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QOTD: Swift and Sure, 18th Century Satire
“‘For,’ said he, ‘as flourishing a Condition as we may appear to be in to Foreigners, we labour under two mighty Evils: a violent Faction at home, and the Danger of an Invasion, by a most potent Enemy, from abroad. As to the first, you are to understand, that for about seventy Moons past there have been two struggling Parties in this Empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low Heels on their Shoes, by which they distinguish themselves. It is alledged, indeed, that the high Heels are most agreeable to our ancient Constitution: But, however this be, his Majesty has determined to make use only of low Heels in the Administration of the Government, and all Offices in the Gift of the Crown, as you cannot but observe; and particularly, that his Majesty’s Imperial Heels are lower at least by a Drurr than any of his Court (Drurr is a measure about the fourteenth Part of an Inch). The Animosities between these two Parties run so high, that they will neither eat, nor drink, nor talk with each other. We compute the Tramecksan, or High-Heels, to exceed us in number; but the Power is wholly on our side. We apprehend his Imperial Highness, the Heir to the Crown, to have some tendency towards the High-Heels; at least we can plainly discover that one of his Heels is higher than the other, which gives him a Hobble in his Gait.'” — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.
Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667, just two months after the death of his father. His family was poor, and he was raised in Ireland by his wealthy uncle, who paid for Swift’s schooling, intending him to follow his uncle’s footsteps into the legal profession. But fate had something else in mind for the young scholar, and a few years after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 put William and Mary on the throne, Swift moved to England to work as private secretary to Sir William Temple. Over the next decade and a half, he pursued a peripatetic career, moving back and forth between Ireland and England, becoming an ordained Anglican priest, and starting to write. He also met Esther Johnson, a housekeeper’s daughter who was fifteen years younger than Swift, and who would become the love of his life.
By the first decade of the eighteenth century, Swift was publishing his early parody pieces, much to the dismay of the Church of England which did not find them amusing or instructive at all, and when the Tories fell from power in 1713, Swift moved back to Ireland as the dean of St. Patrick’s cathedral. It was during this time of his life that Swift wrote his most famous work, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, known more familiarly as Gulliver’s Travels. The book exhibited the same biting wit, clever parody, and anti-establishment tone of his earlier works, and so very quickly became a best-seller, as it has been ever since.
Esther Johnson died in 1728, and as Swift’s life progressed, and as more of his friends died, he became obsessed with death, and quite mentally unbalanced. It’s possible he suffered all his life from Meniere’s Disease, an inner-ear affliction that leaves its sufferers dizzy and nauseous, but as he grew older he became more and more disturbed. His last years were sad and painful, and he died two hundred seventy two years ago this month, on October 19, 1745. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried next to Esther Johnson in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and the bequest of his wealth founded St Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, which opened in his memory in 1757, and which still exists as a psychiatric hospital today. As Swift himself wrote:
*Details of Swift’s life were taken from the biography and wikipedia websites.
Published in General
High heels, low heels and those who hobble along with both. Things haven’t changed very much.
Oh another good Irish lad?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This is an entry in Ricochet’s Quote of the Day Series, a member-devised, coördinated, and written exercise in keeping Western Civilization alive. If you would like to quote a famous person of a bygone era to keep them in the forefront of our memories, you can sign up for a date this month right here. You can even try to keep Eastern Civilization alive, instead, by quoting Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Sun-Tzu, or one of the other old masters.
Another of my favorites. So are you a Tramecksan or a Slamecksan? And how do you break your eggs?
What Swift is satirizing with the small differences is in fact a marvel. The differences are small and they won’t get you killed as they would have in a century of absolutism. Indeed a Glorious Revolution had occurred.
Gulliver’s Travels is a sure-enough hoot! From Laputa (which he explains is not what you think it is) to the talking horses that he can’t understand when he gets back home.
As for high and low heels, Huey Long talked about the low popahirums and the high popalorums. One stripped the tree bark from the top down and the other from the bottom up.
Well, as far as shoes go, neither. Flat and comfortable. Same is true of all my clothes. I’ve even been known to indulge in the infamous “elastic waist” from time to time as well (as have most women of a certain age, I assure you. Most won’t admit it, though. Especially when they think there are men around to hear).
On the egg front, I come from a line of Little Endians. I attribute this to my grandpa, who would eat “eggy soldiers” (a rather revolting breakfast dish, now probably outlawed due to some health and safety regulation about cooking food to an unsafe temperature, but beloved of all small British children, none of whom I ever heard of having died from it), with me in the mornings. The family ritual was that the eggs would go in the egg cups little end up, and then I would bash the tops of them with a spoon to crack the shell, and peel the top off. We would then consume our glorious repast, scooping out the white with a teaspoon and eating that, too.
When our eggshells were completely empty, Grandpa would turn both of them upside down, put them back in the egg cups big end up, and present them to me so that I could bash the “tops” of them again. Such fun!
Being about eighteen months old, and having not quite mastered the principle of causality yet, I was always astonished to find out that the eggs had nothing in them . . .
Yes. Swift was a genius. Difficult man to live with, though, I should think.
Best conversation on Swift:
Swift’s good political deed was fighting a financial scheme in Ireland. Fairly intrepid, & wise.
Beyond that, his political judgment seems to have been worthless all his life.
Also, some evidence Swift had sense & wit in his late years.
My Swiftian take on Michelle Obama’s plan to address childhood obesity was one of the earliest pieces I served up for Ricochet. Some may find it, well…hard to swallow.
http://ricochet.com/archives/time-to-revisit-jonathan-swifts-modest-proposal/
The low spark of high heeled boys.
And yet today we seem to have the opposite issue, with the powers-that-be treating large differences as small differences …
… of course, the powers-that-be in Swift’s time would have argued the same thing about Swift.
By all accounts, those who knew him well, he was an easy man to get along with – in most cases. He didn’t suffer fools easily, but he usually disarmed them gracefully with his wit. There is no evidence he went insane in old age, he suffered from depression, but most likely that was directly related to his likely life-long struggle with Meniere’s disease. Only the last year and a half of his life were plagued with extremely feeble health and mental confusion, nothing unusual even today.
As to his poor political judgment, well, so what, we can’t all be political savants, he backed the wrong horses, but he did so very personal reasons, a rather human failing. Admittedly, he wanted to play power politics but had not the skill for it, and his betters recognized it, he responded by being a literary attack dog and hack, but in the end, his other work has outlasted it all. He also suffered for it and spent his life in the Irish back-water he hated. He finally became a champion of the very people he was called to serve against his wishes and died a national hero for his defense of their interests in an age when few did much for the Irish. His understanding of the ancients and the moderns was profound, and his brilliance in letters makes up for his sins in politics in my estimation.
He certainly possessed his failings, some of which were unique, and others shared by his class in that time and place, but Swift was a man for the ages, his failures, humiliations, and limitations helped to focus him on his great project of Gulliver’s Travels. He was also by the end of his career a conscientious, compassionate, and caring clergyman – in spite of his desire to do other things and to live and be among other people. It is also likely that in later life he discovered the woman he’d always loved was his illegitimate half-sister a profound and horrific shock for them both (this is only a theory, but circumstantial evidence points toward it.)
In his old age friends and servants had to keep people at bay from taking advantage of him and to protect his reputation as his mind was intact but his body infirm, sadly the legend of a misanthrope who hated mankind and went mad as a result became a staple of his biography, confusing Gulliver’s end for his own.
I heartily recommend reading Swift.
I also recommend his best biographer, Leo Damrosch. There is a new biography that looks quite good and came out in the late winter of this year, but I haven’t read it yet.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll take a look.