This chapter explores Swift’s vexed relationship with political partisanship. Swift was both a participant in and a commentator on party politics and this chapter considers both his participation and his commentary. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first sets out the political background during Swift’s years in England and considers his role as a pamphleteer and journalist. The second examines his gloomy assessment of partisanship, which remained a common feature of his writing from beginning to end. The third and final section traces the legacy of Swift’s writings on party – particularly his notion of a ‘national party’ – through the writings of his friend and political ally Lord Bolingbroke.

This chapter disentangles some of the threads that linked history, demography, and ethnicity in Swift’s imagination. The first part of the chapter looks at the predominant theory of English ethnicity during Swift’s lifetime: the notion that the modern English people were direct descendants of the Anglo Saxons, who were themselves descended from the Gothic peoples of antiquity. The second part considers Swift’s attitude towards the native Irish people. And the final section addresses the treatment of the Yahoos in the fourth voyage of Gulliver’s Travels, in which, it seems, conventional racial tropes dissolve into broad-bottomed misanthropy.

This chapter focuses on Swift as a historian. The first section looks at how Swift read historical works: not just what he thought of individual historians, but how he extracted information from their books, marking up pages and jotting down notes. The second deals with Swift’s early attempts at writing works of history. And the third section investigates his efforts to write the history of his own time. Throughout, this chapter emphasises Swift’s concern with the development of the English system of politics. Swift’s historical thought was, this chapter suggests, structural and institutional just as much as it was personal and invective.

Despite the trend in recent decades to view Gulliver’s Travels as a general satire on the folly of mankind, this chapter argues that the Travels is a deeply partisan book. Swift’s text made a specific intervention in contemporary debates about the structural vulnerability of English political institutions. Most of the societies that Gulliver encounters are in terminal decline, resulting from political maladministration. The chapter highlights distinctive parallels of language and thought between Bolingbroke’s oppositional leaders for The Craftsman and the King of Brobdingnag’s assessment of the debased English constitution. Like the essays in The Craftsman, the Travels suggests that English politics has been corrupted by rigged elections, parliamentary placemen, and standing armies. References in the voyage to Lilliput suggest that this corruption of the English constitution, which had now reached a nadir under the ‘Robinocracy’ of Sir Robert Walpole, could be traced back to the death of Queen Anne, the persecution of his former ministers, and the suppression of the Tory opposition. Swift’s general satire against debased political institutions was therefore aimed at a specific political target: the men who based them.