Disappointed Swift

Abstract

Swift promoted an image of himself as a champion of liberty whose urge to vex his age through satire was provoked by 'savage indignation'. Although his anger is often rhetorical, i was also a response to what Swift regarded as a series of disappointments, beginning in his youth, and going on into his old age, and the insults and humiliations he experienced as Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, in what he deemed to be his exile in Ireland. Believing that he was 'born to a million of disappointments', and tracing his misfortunes back to the middle of the seventeenth century when his father emigrated to Ireland, Swift felt he had been dispossessed by 'Cromwell's Hellish Crew'. Swift's hatred of Cromwell has been almost entirely ignored by those who have written about his life and politics