A Modest Proposal

The test is subtractive and finds almost nothing to take. The opening scene must come first, because the projector’s pity is the bait: “It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town”. The arithmetic must precede the proposal, because the proposal is its conclusion, and the horror is that it follows. The culinary particulars, “whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled”, are required because the reasoning must reach the kitchen to show where reasoning of this kind ends. The advantages, the refused alternatives and the close are each required. What holds the axis off the top: the rejected scheme for adolescents and the story of Psalmanazar are a second turn of the screw that a stricter economy could lose at little cost, and some of the six advantages repeat the shape of the one before.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds well beyond Ireland: a polity that already treats a people as stock has already done the eating, and the language of improvement, arithmetic and public good is the instrument by which it does so. One sentence carries it, on the landlords, “who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children”. The second disclosure is of the reader. The pamphlet is built so that one assents, sentence by sentence, to the premises before recoiling at the conclusion, and the recoil is turned on the premises one had accepted. That is an articulated condition, not a mood. Held below the highest marks because it is disclosed from the side of its operators: the poor appear only as objects of calculation, which is the point, and their condition is seen and not entered.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The elevation is cold and dreadful. It comes as the vertigo of a calm voice going where no voice should: the child at a year old, the skin dressed into “admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen”, the children bought alive and dressed “hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs”. The dread rises again with each refinement. The single height is the paragraph of other expedients, where the real remedies are named in the projector’s mouth and dismissed, and the author’s exasperation presses against the mask without breaking it. Held in the low eights because the register never leaves irony for grandeur, beauty or transport: this is the sublime of the deadpan, intense but of one kind, and never sustained beyond a few pages.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The archetype is among the oldest: the devouring of children, Kronos, Thyestes’ feast, Moloch, the ogre’s kitchen. Swift alludes to none of it. He builds it: the whole structure is a dead metaphor, the landlords devouring the poor, made literal and followed through every consequence, so that the myth of the child-eating father is reconstituted from the vocabulary of rents and markets and stands as the load-bearing frame. That is myth built, not evoked. What holds it a tenth below the gate is that the archetype is carried by one figure of speech and one conceit rather than by figures who bear it: there is no Saturn here, only a system and a voice. The particular stays particular, Ireland in 1729 and the price of a carcass, and the archetype is a shadow behind it more than a structure walked through.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is plain: the economic projector’s pamphlet of the age, the political arithmetic of William Petty and his followers, and the ironic impersonation already used by Defoe in The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702) and by Swift himself in the Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708) and the Bickerstaff papers. The turn is in carrying the impersonation to the limit of the unsayable without once letting the mask slip, and in aiming the irony at the reader’s own reason rather than at a party. The stake was real: a reward had been offered for the author of the Drapier’s Letters and their printer prosecuted a few years before, Defoe had been pilloried for his impersonation, and a proposal to eat children could be read straight, and has been. Held below the higher figures because the instrument was inherited and already Swift’s own.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Substitute a form and the pamphlet stops being able to say almost everything it says. As a plain tract, which Swift had already written in 1720 and 1728, it says that Ireland is being ruined and should help itself, and no one listens; the paragraph of other expedients is that tract, inside this one, refused. As the projector’s proposal it knows what the plain tract cannot: that the evil is in the form of reasoning, and so must be shown in that form, with its numbers, its tables of advantage and its professions of disinterest. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, and the reader’s assent and recoil, which are the disclosure, are produced by it and by nothing else. Held just off the top only because the form is borrowed whole from its targets, and could be borrowed by a lesser hand to lesser effect.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence over nearly three centuries of return, in criticism, in teaching and in reuse, and the questions stay open. How far is the projector Swift’s enemy, and how far a voice for Swift’s own despair at the Irish as well as at the English, since the six advantages also mock the Irish poor and the Papists? Is the target political arithmetic, colonial policy, the absentee landlord, the Irish themselves, or reason as such? What does it mean that so many first readers in every generation take it straight? It is a standing text in the teaching of irony and persona, and its devices reward return at the level of the sentence. Held in the middle eights because its yield is concentrated: once the persona is grasped, much of the return is to the same mechanism admired again, and a short work cannot open as many rooms on each reading as a long one.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is English prose of the eighteenth century, and satire in English after it. The force: the pamphlet fixed the deadpan ironic proposal as a form, the method of following an accepted premise to an unbearable conclusion in the voice of its believers, and showed that irony could be the most serious instrument of political argument rather than its ornament. Held below the higher figures because what it moved was a method more than the shape of literature, and the larger turns of the field in that century were made by the novel. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: for a pamphlet the reach is extraordinary. Its title became a phrase in the language for any monstrous or satirical proposal, it is the model invoked whenever deadpan political satire is discussed, and its method runs through later satire in prose, on the stage and on the screen.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over nearly three centuries, from 1729 to now. The text survives whole, as printed, with nothing lost and no question of transmission. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any prose work of its century: never out of print, anthologised and taught in schools and universities wherever English is read, and translated widely. The axis penalises a topical satire, and this is one: its surfaces are the famine of 1729, the absentee landlord, Lent and the price of a carcass in shillings. But it has wholly outlived that occasion and is read for what the occasion pressed on, the reverse of a surface fixed to its moment. Charged a little because much of its presence is as the classroom’s example of irony, read for its device, and because its particulars now need annotation.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged on Swift’s English, with no translation between. The command is total, and load-bearing: the plain style of the projector, the measured periodic sentence of the man of reason, the arithmetic set out with the bland precision of a report, and above all the tonal control that admits no word of indignation into the voice, so that all the indignation is the reader’s. The diction does the work, in the mothers reckoned as breeders and the landlords’ title to the children. The pacing is exact: the proposal is delayed until the reader has assented to the arithmetic, and the six advantages are set out in the numbered order of a projector’s case. The last sentence, ending “the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing”, lands as precisely as any close in English prose. Held below the top only for the narrow range of instruments one voice in a short work can show.

Score: 9.4 / 10

One law governs the whole: human beings reckoned as commodities by a mind that believes itself humane, in a voice that never changes key. Take the two most distant elements, the opening pity for the beggar women and their children and the price of a carcass at the shambles. They obey the same law, and the pamphlet’s knowledge is that they do: the projector’s pity and his butchery are one disposition. The paragraph of other expedients, where the work comes nearest to breaking its law, keeps it, because the remedies are refused in the projector’s own voice and for his own reasons. Held below the highest marks because the range, though wider than its length suggests (the kitchen, the market, the Church’s calendar, the state’s policy), is the range of one voice and one argument, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged on what a short pamphlet holds. The economy of a nation: population, harvests, rents, trade, the market for meat. The state and the colonial relation, in the English policy behind the arithmetic and in the absentee landlords. Class: landlords, squires, tenants, cottiers, beggars. Religion, in the Papists whose numbers the scheme will thin and the Dissenters who leave the country. The family: maternity, nursing, marriage made tender by profit. The body, as meat, skin and breeding stock. They are integrated, not listed: one conceit joins every order to every other. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the vantage and the scale: consciousness is only the projector’s, the poor have no interior, history is a single season of famine, and the natural order is livestock. A low mark on a small form describes the form.

Score: 7.6 / 10