Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), was a complex and fascinating figure. He was a conservative cleric with authoritarian views who rarely smiled or laughed and who cultivated an austere and patriarchal public persona. But he was also “a daring cultural bandit” who became “the most notorious writer of his day”, a rebel admired and loathed in equal measure for the “fury and sardonic bleakness” of his vision.
By the end of his life, with dementia and chronic gout, he was dismissed as the “lunatic Dean”, demonised by his enemies as a “misanthropic monster”. Even his friends tended to regard his mental condition as a “sentence passed by God for earlier sins”, a cruel judgment on a deeply humane figure who at his death in 1745 endowed a hospital for the mentally ill in Dublin. Stubbs’s monumental biography impresses both for its meticulous research and its subtle and insightful portrait of such a contradictory personality, a man who could be “both enlightened and cruelly repressive in a single breath”.
• Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel is published by Viking. To order a copy for £9.34 (RRP £10.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
