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JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)
BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan Swift, often hailed as the greatest prose satirist in the English language, was born in Ireland to English parents but spent significant periods of his life in England. His early career included service as secretary to Sir William Temple, which drew him into political circles and sharpened his engagement with public affairs. Despite his ambitions, Swift failed to secure a church appointment in England, a disappointment that redirected his path. In 1713, he was instead appointed Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, a position that anchored him in Anglo-Irish society and provided the platform from which he produced his most enduring satirical works. LITERARY PRODUCTION 1724: “ Drapier’s Letters” - support the cause of Irish economic and political independence 1726: “ Gulliver’s Travels” 1729: “ A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick” - a satirical essay that suggests that poor people in Ireland could ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the elite. As the Proposer sees it, this one quick fix will bring about many improvements to society and refuses to take seriously any objections to his plan.
A modest proposal (1729)
CONTEXT
When Jonathan Swift was born, Ireland had been subject to English rule, treated as a colony of the English crown, since the 12th century. When England became a Protestant country under Henry VIII in the 16th century, the vast majority of Irish remained Roman Catholic, and English rule became much harsher. A series of “penal laws,” which were meant to encourage the Catholic Irish to convert to Protestantism, rendered the native population disenfranchised and destitute. In 1627 all Irish Catholics were denied the right to vote. Strict inheritance laws dramatically reduced Catholic land ownership and by the time Jonathan Swift penned A Modest Proposal, poverty and famine were widespread in Ireland, and many of the poor Irish had resorted to begging in the streets. SUMMARY Ireland faces severe poverty, with many women begging alongside their children. The Proposer, the essay’s anonymous narrator, views these countless impoverished children as a burden on the nation. The Proposer suggests thus an ingenious solution that will ensure not only that the children of beggars become contributing members of society, but it will also ensure that all the children of Ireland’s poor will be rescued from their sorry condition. The Proposer explains: those mothers who cannot provide for their children will rear them for one year, then sell them to wealthy men of taste. These wealthy men will slaughter the infants and eat them. The Proposer’s friend, an American, has informed him that infant flesh is, in fact, delicious. As the Proposer sees it, this one quick fix will bring about many improvements to society. For one, the mothers will be able to sell their young children at a considerable profit, as it costs little to rear a child for one year. These mothers, some of them beggars, others indebted to their landlords, will thus be lifted out of poverty. The profits overall will boost the Irish economy, as the children are an entirely domestic product, their flesh being too delicate to export. Further, the great majority of Irish poor are Catholic, so the sale and consumption of their children will limit the Catholic population, a group that the Proposer sees as especially wicked. Finally, the Irish public will learn to value marriage, as husbands will come to treat their wives as prized livestock. The Proposer refuses to take seriously any objections to his plan.
The alternative plans that can be proposed in its stead—such as improving manufacturing in Ireland, taxing landlords who do not themselves live in the country, instilling in the public values of temperance, prudence, and love of country—strike him as clearly impossible to put into effect. Further, the Proposer promises us that he is speaking in complete earnest. He stands to gain nothing personally from his plan, as his own child is no longer an infant, and his wife is now too old to bear more children. CHARACTERS Main characters The Proposer – The unnamed speaker in A Modest Proposal is not Jonathan Swift himself, though at first he may appear to be. Rather, he is an exaggerated persona meant to represent a class of people whom Swift especially disdained. The Proposer appears to be a wealthy, highly educated, Protestant Englishman with little regard for the humanity of Ireland’s Catholic poor. He is a fastidious but entirely deluded planner, whose grand designs for the improvement of Irish society fail to take into account the most basic assumptions of human decency and morality. George Psalmanazar – Psalmanazar is, in fact, a historical f igure. He was a French literary imposter who claimed to be a native of Taiwan (then called “Formosa”) and wrote a made-up account of his travels. By the time A Modest Proposal was written, Psalmanazar had been exposed as a fraud. The Proposer is apparently unaware of this development, and writes that the “very worthy person” got his ideas from Psalmanazar. The Pretender – The Pretender, mentioned twice, is James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of the recently deposed King James II. (King James II was replaced as the leader of England by William III and Mary II in what was known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688.) James Francis Edward Stuart, a Roman Catholic with the support of the Pope, claimed to be the true heir of the British throne, though that claim was denied by the Protestant English (hence the nickname they called him by: The Pretender). Because he was Catholic, he was favored by the Catholic population of Ireland, and became a figure of hope and revolution for them, and much hated by the English. Other characters The American – This mysterious character is mentioned only briefly. A friend of the Proposer’s, he is the first to suggest to him that the flesh of infants is edible and, in fact, delicious. A Very Worthy Person – This is another friend of the Proposer’s. This “worthy person” suggests that the lean flesh of teenagers may be a fitting substitute for venison (deer meat), which has lately become scarce in Ireland. THEMES Satire and Sincerity Today we regard “A Modest Proposal” as a seminal work of Western satire—satire being the use of humor or irony to reveal and criticize the evils of society. Though Swift wrote the tract in response to the specific social conditions afflicting his native Ireland, its bitter humor shocks and delights as much now as it did in 1729, when it circulated the streets of Dublin as an anonymous pamphlet. The power of Swift’s satire resides in the intensity of his verbal irony—that is, his ability to say one thing and mean precisely the opposite. In large part, the humor of “A Modest Proposal” arises from the enormous gap between the cool, rational, self-righteous voice of the speaker and the obvious repulsiveness of his proposal: that the infant children of Ireland’s poor be raised as livestock, slaughtered, and sold as food to the wealthy, who will enjoy them as a tasty delicacy. No reader, no matter her personal values or political allegiances, will be able to take seriously the speaker’s proposal.
Society, Rationality and Irrationality Not only does “A Modest Proposal” satirize the casual evil of the English rich and the hopelessness of the Irish poor, it also satirizes the culture of pamphleteering and political grandstanding that flourished in response to the crisis in Ireland. In 18th-century England and Ireland, it was common practice for the civic-minded to write short essays on all matters of politics, which they would then distribute among the public in the form of cheaply printed pamphlets. Many of these pamphlets tried to engineer simple solutions to extraordinarily complex and pervasive social problems, often making use of shoddy statistics and wild speculation to support their claims. Swift uses the character of the Proposer to satirize this tendency towards social engineering. The Proposer arrives at his solution through a series of calculations which may or may not have any basis in reality. He seems obsessed by numbers, and constantly refers back to the math of the situation—how many poor children are born annually, how much an average infant weighs, how much money the Irish collectively owe in debt to their English landlords—to support the perfect rationality of his morally reprehensible suggestions. In one sense, it seems that the Proposer’s methods, which are abstract, mathematical, and hyper-rational, have actually led him to his monstrous conclusion. In his excited pursuit of the best possible fix, the Proposer seems to have forgotten the most basic assumptions of human morality. The Enlightenment, during which Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal,” was a period of renewed faith in the powers of human reason. Following the incredible advancements and discoveries made by scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, intellectuals across Europe began to trust that man could cure all of society’s ills, and, indeed, that the world could be perfected. Misanthropy In a letter to his friend, the poet Alexander Pope, Swift famously wrote, “I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians—I will not speak of my own trade—soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.” Swift is perhaps the most famous misanthrope in the history of English literature. As mentioned previously “A Modest Proposal” most obviously lampoons the colonial powers in Ireland. But less obvious—and perhaps less comfortable for us as readers—are the ways in which the essay also satirizes the poor. As becomes clear in Swift’s backhanded disclosure of his actual suggestions for dealing with the crisis in Ireland, he tends to think of the Irish population as depraved, self-loathing, and unable to organize on their own behalf. He is disgusted by the way Irish husbands treat their wives, and he really does hate Catholics (though he isn’t about to kill any of them). In this sense, he spares neither the English nor the Irish from his biting satire. With this in mind, one could argue that the absurdity of the proposed cannibalism illustrates not just the evils of English colonial rule, nor just the basic hopelessness of the Irish situation, but in fact the depravity of humanity in general. For Swift, the world is utterly and irreversibly fallen, and even on their best days humans are little more than beasts. Therefore, even as he proposes it in total irony, Swift seems also to be genuinely asking: why doesn’t humanity, given all of its terrible faults, deserve cannibalism? SYMBOLS Eating – Eating is an important symbol throughout “A Modest Proposal,” illustrating in painfully literal terms the predatory behavior of the upper classes, and colonial powers more generally. For the Proposer, resorting to cannibalism is just a natural extension of the daily activities of landlords and aristocrats. In addition, Swift uses the symbol of eating to paint humankind as fundamentally bestial creatures—creatures not inherently rational but only capable of reason on rare occasions
