Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-14T12:18:59.228Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Devouring Posterity: A Modest Proposal, Empire, and Ireland's “Debt of the Nation”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sean Moore
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Scholars have rightly asserted that the cannibal motif of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is the mechanism by which the author covertly addresses colonialist pillaging in Ireland. Less attention has been paid to an unresolved problem, that of the satire's audience. This article claims that its publication in Dublin at the height of the Irish parliamentary session of 1729 suggests that Anglo-Irish legislators were its target readers. If so, the figure of the cannibal may signify how national debt and the mortgaging of future public revenues needed to amortize that debt metaphorically devoured the posterity of the colonized Irish natives. Given that the famine conditions of 1729 had reduced revenues and produced a crisis in paying Ireland's “debt of the nation,” the satire's calendar for the harvesting and slaughtering of Ireland's babies could be taken as mimicry of the debates over how to raise new taxes and schedule their collection and expenditure.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 3 , May 2007 , pp. 679 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. The Essays; or, Councils, Civil and Moral. London, 1701.Google Scholar
Barnard, Toby. A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977.Google Scholar
Bell, Ian. “‘Not Lucre's Madman’: Pope, Money, and Independence.” Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary. Ed. Nicholson, Colin. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1989. 53–67.Google Scholar
Berkeley, George. The Querist, Containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public. London, 1736.Google Scholar
Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1765–69.Google Scholar
Bolingbroke, Henry. “The Craftsman No. 307.” The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Stuart Sherman. Vol. 1C of The Longman Anthology of British Literature. David Damrosch, gen. ed. New York: Longman, 2003. 2393–96.Google Scholar
Booth, Wayne. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, John. The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Brown, Laura. “Reading Race and Gender: Jonathan Swift.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990): 424–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, Helen. Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–1784. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2003.Google Scholar
Coghill, Marmaduke. Letter to Edward Southwell. 13 Nov. 1729. Mss. 2827/5/95. Southwell Papers. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast.Google Scholar
Colley, Linda. Britons: The Forging of a Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Cosgrove, Art. “Marriage in Medieval Ireland.” Marriage in Ireland. Ed. Cosgrove. Dublin: College P, 1985. 25–50.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Davis, Herbert. Introduction. Swift, Prose Works 12:ix–xlvii.Google Scholar
De Bolla, Peter. The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.Google Scholar
“Diet, sb.1.” Def. 5a. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.Google Scholar
Downie, J. A. “Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere.” A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. Ed. Wall, Cynthia. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 58–79.Google Scholar
Ehrenpreis, Irvin. Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Oliver. Jonathan Swift and Ireland. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1962.Google Scholar
Flynn, Carol Houlihan. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Forman, Charles. A Second Letter to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole. London, 1733.Google Scholar
Furniss, Tom. Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerrard, Christine. “Pope, Peri Bathous, and the Whig Sublime.” “Cultures of Whiggism”: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Womersley, David. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. 200–15.Google Scholar
Glendinning, Victoria. Jonathan Swift: A Portrait. New York: Holt, 1998.Google Scholar
Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Hawes, Clement. “Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse.” Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 187–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkes, David. Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680. London: Palgrave, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayton, David, ed. The Letters of Marmaduke Coghill 1722–1738. Dublin: Irish Mss. Commission, 2005.Google Scholar
Higgins, Ian. Swift's Politics: A Study in Disaffection. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. MacPherson, C. B. London: Penguin, 1968.Google Scholar
Hume, David. “Of Public Credit.” Political Essays. Ed. Haakonssen, Knud. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 166–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingrassia, Catherine. Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Johnston-Liik, Edith Mary. History of the Irish Parliament, 1692–1800. 6 vols. Belfast: Ulster Hist. Foundation, 2002.Google Scholar
Journals of the House of Lords of Ireland. Vol. 3. Dublin: Sleater, 1779.Google Scholar
James, Joyce. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1990.Google Scholar
James, Kelly. “Harvests and Hardship: Famine and Scarcity in Ireland in the Late 1720s.” Studia Hibernica 26 (1991–92): 65–105.Google Scholar
James, Kelly. “Jonathan Swift and the Irish Economy in the 1720s.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 6 (1991): 7–36.Google Scholar
Kelly, Patrick. “Swift on Money and Economics.” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift. Ed. Fox, Christopher. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 128–45.Google Scholar
Kiberd, Declan. Irish Classics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Kiernan, T. J. History of the Financial Administration of Ireland to 1817. London: King, 1930.Google Scholar
Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968.Google Scholar
Landa, Louis A. “A Modest Proposal and Populousness.” Modern Philology 40 (1942): 161–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latouche, Robert. The Birth of Western Economy: Economic Aspects of the Dark Ages. London: Methuen, 1961.Google Scholar
Legg, Marie-Louise. “Money and Reputations: The Effects of the Banking Crises of 1755 and 1760.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 11 (1996): 74–87.Google Scholar
Lock, F. P. Swift's Tory Politics. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1983.Google Scholar
Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
Mahony, Robert. “Protestant Dependence and Consumption in Swift's Irish Writings.” Political Ideas in Eighteenth Century Ireland. Ed. Connolly, S. J. Dublin: Four Courts, 2000. 83–104.Google Scholar
Mandell, Laura. “Bawds and Merchants: Engendering Capitalist Desires.” ELH 59 (1992): 107–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandeville, Bernard. A Modest Defence of Public Stews; or, An Essay upon Whoring, As It Is Now Practis'd in These Kingdoms. London: Moore, 1724.Google Scholar
Marana, Giovanni Paolo. The Eight Volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy. 8 vols. London, 1702–03.Google Scholar
McGrath, Charles Ivar. “Central Aspects of the Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Framework in Ireland: The Government Supply Bill and Biennial Parliamentary Sessions, 1715–82.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 16 (2001): 9–34.Google Scholar
McGrath, Charles Ivar. “‘The Public Wealth Is the Sinew, the Life, of Every Public Measure’: The Creation and Maintenance of a National Debt in Ireland, 1715–1745.” The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in the British Atlantic World, 1700–1800. Ed. Carey, Daniel and Finlay, Christopher. Dublin: Irish Acad. P, forthcoming. 174–224.Google Scholar
Nicholson, Colin. Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Nokes, David. Jonathan Swift, a Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Phiddian, Robert. “Have You Eaten Yet? The Reader in A Modest Proposal.” SEL 36 (1996): 603–21.Google Scholar
Plato. “Phaedrus.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Hamilton, Edith. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. 475–525.Google Scholar
Pollard, Mary. Dublin's Trade in Books, 1550–1800. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.Google Scholar
Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad Variorum, 1729. Menston, Eng.: Scolar, 1968.Google Scholar
Rawson, Claude. God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Real, Hermann. Securing Swift: Selected Essays. Dublin: Maunsel, 2001.Google Scholar
Reflections on the National Debt; with Reasons for Reducing the Legal Interest; and against a Public Loan. With Some Advice to the Electors of Members of Parliament. Dublin, 1731.Google Scholar
Roncaglia, Alessandro. Petty: The Origins of Political Economy. Trans. Isabella Cherubini. Armonk: Sharp, 1985.Google Scholar
Rowley, Hercules. An Answer to a Book, Intitl'd, Reasons Offer'd for Erecting a Bank in Ireland, in a Letter to Henry Maxwell Esq. Dublin, 1721.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.Google Scholar
Scriblerus, Martin. Peri Bathos; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry. The Works of Alexander Pope. Ed. Croker, John W., Elwin, Whitwell, and Courthope, William J. Vol. 10. London: Murray, 1871–89.Google Scholar
Sandra, Sherman. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Smith, Charles Kay. “Towards a ‘Participatory Rhetoric’: Teaching Swift's Modest Proposal.” College English 30 (1968): 135–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sussman, Charlotte. “The Colonial Afterlife of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography, and Mobile Populations.” Cultural Critique 56 (2004): 96–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Williams, Harold. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963–65. 5 vols.Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. Journal to Stella. Ed. Williams, Harold. Oxford: Clarendon, 1948.Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. The Poems of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Williams, Harold. Oxford: Clarendon, 1937.Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Davis, Herbert. 14 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1939–68.Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Ed. Ross, Angus and Woolley, David. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. 1–103.Google Scholar
Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Wittkowsky, George. “Swift's Modest Proposal: The Biography of an Early Georgian Pamphlet.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 75–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolley, James, ed. Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan: The Intelligencer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Woolley, James, ed. “Sarah Harding as Swift's Printer.” Walking Naboth's Vineyard. Ed. Fox, Christopher. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1995. 164–77.Google Scholar