Jonathan 'Isaac Bickerstaff' Swift
  (1667-1745)

Anyway, Jonathan wrote a lot of stuff in between tutoring sessions, but unfortunately burned most of it.
The writing that survives shows signs of the great satirist he was to become. But when Sir William died in
1699, Jonathan was left scrambling for a job and eventually ended up with several odd little Church
positions back in Ireland. He became a very fashionable satiric writer as far as Dublin society was
concerned.

And now for one of my all-time favorite anecdotes. In the early 1700's, a man named John Partridge, a
cobbler by trade, took up printing almanacs to make some extra money. He challenged his readers to try
their hands at prophecy and see if they could beat Partridge's own prophetic abilities. Well, Partridge had
made some attacks on the Church of England, and in 1708, Jonathan decided to stand up for his
employer. Using the name Isaac Bickerstaff, he prophesied "a trifle...(Partridge) will infallibly die upon
the 29th of March next, about eleven at Night, of a raging fever." At the proper time, using another name,
Jonathan announced the fulfillment of said prophecy. Partridge, in his next almanac, protested loudly
that he was still alive, but no one believed him. The Stationer's Register had already removed his name
from their rolls, and that was good enough for most people.

Somewhere around 1716, some biographers say he married Stella Johnson, but there's no proof of this,
and you'd think there'd be some sign if he had. Though they lived near each other for most of their lives,
they were always very properly chaperoned and may very well have never been alone together11.

Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, Jonathan's first big dive into prose. Though it's been pretty
solidly labelled a children's book, it's also a great satire of the times that is pretty much beyond most
children. It shows Jonathan's desire to encourage people to read deeper and not take things for granted:
readers who paid attention could match all of Gulliver's tall tales with current events and long-term
societal problems. In 1729, Jonathan wrote one of my favorites, A Modest Proposal, supposedly written
by an intelligent and objective "political arithmetician" who had carefully studied Ireland before making his
proposal. Most of you probably know this one. The author calmly suggests one solution for both the
problem of overpopulation and the growing numbers of undernourished people: breed those children who
would otherwise go hungry or be mistreated in order to feed the general public.

Jonathan died on 19 October 1745, aged 78. He hadn't been in a good frame of mind for some time.
He managed to keep some of his sense of humor, though--his last will and testament provided funds to
establish somewhere around Dublin a hospital for "ideots & lunaticks" because "No Nation wanted
(needed) it so much."