Author Guide · Satire
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In 1724 the government in Dublin offered a reward of £300 for the name of the man behind a series of pamphlets signed “M. B. Drapier”, which had turned Ireland against a new copper coinage. Nobody gave him up. The draper was Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, born in Dublin in 1667, who published much of his work under a mask: Isaac Bickerstaff, the Drapier, a ship’s surgeon called Lemuel Gulliver. Two years later Gulliver’s Travels came out anonymously in London and was an immediate success. Three years after that, a calm, numerate “modest proposal” suggested that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food. This guide covers his 10 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1704–1766 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Jonathan Swift’s best-known works are Gulliver’s Travels (1726), A Modest Proposal (1729), A Tale of a Tub (1704) and The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25). Start with Gulliver’s Travels; if you want Swift in twenty minutes first, read A Modest Proposal, the short pamphlet that made his name a byword for satire.
Where to Start with Jonathan Swift
If you want his masterpiece
→ Gulliver’s Travels (1726) — four voyages, from Lilliput to the land of the Houyhnhnms.
If you want the shortest route in
→ A Modest Proposal (1729) — a pamphlet you can read in one sitting.
If you want his early, wilder satire
→ A Tale of a Tub (1704) — religion and pedantry, with a narrator who keeps digressing.
If you want Swift in private
→ Journal to Stella (1766) — his daily letters from London, 1710–13.
10 Jonathan Swift Books, in Order
A Tale of a Tub
Published anonymously in 1704 in one volume with The Battle of the Books. The story of three brothers, Peter, Martin and Jack, who each bend their dead father’s will about their coats, is an allegory of the Catholic, Anglican and Dissenting churches. It is broken up by “digressions” in which a manic modern author mocks himself and the learned fashions of the day. Swift added an “Apology” in the 1710 edition.
The Battle of the Books
Written in 1697, while Swift was secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park, and published in 1704 alongside A Tale of a Tub. In a mock-epic battle in the King’s Library at St James’s, the books of the ancient writers fight those of the moderns, taking Temple’s side in a literary quarrel of the 1690s. Its preface opens with Swift’s best-known line on satire.
An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity
Written in 1708 and first printed in Swift’s Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1711). With a straight face, the speaker grants that real Christianity is long gone and argues only for keeping its nominal form, because abolishing it would be inconvenient. It is an early run of the deadpan method he perfected in A Modest Proposal.
The Conduct of the Allies
A pamphlet Swift wrote for the Tory ministry of Robert Harley, published in 1711. It argued that Britain was fighting the War of the Spanish Succession for the benefit of its allies and of the Duke of Marlborough, and was written to build public support for making peace.
The Drapier’s Letters
Seven pamphlets of 1724–25, written as “M. B. Drapier”, an ordinary Dublin draper, against William Wood’s patent to mint copper coins for Ireland. After the fourth letter the authorities offered £300 for the author’s name and arrested the printer, John Harding; nobody named Swift. A boycott followed, the patent was withdrawn in 1725, and Swift became a popular hero in Ireland.
Gulliver’s Travels
Published anonymously in London in 1726 as the memoir of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon. He is shipwrecked among the tiny Lilliputians, then the giants of Brobdingnag, then visits the flying island of Laputa and its useless scientists, and finally the Houyhnhnms, rational horses who rule over the brutish human Yahoos. It was popular at once, was revised in a 1735 edition, and has been filmed many times, from the Fleischer brothers’ 1939 cartoon to a 1996 television version with Ted Danson and a 2010 comedy with Jack Black.
A Modest Proposal
A pamphlet printed in Dublin in 1729 by Sarah Harding. In the voice of a reasonable “projector”, armed with figures and costings, it proposes that the poor of Ireland sell their babies as food for the rich. The horror is aimed at the landlords, absentee owners and English policy that left Irish families starving, and the title has become shorthand for satire itself.
Verses on the Death of Dr Swift
Written in 1731 and published in 1739. Swift imagines how his friends and enemies will react to his death, from the card table to the coffee house, and ends with an impartial speaker giving a flattering account of his life and work. It is one of his best-known poems.
Directions to Servants
Mock instructions to butlers, cooks, footmen and maids on how to cheat, shirk and blame others, written over many years and left incomplete. George Faulkner printed it in Dublin in 1745, the year Swift died; both surviving manuscripts are incomplete, and Faulkner’s text is the fullest version.
Journal to Stella
The daily letters Swift wrote from London between September 1710 and 1713 to Esther Johnson, “Stella”, and her companion Rebecca Dingley in Dublin, while he was at the centre of Tory politics. They were first printed after his death, in 1766 and 1768, with much of their private “little language” edited out, and were first gathered under this title in 1784.
In What Order to Read Jonathan Swift
Nothing in Swift is a series, so you can read in any order. Publication order does follow his life: the early satires on religion and learning written in Temple’s household, the London pamphlets of the Tory years around 1710–14, then the Irish work written as Dean in Dublin, which includes his two most famous books.
Most readers start with Gulliver’s Travels or A Modest Proposal. Leave A Tale of a Tub until later: it is his most difficult book, full of references to the religious and scholarly quarrels of the 1690s, and an annotated edition helps.
A reading path
1. A Modest Proposal (1729)
2. Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
3. The Drapier’s Letters (1724)
4. Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739)
5. A Tale of a Tub (1704)
Everything Else Jonathan Swift Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 6 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Shorter satires and poems
6
6 books · 1708–1738
- 1708Predictions for the Year 1708the first Isaac Bickerstaff hoax, aimed at the almanac-maker John Partridge
- 1709A Description of the Morninga short poem of London at daybreak, printed in The Tatler
- 1710A Description of a City Showera mock-heroic poem of London in the rain
- 1726Cadenus and Vanessaa poem about Esther Vanhomrigh, written in 1713
- 1732The Lady’s Dressing Roomthe most notorious of his scatological poems
- 1738A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversationa satire on polite small talk
The years · 1667–1745
Quick facts about Jonathan Swift
- Known for
- Swift is known as the sharpest satirist in English, who wrote behind invented narrators with a straight face, most famously as Lemuel Gulliver and as the projector of A Modest Proposal.
- 1667
- Born in Dublin
- 1704
- A Tale of a Tub
- 1745
- Dies in Dublin
- Born
- 30 November 1667, Dublin; his father died months before his birth
- Education
- Trinity College Dublin (BA 1686); MA from Hart Hall, Oxford, 1692
- Early career
- Secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Surrey, in the 1690s
- Church
- Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, from 1713 until his death
- Pen names
- Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver
- Died
- 19 October 1745, Dublin; buried in St Patrick’s beside Esther Johnson
- Legacy
- Left his estate to found St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin, opened in 1757 and still a psychiatric hospital
The red mark is 1726: Gulliver’s Travels, published anonymously in London.
How Jonathan Swift Writes: The Straight Face
Swift almost never speaks as himself. He invents a narrator and lets him talk: a hack writer in A Tale of a Tub, a Dublin draper, a plain-minded ship’s surgeon, a projector with tables of costs. The satire comes from the gap between how reasonable that voice sounds and what it is actually saying, as when A Modest Proposal works out the price of a child per carcass in the tone of a policy paper.
His prose is plain on purpose. In A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders (1721) he defined style as “proper words in proper places”, and Gulliver reports the absurd and the monstrous in the same flat, exact detail he gives to the weather or the size of a meal. Scale does much of the work: by making Gulliver a giant and then a tiny figure among giants, Swift turns European politics into a quarrel over which end to break an egg.
He wrote for immediate effect, usually anonymously and about a live issue: a coinage patent, a war, a famine. That is why so much of his work is pamphlets rather than books, and why it can need footnotes now. The targets changed, but the method did not, George Orwell, who wrote a long essay on Gulliver’s Travels in 1946, is one of many later satirists who learned from it.
Frequently asked questions about Jonathan Swift’s books
How many books has Jonathan Swift written?
Only a few are full-length books; most of what he wrote is pamphlets, poems and essays, usually published anonymously or under a pen name. This page covers his 10 key works, from A Tale of a Tub (1704) to the posthumously printed Journal to Stella, plus six shorter satires and poems under “Everything else”.
What are Jonathan Swift’s books in order?
A Tale of a Tub (1704), The Battle of the Books (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1711), The Conduct of the Allies (1711), The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), A Modest Proposal (1729), Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739), Directions to Servants (1745) and Journal to Stella (first printed 1766).
Where should I start with Jonathan Swift?
With Gulliver’s Travels (1726). If you want a shorter taste first, A Modest Proposal (1729) takes about twenty minutes and shows his method at full strength.
What is Jonathan Swift’s most famous book?
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), published anonymously as the travels of Lemuel Gulliver. Words from it, such as “Lilliputian” and “yahoo”, passed into everyday English. His most famous short piece is A Modest Proposal (1729).
Is Gulliver’s Travels a children’s book?
No. It was written as a satire for adults on politics, science and human nature, and the last voyage, in which Gulliver comes to prefer horses to people, is bleak. Abridged versions of the first two voyages, Lilliput and Brobdingnag, became children’s classics, and most film versions stick to those.
Was A Modest Proposal serious?
No. It is a satire: the proposal to sell poor Irish children as food is put forward in a calm, businesslike voice to expose how landlords and English policy were already treating the Irish poor. Swift was Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin and had written many earlier pamphlets on Irish poverty.
Has Gulliver’s Travels been adapted?
Many times. Among the best known are the Fleischer brothers’ animated film (1939), a part-animated 1977 musical with Richard Harris, a two-part 1996 television film with Ted Danson, and a 2010 comedy with Jack Black.
Was Jonathan Swift Irish?
He was born in Dublin in 1667 to English parents, studied at Trinity College Dublin and spent most of his adult life in Ireland as Dean of St Patrick’s. He belonged to the Anglo-Irish Protestant establishment, but The Drapier’s Letters made him a popular hero in Ireland, where he was called the “Hibernian patriot”.
Was Jonathan Swift a misogynist?
It is a long-running debate. His scatological poems, especially The Lady’s Dressing Room (1732), in which a lover is disgusted by what he finds in his beloved’s room, led to accusations of misogyny; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu answered it with a mocking poem of her own. Other critics read the poem as a satire on the illusions of beauty that men demand, rather than on women.
Did Jonathan Swift marry Stella?
It is not known. Esther Johnson, “Stella”, was his closest companion from her childhood at Moor Park until her death in 1728. Thomas Sheridan believed they married secretly in 1716; people close to them rejected the claim. Swift asked to be buried beside her in St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Footnotes
- Jonathan Swift — Wikipedia
- Drapier’s Letters — Wikipedia
- Gulliver’s Travels — Encyclopædia Britannica
- The Lady’s Dressing Room — Wikipedia
- Directions to Servants — The Jonathan Swift Archive
- The Journal to Stella, ed. George A. Aitken — Project Gutenberg
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
— Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books (1704), the preface
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