Swift was tied emotionally to England but linked by birth to Ireland, a land he considered backward and uncultured. He sought throughout his life to obscure those links and encourage others to think of him as an Englishman; at times he even denied them entirely. His Anglo-Irish heritage left Swift an outsider, always seeking acceptance, recognition, and respect from those he considered to be "inside."
His father, Jonathan, married Abigail Errick in 1664. A daughter, Jane, was born in April 1666; Jonathan was born in November 1667, several months after the unexpected death of his father. When he was a year old, according to an account Swift wrote late in his life, his nurse took him with her secretly to England, where he stayed for three years because his mother did not want to risk the danger of recrossing the Irish Sea. If this story is true, he spent little of his youth with his mother and endured a series of separations: from his mother, from his nurse, from his mother again when he went off to school, after which she moved to England, leaving Swift in the care of relatives in Ireland. It would help explain his hunger for emotional security and his distrust of lasting relations with others (especially women) to supply it.
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