Swift is a shrewd and humorous observer of the changing artistic and cultural scene in both Ireland and England, and his views on these changes in public taste are an important, albeit neglected, part of his biography. His correspondence, especially his Journal to Stella, shows us someone very aware of the various arts and of their lively emergence from the enclosed world of the Puritan era. Many of Swift's friends and acquaintances were serious collectors of paintings, sculpture, coins, medals and Swift himself eventually enjoyed an interesting and revealing collection of artistic artifacts, as this study shows.

Draws on discoveries made in the past three decades to paint a new portrait of the satirist, speculating on his parentage, love life, and relationships while claiming that the public image he projected was intentionally misleading.

Jonathan Swift: Our Dean (along with its companion, Jonathan Swift: Irish Blow-in) aspires to be the most accurate and engaging critical biography of Jonathan Swift ever. It builds on the thorough research of Irvin Ehrenpreis’s highly regarded 1962–1983 three-volume biography, but re-interprets Swift’s life and works by re-assessing his 1714–1720 repudiating the pretender while remaining friends with many who did not, by acknowledging that he likely had a physical affair with Esther Vanhomrigh between 1719 and 1723, by questioning whether in any sense he was a misanthrope, by noting his real care for Esther Johnson in her final illness, and by emphasizing the mutual love between Swift and his caretakers during his final difficult years.

A rich and riveting portrait of the man behind Gulliver’s Travels, by a “vivid, ardent, and engaging” (New York Times Book Review) author. One of Europe’s most important literary figures, Jonathan Swift was also an inspired humorist, a beloved companion, and a conscientious Anglican minister—as well as a hoaxer and a teller of tales. His anger against abuses of power would produce the most famous satires of the English language: Gulliver’s Travels as well as the Drapier Papers and the unparalleled Modest Proposal, in which he imagined the poor of Ireland farming their infants for the tables of wealthy colonists. John Stubbs’s biography captures the dirt and beauty of a world that Swift both scorned and sought to amend. It follows Swift through his many battles, for and against authority, and in his many contradictions, as a priest who sought to uphold the dogma of his church; as a man who was quite prepared to defy convention, not least in his unshakable attachment to an unmarried woman, his “Stella”; and as a writer whose vision showed that no single creed holds all the answers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, in Jonathan Swift Stubbs has found the perfect subject for this masterfully told biography of a reluctant rebel—a voice of withering disenchantment unrivaled in English.

Jonathan Swift's Thoughts on Various Subjects, originally published as an essay in 1706, is a collection of wit and wisdom from one of the English language's finest wordsmiths and greatest satirists. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric. He is regarded by many as the finest prose satirist in the English language. He is most famous for Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal, which are considered classics of English literature.