The Start Of The Literary Tradition
Between the 1690s and the 1720s the hated penal laws were passed, denying Catholics rights to property, education, political activity and religious practice. British misrule created widespread poverty which devastated the countryside and ravaged the population. It's in this period that Anglo-Irish literature began. One of the most prominent of the early pamphleteers and agitators was John Toland (1670-1722), whom the authorities gave the dubious distinction of being the first Irish writer to have his work publicly burned. But the first big-league player arrived in the angry little shape of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. Swift was a cantankerous but basically compassionate man who used his pen to expose viciousness, hypocrisy and corruption whenever he saw it, which in eighteenth-century Dublin was pretty often. Swift was a master of satire; in one of his 75 pamphlets, A Modest Proposal , he proposed that the children of the poor should be cooked to feed the rich, thereby getting rid of poverty and increasing affluence, and his masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels (1726), is as terrifying now as it ever was. He died a bitter man, leaving in his will an endowment to build Dublin's first lunatic asylum, adding in a pithy codicil that if he'd had enough money he would have arranged for a 20ft-high wall to be built around the entire island. He is buried in the vault of St Patrick's, where, as his epitaph says, "Savage indignation can rend his heart no more". The other great satirist of the eighteenth century was Laurence Sterne (1713-1768). A tremendous wit with more mad whimsy than venom, his greatest work Tristram Shandy was once memorably described as "the greatest shaggy dog story in the language". The elegant prose of Edmund Burke (1729-97) - graduate of Trinity College, philosopher, journalist and MP - argued for order in all things, decrying the French Revolution for its destruction of humanity's basic need for faith. He is a complex and difficult figure, and his ideas are claimed in Ireland both by the civil-liberties-trampling Right and by elements of the progressive Left.
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