why Joyce’s early readers were so alarmed, and why it can still disturb. Without it all the usual conventions are undermined. “What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism,” Joyce once said to his friend Arthur Power, “some unrealizable or misconceived ideal. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off…. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.”

Ulysses: the least metaphysical novel ever written…

In keeping close to fact, Joyce happened on a whole new way of writing novels. And the first, most intoxicating invention was the discovery of how comprehensive it was really possible to be. Even sexual fantasies, to choose an extreme example, could suddenly find their form. There’s an episode that takes place in “nighttown,” the red-light district of Dublin, which Joyce wrote as a dream play, where the real and unreal melt into each other. At one point, Bloom is momentarily transformed into a woman, while Bella Cohen, the brothel mistress, is momentarily transformed into Bello, a man. What follows is a domination fantasy, where Bello instructs Bloom in his new duties as a maid emptying the brothel’s chamberpots (“lap it up like champagne. Drink me piping hot”) until, bored, Bello tries to sell Bloom off:

What offers? (He points.) For that lot trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!

If transgender fisting occurs earlier in the history of the novel, I would be surprised.

Yes, Joyce had happened on a new comprehensiveness, an absolute, equable precision. If this was read as provocation, such provocation was only a side effect of a much grander project of universal description. (“I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people,” he had already wearily noted, as early as 1906, when he was trying, and failing, to get Dubliners published.) In Ulysses, perhaps the most stunning achievement of this total writing was the character of Bloom himself. “You seem to have read a lot,” Joyce once said to his friend, the painter Frank Budgen. “Do you know of any complete all-round character presented by any writer?” Budgen’s answer was Homer’s Ulysses, and it met with Joyce’s approval. But Bloom is a much larger creation even than Ulysses, and he remains the most thoroughly imagined character in literature—an achievement perhaps only possible because of the multiple styles of Joyce’s novel, which allowed him not just to describe Bloom’s fantasies, including some that are obscene, but also his height and the precise layout of his ideal home.

And yet it’s also true that, while the obscene in the novel is only one small aspect of this new largesse, it was perhaps through obscenity that he discovered the possibility of this revised gigantic scale—in private, in a series of letters he exchanged with his wife Nora in 1909, before he wrote Ulysses. These letters, often dismissed as a curiosity, are fluorescent with obscenity—with Joyce imagining Nora squatting over him, with “a big fat dirty snaking thing coming slowly out of your backside.” Birmingham writes how these letters “are one of the secret headwaters of modern literature,” and I think Birmingham is right. At this point, it seems that Joyce discovered that everything could be said. There was nothing that could not be transformed into language.

But of course, it was Joyce’s originality with language itself that represented the extra problem for his contemporary readers: his subscribers and attorneys. And I think it’s possible to argue that the linguistic loop-the-loops of Joyce’s prose derive from the same disabused source: his meticulous materialism.

For something strange happens to language in Ulysses. In it, Joyce achieved verbal replicas of joyful brilliance—not just the ordinary prose effects of precise verbs (cattle “slouching by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony croups”), but rhythmic reproductions (“A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles”), and audio imitations (“Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos.”)

And while such replicas might at first sight seem to be ways of foregrounding the artifice of writing, I think the intention was really the reverse. “His writing is not about something,” Samuel Beckett would famously write, “it is that something itself.” Joyce tried to make language become what it describes. He wanted to make it as literal as possible. “When the sense is sleep,” added Beckett, “the words go to sleep…. When the sense is dancing, the words dance.” Beckett was talking about Finnegans Wake, but the project is already visible in Ulysses. When the sense is trotting, the words trot; when the sense is water, the words deliquesce. For what could be more realistic, after all, than a sentence where the word becomes the thing it described?

What seems to have happened, as the novel progressed, was that Joyce realized that if he could transform any phenomenon into language, it was also true that the literalism could be flipped the other way. Language itself could be treated as a thing, a phenomenon to be included in his epic. Every day, we are assailed and contaminated by dead language, by language that has become an object like any other—the random clichés of our internal monologues, advertising slogans, the mass-produced styles of magazines and newspapers. And so, if the ideal was comprehensiveness, a total taxonomy of the world’s phenomena, then he also needed to include not just the full range of the world’s objects, but the full range of its styles, too. “To compress all these wanderings and clothe them in the form of this day is for me possible only by such variation which, I beg you to believe, is not capricious.”

It’s not capricious, but can poor Archibald Bodkin be blamed if the structure of the book eluded him? Instead of the usual unity of style, Joyce’s novel would be held together by the repetition of its infinite motifs. Ulysses becomes its own self-generating machine, remixing its materials across its various techniques. In the episode on the beach, say, Bloom’s orgasm had been covertly signaled by a romance description of the Mirus Bazaar firework display: “And O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads.” And then, a hundred pages later, in the dream play of nighttown, those fireworks minutely return in a garishly self-referential stage direction: “Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs.” With such variations and repeats, Joyce organized the vast expanse of his romanzaccione.

For Joyce was correct, in a way, to call this novel an encyclopedia. Its genre is not so much the novel as total collage, or world history. “I think I will write a history of the world,” he’s said to have told Harriet Shaw Weaver, on being asked what he planned to write after Ulysses. But then, he already had.

The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses

by Kevin Birmingham

GEORGE ORWELL 

On George Orwell

Several words and phrases from Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered popular language. 

Newspeak is a simplified and obfuscatory language designed to make independent thought impossible. 

Doublethink means holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. 

The Thought Police are those who suppress all dissenting opinion. 

Prolefeed is homogenised, manufactured superficial literature, film and music, used to control and indoctrinate the populace through docility. 

Big Brother is a supreme dictator who watches everyone.

Wikipedia

On George Orwell

(Cyril) Connolly remarked of him as a schoolboy, "The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself". At Eton, John Vaughan Wilkes, his former headmaster's son recalled, "...he was extremely argumentative—about anything—and criticising the masters and criticising the other boys.... We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the arguments—or think he had anyhow." Roger Mynors concurs: "Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself...."

Wikipedia 

George Orwell

"one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century and..one of the most important chroniclers of English culture of his generation"

Though I speak with the tongues of men (women) and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. 

Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. ... And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

George Orwell. I Corinthians xiii (adapted) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), opening lines.

One cannot really be Catholic (religious) & grown-up. George Orwell 

George Orwell 

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism and commitment to democratic socialism.

Commonly ranked as one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century and as one of the most important chroniclers of English culture of his generation, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. 

He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together (as of 2009) have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian — descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices — has entered the language together with several of his neologisms, including Cold War, Big Brother, thought police, Room 101, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.

Early Years 

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of plantations in Jamaica.

His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Although the gentility passed down the generations, the prosperity did not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures.

Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him and his older sister to England.

In 1904, Ida Blair settled with her children at Henley-on-Thames. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit in the summer of 1907, they did not see the husband and father Richard Blair until 1912. His mother's diary from 1905 describes a lively round of social activity and artistic interests.

The family moved to Shiplake before the First World War, where Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially their daughter Jacintha. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field. On being asked why, he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up." 

Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry, and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He said that he might write a book in the style of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he also enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister.

At the age of five, Eric was sent as a day-boy to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which Marjorie also attended. It was a Roman Catholic convent run by French Ursuline nuns, who had been exiled from France after religious education was banned in 1903. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family could not afford the fees, and he needed to earn a scholarship. 

Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, East Sussex. Limouzin, who was a proficient golfer, knew of the school and its headmaster through the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club, where he won several competitions in 1903 and 1904. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win the scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement that allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. In September 1911 Eric arrived at St Cyprian's. He boarded at the school for the next five years, returning home only for school holidays. He knew nothing of the reduced fees although he "soon recognised that he was from a poorer home".

Blair hated the school and many years later wrote an essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", published posthumously, based on his time there. At St. Cyprian's, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who became a noted writer and, as the editor of Horizon, published many of Orwell's essays.

As part of school work, Blair wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard. He came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton Colleges. But an Eton scholarship did not guarantee a place, and none was immediately available for Blair. He chose to stay at St Cyprian's until December 1916, in case a place at Eton became available.

In January, Blair took up the place at Wellington, where he spent the Spring term. In May 1917 a place became available as a King's Scholar at Eton. He studied at Eton until December 1921, when he left at age 18½. Wellington was "beastly", Orwell told his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, but he said he was "interested and happy" at Eton. His principal tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who also gave him advice later in his career.

Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley. Stephen Runciman, who was at Eton with Blair, noted that he and his contemporaries appreciated Huxley's linguistic flair. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years, they did not associate with each other.

Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies, but during his time at Eton he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a College magazine, The Election Times, joined in the production of other publications—College Days and Bubble and Squeak—and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to win one. Runciman noted that he had a romantic idea about the East and the family decided that Blair should join the Imperial Police, the precursor of the Indian Police Service. For this he had to pass an entrance examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time; Blair was enrolled at a crammer there called Craighurst, and brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam, coming seventh out of the 26 candidates who exceeded the pass mark.

Policing in Burma

Blair's maternal grandmother lived at Moulmein, so he chose a posting in Burma. In October 1922 he sailed on board S.S. Herefordshire via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. A month later, he arrived at Rangoon and travelled to the police training school in Mandalay. After a short posting at Maymyo, Burma's principal hill station, he was posted to the frontier outpost of Myaungmya in the Irrawaddy Delta at the beginning of 1924.

Working as an imperial policeman gave him considerable responsibility while most of his contemporaries were still at university in England. When he was posted farther east in the Delta to Twante as a sub-divisional officer, he was responsible for the security of some 200,000 people. At the end of 1924, he was promoted to Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam, closer to Rangoon. Syriam had the refinery of the Burmah Oil Company, "the surrounding land a barren waste, all vegetation killed off by the fumes of sulphur dioxide pouring out day and night from the stacks of the refinery." But the town was near Rangoon, a cosmopolitan seaport, and Blair went into the city as often as he could, "to browse in a bookshop; to eat well-cooked food; to get away from the boring routine of police life." In September 1925 he went to Insein, the home of Insein Prison, the second largest jail in Burma. In Insein, he had "long talks on every conceivable subject" with Elisa Maria Langford-Rae (who later married Kazi Lhendup Dorjee). She noted his "sense of utter fairness in minutest details".

In April 1926 he moved to Moulmein, where his maternal grandmother lived. At the end of that year, he was assigned to Katha in Upper Burma, where he contracted dengue fever in 1927. Entitled to a leave in England that year, he was allowed to return in July due to his illness. While on leave in England and on holiday with his family in Cornwall in September 1927, he reappraised his life. Deciding against returning to Burma, he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police to become a writer. He drew on his experiences in the Burma police for the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936).

In Burma, Blair acquired a reputation as an outsider. He spent much of his time alone, reading or pursuing non-pukka activities, such as attending the churches of the Karen ethnic group. A colleague, Roger Beadon, recalled (in a 1969 recording for the BBC) that Blair was fast to learn the language and that before he left Burma, "was able to speak fluently with Burmese priests in 'very high-flown Burmese.'" Blair made changes to his appearance in Burma that remained for the rest of his life. "While in Burma, he acquired a moustache similar to those worn by officers of the British regiments stationed there. [He] also acquired some tattoos; on each knuckle he had a small untidy blue circle. Many Burmese living in rural areas still sport tattoos like this – they are believed to protect against bullets and snake bites." Later, he wrote that he felt guilty about his role in the work of empire and he "began to look more closely at his own country and saw that England also had its oppressed..."

London and Paris 

In England, he settled back in the family home at Southwold, renewing acquaintance with local friends and attending an Old Etonian dinner. He visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for advice on becoming a writer. Early in autumn 1927 he moved to London. Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, helped him find lodgings, and by the end of 1927 he had moved into rooms in Portobello Road; a blue plaque commemorates his residence there.

Pitter's involvement in the move "would have lent it a reassuring respectability in Mrs Blair's eyes." Pitter had a sympathetic interest in Blair's writing, pointed out weaknesses in his poetry, and advised him to write about what he knew. In fact he decided to write of "certain aspects of the present that he set out to know" and "ventured into the East End of London – the first of the occasional sorties he would make to discover for himself the world of poverty and the down-and-outers who inhabit it. He had found a subject. These sorties, explorations, expeditions, tours or immersions were made intermittently over a period of five years."

In imitation of Jack London, whose writing he admired (particularly The People of the Abyss), Orwell started to explore slumming the poorer parts of London. On his first outing he set out to Limehouse Causeway, spending his first night in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy's 'kip'. For a while he "went native" in his own country, dressing like a tramp and making no concessions to middle-class mores and expectations; he recorded his experiences of the low life for use in "The Spike", his first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

In the spring of 1928 he moved to Paris. He lived in the Rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the 5th Arrondissement. His aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He began to write novels, including an early version of Burmese Days but nothing else survives from that period. He was more successful as a journalist and published articles in Monde, a political/literary journal edited by Henri Barbusse, – his first article as a professional writer, "La Censure en Angleterre", appeared in that journal on 6 October 1928 – G. K.'s Weekly – where his first article to appear in England, "A Farthing Newspaper", was printed on 29 December 1928 – and Le Progrès Civique (founded by the left-wing coalition Le Cartel des Gauches). Three pieces appeared in successive weeks in Progrès Civique: discussing unemployment, a day in the life of a tramp, and the beggars of London, respectively. "In one or another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject – at the heart of almost everything he wrote until Homage to Catalonia."

He fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the 14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. His experiences there were the basis of his essay "How the Poor Die", published in 1946. He chose not to identify the hospital, indeed was deliberately misleading about its location. Shortly afterwards, he had all his money stolen from his lodging house. Whether through necessity or simply to collect material, he undertook menial jobs like dishwashing in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in Down and Out in Paris and London. In August 1929, he sent a copy of "The Spike" to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine in London. The magazine was edited by Max Plowman and Sir Richard Rees, and Plowman accepted the work for publication.

Southwold

In December 1929, after nearly two years in Paris, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents' house in Southwold, which was to remain his base for the next five years. The family was well-established in the town and his sister Avril was running a tea-house there. He became acquainted with many local people, including Brenda Salkeld, the clergyman's daughter who worked as a gym-teacher at St Felix Girls' School, Southwold. Although Salkeld rejected his offer of marriage, she was to remain a friend and regular correspondent for many years. He also renewed friendships with older friends, such as Dennis Collings, whose girlfriend Eleanor Jacques was also to play a part in his life.

In the spring he stayed briefly in Bramley, Leeds, with his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey Dakin, who was as unappreciative of Blair as when they knew each other as children. Blair was writing reviews for Adelphi and acting as a private tutor to a disabled child at Southwold. He then became tutor to three young brothers, one of whom, Richard Peters, later became a distinguished academic.

"His history in these years is marked by dualities and contrasts. There is Blair leading a respectable, outwardly eventless life at his parents' house in Southwold, writing; then in contrast, there is Blair as Burton (the name he used in his down-and-out episodes) in search of experience in the kips and spikes, in the East End, on the road, and in the hop fields of Kent." He went painting and bathing on the beach, and there he met Mabel and Francis Fierz who were later to influence his career. Over the next year he visited them in London, often meeting their friend Max Plowman. He also often stayed at the homes of Ruth Pitter and Richard Rees, where he could "change" for his sporadic tramping expeditions. One of his jobs was to do domestic work at a lodgings for half a crown a day.

Blair now contributed regularly to Adelphi, with "A Hanging" appearing in August 1931. From August to September 1931 his explorations of poverty continued, and, like the protagonist of A Clergyman's Daughter, he followed the East End tradition of working in the Kent hop fields. He kept a diary about his experiences there. Afterwards, he lodged in the Tooley Street kip, but could not stand it for long and with financial help from his parents moved to Windsor Street, where he stayed until Christmas. "Hop Picking", by Eric Blair, appeared in the October 1931 issue of New Statesman, whose editorial staff included his old friend Cyril Connolly. Mabel Fierz put him in contact with Leonard Moore, who was to become his literary agent.

At this time Jonathan Cape rejected A Scullion's Diary, the first version of Down and Out. On the advice of Richard Rees, he offered it to Faber & Faber, whose editorial director, T. S. Eliot, also rejected it. Blair ended the year by deliberately getting himself arrested, so he could experience Christmas in prison, but the authorities did not regard his "drunk and disorderly" behaviour as imprisonable, and he returned home to Southwold after two days in a police cell.

Teaching career

In April 1932 Blair became a teacher at The Hawthorns High School, a prep school for boys in Hayes, West London. This was a small school offering private schooling for children of local tradesmen and shopkeepers, and had only twenty boys and one other master. While at the school he became friendly with the curate of the local parish church and became involved with activities there. Mabel Fierz had pursued matters with Moore, and at the end of June 1932, Moore told Blair that Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish A Scullion's Diary for a £40 advance, through his recently founded publishing house, Victor Gollancz Ltd, which was an outlet for radical and socialist works.

At the end of the summer term in 1932, Blair returned to Southwold, where his parents had used a legacy to buy their own home. Blair and his sister Avril spent the summer holidays making the house habitable while he also worked on Burmese Days. He was also spending time with Eleanor Jacques, but her attachment to Dennis Collings remained an obstacle to his hopes of a more serious relationship.

"Clink", an essay describing his failed attempt to get sent to prison, appeared in the August 1932 number of Adelphi. He returned to teaching at Hayes and prepared for the publication of his book, now known as Down and Out in Paris and London. He wished to publish under a different name in order to avoid any embarrassment to his family over his time as a "tramp".

In a letter to Moore (dated 15 November 1932), he left the choice of pseudonym to him and to Gollancz. Four days later, he wrote to Moore, suggesting the pseudonyms P. S. Burton (a name he used when tramping), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways. He finally adopted the nom de plume George Orwell because, as he told Eleanor Jacques, "It is a good round English name." 

Down and Out in Paris and London was published on 9 January 1933, as Orwell continued to work on Burmese Days. Down and Out was successful and was next published by Harper and Brothers in New York.

In the summer of 1933 Blair left Hawthorns to become a teacher at Frays College, in Uxbridge, West London. This was a much larger establishment with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff. He acquired a motorcycle and took trips through the surrounding countryside. On one of these expeditions he became soaked and caught a chill that developed into pneumonia. He was taken to Uxbridge Cottage Hospital, where for a time his life was believed to be in danger. When he was discharged in January 1934, he returned to Southwold to convalesce and, supported by his parents, never returned to teaching.

He was disappointed when Gollancz turned down Burmese Days, mainly on the grounds of potential suits for libel, but Harper were prepared to publish it in the United States. Meanwhile, Blair started work on the novel A Clergyman's Daughter, drawing upon his life as a teacher and on life in Southwold. Eleanor Jacques was now married and had gone to Singapore and Brenda Salkield had left for Ireland, so Blair was relatively isolated in Southwold—working on the allotments, walking alone and spending time with his father. Eventually in October, after sending A Clergyman's Daughter to Moore, he left for London to take a job that had been found for him by his Aunt Nellie Limouzin.

This job was as a part-time assistant in Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope, who were friends of Nellie Limouzin in the Esperanto movement. The Westropes were friendly and provided him with comfortable accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street. He was sharing the job with Jon Kimche, who also lived with the Westropes. Blair worked at the shop in the afternoons and had his mornings free to write and his evenings free to socialise. These experiences provided background for the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). 

As well as the various guests of the Westropes, he was able to enjoy the company of Richard Rees and the Adelphi writers and Mabel Fierz. The Westropes and Kimche were members of the Independent Labour Party, although at this time Blair was not seriously politically active. He was writing for the Adelphi and preparing A Clergyman's Daughter and Burmese Days for publication.

At the beginning of 1935 he had to move out of Warwick Mansions, and Mabel Fierz found him a flat in Parliament Hill. A Clergyman's Daughter was published on 11 March 1935. In the spring of 1935 Blair met his future wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, when his landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, who was studying for a masters degree in psychology at University College London, invited some of her fellow students to a party. One of these students, Elizaveta Fen, a biographer and future translator of Chekhov, recalled Orwell and his friend Richard Rees "draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, "moth-eaten and prematurely aged." Around this time, Blair had started to write reviews for the New English Weekly.

In June, Burmese Days was published and Cyril Connolly's review in the New Statesman prompted Orwell (as he then became known) to re-establish contact with his old friend. In August, he moved into a flat in Kentish Town, which he shared with Michael Sayers and Rayner Heppenstall. The relationship was sometimes awkward and Orwell and Heppenstall even came to blows, though they remained friends and later worked together on BBC broadcasts. 

Orwell was now working on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and also tried unsuccessfully to write a serial for the News Chronicle. By October 1935 his flatmates had moved out and he was struggling to pay the rent on his own. He remained until the end of January 1936, when he stopped working at Booklovers' Corner......

Wikipedia

JONATHAN SWIFT 

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, MB Drapier – or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.

Youth

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was the second child and only son of Jonathan Swift (1640–1667) and his wife Abigail Erick (or Herrick), of Frisby on the Wreake. His father, a native of Goodrich, Herefordshire, accompanied his brothers to Ireland to seek their fortunes in law after their Royalist father's estate was brought to ruin during the English Civil War. Swift's father died in Dublin before he was born, and his mother returned to England. He was left in the care of his influential uncle, Godwin, a close friend and confidant of Sir John Temple, whose son later employed Swift as his secretary.

Swift's family had several interesting literary connections: His grandmother, Elizabeth (Dryden) Swift, was the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden, grandfather of the poet John Dryden. The same grandmother's aunt, Katherine (Throckmorton) Dryden, was a first cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Sir Walter Raleigh. His great-great grandmother, Margaret (Godwin) Swift, was the sister of Francis Godwin, author of The Man in the Moone which influenced parts of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. His uncle, Thomas Swift, married a daughter of the poet and playwright Sir William Davenant, a godson of William Shakespeare.

His uncle Godwin Swift (1628–1695) a benefactor, took primary responsibility for the young Jonathan, sending him with one of his cousins to Kilkenny College (also attended by the philosopher George Berkeley). In 1682, financed by Godwin's son, Willoughby, he attended Dublin University (Trinity College, Dublin), from where he received his BA in 1686, and developed his friendship with William Congreve. Swift was studying for his Master's degree when political troubles in Ireland surrounding the Glorious Revolution forced him to leave for England in 1688, where his mother helped him get a position as secretary and personal assistant of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Farnham. Temple was an English diplomat who, having arranged the Triple Alliance of 1668, retired from public service to his country estate to tend his gardens and write his memoirs. Gaining the confidence of his employer, Swift "was often trusted with matters of great importance." Within three years of their acquaintance, Temple had introduced his secretary to William III, and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments.

When Swift took up his residence at Moor Park, he met Esther Johnson, then eight years old, the daughter of an impoverished widow who acted as companion to Temple's sister, Lady Giffard. Swift acted as her tutor and mentor, giving her the nickname "Stella", and the two maintained a close but ambiguous relationship for the rest of Esther's life.

In 1690, Swift left Temple for Ireland because of his health, but returned to Moor Park the following year. The illness, fits of vertigo or giddiness – now known to be Ménière's disease—would continue to plague Swift throughout his life. During this second stay with Temple, Swift received his M.A. from Hart Hall, Oxford in 1692. Then, apparently despairing of gaining a better position through Temple's patronage, Swift left Moor Park to become an ordained priest in the Established Church of Ireland and in 1694 he was appointed to the prebend of Kilroot in the Diocese of Connor, with his parish located at Kilroot, near Carrickfergus in County Antrim.

Swift appears to have been miserable in his new position, being isolated in a small, remote community far from the centres of power and influence. While at Kilroot, however, Swift may well have become romantically involved with Jane Waring, whom he called "Varina", the sister of an old college friend.

A letter from him survives, offering to remain if she would marry him and promising to leave and never return to Ireland if she refused. She presumably refused, because Swift left his post and returned to England and Temple's service at Moor Park in 1696, and he remained there until Temple's death. There he was employed in helping to prepare Temple's memoirs and correspondence for publication. During this time Swift wrote The Battle of the Books, a satire responding to critics of Temple's Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), though Battle was not published until 1704.

On 27 January 1699 Temple died. Swift, normally a harsh judge of human nature, said that all that was good and amiable in humankind died with him. He stayed on briefly in England to complete the editing of Temple's memoirs, and perhaps in the hope that recognition of his work might earn him a suitable position in England. However, Swift's work made enemies of some of Temple's family and friends, in particular Temple's formidable sister, Lady Giffard, who objected to indiscretions included in the memoirs.

Swift's next move was to approach King William directly, based on his imagined connection through Temple and a belief that he had been promised a position. This failed so miserably that he accepted the lesser post of secretary and chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justice of Ireland. However, when he reached Ireland he found that the secretaryship had already been given to another. However, he soon obtained the living of Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan, and the prebend of Dunlavin in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

At Laracor, a mile or two from Trim, County Meath, and twenty miles (32 km) from Dublin, Swift ministered to a congregation of about fifteen, and had abundant leisure for cultivating his garden, making a canal (after the Dutch fashion of Moor Park), planting willows, and rebuilding the vicarage. As chaplain to Lord Berkeley, he spent much of his time in Dublin and travelled to London frequently over the next ten years. In 1701, Swift published, anonymously, a political pamphlet, A Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome.

Writer

In February 1702, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College, Dublin. That spring he travelled to England and returned to Ireland in October, accompanied by Esther Johnson—now 20—and his friend Rebecca Dingley, another member of William Temple's household. There is a great mystery and controversy over Swift's relationship with Esther Johnson nicknamed "Stella". Many, notably his close friend Thomas Sheridan believed that they were secretly married in 1716; others, like Swift's housekeeper Mrs Brent, and Rebecca Dingley (who lived with Stella all through her years in Ireland) dismissed the story as absurd.

During his visits to England in these years, Swift published A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books (1704) and began to gain a reputation as a writer. This led to close, lifelong friendships with Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot, forming the core of the Martinus Scriblerus Club (founded in 1713).

Swift became increasingly active politically in these years. From 1707 to 1709 and again in 1710, Swift was in London, unsuccessfully urging upon the Whig administration of Lord Godolphin the claims of the Irish clergy to the First-Fruits and Twentieths ("Queen Anne's Bounty"), which brought in about £2,500 a year, already granted to their brethren in England. He found the opposition Tory leadership more sympathetic to his cause and Swift was recruited to support their cause as editor of The Examiner when they came to power in 1710. In 1711, Swift published the political pamphlet "The Conduct of the Allies," attacking the Whig government for its inability to end the prolonged war with France. The incoming Tory government conducted secret (and illegal) negotiations with France, resulting in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ending the War of the Spanish Succession.

Swift was part of the inner circle of the Tory government, and often acted as mediator between Henry St John (Viscount Bolingbroke) the secretary of state for foreign affairs (1710–15) and Robert Harley (Earl of Oxford) lord treasurer and prime minister (1711–1714). 

Swift recorded his experiences and thoughts during this difficult time in a long series of letters to Esther Johnson, collected and published after his death as A Journal to Stella. The animosity between the two Tory leaders eventually led to the dismissal of Harley in 1714. With the death of Queen Anne and accession of George I that year, the Whigs returned to power and the Tory leaders were tried for treason for conducting secret negotiations with France.

Also during these years in London, Swift became acquainted with the Vanhomrigh family (Dutch merchants who had settled in Ireland, then moved to London) and became involved with one of the daughters, Esther, yet another fatherless young woman and another ambiguous relationship to confuse Swift's biographers. 

Swift furnished Esther with the nickname "Vanessa" and she features as one of the main characters in his poem Cadenus and Vanessa. The poem and their correspondence suggests that Esther was infatuated with Swift, and that he may have reciprocated her affections, only to regret this and then try to break off the relationship. Esther followed Swift to Ireland in 1714, and settled at her old family home, Celbridge Abbey. Their uneasy relationship continued for some years; then there appears to have been a confrontation, possibly involving Esther Johnson. Esther Vanhomrigh died in 1723 at the age of 35, having destroyed the will she had made in Swift's favour. Another lady with whom he had a close but less intense relationship was Anne Long, a toast of the Kit-Cat Club.

Maturity 

Before the fall of the Tory government, Swift hoped that his services would be rewarded with a church appointment in England. 

However, Queen Anne appeared to have taken a dislike to Swift and thwarted these efforts. Her dislike has been attributed to The Tale of a Tub, which she thought blasphemous, compounded by The Windsor Prophecy, where Swift, with a surprising lack of tact, advised the Queen on which of her bedchamber ladies she should and which she should not trust.

The best position his friends could secure for him was the Deanery of St Patrick's: this was not in the Queen's gift and Anne, who could be a bitter enemy, made it clear that Swift would not have received the preferment if she could have prevented it. With the return of the Whigs, Swift's best move was to leave England and he returned to Ireland in disappointment, a virtual exile, to live "like a rat in a hole".

Once in Ireland, however, Swift began to turn his pamphleteering skills in support of Irish causes, producing some of his most memorable works: Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), Drapier's Letters (1724), and A Modest Proposal (1729), earning him the status of an Irish patriot. This new role was unwelcome to the Government, which made clumsy attempts to silence him. His printer, Edward Waters, was convicted of seditious libel in 1720, but four years later a grand jury refused to find that the Drapier Letters (which, though written under a pseudonym, were universally known to be Swift's work) were seditious. Swift responded with an attack on the Irish judiciary almost unparalleled in its ferocity, his principal target being the "vile and profligate villain" William Whitshed, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.

Also during these years, he began writing his masterpiece, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, better known as Gulliver's Travels. Much of the material reflects his political experiences of the preceding decade. For instance, the episode in which the giant Gulliver puts out the Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it can be seen as a metaphor for the Tories' illegal peace treaty; having done a good thing in an unfortunate manner. 

In 1726 he paid a long-deferred visit to London, taking with him the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels. During his visit he stayed with his old friends Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot and John Gay, who helped him arrange for the anonymous publication of his book. First published in November 1726, it was an immediate hit, with a total of three printings that year and another in early 1727. French, German, and Dutch translations appeared in 1727, and pirated copies were printed in Ireland.

Swift returned to England one more time in 1727 and stayed with Alexander Pope once again. The visit was cut short when Swift received word that Esther Johnson was dying, and rushed back home to be with her. On 28 January 1728, Esther Johnson died; Swift had prayed at her bedside, even composing prayers for her comfort. Swift could not bear to be present at the end, but on the night of her death he began to write his The Death of Mrs Johnson. He was too ill to attend the funeral at St Patrick's. Many years later, a lock of hair, assumed to be Esther Johnson's, was found in his desk, wrapped in a paper bearing the words, "Only a woman's hair".

Death became a frequent feature of Swift's life from this point. In 1731 he wrote Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, his own obituary published in 1739. In 1732, his good friend and collaborator John Gay died. In 1735, John Arbuthnot, another friend from his days in London, died. In 1738 Swift began to show signs of illness, and in 1742 he may have suffered a stroke, losing the ability to speak and realising his worst fears of becoming mentally disabled. ("I shall be like that tree," he once said, "I shall die at the top.") 

He became increasingly quarrelsome, and long-standing friendships, like that with Thomas Sheridan, ended without sufficient cause. To protect him from unscrupulous hangers on, who had begun to prey on the great man, his closest companions had him declared of "unsound mind and memory". However, it was long believed by many that Swift was actually insane at this point. In his book Literature and Western Man, author J. B. Priestley even cites the final chapters of Gulliver's Travels as proof of Swift's approaching "insanity".

In part VIII of his series, The Story of Civilization, Will Durant describes the final years of Swift's life as such:

"Definite symptoms of madness appeared in 1738. In 1741 guardians were appointed to take care of his affairs and watch lest in his outbursts of violence he should do himself harm. In 1742 he suffered great pain from the inflammation of his left eye, which swelled to the size of an egg; five attendants had to restrain him from tearing out his eye. He went a whole year without uttering a word."

In 1744, Alexander Pope died. On 19 October 1745, Swift also died. After being laid out in public view for the people of Dublin to pay their last respects, he was buried in his own cathedral by Esther Johnson's side, in accordance with his wishes. The bulk of his fortune (£12,000) was left to found a hospital for the mentally ill, originally known as St Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, which opened in 1757, and which still exists as a psychiatric hospital.

Jonathan Swift wrote his own epitaph:

Hic depositum est Corpus

IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.

Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis

Decani,

Ubi sæva Indignatio

Ulterius

Cor lacerare nequit,

Abi Viator

Et imitare, si poteris,

Strenuum pro virili

Libertatis Vindicatorem.

Obiit 19º Die Mensis Octobris

A.D. 1745 Anno Ætatis 78º.

Here is laid the Body

of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Sacred Theology,

Dean of this Cathedral Church,

where fierce Indignation

can no longer

injure the Heart.

Go forth, Voyager,

and copy, if you can,

this vigorous (to the best of his ability)

Champion of Liberty.

He died on the 19th Day of the Month of October,

A.D. 1745, in the 78th Year of his Age.

W. B. Yeats poetically translated it from the Latin as:

Swift has sailed into his rest;

Savage indignation there

Cannot lacerate his breast.

Imitate him if you dare,

World-besotted traveller; he

Served human liberty.

Works 

Swift was a prolific writer, notable for his satires. The most recent collection of his prose works (Herbert Davis, ed. Basil Blackwell, 1965–) comprises fourteen volumes. A recent edition of his complete poetry (Pat Rodges, ed. Penguin, 1983) is 953 pages long. One edition of his correspondence (David Woolley, ed. P. Lang, 1999) fills three volumes.

Major Prose Work 

Swift's first major prose work, A Tale of a Tub, demonstrates many of the themes and stylistic techniques he would employ in his later work. It is at once wildly playful and funny while being pointed and harshly critical of its targets. In its main thread, the Tale recounts the exploits of three sons, representing the main threads of Christianity, who receive a bequest from their father of a coat each, with the added instructions to make no alterations whatsoever. 

However, the sons soon find that their coats have fallen out of current fashion, and begin to look for loopholes in their father's will that will let them make the needed alterations. As each finds his own means of getting around their father's admonition, they struggle with each other for power and dominance. Inserted into this story, in alternating chapters, the narrator includes a series of whimsical "digressions" on various subjects.

In 1690, Sir William Temple, Swift's patron, published An Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning a defence of classical writing (see Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns) holding up the Epistles of Phalaris as an example. William Wotton responded to Temple with Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) showing that the Epistles were a later forgery. A response by the supporters of the Ancients was then made by Charles Boyle (later the 4th Earl of Orrery and father of Swift's first biographer). A further retort on the Modern side came from Richard Bentley, one of the pre-eminent scholars of the day, in his essay Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris (1699). However, the final words on the topic belong to Swift in his Battle of the Books (1697, published 1704) in which he makes a humorous defence on behalf of Temple and the cause of the Ancients.

In 1708, a cobbler named John Partridge published a popular almanac of astrological predictions. Because Partridge falsely determined the deaths of several church officials, Swift attacked Partridge in Predictions for the Ensuing Year by Isaac Bickerstaff, a parody predicting that Partridge would die on 29 March. Swift followed up with a pamphlet issued on 30 March claiming that Partridge had in fact died, which was widely believed despite Partridge's statements to the contrary. According to other sources, Richard Steele uses the personae of Isaac Bickerstaff and was the one who wrote about the "death" of John Partridge and published it in The Spectator, not Jonathan Swift.*

Drapier's Letters (1724) was a series of pamphlets against the monopoly granted by the English government to William Wood to provide the Irish with copper coinage. It was widely believed that Wood would need to flood Ireland with debased coinage in order make a profit. In these "letters" Swift posed as a shop-keeper—a draper—to criticise the plan. Swift's writing was so effective in undermining opinion in the project that a reward was offered by the government to anyone disclosing the true identity of the author. 

Though hardly a secret (on returning to Dublin after one of his trips to England, Swift was greeted with a banner, "Welcome Home, Drapier") no-one turned Swift in, although there was an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute the publisher Harding. The government eventually resorted to hiring none other than Sir Isaac Newton to certify the soundness of Wood's coinage to counter Swift's accusations. In "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739) Swift recalled this as one of his best achievements.

Gulliver's Travels, a large portion of which Swift wrote at Woodbrook House in County Laois, was published in 1726. It is regarded as his masterpiece. As with his other writings, the Travels was published under a pseudonym, the fictional Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon and later a sea captain. Some of the correspondence between printer Benj. Motte and Gulliver's also-fictional cousin negotiating the book's publication has survived. 

Though it has often been mistakenly thought of and published in bowdlerised form as a children's book, it is a great and sophisticated satire of human nature based on Swift's experience of his times. Gulliver's Travels is an anatomy of human nature, a sardonic looking-glass, often criticised for its apparent misanthropy. 

It asks its readers to refute it, to deny that it has adequately characterised human nature and society. Each of the four books—recounting four voyages to mostly-fictional exotic lands—has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Critics hail the work as a satiric reflection on the shortcomings of Enlightenment thought.

In 1729, Swift published A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, a satire in which the narrator, with intentionally grotesque arguments, recommends that Ireland's poor escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich: "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food..." 

Following the satirical form, he introduces the reforms he is actually suggesting by deriding them:

Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients...taxing our absentees...using [nothing] except what is of our own growth and manufacture...rejecting...foreign luxury...introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance...learning to love our country...quitting our animosities and factions...teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants....Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.

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to be continued