by Leo Damrosch
“A PROJECT FOR EATING CHILDREN”
In 1728 Swift and Sheridan launched a weekly periodical called the Intelligencer, a popular name for newspapers since they gave “intelligence” of current affairs. Actually, it consisted of short essays, not news, in the manner of the Examiner years before. The authors were supposed to share the writing equally, but in the end Sheridan did most of it. It lasted barely a year, never made any money, and was discontinued after nineteen numbers.
Swift’s gloom was deepening, and in 1729 he wrote to Bolingbroke and Pope: “I never wake without finding life a more insignificant thing than it was the day before, which is one great advantage I get by living in this country, where there is nothing I shall be sorry to lose; but my greatest misery is recollecting the scene of twenty years past, and then all on a sudden dropping into the present.” Twenty years previously, the short-lived era of Tory rule was about to begin.19
Yet it was from this gloom that a masterpiece suddenly emerged, the short piece that Swift referred to as “a project for eating children.” During the 1720s a series of terrible harvests had reduced the rural population to near starvation, and a brutally cold winter in 1728–29 made conditions intolerable. “The cry of the poor for bread,” Archbishop King wrote movingly in the final year of his life, “is a stab to my heart, to find them dying every day for want, and being unable to relieve them.”20
86. A Modest Proposal. The first page of the original 1729 edition (sixteen small pages in all, six and a half inches high). As is typical of Swift’s pamphlets, it is quite crudely printed, in no way presented as a work of literature.
After publishing a long series of carefully thought-out commentaries, none of which had any effect, Swift brought out A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. It fills less than ten pages in a modern edition, and in its unimposing original form it looked like just another routine economic tract.
A number of writers had published “modest proposals” for addressing the crisis, and Swift begins by mimicking their earnest, objective tone. “It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants.” This was no exaggeration. During his tour of Ireland after the death of Vanessa, Swift had found the plain of Tipperary to be “like the rest of the whole kingdom, a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations—filthy cabins, miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape.”21 That was in 1723, and conditions were far worse now.
Economists at the time—like many later—took a detached view of experience, reducing lives to statistics and deploying coldly objective language. It was widely agreed that since labor creates value, people were the wealth of a nation. Swift had no quarrel with that principle, except that he believed England’s abuse of Ireland made it the one country in which the truism wasn’t true. “This is the only Christian country,” he wrote, “where people, contrary to the old maxim, are the poverty and not the riches of the nation.”22
Now, if people really are the wealth of a nation, it follows that small children must be a financial drain, since they’re too young to contribute labor. But what if there were a way of cashing them in? A note of indignation begins to invade the reasonable tone: “A child just dropped from its dam may be supported by her milk for a solar year with little other nourishment, at most not above the value of two shillings, which the mother may certainly get, or the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of begging.” The term dam belongs to animal husbandry, while “the value in scraps” is a grim reminder of the depths of poverty.
Swift is entirely serious when he speaks of “that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us; sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt [that is, suspect], more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.” The lot of poor children was indeed dreadful, and infanticide was far from uncommon.23
So why not make infanticide commercially valuable? Colonial planters knew all about buying and selling human beings:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that 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 fricassee or a ragout. . . . A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. . . . I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.
Edmund Wilson once commented that Swift shared with Marx “a deadly sense of the infinite capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious or indifferent to the pains we inflict on others, when we have a chance to get something out of them for ourselves.”24
A Modest Proposal continues in a strain that would be completely insane if it weren’t so obviously ironic.
I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children. . . . I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he hath only some particular friend or his own family to dine with him. Thus the squire will learn to be a good landlord, and grow popular among his tenants; the mother will have eight shillings net profit, and be fit for work till she produceth another child. Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.
And what about the elderly? “I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying, and rotting, by cold, and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.”
Swift’s pamphlet is of course a protest against English exploitation of Ireland: “I could name a country, which would be glad to eat up our whole nation.” But fundamentally it is a rebuke aimed at the Irish themselves, for complicity in their own exploitation. By their feckless inaction, Swift told Pope, they “are all inevitably undone; which I have been telling them in print these ten years, to as little purpose as if it came from the pulpit.” In an earlier pamphlet he had quoted the book of Proverbs: “Wisdom crieth in the streets, because I have called and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded. But ye have set at naught all my counsel, and would none of my reproof. I also will laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear cometh.”25
Terse and perfectly paced, A Modest Proposal is so skillfully constructed that it still has the power to startle, even if one has read it many times before. And for anyone who meets it for the first time, it explodes like a land mine. When the Gaiety Theatre reopened in Dublin in 1984, the actor Peter O’Toole gave a reading of A Modest Proposal, saying he had chosen a piece “with a little something to offend everybody.” The result was a mass walkout. One headline reported, “O’Toole Defends ‘Disgusting’ Reading.”26
Swift was rightly proud of his skill as an ironist, and what makes his irony distinctive is the passionate emotion that drives it. Simple irony merely says one thing but means the opposite. Swi
ft’s ironic mode is more profound. “Real irony,” T. S. Eliot said, “is an expression of suffering, and the greatest ironist was the one who suffered the most—Swift.”27
During the 1730s Swift published a few more pamphlets, cranky and eccentric for the most part, but his heart wasn’t in them. A Modest Proposal is a cry of despair. When a stranger wrote to praise “your public spirit and great affection to your native country,” Swift replied that he was “a Teague, or an Irishman, or what people please” only by accident of birth, and that “what I did for this country was from perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression.” In another letter he said grimly, “Looking upon this kingdom’s condition as absolutely desperate, I would not prescribe a dose to the dead.”28
BADGING BEGGARS
One issue in particular did concern Swift during the 1730s, and one of the last things he wrote is also one of the most unsettling. Published in 1737 just before he turned seventy, it was entitled A Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars in All the Parishes of Dublin, by the Dean of St. Patrick’s. Why badges?
A city workhouse had existed since 1704, but it never made much difference, and pedestrians like Swift found begging exasperating (people in coaches could ignore it). The situation was so bad, he claimed, that shopkeepers were letting crowds of beggars besiege their doors, “to the great disgust and vexation of many customers, whom I have frequently observed to go to other shops rather than suffer such a persecution.” But there was a simple solution. “A ’prentice with a horsewhip is able to lash every beggar from the shop, who is not of the parish, and doth not wear the badge of that parish on his shoulder, well fastened and fairly visible.”29
Ireland had no “poor law” like the one that had been passed in England in 1662, but Swift wished it did. Under the English law, a destitute person’s parish was responsible for supporting him or her. The parish was defined as the place where one was born or married, rented a house, or had been employed for at least a year. The hordes of “vagrants” who congregated in towns and cities, seeking work that often didn’t exist, were therefore supposed to be driven back to the villages they came from.
Swift’s plan, first proposed back in 1726, was that every beggar should be required to display a badge, which would carry the initial letters of a parish and a number to identify the individual. Those who were physically unable to work needed help, but able-bodied people should be forced to do useful work instead of begging. Whether there were ever enough jobs was a serious question, and Swift did take it seriously—that was the burden of his many polemics against England’s suppression of Irish industries. But if the immediate concern was to distinguish the truly needy from those who only pretended to be, then the best judges would be those who knew poor people in their local parishes.
Within the parish, though, Swift saw charity as a moral obligation. To illustrate the word “alms,” Johnson quoted a sentence from one of Swift’s sermons: “The poor beggar hath a just demand of an alms from the rich man, who is guilty of fraud, injustice, and oppression if he doth not afford relief according to his abilities.” And Swift practiced what he preached, showing constant generosity to the poor in his own neighborhood. His account books are full of entries such as “charity 2s 8d,” “poor woman 2s 8d,” “gave old woman 6 1/2d,” and “poor boy 6 1/2d.” He was also a contributor to numerous hospitals and charity schools, and an active director of several.30
What makes Swift’s pamphlet disturbing is not just the call for whipping, but the swelling contempt he shows for the poor. In his economic pamphlets he had described clearly how structural problems kept the nation in poverty: English policies drained wealth from Ireland, which was not allowed to make rational arrangements for itself, and agents working for absentee landlords ground down their tenants still further. But when it came to poor people themselves, Swift still thought in conventional moral terms and insisted that they were personally to blame for their plight. “I am confident that among the meaner people, nineteen in twenty of those who are reduced to a starving condition did not become so by what lawyers call the work of God, either upon their bodies or goods, but merely from their own idleness, attended with all manner of vices, particularly drunkenness, thievery, and cheating. . . . [They are] a profligate clan of thieves, drunkards, heathens, and whoremongers, fitter to be rooted out off the face of the earth than suffered to levy a vast annual tax upon the city.”31
As Nokes says, this was “a chilly and unforgiving note” on which to end a publishing career, but it’s also true that sensibilities were different then. The kindly Delany thought that the Proposal for Giving Badges to Beggars was “the wisest, the best judged, the most practicable, and the most Christian scheme for relieving all those who were proper objects of charity.”32
It’s true, too, as a historian comments, that Swift tended to see moral explanations for all kinds of social problems—“hence the recurrent denunciations of greedy landlords and graziers, vain women addicted to expensive imported fabrics, dishonest dealers and idle workmen, that supplement his complaints of English oppression.” But if this moral emphasis neglected some deep structural causes of poverty, it gave Swift’s writing its exceptional power. And as the same writer says, it enabled Swift “to point up contradictions and flaws in the fabric of early eighteenth-century Ireland which other members of that society ignored, glossed over, or concealed.”33
Whatever people thought of Swift’s views on beggars, his popularity was undiminished. In the year in which this pamphlet was published, his birthday was celebrated, according to the Dublin Journal, “with the utmost expressions of joy and gratitude by all the people in and about the Liberty of St. Patrick’s, and in many parts of the city and suburbs. The bells rang as usual on the most solemn occasions, nineteen petararoes were fired several rounds, four large bonfires were upon the steeple, and the windows illuminated.”34 (A petararo was a small cannon.)
And Swift still had his remarkable energy, as attested in an anonymous poem, A Pun on Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D., Proving Him Immortal:
If death denotes to be at rest,
Of swift he’ll never be possessed:
As sure as water’s in the ocean,
While swift is swift, he is in motion;
Then while in motion ’tis confessed
That swift will never be at rest.
What’s swift is quick; then on this head,
Swift can’t at once be quick and dead.35
CHAPTER 28
Swift among the Women
LA BAGATELLE
When the 1730s arrived, Swift still had fifteen years to live, and his mood would darken throughout those years. He predicted to Bolingbroke that he would die in Ireland “in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.” Any writing he did now was only to while away the time, and he destroyed most of it. “I love la bagatelle better than ever; for finding it troublesome to read at night, and the company here growing tasteless, I am always writing bad prose or worse verses, either of rage or raillery, whereof some few escape to give offence or mirth, and the rest are burnt.”1 “Tasteless” probably means “insipid.”
The bagatelles often took the form of language games with Sheridan, who addressed a letter “Tooth ay Revere End Dock tore Jo Nathan Dray Peer, Gull Liver, Inn They Dane a wry” (to the Reverend Doctor Jonathan Drapier, Gulliver, in the Deanery). The game was to find real English words and use them absurdly out of context. Another time Sheridan wrote, “Yew no eye promiss said too right yew a nun inn tell liege eye bell let her. He writ is. Eye main ass crop off it” (You know I promised to write you an unintelligible letter. Here it is. I mean, a scrap of it). Swift’s riposte was a stream of gibberish that made sense if read as Latin—“eat red eye, add nose sight O.” That translates as “et redi ad nos cito,” which in English would mean “and return to us with haste.”2
87. Swift in informal attire.
All of this may look like a waste of time, but verbal puzzles were at least evidence for Swift that his mind hadn’t stopped w
orking. Scott comments that Sheridan’s playful humor coaxed him out of his dark moods, so that friends called Sheridan “the David who alone could play the evil spirit out of Saul.”3
We don’t hear much about other male friends during this period. Delany probably wearied Swift with his humorless earnestness, and when he made a list of “grateful” and “ungrateful” friends, Delany appeared in it as “indifferent partly grateful.” “When [Swift] met with gratitude,” Dr. Lyon said, “he got his reward, and expected no other.”4 He may not have expected favors to be reciprocated, but he did want them appreciated.
Other friends were leaving Ireland, as Ford did in 1732, or else departing from life altogether. Gay sent a chatty letter urging Swift to come over for a visit in the spring. Less than three weeks later Pope and Arbuthnot wrote to say that “an inflammatory fever hurried him out of this life in three days.” Arbuthnot diagnosed it as “a mortification of the bowels; it was the most precipitate case I ever knew.” Swift noted on this letter, “Received December 15, but not read till the 20th, by an impulse foreboding some misfortune.”5
Pope composed a condescending epitaph for Gay:
Of manners gentle, of affections mild;
In wit a man; simplicity, a child. . . .
A safe companion, and an easy friend,
Unblamed through life, lamented in thy end.
These lines were inscribed on Gay’s monument in Westminster Abbey, but so was a more memorable epitaph that he had composed for himself:
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.6
Swift’s one new male friend of any consequence was John Boyle, fifth Earl of Orrery, who was twenty-five when he turned up in Dublin in 1732. Swift had known his father, the editor of the ill-fated Epistles of Phalaris that Sir William Temple championed, and he took to the young man immediately. He was “absolutely the most hopeful young gentleman I ever saw,” he told Pope, and to Orrery himself he sent extravagant praise: “Your learning, your genius, your affability, generosity, the love you bear to your native country and your compassion for this [that is, Ireland]; the goodness of your nature, your humility, modesty, and condescension; your most agreeable conversation, suited to all tempers, conditions, and understandings.”7
