Swift's Political Climates

• Published in: The Eighteenth century (Lubbock) Vol. 63; no. 3; pp. 221 - 239
• Main Author: Havard, John Owen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Pennsylvania Press 01.09.2022
• DOI: 10.1353/ecy.2022.a927517
• ISSN: 0193-5380; 1935-0201

Jonathan Swift imbued the weather, both real and imagined, with multivalent personal and political significance. In Gulliver's Travels (1726), he presented the science-fictional scenario of an island floating above the weather and blocking sunlight from the desolate land below. In his writings on Ireland, Swift depicted the despoiling of the Irish landscape as the product of a wasteful colonial trade regime. In both obvious and more subtle ways, Swift drew upon natural and unnatural climates to gesture towards alternative trajectories for the future British Empire and resisted the emergent course of global capitalism. By contrast, in his private writings—especially his correspondence with Alexander Pope—Swift forged a complexly layered accommodation with an environment whose ills he saw as both inevitable and manmade. Beyond illuminating his own writings, these reflections carry lessons for the present, including the tendency, in an age of confirmed climate change, to project a singular fate for mankind onto changing skies. At a more down-to-earth level, Swift shows how grand concerns with the climate and man's place in the world obscure what we can accomplish "in the mean time" by looking to the world around us.