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Misanthrope or Patriot, How Readers Separated Gulliver from the Drapier
In Brief
- Swift was first celebrated as the Drapier, the pamphleteer who argued that a coinage patent imposed on Ireland from England, without Ireland being consulted, was a matter of who governs, and whose campaign ended with the patent cancelled.
- The charge of misanthropy was not a later invention: Swift wrote that his travels were built on a foundation of misanthropy. What later readers changed was the explanation, tracing his rage to wounded pride or a diseased mind rather than to the wrongs he wrote against.
- Thackeray, the Victorian novelist who lectured on the humourists of the 18th century, read the fourth voyage as the raving of a doomed mind and denied that Swift was Irish, detaching the anger from its Irish object.
- The children's Gulliver completed the misanthropic reading rather than refuting it: the voyages to the little people and the giants were kept as entertainment, the land of the horses was set aside as a libel on mankind, and Ireland survived only as a detail of the author's life.
Main authors
For a few years, a churchman with neither fortune nor high station held more sway in Ireland than almost anyone. Samuel Johnson, in his life of Swift, describes a Dean honoured by the populace as the champion, patron and instructor of Ireland, courted by all who needed the goodwill of the traders or the crowd [1]. His pen name had become a toast: “the Drapier was a health” . Johnson judged the writer by such effects. Swift, he wrote, had delivered Ireland from plunder and oppression, and could say truly that Ireland was his debtor [2]. In this first portrait, the satirist and the patriot are one man, and his power is a political fact.
The same author later reached most of his readers by a very different door. A school reader for the seventh year asks pupils how Swift makes Lilliput seem real, whether the little people act like us, and only then whether they can find “any trace of satire” in the episode [3]. Between the toast and the classroom question lies a long history of reading. It is easy to tell it as a story of forgetting, in which a political writer dissolved into a teller of tales. The sources suggest something sharper. The hatred of mankind was Swift's own claim, not a later slander. What his readers changed was its address: cut off from the Ireland that provoked it, his rage could be pitied, refuted or enjoyed, but no longer answered.
The Drapier and Wood's halfpence
The quarrel that made Swift a national figure was, on its surface, about small change. A patent allowed a man named Wood to supply Ireland with copper halfpence, and Swift, writing as the Drapier, turned it into a question of consent [4, 5]. Ireland, he wrote, had not been consulted at all [6]. Its two houses of Parliament and its privy council had petitioned the King; the privy council in England had then taken the matter out of the Irish Parliament's hands . In his account the good of the kingdom was simply dropped, leaving one man with power over a whole nation for his private advantage . The coin was the occasion. The grievance was a country governed from elsewhere.
The outcome was read, from the start, as a lesson in the power of the pen. Emily Lawless, a later historian of Ireland, records that the ministers finally found it necessary to cancel the patent and suspend the issue of the coin . For the first time in Irish history, she writes, public opinion unsupported by arms had carried its point . Her praise is guarded: she speaks of a terrific panic, and of a logic that seemed unanswerable to the uninformed . Johnson had drawn the bolder lesson. Swift, he wrote, showed that “wit, confederated with truth” had a force that authority could not resist . Both treat the Drapier as proof that words, in Ireland, could do the work of arms.
The Drapier's sharpest weapon was loyalty taken at its word. Swift grants that the King, in passing the patent, believed he was doing an act of grace to his most loyal subjects [7]. But if those subjects judge the patent an intolerable grievance, Wood can only prevail by avowing that his profit outweighs the safety of a kingdom “distinguished for its loyalty” perhaps above all others . The argument turns obedience into an accusation. The more faithful the subject, the more glaring the contempt shown to him. Justin McCarthy, writing his history of the Georges long afterwards, saw the same structure. The anger of the letters, he argued, fell on Wood's coin only because the patent, the bribe behind it and the way it was forced on Ireland stood for the whole system of Irish administration and the wrongs of many generations [8].
The first way of disarming the Drapier was to credit his style rather than his cause. McCarthy observed that English writers readily understood national revolts against ship-money or a duty on tea, yet explained the outcry against Wood's patent only as the work of a clever writer who had bewitched a whole people with captivating nonsense [9]. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica offers a polished version of the same verdict. The only real sufferers, it claims, were the Irish, who lost a coinage they badly needed; perhaps it was still worth teaching the English ministry that not everything could be done in Ireland [10]. Its praise of the pamphlets is double-edged, since it calls them models both for the controversialist with a good cause and for one burdened with a bad one . The objection deserves a hearing, for it doubts the economics rather than the principle. But it leaves Swift a master of persuasion and sets aside the question he actually raised, which was who decides.
Thackeray's caged eagle, or the misanthrope without a country
The misanthrope was not a Victorian invention; Swift named him first. In a letter quoted by Leslie Stephen, he declares that he hates the animal called man while loving John, Peter and Thomas, and that man is not a rational animal but only capable of reason [11]. “Upon this great foundation of misanthropy,” he adds, the whole building of his travels is erected . Readers of the 18th century took him at his word and judged the doctrine a danger. Harris, quoted by the editor of Swift's Works in 1801, thought the last voyage worse reading than the books forbidden as most obscene, because misanthropy saps the foundations of morality and religion; the editor himself calls this an error [12]. Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1787, saw a man who hated the world, loved only particular persons, and was made singular but not respectable by pride [13].
What these readers added was a motive, and the motive was private. Johnson, the same biographer who celebrates the Drapier, reads Swift's letters as the record of a life wasted in discontent, through the rage of neglected pride and unsatisfied desire [14]. Anger at the treatment of Ireland becomes, in this light, anger at a career. Hazlitt pushed the explanation toward the clinic. The obstinacy with which Swift held to a preconceived theory, he wrote, savoured of the morbid condition of which he died [15]. Yet Hazlitt's madness is a strange one. Nothing, he argues, is more likely to drive a man mad than being unable to shake off the distinction between right and wrong, joined to a stubborn preference for the true over the agreeable . The diagnosis still carries a moral compliment.
In Thackeray's lectures of 1853, the doctrine has become a symptom and the book a confession. The reader of the fourth voyage, he says, is like Gulliver among the Yahoos: what he hears is a monster gibbering shrieks and imprecations against mankind, filthy in word and thought, furious and obscene [16]. Worse, Swift knew where his creed was leading, and his logic drifted toward fatal rocks . The same lectures take away Swift's country. Born in Dublin, he was for Thackeray no more an Irishman than a man of English parents born at Calcutta is a Hindu; his heart, his habits and his logic were English [17]. The two moves fit together. A rage that belongs neither to Ireland nor to any cause can only be aimed at mankind or at its author, and Thackeray offers his audience a lonely eagle behind bars, to be gazed at with awe and pity .
Leslie Stephen, at the close of the century, was more cautious and more revealing. He warned that Swift's avowals must not be taken too literally, and noted that it had been disputed whether Gulliver could be read simply as an utterance of misanthropy [18]. Yet his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography of 1898 shrinks the Drapier's anger to personal resentment. The letters, he says, carry the passion stored up in ten years of exile, and their wrath is as easily ascribed to hatred of Walpole as to hatred of oppression [19]. The evidence he then offers for Swift's pessimism points the other way. In a letter to Pope of 1728, Swift describes what passes for his patriotism as “perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness” [20]. Stephen files the line under despair. Read for its objects, it describes a misanthropy and a patriotism that are one passion, fed by what Swift saw from Dublin, where he feared he would die in a rage .
Even the reading most inclined to the universal, once pressed, rediscovers a political society. Hippolyte Taine admits the temptation to agree with Swift: if he drew a Yahoo, it was because he had seen one [21]. But the Yahoo Taine then describes is not humanity in the abstract. It is corruption in high places and brutality below, a band of intriguers leading a mob of brutes . It is a public inflamed by political passion, which burns Admiral Byng in effigy and sways from party to party . The verdict on the species turns, on inspection, into a portrait of a particular political order.
Lilliput in the schoolroom
The third displacement was the most effective, because it came wrapped in praise. Stephen found it strange that cynics and revolutionists should be fascinated by a work that children study with delight, without the faintest suspicion of any ulterior meaning [22]. The charm, he explains, lies in an obvious quality: the plain realism of the fiction. Swift himself captured it in the story of an Irish bishop who declared the book full of improbable lies and said he hardly believed a word of it . The joke cuts both ways. A satire convincing enough to be taken literally can also be read without its targets, as a set of well-told marvels.
Later critics described the result as a defeat for Swift, but rarely asked what exactly had been defeated. Augustine Birrell, who held the hatred of mankind to be genuine, saw in the book's fate an “odd revenge”: Swift's gospel of hatred, the work into which he poured his rage, had become a child's book read with wonder by generations of innocents [23]. The Britannica of 1911 drew the boundary more exactly. The world, it says, chose to be diverted rather than vexed, and in the first two voyages the misanthropy is overpowered by the fun [24]. In the fourth, human nature rejects the Yahoo as a gross libel, and the encyclopaedia judges the protest fully warranted . The children's book and the misanthrope thus form two halves of one settlement: Lilliput and Brobdingnag for the nursery, the land of the horses quarantined as a slander on the species.
In the schoolbook, Ireland survives only as a trait of character. An anthology of stories for the young presents the author as Dean of St Patrick's in Dublin, brilliant in politics, made cross and irritable by a lifelong disease, yet honoured by the poor of Ireland as their friend and champion [25]. The political Swift is there, but beside the book rather than inside it, a biographical note that explains a temper. Hartwell's reader follows the same logic. Pupils first examine the devices that make the story seem real and ask whether the little people behave like us . Satire arrives afterwards, defined as a habit of ridiculing people, things or customs, and as something of which the pupil may or may not find a trace .
This fate was neither universal nor original. In 1922 Giovanni Papini cited an Italian translator who blamed the absurdity of publishers and of the public for turning the book into a harmless fantastic romance for children [26]. Papini agreed as far as modern Italy was concerned. But he recalled that Italian men of letters in the 18th century, even before Swift's death, admired him as a satirist and moralist, and not as an author of extravaganzas for children . The nursery reading is a later, local product of publishing and habit, not something the text demanded.
The English Yahoo, reading the Travels beside the Irish tracts
Against the sentimental readers, Charles Whibley argued in 1917 that the satire has addressees. Those who think the fourth voyage preaches the superiority of all horses to all men, he said, have singularly misread the fable [27]. When Swift makes the King of Brobdingnag a scourge, he is beating the politicians and plotters of his own land, not passing sentence on the human race . Even Gulliver, Whibley notes, is not presented as the only man to have escaped the vices of his country . The point is modest but decisive. A satire aimed at a court and a political class can be universal in reach without being universal in object.
The misreading Whibley describes is a failure to hear irony, and Ireland supplied its plainest case. When Swift, his heart full of rage at the misery of Dublin, wrote A Modest Proposal, he was charged with an unnatural hankering after human flesh [28]. The charge takes the proposal literally, and so turns indignation at a city's misery into a perversion of its author. Whibley adds that the same obstinate refusal to understand irony made A Tale of a Tub into a work of dangerous example . The pattern matches the quarrel over the Yahoos. Literalism converts an attack on what is done to people into a hatred of people.
The Travels and the Irish pamphlets also share a technique, which is why reading them apart loses something of both. Swift understood, McCarthy wrote, how to employ exaggeration so that it did “the business of unquestionable fact” . The skill that made Gulliver's creatures seem real, lifelike and living made the extravagance of the Drapier's letters strike an excited populace with all the force of truth . On this account the fantasist and the pamphleteer are one craftsman. The circumstantial lie that the Irish bishop could not believe and the alarm that brought down Wood's patent come from the same workshop .
What the tracts add is an understanding of how a people is turned into brutes on paper. In one of his Irish writings, Swift observes that the Irish had been represented, with great industry, as a barbarous and stupid people, breakers of public faith, cowards and rebels, and that this had served their detractors well [29]. The extracts do not make the Yahoo an allegory of Ireland, and the claim should not be forced. But they show a writer acutely aware that a degrading image can be a political instrument. The Yahoo that Gulliver brings home is, moreover, placed with care. At the close of his travels he hopes to make the society of “an English yahoo” bearable, and begs those tainted with pride to keep out of his sight [30]. The last word on the Yahoo locates him in England.
Swift's reputation was built twice. His contemporaries knew a churchman who, writing as a Dublin draper, turned a coinage patent granted in England without consulting Ireland into a question of who governs, and won . Later readers knew the author of a book that hates the human species. The second Swift did not erase the first by inventing his misanthropy, for Swift had claimed it himself . It erased him by detaching the misanthropy from its occasions. The rage was traced to wounded pride, then to a diseased mind in a man said not to be Irish at all, and finally made harmless by a nursery reading that kept the little people and the giants and set the rest aside as libel .
The most telling evidence is Swift's own description of his patriotism as rage at the sight of slavery, folly and baseness . In that sentence, misanthropy and patriotism are not rival interpretations but one passion seen from two sides. The readers who chose between them, calling him either the champion of Ireland or the enemy of mankind, each kept half of the man. Hatred without an address becomes a temperament; given back its address, it becomes an argument.
