Biography Essay

On 14 August 1725, Jonathan Swift wrote to his friend Charles Ford: "I have finished my Travells, and I am now transcribing them; they are admirable Things, and will wonderfully mend the World." At the age of fifty-seven, Swift had acquired sufficient experience of human falsehood, cruelty, and pride to harbor few illusions as to the medicinal properties of satire or the perfectibility of the species. "I tell you after all," he wrote to Alexander Pope, "I do not hate Mankind, it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them reasonable Animals, and are Angry for being disappointed." Yet, if Gulliver's Travels did not mend mankind, as Swift sardonically suggested it would, it certainly challenged his readers' smug assumptions about the superiority of their political and social institutions, and their assurance that as rational animals they occupied a privileged position in the Chain of Being...