Survey of English Literature I

Survey of English Literature I

Instructions/Descriptions

Survey of English Literature I

English 243: Survey of English Literature I

Lesson: A Modest Proposal

Objectives:

• to introduce Eighteenth Century English Literature, particularly Jonathan Swift.
• to stimulate enjoyment of literary works of the period.
• to encourage an appreciation of the works in relationship to the cultures that produced them.
• to develop the ability to read literary texts for meaning, structure, and style.
• to develop critical reading, writing, and thinking skills through the analysis of literary works.

Jonathan Swift

Here is a overly brief overview of Swift’s life and works:

Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Protestant Anglo-Irish parents: his ancestors had been Royalists, and all his life he would be a High-Churchman. His father, also Jonathan, died a few months before he was born, upon which his mother, Abigail, returned to England, leaving her son behind, in the care of relatives. In 1673, at the age of six, Swift began his education at Kilkenny Grammar School, which was, at the time, the best in Ireland. Between 1682 and 1686 he attended, and graduated from, Trinity College in Dublin, though he was not, apparently, an exemplary student. In 1688 William of Orange invaded England, initiating the Glorious Revolution: with Dublin in political turmoil, Trinity College was closed, and an ambitious Swift took the opportunity to go to England, where he hoped to gain preferment in the Anglican Church. In England, in 1689, he became secretary to Sir William Temple, a diplomat and man of letters, at Moor Park in Surrey.

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Between 1696 and 1699 Swift composed most of his first great work, A Tale of a Tub, a prose satire on the religious extremes represented by Roman Catholicism and Calvinism, and in 1697 he wrote The Battle of the Books, a satire defending Temple’s conservative but beseiged position in the contemporary literary controversy as to whether the works of the “Ancients” — the great authors of classical antiquity — were to be preferred to those of the “Moderns.”

In 1701 Swift was awarded a D. D. from Dublin University, and published his first political pamphlet, supporting the Whigs against the Tories. 1704 saw the anonymous publication of A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.

In 1720 he began work upon Gulliver’s Travels, intended, as he says in a letter to Pope, “to vex the world, not to divert it.” In 1726 he visited England once again, and stayed with Pope at Twickenham: in the same year Gulliver’s Travels was published. Swift’s final trip to England took place in 1727. Between 1727 and 1736 publication of five volumes of Swift-Pope Miscellanies. In 1729 A Modest Proposal was published.

Swift died on October 19, 1745.

A Modest Proposal

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Swift’s motives for writing A Modest Proposal, which appeared in 1729, were complex. He felt, for his own part, that he had been exiled to Ireland when he would have much preferred to have been in England, and his personal sense of the wrongs he had received at the hands of the English only intensified the anger he felt at the way England mistreated Ireland.

He lived in an Ireland which was a colony, politically, militarily, and economically dependent upon England. It was manifestly in England’s interest to keep things as they were: a weak Ireland could not threaten England, and the measures which kept it weak were profitable for the English. As a result Ireland was a desperately poor country, overpopulated, full, as Swift said, of beggars, wracked periodically by famine, heavily taxed, and with no say at all in its own affairs. England controlled the Irish legislature. English absentee landlords owned most of the land which was worth owning. Irish manufactories were deliberately crippled so that they could not compete with those in England. Swift was enraged at the passivity of the Irish people, who had become so habituated to the situation that they seemed incapable of making any effort to change it. The Irish Parliament ignored numerous proposals which Swift made in earnest — proposals to tax absentee landlords, to encourage Irish industries, to improve the land, agricultural techniques, and the quality of manufactured goods — which would have begun to rectify things. A Modest Proposal, then, is at once a disgusted parody of Swift’s own serious proposals, as well as those of less disinterested “projectors,” and a savage indictment both of the exploitive English and of the exploited Irish. Rhetorically, it is enormously sophisticated; requiring that we accept and reject its central premise at one and the same time.

Behind the “Modest Proposer,” that is, stands an enraged and sardonic Swift, asking both sides whether the whole matter is not merely a question of degree; a question of the extent to which a human being — the manipulator or the manipulated — can be dehumanized. Once the process of dehumanization gets underway, as it obviously is, in a country in which no one — not even the unfortunates themselves — seems to mind or object to the fact that tens of thousands of human beings starve to death each year, where can one calmly, sanely, and logically draw the line and say thus far and no farther? A Modest Proposal is a manifestation of Swift’s sense of anger and frustration, and as such it is merely the most savage, the most brutal, the most heavily ironic, of the numerous tracts which he produced during the early eighteenth century in an attempt to shame England and to shock Ireland out of its lethargic state. It is a ghastly masterpiece, cunningly devised, horribly plausible, deviously manipulative: it remains for the reader to come to terms with it, to comprehend it, and to determine the extent to which, oddly enough, it might be relevant in our own world.

Please read A Modest Proposal.

• For a GoogleDocs printable version, click here.
• For access to other versions, including Kindle and HTML, click here.
• For an “audio” version, including MP3 and Apple iTunes, click here.

This lesson was created by Northern Virginia Community College English faculty and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License unless otherwise stated (see below). Distribution and photocopies are allowed for educational purposes.

Attributions

Jonathan Swift’s biography is a partial copy of a biography written by David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College, for VictorianWeb.org, a site that permits the use of the text and images posted for scholarly or educational purposes as long as the user credits the site (and author if applicable) by name.

The introduction to A Modest Proposal is a partial copy of an online text written by David Cody, Associate Professor of English, Hartwick College, for VictorianWeb.org, a site that permits the use of the text and images posted for scholarly or educational purposes as long as the user credits the site (and author if applicable) by name.

The definition of “Satire” was provided by Shmoop. This site provides a collection of free resources for students and teachers.

“A Modest Proposal” Lesson –

Survey of English Literature I

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