Dean Swift: The Politics of Satire
A Symposium on Jonathan Swift and
the Politics in his Age
Conducted at The Deanery of St.
Patrick's, Upper Kevin Street, Dublin
8, on 18 October 2003,
with Dr Robert Mahony in the Chair
The Politics of A Modest Proposal
Ian Higgins (Australian
National University)
[Dr Ian Higgins is a Senior Lecturer in English literature
at The Australian National University in Canberra,
Australia. He is the
author of Swift's Politics: A Study in Disaffection (1994) and of many
articles on Swift and early eighteenth-century literature. With Claude
Rawson, he is General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of Swift.]
Jonathan Swift's writings on Ireland
explosively combine the perspectives of priest, patriot, and Tory polemicist.
The priest locates the cause of what he called 'the Wretched Condition of
Ireland' in the vices of the Irish themselves. The patriot blames English
oppression for Irish poverty. The disaffected Tory identifies the English
Whig government and its Irish Whig clients as authors of Ireland's
ruin. This paper considers the political character of A Modest Proposal.
Swift's notorious pamphlet of 1729 on the Irish poor and their oppressors has
a particular anti-Whig aspect and Tory political bite.
Many contemporaries viewed Swift's Irish writings as primarily the work of
a Tory or 'Church Party' partisan rather than as the work of a true patriot.
His incendiary pamphleteering was seen as a partisan attempt to open a
popular front against Walpole and
the Hanoverian regime in Ireland.
Contemporary Whigs located the 'origin of Swift's patriotism for Ireland'
in the Tory party's proscription from office after the Hanoverian accession
in 1714 and in Swift's disappointed personal ambition. The Dean's Irish
writings were received as a continuation of his Tory polemic transplanted to Ireland.
The contemporary Whig view of Swift's Irish writings as primarily
party-political in provenance was also put forcefully by later Whig
commentators, such as Francis Jeffrey. Reviewing Sir Walter Scott's edition
of Swift's Works for the Edinburgh Review in 1816 Jeffrey wrote
sharply: 'A single fact is decisive upon this point. While his friends were
in power, we hear nothing of the grievances of Ireland'.
Swift wrote on behalf of Ireland
against English oppression but the Irish patriot was a High Churchman first.
When James Butler, the Second Duke of Ormonde, a High Church Tory, is Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland
(1703-1707 and 1710-13) Swift makes no public complaint about England's
treatment of Ireland.
But he erupts into print against English Whig administrations perceived to be
sympathetic to the claims of Protestant Dissenters for relief from
persecution by statute.
Further, Swift was more than willing to accept English laws when the
Sacramental Test Act was imposed in Ireland
in 1704. The Test clause inserted in the Irish Popery Act of 1704 by English
High Church Tories excluded from public office all who would not take
communion according to Anglican rites. Revealingly, it is in opposition to attempts
by the anti-clerical wing of the English Whig party to remove the Test in Ireland
that Swift first articulates his claims for Irish legislative independence
more famously made in the later Drapier's Letters. In A Letter from
a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of
Commons in England, Concerning the Sacramental Test, published in 1708,
Swift condemned Alan Brodrick, a leading Whig and afterwards Lord Chancellor
in 1714, for agitating to have the Sacramental Test in Ireland repealed by an
Act of Parliament in England. The Test in Ireland
was a national matter, Swift writes, and supposed patriots like Brodrick
ought to know 'the Injustice of binding a Nation by Laws, to which they do
not consent'.
From 1714 Swift was certainly disaffected from the Anglo-Irish
establishment to which he belonged by ethnicity and confession. He reported
in 'A Letter to Mr Pope' (1722) that the principles of Whig rule in Ireland
'consisted in nothing else but damning the Church, reviling the Clergy,
abetting the Dissenters, and speaking contemptibly of revealed Religion'. The
'whiggish or fanatical Genius so prevalent among the English of this kingdom'
was to be accounted for 'by that number of Cromwell's Soldiers, adventurers
established here, who were all of the sourest Leven, and the meanest birth,
and whose posterity are now in possession of their lands and their
principles'.
This fanatical whiggish genius was, in part, Swift liked to point out, a
genius for massacre. Swift finds that Protestant sectarians have a hand even
in the massacres committed by Catholics. Swift wrote that 'the Puritans
…joining with the Scotch Enthusiasts, in the Time of King Charles
the First, were the principal Cause of the Irish Rebellion and Massacre,
by distressing that Prince, and making it impossible for him to send over
timely Succours' (Queries Relating to the Sacramental Test (1732)). In
'A Sermon Upon the Martyrdom of K. Charles I. Preached at St. Patrick's' in
1726, Swift said that 'the Irish rebellion was wholely owing to that wicked
English parliament. For the leaders in the Irish Popish massacre would never
have dared to stir a finger, if they had not been encouraged by that
rebellious spirit in the English House of Commons' which disabled the King
from helping his Protestant subjects in Ireland. The 'murderous
Puritan-parliament' had 'held the King's hands, while the Irish Papists here
were cutting our grandfathers throats'.
Swift wrote that the posterity of the schismatics who rebelled against and
murdered their King now possessed the lands formerly owned by the Catholics
who were loyal to King Charles I and that the Rump Parliament and Cromwell
had murdered thousands of Catholic Irish in order to dispossess them. Swift's
irony in Reasons Humbly Offered to the Parliament of Ireland, For
Repealing the Sacramental Test, in Favour of the Catholicks (1733) does
not preclude sympathy for a Catholic project during the Cromwellian regime
for foreign invasion of Ireland as a means of ending the murder and enslavement
of the Irish and restoring the lawful monarchy. (In his unpublished 'Thoughts
on Religion' Swift did approve of one thing about Cromwell in Ireland,
and that was 'Cromwell's notion' of 'liberty of conscience' which was to
suppress the public expression of it.)
Although Swift's satire of Roman Catholicism in A Tale of a Tub
earned him a place in the Vatican's
Index of prohibited books, Swift deplored the Erastian and
anti-Episcopal character of the Protestant Reformation and so much so that he
sometimes seems barely within its pale. In an unfinished pamphlet of 1736
entitled 'Concerning that Universal Hatred, Which Prevails Against the
Clergy', Swift writes that: 'the reformation, in every country where it was
attempted, was carried on in the most impious and scandalous manner that can
possibly be conceived. To which unhappy proceedings we owe all the just
reproaches that Roman Catholics have cast upon us ever since.' In 'the
Protestant monarchies abroad, little more than the shadow of Episcopacy is
left; but, in the republics, is wholly extinct'. (Swift was a lifelong and
strident defender of Episcopacy though he rarely has a kind word for
bishops.) For Swift the extirpation of the Episcopal Church was the real
project of the republican Puritan posterity in contemporary Ireland,
and massacring the Irish was an aspect of their genius. Animus against the
established Episcopal Church and appetite for massacre are traits of Swift's
most infamous fictional character.
In A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People From
being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for making them
Beneficial to the Publick, Swift personates the 'whiggish or fanatical
Genius' of the established settler class in the unspeakable 'Modest
Proposer'. A Modest Proposal identifies the Hanoverian Whig
establishment in Ireland
with a genocidal proposal to exterminate the poor. The putative author's
modest proposal, as is eventually revealed after some opening paragraphs on
the problem of Irish poverty, is that the solution to Irish poverty is
infanticide and cannibalism. He recommends processing the children of the
poor into a financial, nutritional and culinary asset by eating them.
The putative author, the 'Modest Proposer', reveals himself to be a
Protestant Whig member of the established settler class. He is fanatically
anti-Jacobite, indeed paranoid about the Stuart Pretender, and is sympathetic
to Protestant Dissenters from the established Church of Ireland.
The Modest Proposer, for instance, complains that the Catholic Irish 'leave
their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain'
. Yet he also complains that the Irish stay in Ireland, 'on Purpose, with a
Design to deliver the Kingdom to the Pretender, hoping to take their
Advantage by the Absence of so many good Protestants, who have chosen
rather to leave their Country, than stay at home, and pay Tithes against
their Conscience, to an idolatrous Episcopal Curate' . That phrase
'idolatrous Episcopal Curate' signals that the Modest Proposer is a
sympathizer with Ulster Scots Presbyterianism.
He uses the kind of language found in the published sermons of the
Presbyterian Kirk, as in, for example, James Fraser's Prelacy an Idol and
Prelates Idolaters of 1713. It can be noted here too that the Modest Proposer
attributes Ulster Scots Presbyterian emigration not to the economic distress
of poor harvests and livestock mortality but solely to the tithes demanded by
the Episcopal clergy. Certainly Presbyterians in the 1720s complained about
the tithes but the Modest Proposer is extreme in attributing emigration to
this factor alone. He is Swift's Whig fanatic blaming everything on the Church
of Ireland clergy. A Modest
Proposal was certainly understood by Swift's English Tory friends, Lord
Bathurst and the second Earl of Oxford, as a disaffected attack on the
English Whig administration which was said to be devouring Ireland
and would soon consume an impoverished England.
The trope of a devouring Whig government was familiar in the Opposition
political press of the period. A Jacobite ideologist (Andrew Michael Ramsay)
had even put the case of a sovereign who forced his people into cannibalism
as one in which the removal of the king would be justifiable.
The word 'Modest' in the title of Swift's pamphlet might well have given
an ironic hint to contemporaries that they were about to read some immodest,
immoral monstrosity of Whig provenance. The anti-clerical Whig, Bernard
Mandeville, had scandalized conventional morality with a proposal for the
toleration of prostitution and establishment of state-controlled brothels
entitled A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724). A Modest
Proposal, of course, is concerned with stews of a different kind. Swift
had already parodied another of Mandeville's memorable titles (The Fable
of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714)) when he told
Archbishop King in 1721 that a proposal for an Irish bank 'was for private
advantage and public mischief'. Swift exhorted the Irish from the pulpit to
prefer 'the public interest to their present private advantage'.
Swift was a searing satirist of the phenomenon known in the late-twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries as 'privatization' and relentlessly exposed
cases where he felt the public interest had been sacrificed for private
advantage, as Daniel Eilon has shown. The final irony in A Modest Proposal
is in the ethical proof offered by the Modest Proposer for the
public-spirited motives behind his homicidal scheme. At the end of the
pamphlet, the Modest Proposer claims to be without private views: 'I have no
Children, by which I can propose to get a single Penny; the youngest being
nine Years old, and my Wife past Child-bearing'.
However, the Modest Proposer does have an eye on his own posterity. There
is a hint that he feels he deserves to have 'his Statue set up for a
Preserver of the Nation'. The Modest Proposer also rejects a proposed
refinement on his cannibal project, put forward by a fellow patriot, which
was to use 'the Bodies of young Lads and Maidens, not exceeding fourteen
Years of Age, nor under twelve' as substitutes for venison, since gentlemen
have over-hunted and destroyed all the deer. The Modest Proposer rejects this
refinement, he says, because of the toughness of the flesh of the males and
because of the 'Loss to the Publick' of a capital asset in destroying
females just as they are about to become 'Breeders'. The objection of
'Cruelty' is also entertained and dismissed. However, the Modest Proposer's
late disclosure that he has a nine-year old child hints at his private motive
for rejecting the shooting of early adolescents: he is not prepared to put in
place a scheme in which he would be sacrificing his own child in the near
future. The Modest Proposer exemplifies Whig hegemony: private self-interest
and public evil.
Swift wrote that the 'whiggish or fanatical Genius' among the English
interest in Ireland derived from the time of Cromwell and it is the raw
memories of Cromwellian massacres of the native Irish and of the selling of
the survivors into slavery in the West Indies that Swift's pamphlet, in part,
invokes. The Modest Proposer is a fanatical Whig genius planning to massacre
the starving native Irish poor. Swift's satire is of course exploiting an old
imputation that was succinctly described by Charles Wogan, an Irish Catholic
Jacobite exile, in a letter to Swift of February 27, 1733. Wogan wrote: 'Our English ancestors
dispatched into Ireland, and their descendants, have taken effectual care to
fasten this bugbear upon their mother country, and represent the Irish as
monstors and cannibals, in order to justify their own more barbarous
oppressions upon that people'. Swift's satiric pamphlet imputes cannibalism
to the barbaric oppressors, the English settler class, as well as,
conventionally, to the 'savage' Irish poor.
The Modest Proposer's willingness to enslave the Irish is another
reflection of the Cromwellian and Whig genius of the English settler class
for whom he speaks. Noting that the only current prospects for the Irish poor
are to 'turn Thieves for want of Work', to join the Jacobite regiments
abroad, or to 'sell themselves to the Barbadoes' , the Modest Proposer
had thought of turning the children of the Irish poor into slaves rather than
food, however, in the end, eating them is calculated to be more economical.
In his sermon on the 'Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland', Swift
refers to 'that Ægyptian Bondage of cruel, oppressing, covetous
Landlords, expecting that all who live under them should make Bricks
without Straw …by which the Spirits of the People are broken, and made
for Slavery'. In A Short View of the State of Ireland, first printed
in 1728, the year before the publication of A Modest Proposal, and
reprinted in part in the crypto-Jacobite Tory Mist's Weekly Journal in
London, it is England
and the Hanoverian king who are the slave masters. Ireland
is denied liberties enjoyed by 'the meanest Prince in the German Empire'
and the Irish are imaged as the Israelites suffering under their Pharoah.
Swift had written that it was under the administration of the extreme Whig
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
Thomas, Earl of Wharton, in 1708-1710, that steps were taken towards
completing 'the Slavery of that People'. In his virulent Short Character
of Wharton, 'collaterally' is a Wharton word. The Modest Proposer regards the
Irish as slaves and speaks of the 'Collateral Advantage' of his cannibal
scheme in 'lessening the Number of Papists among us'.
While this violent satire certainly gives vent to Swift's own animus
against the vicious and improvident Irish poor who contribute to their
slavery, as Claude Rawson has shown, Swift did express esteem for the Irish
Jacobite diaspora, praising Jacobite soldiers in Spanish service abroad, the
very men who represented the only military option for overturning Whig
oppression in Ireland. He counted such men among his friends and
correspondents. The Modest Proposer by contrast is scandalized that some of
the Irish 'leave their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in
Spain' .
Swift said that the general satirist should always have particular persons
in view (see, for example, his Examiner of 9 November 1710). The satire of A Modest
Proposal has particular Whig personalities in its sights. The Allens, a Dublin
merchant family who were staunchly Williamite and Hanoverian Whig in
politics, are a particular target in A Modest Proposal, as elsewhere
in Swift's writing. In his poem 'Traulus', an attack on Joshua, second
Viscount Allen, Swift satirized the Whig family as butchers and wrote that
the Viscount 'draws his daily food, / From his tenants' vital blood'.
The punishment of 'Traulus' meted out by the satirist in a pamphlet of
1730 is to imagine him flayed and dissected alive and the carcase put on
display for threepence. Allen's grandfather was a Lord Mayor of Dublin
and an exporter of salt meat. In places the Modest Proposer seems to be
addressing the Whig grandee when he outlines the benefits of his cannibal
scheme: 'a well-grown fat yearling Child… roasted whole, will make a
considerable Figure at a Lord Mayor's Feast, or any other publick
Entertainment'. In a passage where Swift palpably erupts from behind the
ironic pose of the Modest Proposer, pro-English salt meat exporters are
reassured about the human meat trade: 'we can incur no Danger in disobliging
ENGLAND: For, this Kind of Commodity will not bear Exportation; the Flesh
being of too tender a Consistence, to admit a long Continuance in Salt; although,
perhaps, I could name a Country, which would be glad to eat up our whole
Nation without it' .
It is assumed by the Modest Proposer that the only objection readers will
have to his cannibal proposal is a culinary one, and the Modest Proposer,
significantly, is au fait with French dishes: 'a young healthy Child,
well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome
Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no
doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust'.
This black humour is more than just a satire on the luxury of the rich.
Its topical target is the gourmandizing grandees of the Hanoverian Whig
government who were 'devouring' Ireland.
The Whig first or prime minister Robert Walpole employed a French cook. A
sign of English Whig power was its culinary style and among the elite dishes
upon which the Whig ministers notoriously fed were the olio, fricassee and
ragout, as Gilly Lehmann has shown. Attacks on Whig French luxury (and
emphasis on the Stuart Pretender's love of plain English fare, even though he
was exiled in Italy)
were staples of Jacobite opposition propaganda. In A Modest Proposal
the sign of Whig hegemony in Ireland
is its obscene cuisine. It is insinuated that the Whig court and ministry
might even refine their taste further in line with oriental cruelty. Citing
as his authority 'the famous Salmanaazor, a Native of the Island Formosa'
(in fact a notorious French imposter who claimed to be a Formosan), the
Modest Proposer reports that 'the Body of a plump Girl of fifteen' was a
'prime Dainty' sold to the Formosan 'Imperial Majesty's prime Minister of
State, and other great Mandarins of the Court, in Joints from
the Gibbet, at Four hundred Crowns'. Swift's satire, however, pans from
the cannibal imperial court and ministry to sear the court's victims also. It
would not be a bad thing if 'several plump young girls' in Dublin
with a fetish for foreign clothes were eaten.
The Modest Proposer is the latest avatar of the 'whiggish and fanatical
genius' and the satiric black humour of this unthinkable proposal was
designed to arrest attention to the horror of Hanoverian Ireland. Swift wrote
another tract in the character of the loyal Whig Modest Proposer. The work is
called The Answer to The Craftsman (written in 1730). In it the Modest
Proposer, who is now said to have been born in England,
looks forward to Ireland
becoming 'a new Arcadia'
under Whig government policies: the depopulated colony in the British
archipelago, with no Established Church, entirely dependent on England,
and inhabited by a few vegetarians grazing export cattle for the English Whig
butchers.
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