Page 147 - Gullivers

peasantry should eat their children) is based on a seemingly innocent maxim
- the assertion made by Temple in his Essay upon the Advancement of Trade in Ireland (1673) that ‘the true and natural ground of trade and riches is, number of people in proportion to the compass of the ground they inhabit...’ Swist included the abbreviated form of this maxim in his later publication of 1765, Maxims Controlled in Ireland, the penultimate entry of which is ‘that people are the riches of a nation’. In A Modest Proposal Swist takes this idea – that the Irish poor should eat their own children - to its seemingly logical conclusion – one that renders it wholly unpalatable and immoral. Likewise, the power
at the heart of The Drapier’s Letters lies in Swist’s returning to the English
the maxim of equality of all subjects of the realm, and the maxim of the loyalty of all subjects and their duty to protect this realm - one he invokes both to avoid the charge of treason and to defeat the dreaded Wood’s halfpence, the debased coinage destined, in his mind, to bankrupt the country. (In 1724 an English businessman, Wood was granted a patent to provide new copper coins for Ireland at an enormous personal profit but posing a serious threat to the nation’s gold and silver reserves. Through The Drapier’s Letters, published anonymously, Swist mobilised a powerful opposition in Ireland and the plan was dropped.)
The employment of the maxim as a starting point of investigation and analysis is the central literary strategy in all of Swist’s Anglo-Irish classics. Around it he builds a series of clever assaults leading to a gradual disintegration of good sense, all delivered in an energetic prose, ‘alive and breathing’ as he
felt history and morality should be, always aware of the social complexities of discourse, patently enjoying the discontinuities and the anarchy he was creating in the process. While some of his English readers believed A Modest Proposal
to be sincere (a fact that amused Swist and confirmed his worst suspicions, as
it were) this remains an illuminating satire which owes its success to Swist’s inventive literary skills.
VII. The Influence of Jonathan Swist on Anglo-Irish Writing 141