Episode Details

Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, and some of the most savage political satire in the English language — all while serving as the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. He proposed eating Irish babies to solve poverty, invented fake astrologers to humiliate rivals, and wielded his pen with a cruelty that terrified the powerful. He died mad, and the satirist who had exposed everyone else's delusions could not escape his own.

This episode traces Swift from his Dublin childhood through the London political years, the Irish exile, the masterpieces of savage satire, and the dementia that consumed his final decade.

• Swift's Anglo-Irish origins and the political career in London that ended in Irish exile
• Gulliver's Travels — the children's adventure that is actually the most misanthropic novel in English
• A Modest Proposal and the satirical method of saying the unsayable with a straight face
• The relationship with Stella and Vanessa, the dementia, and the fortune left to found a hospital for the insane