III.

Stella and Vanessa

Swift began his Journal to Stella in 1710; Stella was his private name for Esther Johnson, who was then living in Dublin. This series of intimate letters, with its terms of endearment drawn from the language of the nursery, reveals a curious aspect of the great satirist's enigmatic personality. Scholars are unsure of Swift's exact relationship with Stella; they may have been secretly married. The only other woman in Swift's life was Esther Vanhomrigh, daughter of a Dublin merchant of Dutch descent. Vanhomrigh (whom Swift also taught and whom he referred to as Vanessa) became passionately enamored of him, but he did not return her love.

In 1713, Swift was appointed dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. The following year the Tory administration fell, and Swift's political power was ended. In 1724 and 1725 he anonymously issued his Drapier's Letters, a series of highly effective pamphlets that secured the end of the royal patent granted to an Englishman coining copper halfpence in Ireland. Swift was trying to protect the Irish people from a further debasement of their currency. For his championship of their cause in these essays and in “A Modest Proposal” (1729), Swift became a hero of the Irish people. “A Modest Proposal” embodies the mordantly ironic suggestion that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food to the wealthy, thus turning an economic burden to general profit.