The English Swift/the Irish Swift

Abstract

In October 1736, Jonathan Swift was an old man thinking on the last things. Never one to dissemble resentment, he planned a final insult to Ireland, telling his friend Alexander Pope that ‘my flesh and bones are to be carried to Holyhead, for I will not lie in a country of slaves’.¹ Swift had no special affection for Holyhead, as any reader of the splendidly vitriolic Holyhead Journal (1727) will know, but it did have some symbolic advantages. Obviously, it was not Dublin, his city of exile, but neither was it London, the great metropolis of his desires. Holyhead was (and still is) the port used by ships travelling between the two largest British Isles, and it rests on the ‘neutral’ ground of Wales. Swift travelled through Holyhead on several occasions, and he saw it as the midpoint between the two cultures that dominated his life. His eagerness to be buried there formulates his dilemma as an Anglo-Irish writer in a neat symbol: a last resting-place on the hyphen between Anglo and Irish.² But the emblematic power of the story does not end here, for you will look in vain for Swift’s grave at Holyhead. Ireland claimed him in death, as it had done in life: his remains are buried in the great aisle of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.