SOURCE: Lockwood, Thomas. “Swift's Modest Proposal: An Interpretation.” Papers on Language and Literature 10, no. 3 (summer 1974): 254-67.

[In the following essay, Lockwood examines the role of the “economic projector” or narrator of A Modest Proposal, and his objective, if appalling, irony.]

The Modest Proposal has always struck readers as perhaps the perfect work of its kind: breathtakingly to the point, unnerving in the extreme. It is so short and in a certain sense so sweet that one is naturally led to wonder exactly how Swift does what he does in this desperately funny, desperately bleak little performance. Until recently, students of Swift have said that the secret of the work is a peculiarly horrifying kind of ironic impersonation, by means of which Swift creates a more or less fictional character, the “economic projector,” who is the putative author of the Proposal. By silently allowing this character to reveal himself, Swift invites the reader to feel the horror of close contact with the type of the detested “projector,” who is made to speak the “reasonable,” “modest,” and fraudulently compassionate language of real eighteenth century projectors and planners. Thus, the perfection of the work, according to some critics, may be attributed to the convincing completeness of the impersonation.

This interpretation has proved to be one of the great perpetual motion machines of modern Swift criticism: fascinating to watch but not overwhelming the observer with a sense of its eternal fitness. The economic projector has always been more believable as he appears in the criticism than in the work itself. The practiced critic can make him “talk” and create for him a synthetic sort of existence in the work; but more often than not the result is a character who sounds just about like Jonathan Swift, when the critic's intent was to show how well Jonathan Swift is able to make himself sound like a projector. In a notable essay some years ago Irvin Ehrenpreis suggested in effect that if anybody was playing the ventriloquist in creating the economic projector, it was the critic and not Swift, who in the Proposal is speaking very much in character—that is, ironically.¹

It is difficult to know how widely this point has been accepted; but in any case, certain related thoughts may bear brief emphasis.² The view that Swift mimics a projector is based on the very doubtful assumption that Swift somehow saw projectors and their attitudes as at the heart of the trouble in Ireland. But Swift is not attacking projectors in the Modest Proposal. He is attacking the wretched Irish situation. During the previous ten years in which he wrote about that situation, he referred occasionally to projectors, and usually in exasperation or contempt: not because of their inhumanity or moral blindness, however, but rather their stupidity and ignorance in basing their schemes of reform on general economic theories (“uncontrolled maxims”) which did not apply to Ireland's unique situation (e.g., where people were not the riches of a nation).³ The Modest Proposal, then, can hardly be regarded as a satire on projectors when the whole point is that this proposal is the proper medicine for Ireland's disease—indeed the one and only proper medicine, under the circumstances.

It is wrong to suppose that Swift locates the inhumanity and moral indifference of the Irish situation in the character of projectors—however much he may have disliked them or even thought them “morally obtuse.” Projectors, after all, had nothing especially to do with what was wrong in Ireland. The blame for that lay upon absentee landlords, the Dublin men and women of fashion, the English trade policies, and the indifference of the Irish themselves.

An interpretive invention such as the projector persona would be harmless enough insofar as it merely misrepresented Swift's intentions, but it has also worked to obscure or oversimplify some of the most essential qualities of the work. In affective terms, it imposes narrower limits on the emotional range of the reader's reaction than Swift imposes on the range of his own feelings as they come to be manifested in the text. It has meant, for instance, that one must think of the work as having mainly two tones of voice: the flat and innocent tone of a supposedly “typical” projector, and, occasionally breaking through, another more obviously emotional and knowing tone that is out of keeping with what one must expect of a fictional projector—in other words, Swift's voice. But the range of tones is wider and much more complicated than that. Swift goes from the most unaccountable seriousness in speaking of things no one could possibly be serious about, to the most understandable seriousness in speaking of things everyone ought to be—but is not—serious about; from wicked jest to bitter moral protest; from deadpan irony to hyperbolic sarcasm; from ludicrous concession to exhortation to contempt and disgust; from fun with a wild idea to a desperate dismay at the real-life circumstances that have given rise to it; from honest compassion for his miserable countrymen, to reproaches for their lack of patriotism, to diabolically self-satisfied fantasies of Irishmen eating other Irishmen's children “at merry Meetings, particularly Weddings and Christenings.”⁴ Each of these fluid responses is equally valid, because the situation calls them all forth simultaneously. They converge from opposite emotional directions in a brilliantly unified effect of moral and satiric meaning, and the meaning is always the same: that there is madness and misery in the Irish situation that is not to be comprehended except in a plan for selling the Irish children for food.

The formula of the author as projector has also limited our appreciation of the purely comic aspect of the Proposal. That is, we have been taught to feel “horrified” by the monster-projector with his inhumanly rational plans. But the work is at least equally full of laughter. It is Swift's laughter, of course, and the more one focuses on the idea that Swift is trying to sound like a humorless social planner, the easier it is to miss the laughter. It is not surprising that Swift's friend Bathurst should have reacted to the Proposal as though it were all some merry joke to be played and replayed for laughs (this in his letter to Swift about four months after the publication of the Proposal, in the course of which Bathurst talks gaily about what a marvelous expedient Swift's plan could be for a man who, like himself, “has nine Children to feed”).⁵

In fact, of course, Swift's contemporaries tended to appreciate him most for the vein of ludicrous humor that he had mastered; one hears less from them about Swift the relentless critic of society, the “serious” or “committed” satirist more often emphasized in our own time. In any event, it is worth remembering that the Modest Proposal begins with a pun on the word “eat,” and that in one sense the paper is a zany experiment in trying to bring dead metaphors to life: landlords devouring tenants, England eating up Ireland, Home Consumption. At the age of sixty-two Swift's comic imagination was never better, and A Modest Proposal is surely the most exquisite, most telling joke he ever made. It is in the end a work of humor, richly complicated of course by the satiric and moral attitudes toward Ireland that had long since become a part of Swift's consciousness; but fundamentally a deeply personal, deeply alienated joke, one with no beginning, middle, or punch line—not “told” so much as lived, not exactly contained in the work but containing it, without definition apart from Swift himself and—as I hope to show—without definition apart from his reader.

The Proposal involves and implicates the reader more radically than any other work of Swift's, to a degree that the reader may be called the unexpressed subject of the work, its most important though largely invisible “character.” Swift seeks to induce in the reader an emotional replication of his own experience in the Ireland of the 1720s: that is, he makes the work a simulacrum of that lunatic world and imprisons the reader within it as he himself had been living a prisoner in the Irish madhouse.

The question remains as to how Swift achieved that effect. Taking the hint from Professor Ehrenpreis's essay, I should like to urge that the idea of a “projector” be abandoned in favor of the less artificial proposition that Swift simply speaks to the reader ironically. More precisely, he is speaking as if he had matter-of-factly accepted the public attitude of indifference to what he, at least, had for so long taken to be the main issues. In a certain sense, of course, he had accepted this indifference, having no choice, and so he is not really speaking ironically at all; but he does speak ironically in the obvious sense that he does not mean what he says when he recommends his proposal.

When Swift says, “I can think of no one Objection, that will possibly be raised against this Proposal,” he produces the characteristic effect of ludicrous but appalling understatement: mockingly pretending to puzzle over this possibility, “maturely” trying to anticipate any respect in which his plan might not be so appealing, and failing to think of anything except the one consequence which is its chief attraction, the depopulation of the kingdom. Swift ironically takes it for granted that no one will object, at least not on moral grounds, the effect of which is to attribute the very worst sort of moral indifference to those he is addressing, the “publick.” He pretends to give his attention to his nonsensical proposal, fussing about the commercial and culinary details, in that way negatively dramatizing the main point that no one has ever cared or ever will. The deeply bitter implication is: Why should he?

Here is an essay, then, in which a monstrous thing is massively taken for granted: namely, that the reader will scarcely concern himself with what he is reading, let alone raise any protest against the proposal being put before him. What is monstrous about the Modest Proposal, in other words, is not the putative author but his putative audience. Swift's relentless insistence upon speaking an unmoral language indicates simply that no other language is answerable to the occasion, for he addresses himself to an audience who have evidently lost all capacity to register ordinary human responses. “The heart of this People,” he had said on another occasion, “is waxed gross, and their Ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed.”⁶

The celebrated quality of moral anesthesia in Swift's language and manner can hardly be intended to reflect on the author himself; but it does reflect ironically on those for whom the author writes, who will “hear” him upon no other terms. Swift's wickedly systematic silence on the matter of whether there may be any moral question involved in this situation he is otherwise so talkative about—surely one of the most powerfully expressive ellipses in literary history—ironically dramatizes the indifference of his readers. Swift mocks them in effect by acting out their own indifference: why make a reference to the moral question where none is expected, and no one cares?

Some Persons of a desponding Spirit are in great Concern about that vast Number of poor People, who are Aged, Diseased, or Maimed; and I have been desired to employ my Thoughts what Course may be taken, to ease the Nation of so grievous an Incumbrance. But 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 is simply telling his readers—the majority of whom are not “of a desponding Spirit,” i.e., not neurotic worriers—to be patient, at the same time reassuring them that their patience is steadily paying off, at least as far as any reasonable person could expect it to. Here Swift's words force one to regard him as having made certain radical assumptions about his readers: about the things that may be expected to concern them (what are we to do about the old, the sick, and the crippled?), about the things over which they may be expected to grow impatient (when are we going to get rid of them?), about their need for reassurance (we're losing our patience).

As usual, Swift's ironic predication of such assumptions is extremely thorough, and reveals itself in his language and manner as an apparently total incapacity to understand the real point of what he is himself saying. He seems to expect that his use of the phrase “as fast as can be reasonably expected” will be accepted as appropriate usage by those who are reading the words. Swift is fond of using throwaway remarks and offhand phrases as ironic repositories for his most bitterly and deeply felt views: remarks or phrases whose content manifests some extreme perversion or corruption of ordinary values but whose manner is so offhanded as to indicate that this perversion is noncontroversial or otherwise widely agreeable. “As fast as can be reasonably expected” shows that the main issue is not whether, but how fast the old and sick and crippled are dying. Of course it is an inhumanly impertinent thing to say, and grotesquely beside the point. But it is said so unselfconsciously, with such confidence in its being accepted as perfectly to the point, that we are made to feel that somebody thinks this is the point.

More precisely, Swift in this way represents his readers as likely to have an interest in the sick and dying which is at best only actuarial. He does not give out any such opinion of his readers; rather he simply writes as if they were what he thinks them to be, making it appear that his unfeeling manner is a function merely of theirs, that his plan, his rationale, his arguments, his perception of what is and is not acceptable—all these are matter-of-factly predicated upon the universal moral indifference that is the most basic element of the whole situation. And Swift's manner has built into it the evident assumption that this indifference is so very much the case, so deeply and pervasively true, that it may be taken for granted without even mentioning it. His ironic manner, in other words, expresses the degree as well as the fact of the indifference. Irony is only a figure of speech, but Swift typically saturates his speech with the figure so deeply as to suggest that figurative reality is no longer subordinated to literal reality—that there is an equivalency between them or even a substitution of the one for the other. The point of dislocation and disorientation in the verbal medium—the point at which the vehicle appears to become the tenor, as it were—corresponds in Swift's Irish experience to the point at which passive indifference to suffering is so completely the rule as to become quite naturally an active interest in seeing it become more efficient: one wants to hear not only that the old and sick and crippled poor are dying (which everybody knows anyway) but that they are dying every day, and as fast as they can.

In order to put a work like the Proposal into a comfortable perspective, one must be able to deal directly with Swift's real opinions. But of course Swift does not present his opinions directly. Instead he makes an absurd proposal, clearly predicated on the assumption that no one cares, including apparently himself—a proposal so absurd and repellent as to compel the reader to search the essay for any evidence of a merely human reaction to it. But there is no such evidence to be found there, because Swift has contrived to make the reader expect from this essay the very thing he himself had been expecting for so long from the public—a sense of shame—and has further seen to it that the reader's expectations, like his own, are doomed utterly to defeat. Thus the reader cannot really respond to Swift's portrayal of the situation unless he first acknowledges or, like Swift, takes it for granted that no one cares. The question of whether there would be an emotional or moral reaction to this proposal is therefore no question at all, having long since been settled. If one does not acknowledge the extent of the moral indifference, then one is left trying to prove somehow that people do care when all the evidence to the contrary is on Swift's side. In other words, the idea that people have limits beyond which they will react (for example, cannibalism) is for Swift an uncontrolled moral maxim, inapplicable to Ireland.

What sort of relationship does Swift seem to have with this audience of Dubliners whose hearts have waxed gross? He is, as it were, their “humble servant,” their creature and, in a sense, their creation. He is one of them (frequently using the first person plural) and his humility and modesty are an elaborate and intentionally transparent pretense designed to heighten the effect. His apparent respect for the public is somewhat like the attitude of Gulliverian respectfulness with which the Argument against Abolishing Christianity begins: intended to sharpen our sense of how all-powerful the public is, how impossible it is to try to argue with them. Swift is “modest” and “humble” and earnestly reassuring to his readers because he must be if he is to have a hearing (and if he is to be thought loyal, and not disaffected); again, he mocks the audience with his outlandish respect for them, his acute sensitivity to their unparalleled insensitivity, thus dramatizing intensely, by his usual contrarious method, the contemptible degree to which they are beyond any respect or consideration.

In his unpublished papers of 1729, Swift's bitterest reflections have to do with what he sees as the public's incomprehensible stupidity on the Irish question. These papers furnish us the proper introduction to the Modest Proposal, as their mood is increasingly hopeless, in terms of Swift's perception not only of the situation itself but also of his role in it. “I am tired,” he says, striking the note of personal despair that is shortly to become the very material of the Proposal, “with Letters from many unreasonable well-meaning People, who are daily pressing me to deliver my Thoughts in this deplorable Juncture, which upon many others I have so often done in vain. What will it import that half a score more people in a Coffee-house may happen to read this paper, and even the Majority of those few differ in every sentiment from me.”⁷

Elsewhere, arguing for elimination of the imports as the only means of making even the slightest improvement in the economic condition of the country, he notes, “All other Scheams for preserving this Kingdom from utter ruin are idle and visionary, consequences drawn from wrong reasoning, and from generall Topicks which for the same Causes that they may be true in all Nations are certainly false in ours; as I have told the publick often enough, but with as little effect as what I shall say at present is likely to produce.”⁸

What appears here to be a purely personal cynicism and frustration is given logic and propriety and meaning in the context of universal indifference which is the Modest Proposal. For ten years or more, all through a steadily worsening situation, Swift had been advocating realistic remedies; and all to no purpose whatsoever. But he had also been proceeding upon the false assumption that his audience cared enough to listen, or would in time be persuaded by plain words and plain sense. (One sees Swift rather bitterly coming to terms with the falsity of the assumption in the unpublished papers.) The Modest Proposal shows a certain development in his thinking, however, in that he adopts there the more realistic assumption that the situation is morally quite hopeless and physically almost hopeless, and that the public attitude of indifference and ignorance will not change in the slightest. Once he has accepted this attitude as the basic given of the whole situation, he can speak to his reader with an irrepressible confidence in being, at last, listened to, understood, and even agreed with.

When Swift concludes the paper by saying, “I have no Children, by which I can propose to get a single Penny,” he is in effect reasserting the truth of his implicit representation of the public attitude by offering up one climactically consistent illustration of the distinction he has been silently dramatizing throughout the work between what his readers may and may not reasonably be expected to care about. They are not capable of imagining that there is anything wrong with the proposal, any more than they are evidently capable of seeing anything wrong with children starving all around them; they are, however, quite capable of imagining how nice it would be to be able to get money by selling their own children—and that this is probably what their fellow-countryman has in mind for himself. So Swift reassures them on that point.

The perfection of that famous concluding paragraph is the quality of harmonious completion it gives the essay, like tonic chords at the end of a sonata. Again the point—the “real” point—is horribly missed, just when one feels sure there cannot be any new way of missing it. This most unreassuring piece of reassurance leaves the reader with a convincing feeling that the point will continue to be missed, in perpetually fresh ways, indefinitely. The peculiar beauty of the end of the essay, in short, is its manifestation of the endlessness of a condition we have been made to feel is so monstrous it would surely end itself.

The Proposal shows us an audience of people who (1) “know very well” that money is scarce, prices are high, and people are starving all over the kingdom, but who (2) do not concern themselves with the causes or the consequences, and (3) might be interested in a solution only if it involved no moral or practical effort whatsoever. Swift gives them what they want, a plan that is “innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual,” so that one might say the essay does for them only what true poetry is supposed to do, according to the Augustan rule—it gives them back the image of their mind.

The enormity of this plan of course is meant to be taken as a measure of the enormity of the situation. In seeming not to notice the monstrousness of his proposal, Swift is indicating that no one would care if such a plan were actually adopted, and suggesting that the proposal is indeed very close to reality and that he is (almost) serious. In rigorously underplaying the aspect of fantasy in his proposal, he suggests that the Irish have virtually arrived at a condition in which such a plan may be seriously considered. In that condition the plan is both economically enforced (because the kingdom is reduced almost to cannibalism) and morally acceptable (because no one could possibly make moral objections to the cure when no one has made any moral objections to the disease).

Swift speaks of himself as “having been wearied out for many Years with offering vain, idle, visionary Thoughts,” which are the “preposterous” proposals he has been making all along and which he restates in his list of “other Expedients” in the Proposal. Simple, sensible ideas in themselves, like “quitting our Animosities, and Factions,” but in the real-life Irish context, nothing more than foolish daydreams. There is little reason to think Swift does not literally mean what he says when he writes, “Therefore I repeat, let no Man talk to me of these and the like Expedients; till he hath, at least, a Glimpse of Hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere Attempt to put them in Practice.”

Earlier in the essay Swift talks about the scheme of his patriotic friend for supplying the want of venison with the bodies of young boys and girls between twelve and fourteen, an idea he politely rejects, partly because “it is not improbable that some scrupulous People might be apt to censure such a Practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon Cruelty; which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest Objection against any Project, how well soever intended.” These seemingly phony asservations about “cruelty” are a superb example of Swift's trick of dumping the crucial question into the lap of his reader, for whom in this instance it becomes almost impossible not to come to some foolish, premature conclusion about the author's inconsistency. How is it that a man who talks so fastidiously about cruelty can be advocating a scheme to sell babies for food? The triumphant answer is that it is not a cruel scheme; one has only to “ask the Parents of these Mortals, whether they would not, at this Day, think it a great Happiness to have been sold for Food at a Year old, in the Manner I prescribe. …” What seems at first to be a grotesque failure of perception on the part of the author is proved to be, rather, a failure on the part of the reader. Swift's apparent failure to notice, even to raise the question of whether there is any distortion of moral value in his plan simply expresses the fact that morally it distorts nothing. It can hardly be inconsistent or absurd of him not to raise the question. The only absurdity would be in thinking that anyone could possibly, under the circumstances, consider it a cruel plan. Such a thought is so absurd, indeed, that it quite properly does not occur even to a man for whom cruelty hath always been the strongest objection against any project.

In some of his earlier Irish papers Swift had occasionally made ominous hints about the doom of the nation. “One Thing I know,” he says of Ireland in the Short View, “that when the Hen is starved to Death, there will be no more Golden Eggs.”⁹ Elsewhere he asserts, “If labour and people make the true riches of a nation, what must be the issue where one part of the people are forced away, and the other part have nothing to do?”¹⁰ Swift may be thought of as having answered this rhetorical question in the Modest Proposal. In 1728 he had said, “If so wretched a State of Things would allow it, methinks I could have a malicious Pleasure, after all the Warning I have in vain given the Publick, at my own Peril, for several Years past; to see the Consequences and Events answering in every Particular.” Following which he quoted 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 nought all my Counsel, and would none of my Reproof. I also will laugh at your Calamity, and mock when your Fear cometh.”¹¹ In a sense, then, Swift is envisioning this calamity in the Modest Proposal, and doubtless taking a malicious pleasure in it: there is, certainly, a distinctively mingled mood of despair and triumph in the essay as Swift makes horrifyingly specific the veiled prophetic hints he had been issuing in the earlier papers.

This prophetic or futuristic quality in the Modest Proposal is worth noticing. It is reflected in the verb forms, for instance, which are generally future declarative: “Infants Flesh will be in Season throughout the Year,” or “a well-grown fat yearling Child; which, roasted whole, will make a considerable Figure at a Lord Mayor's Feast, or any other publick Entertainment.” We see it too in the brief comic-nightmare visions of Irishmen eating Irish children all over the kingdom, as for instance “at merry Meetings, particularly Weddings and Christenings.” And at public houses—“This Food would likewise bring great Custom to Taverns, where the Vintners will certainly be so prudent, as to procure the best Receipts for dressing it to Perfection; and consequently, have their Houses frequented by all the fine Gentlemen …”—and private homes—“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. …”

As a vision or imagined fulfillment of Swift's warnings, then, the Proposal dramatizes the extremity of the Irish condition, economically reduced to cannibalism, morally reduced to practicing it with gusto. The masterstroke is Swift's projecting this vision in the form of a proposal, which is a much more “realistic” vehicle than prophecy: it provides a convincing context for the elaboration of practical details, and it minimizes the quality of illustration-by-exaggeration in the idea of a nation so poor that it has to practice cannibalism. In a certain sense what Swift means is that “we are almost to the point of having to eat our own children,” but instead of simply saying that (which he had more or less been doing all along) he writes a cannibalistic proposal, talking about it as if it were no worse than a picnic in the park—thus effectively eliminating the “almost” that separates jesting exaggeration from literal truth. The catastrophic future Swift had been warning against seems in the Modest Proposal suddenly to have arrived, and the proposal itself is the proof.

The Modest Proposal is by far Swift's most comprehensive rehearsal of what he had called “the true state of Ireland,”¹² taking in as it does virtually everything he had ever said on the subject for the previous ten years: every misery he had discovered, every cause he had assigned, every remedy he had offered, all newly subsumed by this ominously suitable plan for consuming the children of the kingdom. And there is more to the work than satire; it is a rendering of the Irish situation in a medium compounded variously of sarcasm, knowing jokes, contempt, moral protest, prophetic ultimatum, frustration, and despair, underlying all of which is Swift's frantic desire simply to make the most compelling possible display of the situation in all its desperate simplicity and obviousness, to make the reader see what he sees, yet without telling him to look.

It is that peculiarly Swiftian kind of satire that is constantly seeking to go beyond the conventions of the genre “satire” into some undefined but more richly expressive, more genuinely affective form. Swift in this work evokes a terrible indifference; it seems almost to envelop him like some numbing murky fluid through which one may just glimpse a figure seeming to shout but whose words reach us only in deadened, dreamlike sounds. These “sounds” are the characteristic language of the Modest Proposal, the language of moral opposition and outrage neutralized, as it were, by its passage through this enveloping context of indifference.

The astonishing thoroughness with which Swift dramatizes this indifference as a permanently prevailing moral condition in Ireland, in England, among his putative readership, gives it an authenticity quite beside whatever it may involve of satiric hyperbole. Here it is simply a matter of Swift's telling the truth: he saw a monstrous indifference, and he wrote about it so as to make it visible to everyone else. That is why Swift's proposal itself has always seemed, fascinatingly, so much more difficult to dismiss than such a proposal ought to be—that is, because Swift makes us believe so implicitly in the moral deadness in terms of which it becomes an apt, reasonable, not to say attractive idea. Every reader finds himself drawn almost in earnest into contemplations such as Bathurst's: “The more I think upon this scheme, the more reasonable it appears to me.”¹³

Swift does of course make one last effort in the Modest Proposal to publicize his “real” proposals for improving the situation, but he also makes a point of saying that they are hopelessly unrealistic. It would be nonsense to believe that after ten years of virtually total defeat on this question, Swift is still hoping that his words might be listened to, let alone acted upon. When Swift wrote this paper there were Irishmen who persisted in declaring Ireland to be a thriving nation, Irish farmers who believed the crop failures merely to be the cause of all the trouble, Dublin women who were as eager as ever to be wearing Paris clothes, and the majority of Englishmen who simply never thought about Ireland one way or another. The mood of hopelessness in the Modest Proposal is authentic and virtually unmitigated. The real genius of the work is the way in which Swift manages to objectify or otherwise make an extremely realistic representation of the most intensely personal frustration and despair. His style of address, a manner of insinuating that the reader will surely not find anything very startling or objectionable in what he is saying, is wrought upon so variously, insisted upon so literally as to force even the twentieth-century reader to assume to a degree the attitude of moral nonchalance that Swift assigns his Dublin audience. To be sure, one must distinguish between “real” readers (you and I) and putative readers: but Swift in projecting an indifferent putative reader seems to communicate only with him, leaving “real” readers no role in the author-reader relationship. To some extent, then, reading the work involves joining Swift in the madhouse. Swift is here giving up on Ireland, taking the malicious pleasure he had threatened in contemplating or “projecting” the ultimate doom of the kingdom. Yet, for all that, it is impossible to dismiss the Proposal as the jaundiced kidding of a merely frustrated man, because in it Swift compels one to assent to his despair, to validate it, by his recreation of the undismissible moral reality of the situation. How a work of such unrelieved moral pessimism may nevertheless claim the highest sort of artistic value is a point well explained by Bonamy Dobrée when he observes that although it expresses an absolute despair, it does not express acceptance: “There is not the faintest perfume of hope in the document; nothing will happen; no one will stir a finger, but there is no acceptance in it, neither Stoic nor Christian. It is the control, the courageous will disciplining and shaping the justifiably bitter emotions, that makes of it a consummate, a great, almost a noble work of art.”¹⁴

Notes

1. “Personae,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago, 1963), p. 36.

2. For a strenuous (and strained) objection to Ehrenpreis, see John W. Tilton, “The Two ‘Modest Proposals’: A Dual Approach to Swift's Irony,” Bucknell Review 14 (1966): 76-87.

3. See for example the “Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Persons” (1729) in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1939-68), 12:79.

4. The text of this and subsequent references to the Modest Proposal is from the Prose Works, 12:109-18. As the Proposal is so short and so well known, I have not cited particular page references for each of my quotations from it.

5. Letter of 12 February 1729/30, in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1963), 3:372-73.

6. This is in the “Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Persons,” in Prose Works, 12:75.

7. Prose Works, 12:80-81.

8. “Letter to the Archbishop of Dublin, concerning the Weavers,” in Prose Works, 12:66-67.

9. Prose Works, 12:12.

10. “Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Hands,” in Prose Works, 12:89-90.

11. “An Answer to a Paper called, A Memorial …,” in Prose Works, 12:22-23.

12. Letter to Pope, 11 August 1729, in Correspondence, 4:89-90.

13. Letter of 12 February 1729/30, in Correspondence, 3:373.

14. English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1959), p. 445.