Jonathan Swift Trivia
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49 free Jonathan Swift trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Jonathan Swift trivia quiz covers the Anglo-Irish clergyman who became the greatest satirist of the Georgian age. The easy questions are the ones any reader can answer: his most famous book, the tiny island he invented, the essay that suggested eating Irish babies and the cathedral he ran as dean. From there the set moves through the life: a father dead of syphilis before he was born, a wet nurse who carried him off to Cumberland, Kilkenny College and Trinity, the years as Sir William Temple's secretary at Moor Park, the eight-year-old pupil he called Stella, the Ménière's disease that plagued him, and the miserable parish at Kilroot. The harder end is for literature students: the coats of A Tale of a Tub, the Battle of the Books and the Epistles of Phalaris, the Isaac Bickerstaff hoax on almanac-maker John Partridge, the Scriblerus Club, The Conduct of the Allies, Queen Anne's grudge, the name Vanessa coined for Esther Vanhomrigh, William Wood's halfpence and the Drapier's Letters, the lock of hair labelled Only a woman's hair, the fortune left to found a mental hospital, the epitaph Yeats translated and the crater on a moon of Mars. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Swift and his major works before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Gulliver's Travels, Classic Literature and Irish Writers quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What first name did Swift give Gulliver, the ship's surgeon who narrates his Travels?
Lemuel
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.
Q 02Swift's father died before he was born, so which relative paid for his schooling?
Uncle
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'.
Q 03From 1713 until his death, Swift held which office at St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin?
Dean
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.
Q 04What did Swift's A Modest Proposal suggest Ireland's poor do to escape poverty?
Sell their children as food to the rich
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.
Q 05Swift is credited with inventing which popular woman's name through a poem?
Vanessa
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.
Q 06What was the fictional island of tiny people that Swift created?
Lilliput
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.
Q 07Under which pen name did Swift 'predict' the death of a living London almanac-maker in 1708?
Isaac Bickerstaff
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.
Q 08Swift's suggestion of a 'Newgate pastoral' set among thieves led which friend to write The Beggar's Opera?
John Gay
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.
Q 09As a baby, Swift was carried from Dublin to England and kept there for years by whom?
His nurse
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.
Q 10Which philosopher also attended Kilkenny College, where Swift began school at six?
George Berkeley
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.
Q 11Swift received his BA from Trinity College Dublin in 1686 by which form of dispensation?
By special grace
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'.
Q 12For which retired English diplomat did Swift work as secretary at Moor Park in Surrey?
Sir William Temple
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.
Q 13What nickname did Swift give the young girl he tutored at Moor Park?
Stella
Q 21Swift formed the core of which literary circle with Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot?
The Scriblerus Club
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.
Q 22Which Tory periodical did Swift edit after the party came to power in 1710?
The Examiner
The Examiner. Swift took it over within weeks of changing sides, and was soon lampooning the very Whig ministers he had spent years lobbying.
Q 23Swift's 1711 pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies helped pave the way for which peace settlement?
The Treaty of Utrecht
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.
Q 14Swift's lifelong vertigo and giddiness are retrospectively attributed to which condition?
Ménière's
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.
Q 15Swift parodied Robert Boyle's pious Meditations with a mock-solemn meditation upon which household object?
A broomstick
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.
Q 16In Gulliver's Travels, two tiny empires fight a long war over the right way to do what?
Crack an egg
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.
Q 17Roughly how large was Swift's congregation at Laracor, County Meath?
About 15
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.'
Q 18Which word for a crude, loutish person did Swift invent for the brutes of Gulliver's Travels?
Yahoo
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.
Q 19In A Tale of a Tub, three sons each inherit what from their father, never to be altered?
A coat
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.
Q 20Which almanac-maker did Swift, in a 1708 hoax, predict would die on 29 March?
John Partridge
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.
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.
Q 24In Gulliver's Travels, what sets the wretched Struldbrugs of Luggnagg apart from everyone else?
They can never die
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.
Q 25Swift called himself a Whig in politics, but which label did he claim in religion?
A High-Churchman
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.
Q 26Which monarch is said to have found A Tale of a Tub irreligious and blocked Swift's hopes of an English church post?
Queen Anne
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.
Q 27Swift told a friend he feared he would die in Dublin in a rage, like what?
A rat in a hole
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.
Q 28The Drapier's Letters of 1724 attacked whose patent to mint copper coinage for Ireland?
William Wood
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.
Q 29Who was arrested when a £300 reward failed to unmask the Drapier?
His printer
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.
Q 30At the tiny emperor's court in Gulliver's Travels, candidates win high office by showing their skill at what?
Rope dancing
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.