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Jonathan Swift

3 books in the library

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, clergyman and pamphleteer, and Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin for the last thirty years of his life. He published Gulliver's Travels anonymously in 1726 as a genuine sailor's narrative, complete with maps, and it sold out in a week. His pamphlets defended Irish interests against English economic policy so effectively that a reward was offered for his name, and A Modest Proposal — which recommends that the Irish poor sell their children as food — remains the most savage piece of irony in English. He left his estate to found a hospital for the mentally ill.