On every birthday, Jonathan Swift would take off his starched, powdered wig with its cascade of white curls, gingerly place it down by the candle-light illuminated stained-glass window of the Deanery of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. He would mark the anniversary of his birth by mumbling from Job 3:3—“Let the day perish wherein I was born.” This incongruous scene of the greatest satirist since Juvenal meditating upon Job’s lamentations while dressed only in the simple black cassock of a parish priest would later be compounded when the poor just outside of Dublin’s traditional walls—weavers, spinners, dyers, and combers laboring in the textile industry—gathered in the November chill on the cold cobble-stones so as to sing anthems and light bonfires in honor of that great Irish patriot the Dean of Saint Patrick’s.

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On his 59th birthday in 1726, the undesired festivities remain a few years in the future.…