During his long professional career as a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, Swift was obliged to preach sermons. This chapter analyses the dozen sermons attributed to him that have been preserved. Sermon culture in Swift’s lifetime was strongly politicised and Swift, like other preachers, took sides. He was a partisan polemical divine. His extant sermons inveigh against Protestant dissenters, rebellion, faction, regicide, fanaticism, and disobedience. While doctrinally orthodox and written in the plain style of contemporary Anglican homiletics, this chapter argues that Swift’s sermons are nevertheless idiosyncratic, occasionally strange and sometimes even amusing performances.

Jonathan Swift was a High Church clergyman and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland. However, Gulliver displays no Christian devotion. His Christianity is simply assumed in a narrative which presupposes a largely Christian readership. The chapter considers Gulliver’s witness of religious practices in the countries he visits. Gulliver’s Travels is predominantly a secular book, but its philosophical, political, and historical perspectives are refracted through the lens of Swift’s religious confession. In these voyages to remote nations of the world, Gulliver encounters or discusses religio-political issues that were highly controversial back home in Gulliver’s England. The book draws upon religious history and polemic. The satire’s treatment of European religious controversy and its view of human nature attracted charges of blasphemy and irreligion, as had Swift’s earlier satiric masterpiece A Tale of a Tub.The chapter examines these charges and comments on some modern critical views of the religious implications of Gulliver’s Travels. It indicates some significant parallels between Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Thomas More’s Utopians.

The Irish-born satirist and pamphleteer Jonathan Swift, Church of Ireland Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral Dublin, was a juring High Churchman, yet he was involved in publishing the memoirs of an Irish Jacobite soldier in Scotland, a work which is in part a printed apologia for Episcopalian Jacobitism. The remarkable book was Memoirs of Capt. John Creichton. Written by Himself, an octavo volume of 170 pages, first published in 1731. It is an instance of Swift 's sympathy, indeed elective affinity with a Jacobite community of allegiance. This essay will consider aspects of the work and contend that Swift 's involvement with Creichton's memoirs was prompted by his High Church confessional politics which was the principal lens through which Swift viewed the Revolution in Scotland, Ireland and England. Swift had a three kingdoms perspective. He fully supported Anglican opposition in 1686–8 to James II's attempt to repeal the laws and Test Acts against Roman Catholics and Protestant nonconformists and to the King's exercise of the prerogative through Declarations of Indulgence. He wrote that the Revolution of 1688 was justified, but that in its consequences ‘the Prince of Orange's expedition … produced some very bad effects, which are likely to stick long enough by us’.

Jonathan Swift had a lifelong interest in the English language. The extent of this interest is extraordinary. It includes language history and theories; dialect, jargon, and slang; vocabulary, orthography, and punctuation; etymology; rhetoric and dialectic; code and private languages; puns and language games; the social and political function of language and its abuse in propaganda. A received view in the extensive modern scholarship on Swift and the English language is that Swift is a linguistic conservative. He deplores the impurity, instability, and impermanence of English and aspires to arrest its obsolescence and purge it of corrupt words. He prescribes standardization in spelling and punctuation. He insists on simplicity and stylistic propriety, which he polices in his satiric invective against offending authors. Yet, paradoxically, Swift's stylistic practice is characterized by unconstrained linguistic freedom. Swift was certainly called to account by contemporary critics for his impropriety. In the “Apology” for his brilliant early satire A Tale of a Tub the “Author”acknowledges that “he gave a Liberty to his Pen, which might not suit with maturer Years, or graver Characters” (PW i: 1-2).

A Tale of a Tub To which is added The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit is a baroque miscellany book on abuses in religion and learning. Its satiric prosecution of religious enthusiasm draws on Restoration religious polemic and patristic writings against heresy. In particular, the great Restoration satire of the Commonwealth period, Samuel Butler's Hudibras, with which Swift was said to be entirely familiar, has been recognized as a significant antecedent text to the Tale. Butler, like Swift, satirizes hubris, nonconformity, religious fanaticism (analysed as a psychopathology), pedantry, and dullness. Both satirists impute a nexus between popery and Protestant nonconformity, connect occult learning, astrology and religious enthusiasm as fanatical imposture, and pillory sectarian preaching, predestinarian doctrine, Quakerism and sectarian claims of divine revelation and inspiration such as the Quaker doctrine of the ‘Inner Light’.

The religious satire of A Tale of a Tub and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, situated principally in a seventeenth-century tradition of Anglican apologetic and invective, has been regarded by some modern scholars as ‘old-fashioned’ in content and polemical vision at the time of its composition (c. 1696–7) and publication (1704). The work is not regarded as having any immediate political purpose, although, especially in its satire on Dissent, it is seen to be informed by Swift's experience as an Anglican priest at Kilroot near Belfast in 1695–6, a parish comprised largely of Presbyterians.

Swift's politics is a large, complex and controversial subject upon which there is a considerable corpus of commentary. This chapter considers briefly some of the contested issues in interpretation of Swift's political biography and writing.

The exegesis of Swift's political principles and party-political allegiance is a matter of continuing disagreement in modern Swift studies. A complexity in the case is that Swift was reputed to be a Whig at the beginning of Queen Anne's reign but a Tory by the end of it.

This contextualist study is concerned with the contested critical question of Jonathan Swift's political character. Attending to topical polemical circumstances the historical criticism in this book attempts to recover the partisan meanings of Swift's texts and their original political impact. This study offers a reassessment of Swift's political writing and recorded opinion. While contesting current conceptions of Swift as a Whig, it offers a partial revision of that scholarship which describes Swift as a non-Jacobite Tory. Swift's first readers claimed he was a disaffected High Churchman. Swift did not subscribe to traditional royalist Tory principles of absolute, divine-right monarchy and indefeasible hereditary succession, yet his Whig adversaries came to regard him as ‘a great Jacobite’. The question of Swift's ‘Jacobitism’ has been often canvassed in modern Swift studies and it is the scholarly orthodoxy that Swift was not a Jacobite. In constructing the author of A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels as a Whig or as a loyal Tory, modern scholarship has occluded a militant polemical strain in his great satires, poems and pamphleteering on affairs of state. Whether or not Swift was a Jacobite cannot be determined. He claimed in private and in print to be a Whig. Rather than dismiss the judgement of Swift's contemporaries, however, this study asks whether there is anything about Swift's political writing in polemical context that could have led contemporaries to construe Jacobite Tory meanings. The consonance of Swift's political rhetoric with Tory and Jacobite polemic is registered here.

Some circumstances of composition

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships was substantially written between 1721 and 1725 and first published in 1726. The history of the actual composition of the book is evidenced in Swift's correspondence and that of his friends. Empiricist historical criticism of Gulliver's Travels attempts to recover the meanings the text had for Swift and his readers in the early Hanoverian period. Reactivating the political meanings of Swift's satiric text and its contexts means exhuming some neglected polemicists and ephemeral literary production. Reading Gulliver's Travels alongside political works and writers privileged in modern conceptual analyses of eighteenth-century political literature and thought (such as Bolingbroke's Craftsman, Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters, Locke, the canonical authors of civic humanism) modern Swift criticism has occluded the presence in Swift's book of some fugitive militant voices from the contemporary paper wars. Swift's political circumstances and whereabouts during the period of Gulliver's composition are also of significant contextual interest for an intentionalist and historicist interpretation of the book's politics. Swift's partisan ‘Posture’, Tory milieu and connections in the period of Gulliver's composition will be remarked briefly here before the historical character of the book's political discourse is discussed.

Swift's first reference to Gulliver's Travels in his correspondence is in a letter to Charles Ford of 15 April 1721 (Corr, II, 379–81).

The corpus of Tory literature in print and manuscript in the first Age of Party is massive and heterogeneous. Scholarly studies exist on many well-known Tory writers, including, for example, John Arbuthnot, Mary Astell, Francis Atterbury, Tom Brown, Mary Caesar, Jeremy Collier, the newsletter-writer John Dyer, George Granville, Charles Leslie, Roger L'Estrange, Delarivière Manley, William Oldisworth, William Pittis and Ned Ward. There is a substantial critical literature exploring the Jacobite dimension in the later poetry, translations, prose and dramatic writing of John Dryden, who dominates the literature of the 1690s, and in the work of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. This chapter explores aspects of the radical idiom of Jacobite Tory literary reaction to the Revolution of 1688–9 and the Williamite, Queen Anne and Hanoverian establishment. What is witnessed in Swift is a post-Revolution Toryism which combined High Church attitudes with a radical political critique of Whig establishment. Swift's imaginative texts are not without Jacobite implication and velleity.

A ‘Tory’ text might express certain characteristic commitments and hostilities: engagement for the rights, powers and privileges of the Church of England, support for the proscription of Dissent from public life, repudiation of latitudinarian politics, subscription to the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance (however modified), detestation of anti-monarchical principles identified with Whiggism, and animus against the naturalization of foreign Protestants and against the Dutch.