49 Fun Facts About Jonathan Swift

What first name did Swift give Gulliver, the ship's surgeon who narrates his Travels?

Lemuel. Swift kept his own name off the book: a preface by an invented cousin presents Lemuel Gulliver as a real sea captain, by then retired to Nottinghamshire.

Swift's father died before he was born, so which relative paid for his schooling?

His uncle Godwin Swift paid for his nephew's schooling, but Swift resented the help as grudging and is said to have called it 'the education of a dog'.

From 1713 until his death, Swift held which office at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin?

Dean. He always regarded the job as a kind of exile, taken only after his friends had failed to win him a church post in England.

What did Swift's A Modest Proposal suggest Ireland's poor do to escape poverty?

It suggests they sell their children as food to the rich. The deadpan narrator then waves away the real remedies Swift had urged, such as taxing absentee landlords and buying Irish goods.

Swift is credited with inventing which popular woman's name through a poem?

Vanessa. He is thought to have built it from the Van of Esther Vanhomrigh's surname and part of her first name, and it later became the name of a genus of butterflies.

What was the fictional island of tiny people that Swift created?

Lilliput. Gulliver swims ashore there after a shipwreck, falls asleep, and wakes to find people under six inches tall have tied him to the ground.

Under which pen name did Swift 'predict' the death of a living London almanac-maker in 1708?

Isaac Bickerstaff. The hoax made the name so famous that Richard Steele borrowed it the next year as the pretended editor of his new paper, The Tatler.

Swift's suggestion of a 'Newgate pastoral' set among thieves led which friend to write The Beggar's Opera?

John Gay. Swift floated the idea in a 1716 letter, and Gay turned it from a pastoral poem into a musical play about highwaymen and their jailers, staged in 1728.

As a baby, Swift was carried from Dublin to England and kept there for years by whom?

His nurse. By Swift's own account she had grown so fond of him that she took him home to Whitehaven, where he learned his letters before he was sent back to Dublin.

Which philosopher also attended Kilkenny College, where Swift began school at six?

George Berkeley. He arrived a generation after Swift, who in 1713 took the young thinker to court and talked him up to every minister he knew.

Swift received his BA from Trinity College Dublin in 1686 by which form of dispensation?

By special grace. It was no honour: the term marked a weak candidate, and Swift himself wrote that he had been 'stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency'.

For which retired English diplomat did Swift work as secretary at Moor Park in Surrey?

Sir William Temple. When he died in 1699, Swift wrote that 'all that was good and amiable among mankind' had died with him, then spent years seeing the old man's papers into print.

What nickname did Swift give the young girl he tutored at Moor Park?

Stella. She was the daughter of a widow in the household, and as a grown woman she moved to Ireland, where she lived near him for the rest of her life.

Swift's lifelong vertigo and giddiness are retrospectively attributed to which condition?

Ménière's disease, a disorder of the inner ear. Swift had his own theory: he blamed the dizzy spells that dogged him from his twenties on eating too much fruit.

Swift parodied Robert Boyle's pious Meditations with a mock-solemn meditation upon which household object?

A broomstick. Swift is said to have slipped his parody into a reading of Boyle's devout reflections, to see whether his listener would take it for the real thing.

In Gulliver's Travels, two tiny empires fight a long war over the right way to do what?

Crack an egg. An emperor ordered eggs broken at the smaller end after his son cut a finger opening one the old way, and eleven thousand Big-endians chose death over giving in.

Roughly how large was Swift's congregation at Laracor, County Meath?

About 15, and on weekdays fewer still. Finding only his clerk in church one day, the story goes, Swift began the service: 'Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me.'

Which word for a crude, loutish person did Swift invent for the brutes of Gulliver's Travels?

Yahoo. The sting is that their masters class Gulliver as one of them, a Yahoo with a little reason, and in the end order him out of the country.

In A Tale of a Tub, three sons each inherit what from their father, never to be altered?

A coat. The brothers Peter, Martin and Jack stand for the Catholic, Anglican and dissenting churches, and within a month they are twisting the will's wording to add fashionable shoulder-knots.

Which almanac-maker did Swift, in a 1708 hoax, predict would die on 29 March?

John Partridge. The day after the deadline Swift announced that the prophecy had come true, and Partridge had to print a special almanac insisting he was still alive.

Swift formed the core of which literary circle with Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot?

The Scriblerus Club. Its members invented a pompous scholar, Martinus Scriblerus, to mock false learning in his name, and Gulliver's Travels is thought to have begun as one of the club's projects.

Which Tory periodical did Swift edit after the party came to power in 1710?

The Examiner. Swift took it over within weeks of changing sides, and was soon lampooning the very Whig ministers he had spent years lobbying.

Swift's 1711 pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies helped pave the way for which peace settlement?

The Treaty of Utrecht. Swift's pamphlet argued that the war was being dragged out for the benefit of Marlborough, the Whig ministry and Britain's allies, and it sold fast in the weeks before Parliament voted for peace.

In Gulliver's Travels, what sets the wretched Struldbrugs of Luggnagg apart from everyone else?

They can never die, yet they go on ageing. At eighty the law treats a Struldbrug as dead: his heirs take the estate and he is left a small pittance to live on.

Swift called himself a Whig in politics, but which label did he claim in religion?

A High-Churchman. The mix decided his career: when the Whigs seemed ready to give ground to the Nonconformists, he crossed over to the Tories.

Which monarch is said to have found A Tale of a Tub irreligious and blocked Swift's hopes of an English church post?

Queen Anne. The Archbishop of York is said to have warned her against the book, and Swift then made matters worse with a squib mocking her favourite, the Duchess of Somerset.

Swift told a friend he feared he would die in Dublin in a rage, like what?

A rat in a hole: a poisoned one, he told Bolingbroke in 1729. Three years earlier, on a visit to England, he had sought out the Whig leader Walpole and come away with nothing.

The Drapier's Letters of 1724 attacked whose patent to mint copper coinage for Ireland?

William Wood. The English ironmaster had paid the king's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, £10,000 for the patent, and nobody in Ireland had been asked.

Who was arrested when a £300 reward failed to unmask the Drapier?

His printer. John Harding was arrested over the fourth letter, yet nobody in Dublin claimed the money, although the author's name was an open secret all over town.

At the tiny emperor's court in Gulliver's Travels, candidates win high office by showing their skill at what?

Rope dancing. Whoever jumps highest on a taut thread without falling gets the post, and the treasurer, Flimnap, can caper an inch higher than any other lord in the empire.

Gulliver's stay among the giants of Brobdingnag ends when what carries off his travelling box?

An eagle. The bird drops the box into the sea, where a passing ship hauls it aboard, and Gulliver finds himself back among people of his own size.

Which real country does Gulliver visit on his third voyage, after Laputa and Luggnagg?

Japan. Passing himself off as a Dutch trader, Gulliver begs the emperor to excuse him from the ceremony demanded of the Dutch there: trampling on a crucifix.

In Gulliver's Travels, how does Gulliver put out the fire in the tiny empress's palace?

By urinating on it. He saves the palace, but the empress is so revolted that she refuses to live in those rooms again, and the deed is later listed among the charges of treason against him.

What did Esther Vanhomrigh do shortly before her death in 1723?

She is said to have destroyed the will she had made in Swift's favour; the one she left divides her fortune between two other men and leaves him nothing.

After the death of the woman closest to him, what did Swift keep in a paper marked with four words?

A lock of hair. The words he wrote on the paper were 'Only a woman's hair', a shrug that Thackeray, for one, took to mean the very opposite.

Which French writer met Swift while living in exile in England in the late 1720s?

Voltaire. Others called Swift 'the English Rabelais' as a compliment, but Voltaire thought it sold him short: the title, he wrote, was 'highly derogatory to his genius'.

In his poem imagining his own death, Swift has his lady friends take the news while doing what?

Playing cards. One lady breaks off her sigh to ask what is trumps, and a husband is excused from the funeral because he cannot miss his game of quadrille.

Comparing himself to a tree, how did Swift predict he would die?

At the top. The poet Edward Young heard him say it, and the fear came true: in 1742, three years before he died, a court had to appoint guardians to look after him.

What did Swift leave the bulk of his fortune to found?

A hospital for the mentally ill. He had announced the gift in verse years earlier, with a sting in it: he would 'build a house for fools and mad' because 'no nation wanted it so much'.

Which poet translated Swift's Latin epitaph, with its 'savage indignation', into English verse?

W. B. Yeats. His version is freer than it is faithful: where Swift's Latin invites the passer-by to imitate him 'if you can', Yeats hardens it to 'Imitate him if you dare'.

Beside whom is Swift buried in St Patrick's Cathedral, in accordance with his wishes?

Esther Johnson. On his own instructions he was buried privately at midnight beside the lifelong friend whose funeral, in the same cathedral, he had been too ill to attend.

Which Hayao Miyazaki film takes the name Laputa from an island in Gulliver's Travels?

Castle in the Sky. Miyazaki set out to make a kind of flying Treasure Island, and took from Swift both the name and the notion of an island that floats in the air.

Which discovery did Swift's fictional astronomers make in Gulliver's Travels roughly 150 years before real ones did?

The two moons of Mars. Gulliver hears of them on his third voyage; the real pair were found in 1877, and a crater on one of them, Deimos, now bears Swift's name.

Which novelist listed Gulliver's Travels among six books to be saved if all others were destroyed?

George Orwell. He first read it the day before his eighth birthday, sneaking a look at the copy meant as his present, yet he disagreed with Swift on almost every political question.

A Modest Proposal's narrator cites which notorious impostor as an authority?

Psalmanazar. He had dazzled London as a native of Formosa, an island he never visited, yet Swift's narrator solemnly calls him 'famous'.

Which country in Gulliver's Travels is ruled by calm, rational horses?

Houyhnhnmland. Its horses so impress Gulliver that, home in England, he can hardly bear his own family's company and spends four hours a day talking to the two he keeps in his stable.

A Modest Proposal is a textbook case of which kind of satire, named after a Roman poet?

Juvenalian. Horace's heirs coax with a smile and Juvenal's attack with scorn, and Swift's deadpan version of the harsh kind gave English a word of its own: Swiftian.

After hearing Gulliver describe England, the King of Brobdingnag calls its people a race of little odious what?

Vermin. Gulliver had hoped to impress the giant king, and then makes matters worse by offering him the secret of gunpowder, an idea the king hears with horror.

Which poet, a distant cousin, is said to have told Swift he would never be a poet?

John Dryden. The verdict was on one of Swift's early odes; he gave up that grand style soon afterwards, and is said never to have forgiven his cousin for the remark.