Devouring Posterity:A Modest Proposal, Empire, and Ireland's “Debt of the Nation”

Abstract

Scholars have rightly asserted that the cannibal motif of Jonathan Swift'sA Modest Proposalis the mechanism by which the author covertly addresses colonialist pillaging in Ireland. Less attention has been paid to an unresolved problem, that of the satire's audience. This article claims that its publication in Dublin at the height of the Irish parliamentary session of 1729 suggests that Anglo-Irish legislators were its target readers. If so, the figure of the cannibal may signify how national debt and the mortgaging of future public revenues needed to amortize that debt metaphorically devoured the posterity of the colonized Irish natives. Given that the famine conditions of 1729 had reduced revenues and produced a crisis in paying Ireland's “debt of the nation,” the satire's calendar for the harvesting and slaughtering of Ireland's babies could be taken as mimicry of the debates over how to raise new taxes and schedule their collection and expenditure.