Still, he did generally side with political conservatives on the issues of the day.Įverything seemed to be going relatively well until George I took the English throne in 1714. Swift may not have believed as strongly in the divine right of kings as some dyed-in-the-wool Tories (as you might guess from his satire of kings in Gulliver's Travels).
The Tories also opposed increased power for the Parliament, the English equivalent of the American Congress. Tories favored royal authority and the national church (Anglicanism). While Jonathan Swift began life as a Whig (Britain's liberal party in the eighteenth century), he eventually became a prominent Tory (a member of England's conservative party). Swift was an Irish clergyman who regularly came to London to participate in the political and literary scene under Queen Anne. In fact, Swift had a lot of cause to despise people, because he had a somewhat disastrous public life. This was lucky for Jonathan Swift, since he's like the king of haters – one of the greatest writers of satire that English literature has ever seen. Thus, we think it's fair to say that the early eighteenth century was a good time for haters. They even started a club, the Scriblerus Club, to express their general contempt for humanity and for bad writing in particular. In fact, some of the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century, including poet Alexander Pope, mathematician John Arbuthnot, and our main man, Jonathan Swift, could not get enough satire. But if you love twenty-first century satire (like we do), you should check out the eighteenth century – those guys were huge fans of a good satire. Some of our favorite satires include The Onion and The Daily Show. A satire is a (generally funny) fictional work that uses sarcasm and irony to poke fun at the general patheticness of humanity – our weakness, our stupidity, all that jazz. You might have heard people call Gulliver's Travels a satire.
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