Jonathan Swift’s Last Joke
Jonathan Swift’s Last Joke
In the dying light of a December afternoon in 2018, within the vaulted Gothic interior of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Rosie Hennigan saw that her husband, David Kenny, was hypnotized by an epitaph. Kenny and Hennigan are a witty, attractive Irish couple. He is a professor of law at Trinity College and she is a novelist. Their conversations often take the form of friendly jousts.
Hennigan had suggested the visit because she wanted to learn more about a Tudor artifact in the cathedral, known as the Door of Reconciliation, for a book she was researching. But it was a more recent monument that detained Kenny. Near the south door, he gazed up at a marble plaque bearing the epitaph for Jonathan Swift, the redoubtable novelist, poet, satirist, and former Dean of St. Patrick’s who died in 1745, and who was buried beneath the cathedral floor.
The text of the monument was in Latin and stipulated by Swift himself, in his will. Translations vary, but the most enduring was published in 1933, by William Butler Yeats, who considered Swift’s “the greatest epitaph in history”:
Kenny reads Latin, and knew that Yeats had taken some liberties himself. Leo Damrosch, who published “Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World,” in 2013, had rendered a less flamboyant translation:
Kenny had adored Swift since he was introduced, as a schoolboy, to “A Modest Proposal,” the Dean’s mordant, devastating satire on class relations in Ireland. (Swift’s suggestion for reducing the number of poor children in the country is for the rich to eat them; kids are delicious, he notes, “whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”) Kenny had read Swift’s epitaph before, but on that gloomy afternoon the lines caught him anew. “I had the strongest sense that there was something going on here that I couldn’t quite understand, and that wasn’t captured by Yeats,” Kenny told me recently. “The interpretive materials in the cathedral didn’t suggest the possibility of any other reading. The rousing, earnest interpretation taken up by Yeats was clearly the accepted understanding. But, to my ear, it was discordant. . . . Swift had never struck me as boastful. Something felt wrong.”
Hennigan and Kenny returned home. She went to bed; he stayed up until the early hours reading Swift. This wasn’t that anomalous an occurrence. Kenny, who later became head of the law school at Trinity, is a constitutional specialist who has worked in Ukraine and has advised the Japanese parliament on referendums. But he also teaches a class called Literature and the Law, and many of his friends are writers. (He’s mentioned in the acknowledgments of Sally Rooney’s novel “Intermezzo” because he helped her better understand the world of one of her protagonists, a Dublin barrister.) That night of Swiftian immersion was the start of Kenny’s effort to grasp the deeper meaning of the epitaph—an academic side quest that, he freely admitted, has become an obsession. Seven years later, the journey may be reaching its conclusion.
In September, Kenny and I walked a mile from the elegant front quad of Trinity College to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. About to turn forty, he was wearing a sports coat, chinos, and oxfords, and his brown hair was swept tidily across his head. We stopped every so often so that Kenny could point out some piece of Swiftiana: the Dean’s modest birthplace, near Dublin Castle; the library outside St. Patrick’s, which holds the oldest copy of Swift’s will; the row of houses near the cathedral, which are adorned with reliefs depicting scenes from Swift’s dark and riotous novel “Gulliver’s Travels,” the work with which he will forever be associated. As we entered the cathedral, we passed a cast of Swift’s skull. Nearby, on a wall, was the epitaph.
Kenny showed me around. He told me that, soon after his December, 2018, visit to St. Patrick’s, an observation from a 1953 essay by the critic Maurice Johnson had struck him: “There is no joke in Swift’s epitaph. It is obtrusively serious.” Kenny couldn’t bring himself to believe this. Nothing Swift wrote was “obtrusively serious.” There was cleverness and doubleness in every line. Moreover, something was off in the heroic style of the epitaph. Swift rarely wrote in such a register, except to mock it. As he put it in the comic poem “An Epistle to a Lady,” “For your Sake, as well as mine / I the lofty Stile decline.”
There was one text that Kenny thought was particularly relevant to his search for the truth about the epitaph. In 1732, Swift completed a poem titled “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.” in anticipation of his demise. The poem describes how Swift will be forgotten by his friends, and by the reading public. Its final verses contain some egregious claims, not least that Swift’s brutal satires have never been cruel: “Yet malice never was his aim; / He lash’d the vice, but spar’d the name; / No individual could resent, / Where thousands equally were meant.”
“Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” was widely misunderstood in Swift’s lifetime, and for centuries afterward. Alexander Pope, a friend of Swift’s, dismissed its final stanzas as “too vain” and “not true.” But, as several scholars have since noted, Pope got Swift wrong. Swift was being ironic in these passages: mocking himself, and mocking vanity of all kinds. (The claim that he had “lash’d the vice, but spar’d the name” was undermined by the long list of enemies he ravaged, by name, earlier in the same poem.) In other words, the boasts were Swift’s joke—on himself, and on the remembrance business in general. Kenny wondered if the same misunderstanding had afflicted “the greatest epitaph in history.”
Kenny’s quest to understand where Swift’s last joke was hidden began with studying epitaphs in general. (One night, as Kenny and Hennigan read together on their living-room couch, she asked what was so absorbing him; it was the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland.) Then, after reëncountering Swift’s epitaph, he attempted to understand Swift himself as thoroughly as possible, by reading every major biography and as many secondary works as he could handle, including large volumes of Swift’s correspondence. Finally, he “started looking at matters related to the epitaph,” Kenny said, adding, “I was first interested in making sure of my case that Swift was up to something, rather than necessarily to figure out what he was up to.”
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This went on for years, as Kenny disappeared into several “wonderful diversions” that allowed him a more acute understanding of Swift. For instance, the Dean had written another epitaph in the cathedral, for the Duke of Schomberg, who died, at the Battle of the Boyne, in 1690. Kenny told me that it was “one of the maddest epitaphs” he’d ever seen. On our walking tour, we stopped to read its Latin text. In it, Swift settles scores with Schomberg’s relatives, who failed to respond to Swift’s entreaties to erect a monument to the Duke’s memory. “His reputation for virtue among strangers was stronger than the ties of blood,” it reads. Swift also paid for the text to be published in London newspapers, so that Schomberg’s skinflint relatives would see it. “Apparently the King and Queen were furious,” Kenny told me. “They thought it might lead to a breach with Prussia.”
The Schomberg epitaph taught Kenny something: Swift was unafraid to use marble to make a point. But it was only in March, 2025, that it became obvious to Kenny what the point may have been. He bought a secondhand copy of a rare printing of Swift’s long and elaborate will from a bookseller, for thirty-five euros. He had read the will online several times, but something about having the paper copy led him to read it differently.
One night, Kenny brought the will into the bedroom to show Hennigan something that had tickled him. Swift had mischievously bequeathed his first-, second-, and third-best “beaver hats” to his friends, allowing them to squabble after his death about how he might have ranked the garments. Another detail also jumped out:
Narcissus Marsh! It was a thunderbolt. As Kenny knew, Swift loathed Marsh.
Marsh was the provost of Trinity College during Swift’s time, and had risen to be the Primate, or chief clergyman, in Ireland. Swift believed him to be a man of little wit and few talents who had failed upward. In a description of Primate Marsh written around 1710, Swift comments on his enemy’s unpleasant body odor and lack of friends, and notes that he is “the first of human race, that with great advantages of learning, piety, and station, ever escaped being a great man.” Swift concludes his attack: “No man will be either glad or sorry at his death, except his successor.”
Why, then, would Swift have asked for his epitaph to be placed next to such an unimpressive man? On our tour of the cathedral, Kenny showed me Marsh’s monument. It was a huge slab of white marble on which there were some sixty lines of text, in Latin, listing Marsh’s many achievements and virtues—he was brilliant, pious, munificent, and a seven-time Lord Justice of Ireland. Kenny laughed at the Ozymandian pathos of the scene: the monument was partially obscured by several towers of stacked plastic chairs.
Kenny explained to me that the monument had originally been outside the cathedral, near the public library that Marsh had founded and that bears his name. The stone was moved inside in 1728, to save it from the weather. Swift’s will was written after Marsh’s vanity project took up residence in the cathedral. It was notable to Kenny that Swift had stipulated that his monument be “deeply cut” in black marble, to contrast with Marsh’s. In Kenny’s mind, the placement was a jab at his old rival’s vainglory: the ultimate satire.
If Swift had asked for his monument to be placed next to Marsh’s, why were they now separated by a distance of some fifty yards? Further inquiry led to another thunderbolt. Kenny began to study the history of the cathedral. The first stone of St. Patrick’s was laid in the thirteenth century, on boggy land. By the early part of the nineteenth century, some of the cathedral’s foundation had sunk. In the eighteen-sixties, Benjamin Guinness, a scion of the brewing family, paid a substantial sum to have St. Patrick’s rebuilt. Could one of the monuments have been moved during the refurbishment?
Kenny went back to documents from the eighteenth century, in search of a contemporary description of the cathedral. Eventually, he came across a revelatory passage in an obscure epistolary travelogue from 1777 titled “A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland”:
So the epitaphs were indeed once together, as Swift had demanded, and later moved apart. As we walked along the redesigned south side of the building, past Marsh’s monument and toward Swift’s, Kenny said, “Part of our assumption about old places is that they stay the same, but that’s not the case at all. . . . They’re all a Ship of Theseus, in some state of being rebuilt.”
Kenny felt that his theory of the epitaph had been confirmed. In renovating the cathedral, Guinness had ruined Swift’s last joke.
During a gathering of writers last year, which started at a Lebanese restaurant and finished at a rowdy South Dublin pub, Kenny narrated the tale of his inquiry into Swift’s epitaph. He had been at Marsh’s Library earlier that day, conducting more research, and had arrived at dinner bursting with new facts. When he presented his findings, he did so in a self-deprecating, and riotously funny, style. (Shortly after the dinner, he wrote me an e-mail about his research, saying, “I doubt anyone will pay much attention, but that’s okay.”) But his discovery of the epitaph’s potential meaning was a serious, if unusual, piece of scholarship: part literary criticism, part historical reconstruction, part detective story. I wondered whether he had sought confirmation from Swift experts about his epitaph theory. Kenny said that he was nervous to expose his work to the light. Swifties, he warned me, could be withering.
Among these experts was John Stubbs, the author of “Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel,” a well-regarded recent biography. When I reached Stubbs by phone, he was pleased to be presented with Kenny’s theory, but stopped short of an immediate endorsement. “It’s completely in character,” Stubbs said. “Swift was just an inveterate hoaxer. He loved pranks, practical jokes—couldn’t stop himself. And I would love it to be true.”
Stubbs pointed out, however, that Swift’s language also worked “straight up.” He did feel the “savage indignation” that is in the epitaph. (Swift saw himself as an “avenger,” after all.) But, the more Stubbs thought about Kenny’s theory, “the idea that it’s this big practical joke against this guy whom he despised” sounded “completely plausible.”
Kenny was thrilled that his theory had not been dismissed out of hand. But the final boss in his Swift mission had always been Leo Damrosch, whose playful and penetrating biography Kenny admires more than any other. “He roams over all of Swift with such an easy command,” Kenny said, of Damrosch.
In November, I called Damrosch at his home, in Newton, Massachusetts. An emeritus professor at Harvard, he is now in his mid-eighties and still publishing books. As I related Kenny’s theory to him, I felt oddly nervous, as if it were I, not Kenny, who might be humiliated. But, as I spoke to Damrosch, there were encouraging signs. I heard chuckles of amusement as I read some of Swift’s descriptions of Marsh, and purrs of approval as I outlined Kenny’s detective work about the movement of the monuments. “Well,” Damrosch said, finally. “Thank you. If I had known about it, this would have been in my book, because I think it’s totally convincing, and exactly what Swift would do: from the grave, haunting his old enemy.”
Damrosch wanted to note one more thing. When he published his own book, he said, he demolished many of the claims that had been made in the totemic three-volume study of Swift published by the scholar Irvin Ehrenpreis between 1962 and 1983. Damrosch had observed that much of the most revealing work about Swift had been done by enthusiastic amateurs outside the literary-academic community. One of them was Denis Johnston, an Irish playwright and journalist who—among other significant acts of witness—had reported on the liberation of Buchenwald in 1945. Johnston, Damrosch argued, published incisive work relating to the parentage of Swift’s lover, Stella, suggesting that she was the daughter of Sir William Temple—a diplomat who was one of Swift’s most important mentors. Michael Foot, a former leader of the British Labour Party, also wrote sparkling essays about Swift, once calling “Gulliver’s Travels” a “perpetually unfinished argument.” As Damrosch saw it, Kenny had just joined this fine tradition. Academics could sometimes place Swift on a pedestal; amateurs saw the grudges and the ordinary human failings beneath his literary legacy.
I called Kenny the minute I hung up with Damrosch, and told him of the scholar’s reaction. Kenny squealed with delight. “Oh, my God,” he said. “That is a piece of feedback that I am kind of bowled over by.”
A few weeks later, I asked Kenny whether his quest was now at an end. He told me that his inquiry had been abandoned for the moment. There were other leads to run down—one link to John Dryden, and another to Juvenal, seemed particularly promising—but these investigations could wait. His relentless appetite for work had been causing him medical problems, and he had recently stepped down as the head of the law school at Trinity to try to find a healthier balance in his life. Nevertheless, he was still lured by his old addiction. As he put it to me, “I don’t know that I will ever stop thinking about Swift.” ♦
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