Joseph McMinn
(Appletree Press, £15.99)
Appearing a year before the 250th anniversary of Swift’s death in 1745, Joseph McMinn’s Jonathan’s Travels performs admirably the long overdue task of locating the Dean firmly in his native land. Swift belongs to the world, of course: even during his lifetime Gulliver’s Travels attracted an international audience. That he belongs equally to Ireland has never been so well recognised beyond its shores. One of the many curiosities of his reputation is that Swift is less commonly considered an Irish writer than Yeats or Joyce, both of whom spent a greater proportion of their lives outside the country. Swift is himself largely responsible for this impression, since he would have preferred a career in England, complained of his time in Ireland as exile, and sought primarily an English readership by most often publishing his works in London. And since he rarely voiced praise or affection for his own island, the case for his Irishness is perforce derived most often from his memorable rhetoric defending Ireland’s interests against British power. McMinn served that case well a few years ago with his edition of Swift’s Irish Pamphlets (Gerrard’s Cross 1991); now he has effectively expanded the argument by tracking the Dean’s rambles and residences in Ireland.
As a British Swiftian, the former Labour Party leader Michael Foot, wonders in his ‘Foreword’ why nobody has done this before. Swift certainly left his stamp upon Ireland. Dublin, where he was born, spent most of his career, and died, remembers him with particular fondness, but he was a schoolboy in Kilkenny, had clerical appointments in Kilroot, County Antrim and Laracor, County Meath, and while Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral often visited friends around or well beyond the capital. He delighted in the physical exercise of horse-riding and making horticultural ‘improvements’ to his hosts’ grounds as to his own. Indeed, he regularly indulged in the hospitality of friends (and saved money thereby), sometimes spending a whole summer away from the Deanery. Throughout Ireland points of interest are named after him, but the country left its stamp on him as well. He saw at first hand the rapacity of landlords and their tenants’ misery, while the general degradation of the Irish countryside, in contrast to English rural orderliness, reflected the political relationship of the two nations. Travel offered Swift not only recreation and companionship, then, but also the opportunity for observations that charged his patriotic rhetoric with passion and irony.
In its biographical organisation, Jonathan’s Travels stands as an Irish-centred counterpart to the literary emphasis of McMinn’s Jonathan Swift: A Literary Life (London 1991). Local history enhances, without dominating, the focus upon Swift himself, his special affection for Stella and for Vanessa, his circle of friendships, and the growing impact of his Irish experiences on his imagination. This is an inviting and rewarding work, attentive to the general reader rather than the professional scholar (an excellent bibliography, for instance, is provided in place of footnotes), and distinguished by a gratifyingly fluid, accessible style.
Robert Mahony