Author: Swift, Theophilus
Biography:
SWIFT, Theophilus (1745-1815: ancestry.co.uk)
He was the son of Deane Swift (1707-83) and his wife Mary Harrison. Both parents were cousins of Jonathan Swift (q.v.) and Deane Swift was one of his editors. Although the DIB gives a birth year of 1746 in Hereford where the Swifts owned an estate at Goodrich, Ancestry records his birth on 6 Oct. 1745 at Castlerickard, County Meath—another Swift family estate. Like his father, Theophilus studied at St Mary Hall, Oxford, matriculating on 24 Mar. 1763 and graduating BA in 1767. He entered the Middle Temple and was called to the bar in 1774. He married Charlotte Maria Pead (d 1810) in St Clement Dane’s, London, on 6 Dec. 1770; their two sons, Deane and Edmund (qq.v.), were both born in England. The family settled in Ireland in 1783 although they continued to spend time in England. Swift gained a name for himself as an eccentric contrarian who took up unusual causes. His A Letter to Sir William Brown, on the Duel of the Duke of York with Colonel Lenox (1789) led to a duel in which Swift was injured. He argued for the innocence of Rhynwick Williams, nicknamed “The Monster” and charged with knife attacks on young women; Swift was Williams’ counsel at trial in Hereford and published A Vindication of Rhynwick Williams (1790). His 1794 Animadversions on the Fellows of Trinity College attacks the university’s curriculum for its focus on logic at the expense of classical learning and denounces the Fellows but was prompted by anger at their treatment of his son Deane. In the same year an attack on Thomas Elrington, Provost of Trinity, by father and son resulted in a brief spell in prison. Swift endured a longer prison sentence of two years in Newgate when, in June 1796, he was convicted of libel for Animadversions. While in Newgate he wrote Prison Pindarics, a treatment in verse of the same material as Animadversions. Other publications include his “Essay on the Rise and Progress of Rhime” (1801; winner of the Royal Irish Academy gold medal), and Mr. Swift's Correspondence with the Rev. Dr. Dobbin and his Family (1811) in which he accused Dobbin of encouraging his daughter to jilt Swift (reissued in an enlarged third edition as The Touchstone of Truth [1811]). In the 1810s he corresponded with Walter Scott (q.v.) and supplied information for Scott’s “Life of Swift.” He died in Dublin in 1815. (DIB 25 Oct. 2021; ODNB 25 Oct. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 25 Oct. 2021; Hereford Journal 22 Dec. 1790; Dublin Evening Post 16 Dec. 1794; The Times 23 Dec. 1794; Norfolk Chronicle 11 June 1796; Dublin Evening Post 27 Oct. 1796; Sir Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Times [1827]) SR
Other Names:
- T. S.