Page 141 - Gullivers

of their plight. Many stories of his wit and sagacity were circulated in the form of ‘Jack Tales’ and are still recounted today.
Apart from these it is important to know something of Swist’s history
and of the historical context of his writing before we can assess his influence. Jonathan Swist was born in Dublin, in the parish of St. Werburgh’s in 1667.
His father died before he was born; his mother returned to England to live shortly aster his birth, leaving the hapless infant in the hands of a besotted nursemaid who soon asterwards kidnapped him and removed him to Whitehaven in England. Approximately two years later she and the infant returned to Dublin and resumed a more mundane existence. Swist was educated at Kilkenny School, and later at Trinity College, Dublin. On graduating in 1689 he moved to More Park, in Surrey, to become secretary to the celebrated writer and diplomat,
Sir William Temple. Swist was to spend almost twenty four years moving back and forth between Ireland and England before taking up his post as Dean of
St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713.
The early period of effective abandonment by his immediate family lest Swist with a permanent sense of being alone. He was a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class, at that time a minority of approximately one-fisth of the island’s population. His nomadic life lest him with a degree of ambivalence towards both countries and a profound sense of belonging to neither. Yet he grew to be one
of the most outspoken critics of the desperate situation of the native Irish and to be a passionate adversary of the ruling Anglo-Irish elite whose neglect of their responsibilities he abhorred.
While the relationship between Ireland and England is, historically, one
of colonial domination of the former by the latter, critics have taken pains
to differentiate this relationship as a unique colonial experience, where the distinctions between oppressor and oppressed are complex and nuanced – where a straightforward dichotomy of identities is never fully stable. Factors of proximity to the main territory of the coloniser; a shared language (eventually)
VII. The Influence of Jonathan Swist on Anglo-Irish Writing 135