Jonathan Swift Poet, satirist, man of religion and politics, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a master of scathing satire and political wit. His most famous satirical writings are A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver’s Travels (1725), and A Modest Proposal (1729). Swift wrote his own epitaph in which he speaks of his ‘savage indignation’ and defies future generations to surpass his defence of liberty. Swift’s writing remains a byword for absurd humour, acute political insight, grotesque imagination, and lacerating wit.

Jonathan Swift Poet, satirist, man of religion and politics, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a master of scathing satire and political wit. His most famous satirical writings are A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver’s Travels (1725), and A Modest Proposal (1729). Swift wrote his own epitaph in which he speaks of his ‘savage indignation’ and defies future generations to surpass his defence of liberty. Swift’s writing remains a byword for absurd humour, acute political insight, grotesque imagination, and lacerating wit.

More on Swift and Trim

‘I beg you will hold your resolution of going to Trim…’

 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, Letter 1, 2 September 1710 

 Jonathan Swift was ordained a Church of Ireland clergyman in 1695. In 1700 he was appointed to a union of three Church of Ireland parishes adjacent or near to the town of Trim. The livings of Laracor, Agher and Rathbeggan brought him an income of over £200 a year. Swift was the twenty-third vicar of Laracor; the records of the incumbents go as far back as 1408. According to his biographer David Nokes, Swift ‘developed a strong affection’ for his parish and though he went on to become Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin, he remained attached to it for the rest of his life.  

Although he ‘loved to visit and improve’ his parish, Swift’s life and dealings in the area were not always easy. He disagreed politically with the Bishop of Meath and made efforts to avoid him on his regular visitations; he had difficulty in collecting tithes from his parishioners who offered various excuses, including the weather, as to why they were unable to pay. When he arrived, Swift found the parish in a poor state. His church, its grounds and buildings had been neglected and the area had very few Anglican residents and even fewer regular churchgoers – as the anecdote below relates, he sometimes preached before a congregation of only one! But these problems provided Swift an opportunity to express his characteristically bizarre sense of humour and also to indulge ‘his passion for improvement’, as Louis Landa remarks. Within a few years of arriving, as Irvin Ehrenpreis’s biography records,  Swift had dug trenches and ditches, planted willow and fruit trees, laid a canal and river walk, built a parsonage and transformed a dilapidated building into a “handsome well built church, properly ceiled and flagged, ‘furnished with all conveniences except a surplice and a carpet’

In the enormous body of scholarship and anecdotage concerned with Swift, Trim is associated with the conviviality and intimacy of friends and lovers, as well as with solitude and contemplation. In times of melancholy and sickness, Swift’s County Meath parish became a place of escape and seclusion where, as Nokes remarks, he ‘tried to lead a simple, ascetic life. It was a solace to see his canal in great beauty and the trout playing in it.’

From John Boyle, Lord Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr Jonathan Swift (1752)

 [Swift] was loitering one Sunday in the afternoon, at the house of Dr Raymond at Trim. The bell had rung; the parishioners were assembled for evening prayers and Dr Raymond was preparing to go to the church, which was scarce two hundred yards from his house. “Raymond,” said the Dean, “I’ll lay you a crown I will begin prayers before you this afternoon.” “I accept the wager,” replied Dr Raymond, and immediately they both ran as fast as they could towards the church. Raymond, who was much the nimbler man of the two, arrived first at the door, and when he entered the church, walked decently towards the reading-desk. Swift never slackened his pace, but, running up the aisle, left Dr Raymond behind him in the middle of it, and stepping into the reading-desk, without putting on a surplice, or opening the prayer book, began the liturgy in an audible voice, and continued to repeat the service sufficiently long to win his wager.

 [On being appointed to his Trim parish, Swift] gave public notice to the parishioners, that he would read prayers on every Wednesday and Friday. Upon the following Wednesday the bell was rung and, and [Swift] after having sat some time, and finding the congregation to consist only of himself and his clerk Roger, he began with great composure and gravity but with a turn peculiar to himself, ‘Dearly beloved Roger’ … and then proceeded through the whole service. I mention this trifling circumstance only to shew you, that he could not resist a vein of humour whenever he had an opportunity of entering it.

 Other notable Trim residents in the time of Swift

Esther Johnson (‘Stella’)

None of Swift’s relationships with women were straightforward, and his dalliance with Esther Johnson (1681-1728), known to the world by the nickname ‘Stella’, was the most complex and enduring of all. Swift met her as a child on the estate of Sir William Temple and maintained a close relationship with her until her death, after which he remarked: ‘never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who so improved them by reading […] I cannot call to mind that she ever made a wrong judgment of persons, books or affairs’. Such was his sadness on the night of her funeral that he moved, as he said, ‘into another apartment that I may not see the lights in the church, which is just over against the window of my bedchamber’. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an entire mythology grew up around their relationship and the persistent rumours that the two had either married or had been prevented from doing so because, as Temple’s illegitimate children, they had been half-brother and sister. Investigations into the truth of their relationship led to their tombs in St Patrick’s Cathedral being concreted over to prevent further interference. ‘Stella’s cottage’ is a notable Trim landmark. Denis Johnston’s play The Dreaming Dust (1940) dramatizes the Swift-Stella relationship. 

 Anthony Raymond

He was rector of Trim between 1705 and his death in 1726, a neighbour and friend of Swift, who along with ‘Stella’ was often a guest at the Raymonds’ house in the town. Raymond had been a fellow of Trinity College and he pursued a lifelong passion for learning. Unusually for a Protestant clergyman at this time, Raymond was a keen student of the Irish language, its literature and the history and antiquities of pre-Norman Ireland, and he planned to publish an English translation of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn. Raymond’s life, learning and relationship with Swift are discussed in The Dean’s Friend (1999) by the late Alan Harrison.

 Joe Beaumont

Beaumont was ‘a venerable, handsome, grey-headed man, of quick and various natural abilities’. A linen draper from the town, his story is perhaps the saddest of all Swift’s Trim friends. He became obsessed with finding an accurate way to measure longitude, which was one of the burning scientific issues of the day. Allegedly as a result of his researches, Beaumont lost his sanity and eventually committed suicide. His sad plight caused a friend to write to Swift: ‘For God’s sake do something to comfort Joe … do anything to keep him alive.’ Interestingly, the most sane, humane and likeable first-person narrator in Swift’s literary canon is a plain-talking draper. Although a resident of Dublin, ‘M.B.’, the narrator of The Drapier’s Letters (1724-5) may perhaps bear the odd trace of Joe Beaumont. At one point Swift’s ‘Drapier’ asks an exasperated rhetorical question of an opponent:  ‘Hath he discovered the Longitude?’