Page 13 - Gullivers

For some years previously Swist had been entertaining plans for permanently altering the physical and moral fabric of Dublin with a new building to be erected at his own expense aster his death. ‘The Legion Club’ represents the Irish parliament as a madhouse, a bedlam, but a more compassionate Swist had long been a director of the Bethlehem (or Bedlam) hospital for the insane in London and not only had a particular interest in the treatment of the psychologically disturbed but projected a similar, but more humanely-designed, building for Dublin. Having already persuaded his friend Hester Johnson, the ‘Stella’ of his pœms and the ‘Journal to Stella’, to leave a substantial bequest to another well- known charitable institution in the capital - Dr. Steevens’s Hospital, of which he was a director also - Swist lest money in his own will for the building of St. Patrick’s Hospital, which not only survives today physically but which, greatly enlarged, is still used for the purposes Swist designed over 250 years ago.
His bequest to the new hospital was the last act of Swist’s life. His (osten troubled) relationship with Dublin, with Ireland, had begun much earlier. Jonathan Swist was born on 30 November 1667, in Hœy’s Court, near Dublin Castle; he died in the Deanery House of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 19 October 1745. So much is certain. It is certain too that during the course of a life of seventy-eight years, Swist lived for some sixty-four years in Ireland, much of that time spent in Dublin itself. Having long aspired to a more glittering career in England, Swist became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713 and from the following year until his death only twice lest Ireland, for short visits
in 1726 and 1727. To read Swist’s works in verse and prose is to become aware of the extent to which Ireland is a recurring subject and location for the author, from his earliest surviving work ‘Ode: to the King, on his Irish expedition and on the success of his arms in general’ (1690) to the impromptu epigram, ‘Behold a proof of Irish sense!’ (c. 1742/1745), composed in old age during a walk in the Phœnix Park.
St. Patrick’s 1828
I. Swist and Dublin 7