Swift’s Legend Lives On at Cathedral

The story goes that any 18th-Century worshiper who snored during the sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral here was in peril of waking to find Jonathan Swift looming above him in his pulpit.

It’s a legend worthy of the author of “Gulliver’s Travels,” and may well be true. The pulpit, mounted on wheels, is still in the cathedral. So is Swift.

Swift is buried beneath the floor near the southwest porch, where everyone goes in and out, many of them drawn to Swift.

“He is still a live figure in the cathedral and he commands respect from scholars and students everywhere,” said Victor Griffin, the 20th dean of St. Patrick’s since Swift and 63rd in line from the first dean, William Fitz-Guido in 1219.

The cathedral also displays Swift’s chair, an altar table from the church at Laracor where he was vicar in 1700, a bookcase containing his death mask, some of his books and books about him.

Appointed dean of the Anglican cathedral in 1713, Swift died Oct. 19, 1745, at age 78.

Swift, born in Dublin of English parents, is revered in Ireland for standing up for the people against the English politicians whom he blamed for much of the misery he saw around him.

“Swift was the first to preach an Irish patriotism and he addressed it to all classes and creeds,” Griffin said in an interview.

“He fought for Irish freedom. He wasn’t a separatist in the sense of later Irish freedom fighters who sought separation from England,” the dean said. Griffin, 67, retires this fall.

“Swift wanted Ireland to be an equal part of England but not subservient and with its own Parliament and laws. So he gave Ireland this great sense of patriotism and from Swift came a whole succession of Irish patriots.”

St. Patrick’s is in a Roman Catholic country and is 800 years old this year, as ancient as the English presence in Ireland.

A dean is the senior clergyman in charge of a cathedral; what he says goes. Swift is admired by his successors at St. Patrick’s for his meticulous care of the cathedral, its services, choir and school.

“Swift had such command, such absolute command. One day he was disturbed by the noise a crowd was making outside so he sent his servant, Alexander McGee, to see what was happening,” Griffin said.

“McGee reported they were expecting an eclipse of the sun and would get a better view of it there. As Swift didn’t want to be disturbed, he told McGee to tell them to go away as he had postponed the eclipse for 48 hours. McGee did so and the crowd went away, quite believing in their dean.”

In a Dublin crowded with beggars, he wrote eloquently and sometimes savagely in the Irish interest, using subtle and powerful irony to drive home logical argument, often by making some shocking suggestion.

The most notorious was his “Modest Proposal” of 1729 when he said a shortage of venison might be filled with specially reared Irish children who could be “stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.”

“Gulliver’s Travels” describes a traveler’s fantastic adventures to show the absurdity and folly of human behavior. Michael Foot, former leader of Britain’s Labor Party and champion of Swift, once recommended that “everyone standing for political office in Dublin, the United States or London should have a compulsory examination in ‘Gulliver’s Travels.”’

Cathedral officials acknowledge that Swift’s fame is what draws most of their visitors from all over the world.

“For a hundred years or more after his death local people talked of how he helped the poor in the Liberties, this old district around the cathedral,” said Victor Jackson, archivist at St. Patrick’s.

“There were lots of beggars. Swift decided not to stop them (from) begging but to control them, so he issued every beggar with a badge to show they were genuine,” Jackson said.

“Swift formed charities, lent money at low interest or none at all and gave out money at the deanery when people asked him,” he said.

Swift’s relations with women remain mysterious. He never married, but he was loved by two women, Esther Johnson and Hester Vanhomrigh.

Some biographers assert that Swift was secretly wed to Esther in 1716, but there is no evidence for it.

He was her tutor in England; she was the daughter of a servant and 14 years younger. His letters to her were published as “Journal to Stella.”

Esther followed Swift to Ireland and remained his closest friend until her death in 1728.

Her grave is beside Swift’s at St. Patrick’s. On the night of her burial, Swift moved from his usual room at the deanery to avoid seeing the light in the cathedral that would tell him the burial was taking place.

Hester met Swift in London. He called her Vanessa and she also followed him to Ireland so that Swift had two young women living near him. Hester was upset by Swift’s refusal to marry her, broke with him and cut him out of her will. She died in 1723.

Griffin, who, like Swift, lives in the deanery beside the cathedral, rejects the common assertion that Swift was out of his mind for the last three years of his life.

“All these stories about Swift going mad are all silly,” Griffin said.

“People even ask me if I see the mad ghost of Swift in the deanery. He wasn’t mad; he suffered from Meniere’s disease--deafness and ringing in the ears--and a slight stroke, so he couldn’t communicate. He was frustrated in that he understood what was said to him but he could not answer, and when he tried, people thought he was mad.”