upon men’s belief and actions .... Every candid reader will easily understand my
discourse to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, the other having been
for some time wholly laid aside by general consent as utterly inconsistent with all other
present schemes of wealth and power.Likewise,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
publicproposes that surplus children be eaten.
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. I do therefore humbly offer it to public
consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed,
twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males ....
That the remaining hundred thousand may at a year old be offered in sale to the persons
of quality and fortune throughout the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them
suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. 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.After enumerating the moral as well as economic advantages of his scheme, Swift
ends disinterestedly: ‘I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny;
the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past childbearing.’ The proposal is
prophetic of the 19th-century economist who, on hearing of the number who had
died in the Irish Potato Famine, remarked sadly that it was not enough.
Swift exposes the inhumanity of emerging forms of rational simplification by
simplifying them even further. His Modest Proposal solves a human problem by an
economic calculus which ignores human love and treats the poor as cattle.
Gullive r’s Travels(1726) also takes new per spectives to logical conclusions. Captain
Gulliver records his voyages to the lands of the tiny people, of the giants, of experi-
mental scientists and of horses. Gulliver expects the little people of Lilliput to be
delicate and the giants of Brobdignag to be gross; they are not. These first two
voyages are often retold for children; the simply-told wonder-tale delights both
readers who guess at Swift’s purposes and readers who don’t.Gulliver draws on the
True History of Lucian of Samosata (c.125–200), an account of a voyage to the
moon,straight-faced but (of course) untrue. Gulliver refers to ‘Cousin Dampier’
(William Dampier’s Voyage round the World and Voyage to New Holland were
much read), and gives Lilliput a map-reference, placing it in New Holland (i.e.
Australia).
Gullive r is,like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, one of the practical self-reliant seamen
through whom Britannia had begun to rule the waves. As with Crusoe, the reader
can identify with the hero, whose common sense gets him through his adventures.
Our identification with the ‘I’ who tells the story is Swift’s secret weapon. Late in
Book II, Gulliver boasts of the triumphs of British civilization to the king of
Brobdignag, who has treated him kindly. The king says that the advances Gulliver
has rec ounted make him think of Gulliver’s countrymen as ‘the most pernicious race
of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the earth’.
Shocked, Gulliver tries to impress him with the invention of gunpowder and the
wonder ful effects of artillery.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 187