Jonathan Swift is remembered today as the author of three brilliant, difficult prose satires: A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729). Many commentators consider them to be the supreme expressions of the satirical mode in the English language.

Swift was born 30 November 1667 in Dublin. His father (also Jonathan, a Dublin attorney and minor office-holder) had died earlier on that year. At some point before his first birthday Swift was taken from Dublin by his nurse-maid to Whitehaven, Cumberland, where he seems to have lived until his third year. By the time he returned to the house of his uncle Godwin Swift, a distinguished Irish Lawyer, Swift's mother Abigail had moved with her elder daughter Jane to her family's residence in Leicestershire. Swift may not have seen her again until 1689.

Godwin seems to have paid for Swift's education at Kilkenny grammar school and Trinity College, Dublin. Swift claimed that he was ‘stopped of his Degree, for Dullness and Insufficiency’, but he may have exaggerated his academic failings. His real education began in the summer of 1689 at Sheen in Surrey, where he joined the household of Sir William Temple, whose father Sir John Temple had been patron to the Swift family while he was Master of the Rolls in Ireland. Sir William was a vain man of no very deep learning, but he gave Swift access to his excellent library, and introduced him to an environment of polite scholarship and literary application. He treated Swift, who worked as his reader, amanuensis, accountant and secretary, with a combination of encouragement and high-handed restriction. Swift was Temple's emissary to King William's court, his agent among the London publishers, his literary executor – and yet the retired diplomat really wanted him as a sort of tenured upper servant. Swift broke away from the Temple household in 1694, and was ordained priest in the Church of Ireland in 1695. Profoundly depressed by his meagre parishes in Kilroot, County Connor, he returned to Temple's household in May 1696.

Over the next three years Swift drafted A Tale of a Tub, a grand, elusive satire on false learning, non-Anglican Christianity, and contemporary literary fashion. He also completed The Battle of the Books, his defence of Temple's position in the controversy between the partisans of ancient and modern learning, which was published with the Tale in 1704. Temple died in 1699, leaving him a legacy of £100 and a charge to edit (and where necessary translate) certain unpublished works for the press: his Letters, 3 vols. (1699-1703), and Miscellanea, the Third Part (1702). In 1709 Swift was denounced by Temple's family for publishing the sensitive third volume of his Memoirs.

Swift was chaplain to the second Earl of Berkeley between 1699 and 1701, after which he was appointed prebendary to Dunlavin at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. This relatively lucrative place, together with his new living at Laracor, Country Meath, gave him at last a degree of independence. In October 1701 he published his first political pamphlet, a parallel history titled A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome, in which he employed a complicated historical analogy to defend the recently-impeached members of the Whig Junto, including John, Baron Somers, and Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax.

By the time Swift published the Contests he had persuaded Esther Johnson, the "Stella" for whom the Journal was written, to move from Moor Park (Temple's final home) to William Street, in the centre of Dublin. Her mother had been Temple's housekeeper, and she lady's maid to Temple's sister, Lady Martha Giffard. Swift had known Stella since 1687, when she was eight years old, and had acted as her tutor. He brought her up to be his companion, and their very intimate friendship seems always to have been non-physical, non-domestic, and to a great extent intellectual. She lived with the daughter of poor relatives of Temple's, Rebecca Dingley, who made a third on every occasion that Swift and Stella met – in the Journal to Stella Dingley and Stella are addressed collectively as 'MD'. Swift's hesitant commitment to Stella received its ultimate test (and assumed its final form) in 1703, when he effectively discouraged a suitor, William Tisdall, without coming forward himself to claim Stella's hand, as several of their friends expected him to do.

A Tale of a Tub was published anonymously in 1704, at a time of heightened concern among conservative clerics about the 'danger' posed by Whig tolerationist reformers (like Somers, dedicatee of the Tale) to the established church. The Tale seems at once belligerent in its defence of the English and Irish church, and wildly sceptical about established religion in general. The Tale gave Swift a high rank among the London wits, however, and he was intimately acquainted with Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and their Whig patrons in 1707. This status was confirmed in 1708 when he published a spoof almanac in the style of John Partridge, predicting Partridge's own death – perhaps his most brilliant public 'bite': Partridge complained to Isaac Manley that 'reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated'. At this time he was also engaged in writing the various pamphlets, satires and polemics on church politics that were later collected in his 1711 Miscellanies. But the preferment once promised him by his Whig patrons seemed as far away as ever.

Swift was in Ireland between May 1709 and August 1710, when he was commissioned by the Irish bishops to resume in London an earlier campaign for the remission of certain taxes (called the First Fruits) on the incomes of the Church of Ireland. He arrived in London on 7 September 1710, and the Journal to Stella begins two days later.