Jonathan Swift, "Description of a City Shower" (1710) and "A Modest Proposal" (1729-30)

Genre: satiric verse and prose satire.

Characters: Swift’s "Projector" persona, the Irish poor, and Irish and English readers, in "A Modest Proposal"; in "City Shower," a survey of typical "town" types, rather like the General Prologue of "Canterbury Tales," but concentrating on the new city-scape of the seventeenth century: Susan, the Templar, the "sempstress," Tories, Whigs, and beaux.

Summary: "Description of a City Shower":  A city shower ironically levels the pretensions and class differences which ordinarily divide the town's population, even as it exposes the disgusting waste that the new "mode" (viz. "modern") life now forbids one to mention.  All social surfaces suddenly are exposed, from low to high: Susan takes down her linens from the line, Tories and Whigs "forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs" (line 41), etc.   (Compare with Dryden's "Annus Mirabilus" which turns a city ruined by the great fire into a rising, angelic ruler of the world.)  Be sure to visit the U. Va. E-text of "City Shower" (link above) to see images of the poem's pseudonymous first edition in Joseph Addison's The Tatler, one of England's first periodical publications (i.e., a "magazine").  Better yet, see the real thing in Goucher's Rare Book Collection!

"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."  The essay satirically promotes the consumption of one-year-old children to eliminate the growing number of poor citizens in Ireland.   Swift uses savage irony to point out the inhumane condition of the colonized Irish.   Near the end, his "Projector" rejects several rational ways to help the poor, strategies Swift, himself, had previously proposed in pamphlets, including the series known as "The Drapier's Letters."  Part of the satire's effect derives from the thoroughness with which it works out its basic metaphor equating the English devouring of innocent babies and wealthy absentee landowners devouring the Irish economy.   This has the effect of literalizing the metaphor as the butchery, sale, and consumption of the "product" are worked out.  This also was a satirical strategy we saw in Jonson's Volpone (feigned madness becomes a real madness, leading to incarceration).  This proposal could be compared with More’s Utopia because they both use satire to discuss the welfare of society.  More used a more appealing alternative to create his utopia,  a place where everyone was equal and where sharing everything solved class divisions.  Distancing the subject from England helps readers play More's game since it reduces  their drive to test the utopian constructs against "reality."  By contrast, Swift used the horrendous proposal of devouring children to make a statement about the society in which he lived, in effect making England and Ireland seem strange, alien places, a negation of the popular vision.   Such a "negative Utopia" could be called a "dystopia."

Issues and Research Sources:  

1.    The mistake first-time readers of "MP" usually make is in identifying Swift's intended readers as "the English."  This is  probably suggested by the "Projector" persona's reference to "them" and "they" when referring to the Irish poor, but remember that not all the Irish were poor, though all were affected by the economic exploitation of Ireland by England.  Look closely at the pronoun "we" as it is used in the last paragraph on 2474, or "our merchants" on 2475, and especially "our" in the paragraph about "other expedients" on 2478.  Swift plays with his audience by implying that the Projector is Irish, and that his intended readers are Irish, as well.  This is borne out by the early publishing history of the essay--the first edition was published, anonymously, in Dublin, though the edition was reprinted with a new title page listing it as "By Dr. Swift" in London in the same year.  What effect would anonymous publication of such a pamphlet have upon the Irish readers?  What effect would it have upon the English readers who would be, in effect, overhearing this conversation about their colony being conducted by colonials.  A later edition in 1730 included two additional sections as a preface to the "Proposal," and it impishly refused to explicitly identify the author as Swift.  Why?

2.  Dublin and London, where Swift first published "MP," both considered themselves "worlds," centers of culture and learning, and sources of the new norms of behavior that well-informed people sought to follow.  Novelty becomes a quality sought for its capacity to surprise, just as tradition once was sought for its calming familiarity.  And just as some traditions deserved to be changed even though they comforted those they privileged, so some novelties needed to be condemned before they ruined conversation, the economy, or people's lives.  See the events associated with the founding of the London Stock Exchange, especially the "South Sea Bubble," for an example of the last.  "Projectors," such as the one using socio-economic analysis to solve Ireland's poverty problem, were behind the "Bubble," too.  The satirist takes upon her-/himself the risky task of arbitrating the modes of each new day, to praise those which deserve it while mocking those which do not with just enough savagery to stunt their growth or to ensure their extinction.  Unfortunately for the Irish people, Swift's satire in "MP" did not succeed and the economic situation actually continued to get worse for over a century.  Why didn't this satire stop the exploitation of the Irish poor?  Remember Sidney's ("Defense of Poesy") assertion that "praxis" (deeds) rather than mere "gnosis" (knowing) was the true test of poetry's powers.

3.  Swift's most potent weapon against readers' indifference toward the Irish poor was his satire's rhetorical style.  All satirists take advantage of readers' willingness to believe that they are reading "normal truth-telling" unless warned otherwise, and from the title to the introductory description of the economic problem besetting the Irish, this strategy is pursued by Swift's speaker (usually called "the Projector," as in one who proposes "projects" to remedy social ills).  Swift may be more skilled than any other English satirist in the speed with which he leads readers from their comfortable absorption in the "normal truth-telling" discourse to the Projector's sudden descents into foolish (Horatian) or criminal (Juvenalian) assumptions.  For an early clue that something is wrong with the Projector's calm description of the socio-economic disaster, see the first sentence's numeric sequence of poor children following their begging mothers from door to door.  Do the math.  What does that sequence look like as a graphed curve?  See #8 below for the consequences of the culture's ignorance of Swift's warning.

4.  In this proposal, Swift has mentioned other ways to increase the prosperity of Ireland (2478).    Why do you think that Swift chose to use the devouring of children’s flesh as the basis of this proposal?

We have many precedents for this strategy.  For instance, Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals" argued that, though they ate human flesh, the cannibals were more noble than we were in their other conduct; Jonson's Volpone, suggested that Europeans' greed turned them into animals who preyed upon one another (see the I.1 "duet" between Volpone and Mosca in which they praise Volpone for what he will not do, but others will, in pursuit of money); Behn's Oroonoko, argued that sophisticated Europeans were more debased than the "Natural Man" (compare especially the behavior of the Native Americans vs. the colonists' debauchery on Sundays, the day of the slaves' revolt).

Note that even Behn makes her most debased European "the wild Irishman, Bannister" and moderate Marvell's "Horatian Ode" guardedly praises Cromwell's suppression of the Irish, while Milton positively dances on Irish graves in his commendatory poem to Cromwell on the same expedition. 

• What mental behaviors make it possible for the colonizers to make such radical distinctions between themselves and the colonized?  Where do the Irish fit into the English project of self-definition and self-justification?

Think about how we conceive of our identities by making comparisons and contrasts with others.  In our most deeply buried layers of character, there are visions of the Other by which we anchor our separateness, our notion of a discrete identity.  The use of the Irish as the Other happens in America, too, with even in the works of revered writers like Thoreau and Hawthorne.

• How would italic text affect reading of those passages?

7.     One of the infuriating things about the "Proposer"'s or "Projector"'s voice is its serene rationalism.   All of its rhetoric imitates the ideal C17 public speaker's tone of sweet reason and enlightened concern for the well-being of others.  He never descends to polemical ranting.  The scariest part of the essay may be when the argument turns to the suggestion that, if the Irish were offered the chance to kill their children, they might prefer it to seeing them grow up in such total poverty (cf. Oroonoko's decision to kill Imoinda so that their unborn children would not be raised as slaves).

• How and why does Swift manage to bring his readers to see that they can imagine even cannibalism as a "rational" alternative to other things?
• What could be his agenda regarding rationalism, and how might it compare with Rochester's "Satyr Against Reason and Mankind"?
• Swift would have known Aristotle's Rhetoric since his student days, and he could presume his readers would likely be familiar with the Greek philosopher's analysis of the three main rhetorical appeals.  Click here for a short definition of each appeal and some suggestions for using these tools to gain insights into how Swift created both the Proposal and its Modesty.

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