In Our Time - Swift's A Modest Proposal

Episode Date: January 29, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most brilliant and shocking satires ever written in English – Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Masquerading as an attempt to end poverty in Ireland once and for all, a Modest Proposal is a short pamphlet that draws the reader into a scheme for economic and industrial horror. Published anonymously but written by Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal lays bare the cruel presumptions, unchecked prejudice, the politics and the poverty of the 18th century, but it also reveals, perhaps more than anything else, the character and the mind of Swift himself.With John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London and Ian McBride, Senior Lecturer in the History Department at King’s College London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, 1729 was a very bad year for the Irish people who worked the land. Three failed harvests and oppressive laws meant times were dire. Poverty, disease and famine were the lot of life and had been for a while. But then came an idea to solve Irish poverty once and for all.

in a short pamphlet with a long title. A modest proposal for preventing the children of the poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the public. It's known more conveniently as a modest proposal. A modest proposal was published anonymously but written by Jonathan Swift, three years after Gulliver's travels. And it's one of the most chilling and brilliant satires in English.

It lays bare the cruel presumptions, unchecked prejudice, the politics and the poverty of the 18th century, but it also reveals perhaps more than anything else the character and the mind of Swift himself. With me to discuss a modest proposal are Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, Ian McBride, Senior Lecturer in the History Department at King's College London and John Mullen,

Professor of English at University College London. Can I start with you, John Mullen? Can you take us through a modest proposal? It's quite brief, and can you just tell us what it says? Right. Well, you mention, you, you mention, that it was published anonymously, and I think the first important thing about what it says is that it doesn't declare itself to be what you described it as a satire. It presents itself as if it were a proposal, and it's a proposal for something that's going to be good for the Irish and good for the nation of Ireland, and particularly good for the poor of Ireland. And it starts off lamenting that there are so many poor people, there's so many beggars on the streets and

roads of Ireland, particularly lots and lots of poor children. And the person writing it, who is nameless, and Swift's name is nowhere on this, says that he has a terrific idea, a scheme, a project to improve things. He does a certain amount of calculations about how many poor people there are starving. And he has an idea. He has an idea that's going to both deal with the poverty, but also the overpopulation in Ireland. And after a lot of sort of rational calculating prose, he gets to a sort of an extraordinary sentence. I don't know, am I allowed to read the sentence out?

After all these sort of promises of the benefits that he's going to bring to the Irish and stop all these terrible abortions and infanticides that are going on because poor people have so many children, they're all starving, he says this, I'm assured by our merchants that a boy or girl before 12 years old is no saleable commodity. So what's he going to do?

I've 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 fricacy or raw. Raghu. And that's the proposal. And then the rest of the modest proposal is a series of kind of reasonings and explanations

of all the extraordinary benefits that's going to go about and some of the practical necessities of this scheme. Could you outline these? Well, it's going to... It's going to be very beneficial for trade, of course. There's going to be lots of books. and inkeepers setting up to use this trade.

And there's going to be all sorts of side benefits so that these children are going to be flayed for gloves for fine ladies and boots for gentlemen. And suddenly these poor people who've got no jobs and no way of earning a living are going to discover that as breeders, as he calls them, they're going to have a real economic future because these women can pop out a child every year, make much more from selling them than it costs to plump them up for the market,

and everybody is going to benefit. And he thinks their husbands will look at their pregnancy as fondly as a farmer looks at the swelling of his calves. Sure, well, one of the great things about it is as the projector, this person with his proposal, starts warming to his task, he thinks of more and more benefits. So, for instance, there's going to be no more wife beating anymore because these, as you say, these women are now going to be for their husbands

great kind of economic properties. They're not going to kick them when they're pregnant. They're going to be as valuable as pregnant pigs or pregnant calves. It's strange, isn't it? We come at these things with hindsight and say it was swift, and it sort of spoils their actions. You're quite right to say nobody, except one or two people, knew who was saying this, not what we're saying.

and so it had the greater impact for that. It came out of this welter of pamphitheering at the time. We'll talk about that later. There it came like a modest, serious, dressed up as. And some people would say, well, especially as this starts so gently, doesn't he? We all deplore, these women on the streets, these poor women with six or seven children all begging, taught to beg, talk to thief and that sort of thing. We must try to get rid of this.

We must help them. One of the distinctive things about the voice of this projector is that he professes, great sympathy and he sometimes says, you know, brings tear to my eyes to see the plight of these people. But I think also the extraordinary thing is when you read it now, you know it's by Swift and it's likely to come to you in a book with his name on the cover. And yet once you start reading, in a way that effect that you describe for the first readers comes alive, I think, all over again, actually. Judith Hawley, John has referred to the word projector, and that's the projector. of the argument, the impersonated author that Swift entertain in order to write this. It was a period full of people with schemes for projecting things.

Did these have any bearing on the way Swift wrote this modest proposal? Yes, that's right. I mean, the very framing of it, the way that the pamphlet looks on the page, imitates quite closely the kind of pamphlets that were being published. And there are a mixture of projects, get-rich-quick schemes, people proposing that you should set up colonies here there and elsewhere around the world. Marvellous new inventions which were going to wash your clothes white or whatever it might be. But there's a particular kind of scheme that he's aiming at.

It's not that this is his only target. Swift himself had projects. By this time he had published numerous pamphlets in which he had schemes for solving the problems of Ireland. but behind a lot of his arguments is a relatively new intellectual discipline, and that is political arithmetic. And this is a kind of way of thinking which combines the empiricism and the mathematics of the new science with the kind of utilitarianism in politics.

So you reduce people to numbers, and then you can do things with them. And the chief proponent of this idea, and one who has several kinds of relevance for the modern. proposal is a man called William Petty, who died in the late 17th century, and he's one of the founding members of the Royal Society in 1662. But before that, in the 1650s, he had been a surveyor in Ireland working for Cromwell. And he's part of the great Cromwellian land grab, in which land was mapped and measured by Petty and taken from the Irish people and given to soldiers, croners of Cromwell,

creditors and so on, creating this vast area of land where the people were in effect starved and homeless. And in the process of this, he amassed an enormous amount of data. He got great statistics. And putting these on paper and combining the methods of the Royal Society with the kind of, there's a lot of facts and rationality, but also a certain amount of balmy, hairbrained utopianism. in the early days of the Royal Society.

We can make things better, if only we can get the sums right on paper. It was a mathematical solution, and Swift employs that. We have, as John Mullen said, we have 180,000, 120,000 breeders, you call them, and these breeders are such and such.

If you take 30,000 away that leaf, 90,000, we can do such and such. We need one in four males, which is rather more than you give to sheep, when they've made it, and so, and it's done that. He's very precisely parroted that habit of the king. with that. You think, well, that's a good. You think the maths work out, yes.

Especially in an age which was at that time besotted by the idea that mathematical, this new alarming and wonderful solution to life was mathematics. And so you could be carried along by that. And one thing that gets lost is the sense of the human beings being counted. But we mustn't think that Swift himself was sympathising with the Irish poor. He didn't have any warm and fuzzy feelings for the suffering Irish. He constantly complained in his own pamphlets, about what a burden beggars were.

But he did have, he had the Irish landlords in his sights, didn't he? Can you talk briefly about that? The Irish landlords, a lot of these were English people who, as well, William Petty, was involved in bestowing lands. Protestant Anglo-Irish people. They owned the land, they took the rents. They were also carrying out projects akin to the Highland Clearances. They were getting rid of corn and subsistency.

crops and replacing it with sheep, which they're then producing wool from. But because of the restrictive trade laws imposed by the English, these Irish landlords, or the Anglo-Irish landlords, were producing wool, which couldn't then be sold in England. So they're producing a useless crop. It was an extractive economy, really, wasn't it? They took the rents, they took the money, they went to London and spent it there. And then they imported luxury goods into Ireland.

Ian McBride, Judith mentioned the part that Swift himself might have had, which might be run alongside the pamphlet. It's tricky territory of this, but it's very interesting. Some of the things there suggest, the passion of them, suggests that maybe he had more than a touch of belief in what he was saying. Yes. Well, on the surface of things, at least, it does look as if the clear victims here are the Irish poor or the common people of Ireland, and therefore we're being invited to say. sympathise with them. And particularly for modern readers with liberal or progressive instincts,

it would be comforting if we could find some kindness or compassion in swift in a sense that he was actually a champion of the ordinary Irish in some sense. And the pamphid itself begins with this depiction of starving women on the streets of Dublin begging for money surrounded by children in rags. And that, of course, was a problem at the centre of Irish affairs.

The time everybody was talking about this problem. Thousands of people were dying. Presbyterians were emigrating to the American colonies. And something like half of the population was dependent on poor relief or thieving, which Swift liked to concentrate on. So it looks as if this is a satire on exploitation, the exploitation of the Irish common people by their landlords. But with Swift, his denunciations of oppression, however bitter or vehement they are, don't imply sympathy for the victims.

That seems to be a general law with Swift. So he wants us to see how oppressive landlords are, but he doesn't really leave us any comforting resort to the sorts of positive standards that philanthropists or patriots pointed to. It was a much more brutal age than we're used to us. It was brutal, and the brutality comes out in Swift's other works written at this time. So a contemporary pamphlet entitled Maxim's Controlled in Ireland, which tries to explain how all economic laws get warped by Irish conditions to produce the opposite effect from the one they're supposed to. That pamphlet deals with the problem of poverty,

and the poor are always described by Swift as improvident, ignorant, lazy, indigent, and thievish. And in this pamphlet, he simply proposes a mass transplantation scheme publicly funded to get all able-bodied, poor Protestant and Catholic, off to the American colonies. Is it saying too much, it probably isn't,

go ahead, in that case you can slap it out? Is it saying too much that perhaps there's a sense in which Swift is using the cloak of satire to say what in some measure he really himself believes? Well, I mean,

In other works, his sermon on the poor man's contentment, for example, he says that there's not one in a hundred of these people who are not the creators of their own misfortunes. The real problem, yes. The real problem is laziness, drunkenness, and their tendency to marry without saving, which is another Ede fix of his. So, of course, this isn't to say that the oppression of landlords

didn't upset him. I mean, that is his target. It's just that he thinks that phony or facile benevolence is just too easy. And there are the rumors which feed into what he says, the rumors that the Irish poor had indulged in cannibalism.

These are rumors all over the place when people are in such direst rights. But that was, that fed into, to what he was writing. Yes. It's a very old slur that the Irish devoured each other.

And Swift satire works by trying to collapse the boundaries between us, the civilised nations of Europe and the savage peoples of the rest of the world. Cannibalism is the ultimate mark of savagery. In a modest proposal,

the idea of eating children is introduced by a knowing American who Swift or the author had met in London. And of course at this time people would associate cannibalism with literature on the Native Americans, which is widely read. And the Native

Americans, often compared to the Irish, were supposed to be descended from Scythians and related to tartars, these ancient primitive peoples who were nomadic. And above all, engaged in this act, which was

the hallmark of true savagery. there's a certain sort of shading and toning of this view of swift now with regard to the modest proposal but at the time do you think it if very brief because I would like to move on it briefly did what it set out to do it shocked people into a realisation

of the extremes that were being experienced in Ireland well we know very little about how it was read but it certainly seems to have contributed to a greater debate on the problems of famine conditions in Ireland.

And the shock led to, for example, adopting the custom of wearing linen at funerals rather than silk and thereby supporting home consumption native Irish industry. So it did have some positive effect in that sense. Let's look at the thrift himself, John Mullen. He's living in Dublin, as I understand. he was living in Dublin. The historic present mustn't be?

It does dominate this programme. It's something to the outrage of some people. He's in Dublin. What position was he in when he wrote this? How would you describe his own view of his own life? Well, he's Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which sounds like an important thing to be, and it is, in a way. But he is, I mean, he's now.

and I think even in his own mind, at the end of a career in a way, I mean at the end of a career as a writer, but also he's a man who grew up thinking and hoping, I think, that through the Anglican Church he was going to achieve advancement, and he must have been, I mean, he was early marked out for success. I mean, he was a man of great and evident literary brilliance to all his contemporaries, but for various reasons, largely political but partly temperamental, he ended up going to Ireland and whether he ended up thinking that he was, as it were,

a part of the population in which he found himself. This was a position partly of exile and of sort of failure in his career, really. And he was part, we've already mentioned this, of a ruling minority, but an embattled minority, but of the... He was part of the English... The Anglo-Irish Protestant minority

that rules and that is greatly outnumbered by the Roman Catholic majority, but also is antagonistic to the large Protestant Presbyterian population in the north of the island. But for Swift, it's much more than that. I mean, he has his great moments always, is in, if you look at his letters, when he goes on his visits to London.

His last visit to London is two years before he writes a modest proposal, where, you know, he hangs out with his great friend Swift and many other sort of brilliant men at the time. Pope. Sorry, Pope, terrible. He's a great friend of Pope's. Incidentally, a Catholic? Absolutely.

And in an earlier period, in the reign of Queen Anne, some 15 years before, he actually keeps company with men who wield huge political power. So he goes through times when he thinks of himself as at the centre of things. In Ireland, it absolutely not.

It's out on the fringes and he is a disgruntled even if a fatalistic member of a ruling minority in that country. We have to remember that he was actually born in Ireland and he describes himself as having been dropped in Ireland

in the way that in the modest proposal he used the language of Irish babies being dropped by their dams. So there's some way in which he is Irish, but he's born to English parents. What he wanted was an English bishopric, so he was terribly disappointed that he got not only a deanery, but an Irish deanery. And although he's a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant descendancy, he was attached to one of the weakest parts of it, which was the Anglican Church in Ireland, which was squeezed between the Catholic and the Presbyter, and was in financially a very precarious position. And it's partly that his circumstances were difficult,

but also he loved to magnify his difficulties. Instead of saying, it's great that I'm this, isn't it awful that I'm the other? I'm not that, yeah. But it gave him this fantastic position of, he could hug himself with glee at the thought of how miserable he was and how rubbish the world was by saying, not only was he, you know, a poor Englishman stranded in Ireland,

but he was in the church of Ireland, which is the weakest part of it. and he was living in a bog which is full of these savages who are eating each other. I count no man truly unfortunate who has not been condemned to live in Ireland. I mean, but he's full of these quotes, isn't he? In McBride, he doesn't seem a natural Tory. And yet, when he went across to England to make his fortune, which is what he did, tried to make his fortune,

those are the people he associated with, both mostly in the general world, but certainly in the political world with Harley and so on. And then when they crashed in 1714, he crashed. What drew him to that side, do you think? Well, Swift regarded themselves as a wig in politics and a Tory and church matters often and the political landscape in England is complex at this time and you could believe in the sorts of constitutional principles

often associated with whigs, that is, you know, parliamentary monarchy, objections to standing armies, that sort of thing that was shared quite widely. But still think that the church, the Church of England or the Church of Ireland, the established Anglican Church, was under threat at this time. And the sorts of people who were undermining it were the Whigs. And so Swift's Toryism is at its most pointed, always on ecclesiastical matters. And that relates to this other problem in Ireland that John and Judith have both mentioned already,

which is what he called the Scotch plantation of the North. Because we tend to think of 18th century Ireland as a straight contest between Protestants and Catholics. or English and Irish. But there is this third element in it, which is non-conformist Protestants of Scots descent, who are the majority in Ulster. So the Church of Ireland not only has a Catholic majority throughout Ireland, but it has this stubborn Presbyterian majority in the northeast

in what's today, Northern Ireland. And that's where his parish was in Laracour. His first parish is in the north, just outside Belfast. and Swift's most consistent commitment is the defence of the Irish Church against the enemies of descent. John Mullen, how did he come to, he gained a reputation as an Irish nationalist

before the modest proposal. Given what's being said around this table so far, I think the listeners deserve an explanation as to how he'd arrived at that. Well, in the 1720s particularly, he did write, he contributed to a... a series of public arguments about how Ireland was ruled. And in particular, there was an attempt in the early 1720s to re-coin the currency.

And I mean, it's a long and complicated story, but essentially a sort of British, an entrepreneur, an ironmonger from the Midlands, used his contacts at court to get the contract. and this was all fixed by the English without any reference, even to the Anglo-Irish minority who were in place in power in Ireland. And this provoked great antagonism and Angan and Swift wrote a series of anonymous again pamphlets called the Drapier's letters, assailing this policy, and with remarkable success, actually, it's success. in sort of concentrating public outrage, and particularly the outrage of actually the property of classes,

and the measure was eventually withdrawn. And Swift became a kind of, because although it was anonymous, he was known to be the author. And he became as a public hero, and he rather liked that. And he rather liked the fact that a huge reward had been offered for anybody who grasped him up as the author, and nobody did. And he sort of rather suddenly fancied this new role, I think,

as an Irish patriot, whatever his speech. things about the Irish. Yes, absolutely. And particularly the fourth Travers letter, which is addressed to the whole people of Ireland, which is the most famous one, was revered by later generations of Irish nationalists, including Wolf Tone, the first Irish Republican. And that's what led to Swift's image appearing eventually on an Irish banknote. Ten pound note. It was a ten-pound note. It was

an ironic victory for somebody who had brought down a British currency. But of course, depends what you mean by nationalist really and nationalism is a 19th century term and it has all of these connotations of self-determination democracy and particularly cultural identity

and in Ireland, Irish nationalism became linked to the idea of reviving Gaelic culture, the Gaelic language and Gaelic sports. And that was something that Swift was completely opposed to because along with his other schemes for dealing with Irish poverty was a persistent idea that

the Irish language must be abolished because that was associated with the barbarous aspects of Native Irish culture. So when he addressed his work to the whole people of Ireland, he really meant what he referred to as the true English people of Ireland. That is the dominant class of Elizabethan or Jacobian or even Cromwellian settler descent, the sorts of people like him who worshipped in the Established Church and controlled the Irish Parliament. He had ferocious notions about language, though.

He wanted to freeze the English language, and so it stopped at precisely the position it was in when he, John Swift was writing, it must never be allowed to develop again, and he petitioned the queen for this to have. And he did publish a pamphlet on it. It's a very immodice proposal, that pamphlet. But let's just come back to this, Judith Hall. He's in Dublin. He is very, very bitter. Perhaps you can talk a bit more than that.

He is the, though, it's just two or three years after producing Gulliver's travels. So is he, is the Gulliver's travels aura doing anything for him? Is he more welcome? Is he more famous? I mean in a proper sense. I don't mean celebrity rubbish. I mean, is he regarded more highly

because he's produced this amazing book and therefore his word carries more weight and person to listen to. Yes, I think that's right. I think the, from 1720 onwards, Ireland is a major subject for him. He becomes passion involved in it. And it's passion involved in the sort of abject.

sense of himself. I don't want to psychoanalyze too much, but that kind of, it suits him in a way to attach himself to a country he hates, and then to have that country be his source of fame. Gulliver's Travels was a big success, a runaway success. And with a combination

of Gulliver's Travels, which is very Irish in its concerns, I mean, book four of Gulliver's Travels with the Huinims and the Yahoo's is really also about the Irish. His birthday is celebrated every year with bonfires up and down the country. People are having parties

every time it's with his birthday. And he complained about it. The bells are ringing. I can't get to sleep. It's driving me mad. But he loved it too. In 1730, he gets given the freedom of the city of Dublin

after the modest proposal. And of course, he thought this was far too late. He should have been given this in 1725. But, you know, at least he got it. Can I, I wonder if I could, sort of just go back to the thing you've provoked, try to provoke Ian with, I think it was much too polite to bat you down, as you say,

way, that the sense that a modest proposal might somehow, in a way, express what sort of swift, darkly thought. Yeah, I'm going to... Just a second, I was going to come back to that. You're in my mind. I think that it's worth talking about. Can I sort of... Can I go back to that then?

Because I think it's very important. Judith's talking about Gulliver's travels, which has in common with a modest proposal. This peculiar thing that not, I think, actually that Swift is saying what he really thinks. But the literary method of his satire, which he takes to a wonderful and disturbing extreme in all his great satires,

all of which were published anonymously or pseudonymously, and in all of which, what he does is he gives over an argument or in Gulliver's case, it's written by Gulliver, a whole account of a voyage or four voyages, to a sort of, to a person who's not him, who says all sorts of terrible things, but for all sorts of good reasons,

that there is always something sort of merciless about Swift's satires, even when they're mocking cruelty, they are themselves merciless, because they're these extraordinary negative creations. He wants to mock people who are sort of irreligious or whose Christianity is. I think you're making it, we're going around the house of there, because I think you're strange, but it was attacking what I was saying, which I'm very interested in,

for suggesting that inside the modest proposal, Swift might have been expressing some of his own ideas. Now, I think that's a proposition worth considering about this particular modest proposal. I've been reinforced in thinking of there's something in that by what Ian said, actually, about what Swift constantly said about the Irish poor, the way he thought about them,

the way he talked about, the way I dealt with them. It's worth having a bit of a talk about that, instead of just batting things back on the forward. No, no, but he's imagining. He was brilliant and imagining something terrible. He's impersonating the person who writes the pamphlet, fine. But you do that and you reveal yourself as well. You know that, John Bonner, better than anybody.

So he could be talking about himself as well as being the projector. Just a second. You've got to say, come back in a second. There are passages in the modest proposal in which, the way he describes the Irish, the Irish poor, they're begging, they're thieving, their wife beating, which are very similar to the way he describes them in his sermons. who stands up in his clerical garb, in his pulpit of a Sunday

and says, the Irish poor are beggars and thieves, they need to reform their vicious habits. So it's not miles away. But there's another point that I want to make, which is like that, which is that I think Swift also satirizes himself. I think his irony is so complex. It cuts in so many directions at once. He's also satirizing himself and people like him

who think that modest proposals can do any good. At the end of Gulliver's travels, he says, the Gulliver figure who's been reduced to the feeling that he'd rather be a horse than a human, says, I published this book six months ago, and it horrifies me, not one single person has reformed. So he's satirising the folly of thinking that people will ever stop being beggars and thieves. Ian, just go back to the dark Swift. Again, I mean, I think this is a particularly bad moment for Swift,

because throughout the 1720s, he had produced, quite a few pants, perhaps as many as two dozen dealing with economic affairs and recommending various solutions to Ireland's problems and he felt they hadn't been listened to. And Swift, I mean,

he wasn't a very, he didn't have much pity, but he wasn't above self-pity. And in 1729, the people come to him and they say, you know, isn't the draper going to make some kind of comment on the current situation? The corporation of weavers,

whom he had helped because he did some charitable, work, so to speak himself, they come to him and say, you know, won't you write something that will stimulate our industry at this time? And his position is, well, I've done all that already. You didn't listen.

So this is the logical conclusion. If you don't listen to me, this is what you get. But on the Dark Swift and this idea of Swift's misanthropy, I mean, in part, of course, that is a pose. And that's why we tolerate it, you know, as well as the humour. because what he thinks, he thinks that benevolent improvers are dishonest, that that's just an easy way out. And so misanthropy is a way out of appearing to be one of these naive do-gooder types,

who has all the solutions. The other point is, of course, if you look at the island of the time, I mean, Swift was an ex-officio member of the Foundling Hospital in Dublin. He knew all about infanticide. So, you know, the situation was dark. The parliament he defended. had passed or drawn up a bill in 1719 for the castration of Roman Catholic priests

an order of men set apart from other men by their celibacy and that's as black a joke as anything you can find in Swift I think. It's worth bearing in mind that it is deliciously funny. The passage that John read out earlier about fricasseed babies, I mean it's sickening but it's a hoot. And he has lovely descriptions of fat girls

who travel around in, and chairs all the time going to the theatre and if only they would get out and walk they would solve a lot of their problems. Can we just end this little episode at John Mullen by saying, Judy talked about the sermons where he

castigated the Irish poor. I mean what was that Christian in Swift? Well I think if you read his sermons, it's just one aspect of his sermons but if you read his sermons a lot of the time they are eloquent and orthodox defence of Anglicanism, and they are theologically quite astute, and if you read them, you'd say

Swift believed in God, he was an Orthodox Christian, and he saw his job as strengthening the belief of those sitting in the pews. But as always with Swift, you get the feeling too that rather than, unlike many of his contemporaries, particularly the dissenters he reviled and mocked. He believed, I think, that religion was there because of our weaknesses, not because of our strengths. And there's this sense that many of his acquaintances and friends had that may be, indeed, temperamentally, however orthodox and brilliantly orthodox he was when he was in the pulpit, temperamentally, religion was a defence for him against the void, against some sort of terror underneath it. Can we just turn to Judith Hall of the idea of pamphleteer

lack of censorship at the time, why at the end of the 17th century into the 18th century, it became the great age of pamphleteering, of unlicensed opinions going to, Voltaire said, came across and said this was the first modern society because of that. Because of the dropping of an act in the 1690s. Will you tell us?

Yeah, I think during the 17th century during the Civil War, people had got used to expressing their opinions and also cultural life had become very factionalised. There are so many splinter groups who are used to having their own voice. So pamphlets became a vehicle for that. The government kept trying to control them

but kept failing. They wanted to tax them, they wanted to censor them and so on, but they couldn't. Printing and the distribution of pamphlets became much better in the early 18th century. There were more printing presses around the country. There are distribution networks.

People were selling a variety of small, cheap. I mean, a couple of pence or up to sixpence. I think possibly the multiple appraisal cost six pence. These things were widely available. And they were discussed in coffee houses, in rooms and so on. So there's this real sense of factionalized, but very discursive, eloquent community. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

What I'm trying to get out, gentlemen, is this enormous eruption that happened at the end of the same, the lack of censorship, the growth of presses, there'd been presses at Oxford, Cambridge, and mainly in London, of course. But all over the Dublin started to have a press, north of England, we go, because of this lifting of the grip that the station has had on the law. And that led to it, what we would call, would you say it was a freedom of expression,

a freedom from Sanctia which was superior to anything, certainly we had before or even since? Well, arguably, it's an unprecedented thing in sort of human history that you've got, I mean, obviously you've had a print culture, you've had printing for a long time, but this lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 removes state control of publishing. And it also removes control of printing. Anybody who's got the capital and the audacity can set up a printing press. Perhaps eruption slightly wrong, but certainly a kind of a stream which becomes a river, which becomes a flood. And it's extraordinary freedom. I mean, arguably, greater freedom when we know. I mean, you can be incredibly rude about people. And whereas now try doing that to a celebrity, they will take you to court. Try saying things which aren't true about their private life, or even which are true but are shameful, and they will take you to court. In the early 18th century, there's very little regulation of that kind.

Ian McBowell. There still were some attempts to control print, of course, and these affected Swift because in 1720 his proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture to get people to wear Irish made clothes, that pamphlet led to the prosecution of the printer, Edward Waters. And Swift explained, I'm not sure how well attested this actually, as Swift explained that the judge sent the jury back nine times in order to get the right verdict. One of the draper's letters led to the prosecution of his next printer,

John Harding, who died whilst in prison, But what the government in Ireland found at that point was that they couldn't rely on juries to convict people in these cases of prosecution for seditious libel. And what you find is that for the first time governments, instead of trying to clamp down on public discussion, have to adapt to it. So after the 1720s, ministers field their own pampheteers, if you like, they have to enter public debate as well. Do you, Thawley, can you tell us, did the modest proposal work in its intended aim to elite? the poverty of the Irish people, to draw attention to it, to make people do things which would alleviate it. Well, clearly not, in that the Irish was still dying and emigrating in the hundreds

and thousands of many years afterwards. We've actually, we had a discussion beforehand. We're trying to work out what impact it did have. And apart from being much imitated, the title, A Modest Proposal, suddenly starts appearing after 1729 in many pamphlets. I can't think of an instance where this particular pamphlet had a direct, impact, unlike the draper's letters, which led to the ending of a government policy. I don't see how this had that kind of impact.

Don't you think in a way the pamphlet has a bit of the force of despair about it? I mean, it's almost swift saying, here's my last word on, I've tried doing all. And this is it. This is the logical extension of the idea that the landlords are consuming the people and that the Irish consume their own products. Reduct here at a sardom, eat your own babies. We've talked about the unleashing of a person. opinion because of the dropping of that bill or failure to re-enact it in 1695.

That period came to an end. Why did that come to an end? After many decades, that openness closed down and the doors were closed again or half-closed. Well, I mean, partly it's the death of certain personalities, Pope and Swift die in the 1740s within a year of each other. And that has an important effect. But I think also it's that you're referring earlier to Swift's sort of Toryism, Pope was more definitely a Tory than Swift.

And I think there's a strong sense that that satire comes out of the angry brilliance of these men who, to us, are representative of their cultures. But they see themselves as outsiders, as embattled figures, Swift in Ireland, but his friends like Pope in different ways because of their religion and their political views. And it's that sense that on the one hand they are linguistically. and in terms of their literary inheritance, absolutely the great men of their times, but in another way they're absolutely hostile to the way the country is going. It's politics, it's commerce.

The very commerce that produces all these pamphlets, Swift hates it, it's terrible, it's all madness. Ian McBride, why do you think the modus proposal still carries the power to shock? Well, I suppose in part, it's the detail with which Swift forces to examine our. our own relationship as human beings to other animals.

So, of course, it's not just about eating babies. It is, as we've already said, all the spin-off products of breeding babies as, you know, factory animals, skin for gloves and so on. And once again, the point that you mentioned at the beginning, which I think is the funniest of all, the fact that treating babies as animals bred up for eating will actually make husbands treat their ones. why it's better. Well, thank you very much, John Mullen, Julius Hawley and Ian McBride. Next week we were talking about the Brothers Grimm, their fairy stories and their work on language. Thanks very much for listening.

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