CHAPTER
4
“Money, the Great Divider of the World, has, by a strange Revolution, been the great Uniter of a Most divided People”
From Minting to Printing in The Drapier’s Letters
Swift’s skepticism of British publications reflected his belief that the book trade was deeply intertwined with Enlightenment discourse, and his call in 1724–1725 for a boycott of a different medium of communication and exchange—currency—linked print to money in an epistemology that integrated political, fiscal, and linguistic components of sovereignty. The needs of the Monti after the collapse of the investment bubble provoked his awareness of the interrelationship of these seemingly distinct categories of knowledge, a synthesis that could be regarded as the spark of an interdisciplinary Irish Enlightenment. The Drapier’s Letters, published in 1724 and 1725, was a series of pamphlets written in reaction to the crown’s move to introduce copper halfpence into Ireland via a minting patent granted to William Wood.1 The pamphlets concerning Wood’s halfpence, however, were not so much about the coin as a material object as about what the constitutionally suspect way it was introduced said about Ireland’s legal standing within the three kingdoms. Swift understood that in the post–South Sea Bubble era, the definition of what constituted “real” money had become more slippery. Consequently, his overt concern about the type, weight, or fineness of the metal in the copper halfpence may have been a pretext for a more subtle message: that the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a currency could shape public opinion into a national form. He exploits a coinage crisis “to generate anticolonial intellectual coin,” cultivating a more universal Irish public sphere that would be useful not only for the political defense of the Irish Parliament’s revenue authority but also for the nationalization of the Irish book trade, the cause and effect of that sovereignty.2 Thus, his discourse on political economy migrates from minting to printing as the source of value, indicating that coins and words were homologous signifiers of sovereignty to the extent that “it would be otiose to quibble about the nice issue of which is the ‘base’ and which the ‘superstructure,’ ” writing or coin.3 The term “ware,” which could include both currency and written materials in this period, functions in the Drapier’s Letters to signal this homology and to mark this migration in a manner that would have been apparent to Dublin book craftsmen.
Swift, in the persona of a Dublin drapier (textile merchant), used the Letters to help expand Anglo-Irish identity, initially constructed in A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture and the bank satires, into a broader, more universally Irish subjectivity. The Letters’ consequent hybridity—their attempt to mix Ireland’s diverse identities into a whole—however, should be taken as an attempt to help the Monti’s interest appear to be the same as that of the Dublin merchant community and other domestic constituencies. As many critics have contended, there is evidence that Swift was recruited by prominent members of the Protestant Interest to write these letters, which suggests, in this context, that what was at stake were the revenues feeding the creditors to the Debt of the Nation.4 The reason that the Letters should be read skeptically is that, while the founding of the Monti and its creation of a private public of government creditors had formed the economic basis for an autonomous provincial identity, the migrations of its members and their cash undermined their patriotic claims to be acting in the interest of Ireland’s population as a whole. There were many complaints from Swift and members of the Irish Parliament about absentee landlords among them, who lived in London and elsewhere, taking with them currency and capital that would otherwise have been reinvested in the domestic economy. Yet, the unanimous concern of the Anglo-Irish landed class and churchmen about the payments of their rents, as the Earl of Abercorn documented in his petition for the Bank of Ireland charter, suggests that these complaints were little more than apologetics. Their loyalty to British sterling, rather, was an expression of their regard for their English sovereign; and despite advocacy for an Irish mint by some of their writers, their appetites demanded that sterling be yielded from their tenants in ever-increasing amounts. The Wood’s halfpence, intended to resolve Ireland’s chronic shortage of smaller denomination coins by introducing debased copper tokens in their place, threatened the Monti’s supply of this ultimate sign of Englishness to the extent that the members paradoxically had to invent a more universal “Irishness” to obtain this token of Englishness. The Drapier’s Letters were the vehicle for this task, manufacturing a broader patriotic public convinced that the halfpence initiative would be bad for them. As such, this corpus of work is one of the better examples of how a small circle can engineer public opinion in such a way as to enlist a vast majority to a cause not necessarily in their interests. The manifest gap between the economic base and the ideology of this new imagined community suggests that colonial contexts present extraordinary opportunities to examine the use of print culture to manufacture consent. Further, the Letters, if taken as texts commissioned by the Monti, demonstrate how a literary market can emerge as a parasite on the national public formed by political intervention in available media.
The Drapier’s Letters, like the bank satires before them, exploited the homologies of money, power, and print to both constitute value in the absence of intrinsically valuable currency and ensure that what remained of the latter gravitated toward the Monti. Their protest against the copper pennies was therefore also a nearly treasonous assertion of Ireland’s sovereignty vis-à-vis Britain. Its subtext of sterling functioned to render the legal tender as much cultural as it was political and economic, making it not only the general equivalent but also the final ground for the epistemology that governed identity in the Anglophone Atlantic. Because sterling presented both mobile private property and the fruits of immobile landed property in the Anglo-Irish mind, it was an expression of the certainty which the traditional concept of the state had provided.
The Wood’s halfpence affair thus became a referendum on the relationship among currency, sovereignty, and identity; and it therefore marks, more strongly than the Bank of Ireland affair of 1721, the moment when the seeds of colonial nationalism were forged out of a resistance to the centralizing societal modernization that empire was consolidating over the course of the eighteenth century. This “forging” of identity matched the essential “forgery” that was the Drapier’s Letters—the Letters were a fiction about a copper currency that the Anglo-Irish regarded as counterfeit and “fictional”—yet the Letters Nonetheless attained legitimacy for this national identity through their success in mobilizing the population. Examining this controversy and its impact on Irish political economy may help explain how the Anglo-Irish category of the literary emerged as the product of a discourse on currency.
I
Wood’s halfpence were threatening to the Monti in two ways. The first was the base coin’s challenge to members’ private incomes from the rent of land, for if landlords began to receive rent payments in the halfpence, the value of their leased land would decrease dramatically. For example, the speaker of the Irish Parliament would need “Two Hundred and Fifty Horses” to transport the halfpence that would be used to pay just a half-year’s worth of his “Sixteen Thousand Pounds” in annual rents (10:7). Swift tells his readers that absentee Anglo-Irish landlords living in London would be most affected and offended by the inferior coinage: “do you think those who live in England upon Irish Estates, will be content to take an Eighth or a Tenth Part, by being paid in Wood’s Dross?” (10:22). Second, the base coin would cut into landed gentlemen’s income from public sources because it would undermine the value of Ireland’s revenue and decimate the all-important interest payments on the Debt of the Nation. Because of this problem, “the Officers of the King’s Revenue… had already given Orders to all the inferior Officers not to receive any of his [Wood’s] Coin” (10:44), not least because they were “obliged by Act of Parliament, to take nothing but Gold and Silver in Payment” of taxes (10:46). These tax officials were paid out of the revenues that they collected, and they knew that they would “be Losers of Two Thirds in their Salaries or Pay” if they accepted Wood’s money in payments—a strong disincentive that ramified into all aspects of tax-supported civil service and military employment (10:47). Because money was “neither Whig nor Tory, neither of Town nor Country Party” (10:59), even “the People sent over hither from England, to fill up… Vacancies, Ecclesiastical, Civil and Military” were all opposed to the new halfpence (10:61). The Drapier’s Letters, consequently, can be regarded as a media campaign engineered by the landed class and the government to protect their profits. A close reading of the Wood’s halfpence controversy, however, reveals that this overt concern for the income consequences of accepting the halfpence is only part of the drapier’s message; its more covert argument concerns the capability and profitability of sustaining future media campaigns— the health of the book trade—due to the halfpence’s effects on the economy. This argument is conducted subtly by the drapier “in the Terms of his own Trade,” the language of textile production, a code for the jargon of those employed in the printing industry (10:83). In these letters, the narrative persona of the drapier, a dealer in cloth, can be regarded as a figure for a bookseller.
The term “ware,” already meaning both coin and cloth in the Drapier’s Letters’ literal text, underwrites this metaphorical figuration in its capacity to also signify manuscripts, printed pages, and other raw materials for bookmaking. “Ware” is mentioned no fewer than twelve times in the seven letters to identify Wood’s profession and the commodities in which he deals. He is said to be a “Hardware Dealer” (10:4), a “Hard-Ware-Man” (10:16, 10:18, 10:23, 10:29, 10:105, 10:119), and one whose base copper pennies are “merchantable Ware” (10:135) that is “so bad” (10:136) that the Anglo-Irish should have “nothing to do” (10:57) with the “Cart-Loads” of it (10:46). In the eighteenth century, it would not be unusual to refer to any commodities as “wares,” and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a drapier, as a textile merchant, would certainly use the term to describe the cloth in which he dealt (OED “ware, n.3.” Def. 3b). “Hardware,” internal evidence suggests, clearly signifies Wood’s halfpence as well.
The word has a further, metaphorical meaning in the Letters, however, because it was also used in contemporary documents to connote texts. For example, the narrator of A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet speaks of Grub Street as “a Market for Small-Ware in WIT,” using italics to lend emphasis to the fact that he is describing writing (9:341). Further, Lisa Maruca has documented several cases in which literature was referred to as ware. She cites the Monthly Review of 1766, which says that “retailers of every kind of ware aspire to be the original manufacturer and particularly in literature,” and reveals that a printer’s dictionary of 1753 referred to “printed sheets” as “this ware” before they become bound in books.5 Using this definition, she describes manuscripts as “ware like any other,” discusses satires as potentially “libelous wares,” and writes of “hawkers” of pamphlets “who strolled the city crying their printed wares.”6 In short, this etymology, particularly in this context, suggests that though Swift was certainly describing Wood’s halfpence with this word, “Hard-ware” was also referring to British books that were being imported into Ireland. The Drapier’s Letters, accordingly, may be taken as a call to boycott both Wood’s halfpence and London presses, an act that would simultaneously create a market for Dublin-printed wares like the Letters and a distinctly Irish imagined community. These works, via the persona of the drapier, revisit the text/textile homology with which Swift had been working since at least 1720, yet they extend it to encompass currency.
The first of the Drapier’s Letters, A Letter to the Shop-Keepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and Common-People of Ireland, employs the weaving/writing metaphor, from the outset referencing A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, describing it as “a little Book” about the plight of “WEAVERS” that was published “ABOUT four Years ago” (10:3). Given his use of capital letters in his discussion of a “POOR PRINTER” who was found “GUILTY” by a “JURY” consisting partly of “WEAVERS,” Swift can be said to be announcing on the first page his intention to exploit that metaphor (10:3). He refers to the copper halfpence—“base metal”—as “TRASH,” a word that, given its uses in his critique of politeness to signify bad literature, serves as a transitive term mediating the homologous relationship between imported books and debased coin that he is constructing (10:4). The halfpence, Swift implies, are the visible sign of a much larger, invisible crisis of general equivalence and commensurability that Ireland is experiencing due to its lack of sovereignty’s legal, textual, and monetary components. “Trash”—a few pages later revised to “Filthy Trash” (10:11)—therefore imputes to false coin not only a disturbance in monetary exchange but also a much larger crisis in the political and cultural processes, including those associated with the print industry, which produced the “trash.” Accordingly, when the narrator, the drapier, says that he has “a pretty good Shop of Irish Stuffs and Silks,” Swift is borrowing from A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture to refer to a bookstore specializing in domestically produced Irish publications. He is implying that the most important “Shopkeepers” that he is addressing in this letter are booksellers and others in the publishing trade, whom he again asks to support the fledgling Irish print industry (10:7). The fact that he alternates between referring to the halfpence as “Brass” (metal associated with counterfeit coin) and “Lumber” (pulp associated both with the minter’s name—Wood—and with inferior paper products, including books, imported from Britain) further highlights the minting/printing homology that this letter is presenting (10:7).
The drapier’s second, third, and fourth letters, A Letter to Mr. Harding the Printer, Some Observations Upon a Paper, and A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland, play upon this homology via a metadiscourse on the sovereign right to produce coin. A Letter to Mr. Harding begins and ends by calling attention to that homology, not metaphorically, but with a literal description of a minter as a writer. By reference to a paragraph by William Wood published in Harding’s newspaper, the drapier observes, “Wood is generally his own News-Writer” and that his printed words, like the minted halfpence, are “an Imposition upon the Publick” (10:15). This direct, rather than implied, connection between minting and printing is exploited further, in a comparison of the quality of Wood’s writing to the quality of his coin: “this Publick Enemy of ours, not satisfied to Ruin us with his Trash, takes every Occasion to treat this Kingdom with the utmost Contempt” (10:15). Wood’s writing lacks civility just as the metal of his coin lacks refinement. Ending the letter by saying that Harding is “much to blame” for giving Wood a public forum in his newspaper, the drapier requests that Harding publish more copies of the Letters instead, and Swift invents a domestic demand for them: “Several Hundred Persons have enquired at your House, for my Letter to the Shop-keepers, these direct links between Dublin’s print industry and the problem of currency.
The third letter, Some Observations, continues in this vein via a discourse on the origins of a document entitled A Report of the Committee of the Lords of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council in England, relating to Mr. Wood’s Half-pence and Farthings. It seems to have been reprinted in Dublin from an edition published in “the London Journal, or some other Print of no Authority or Consequence” (10:27). The drapier refers to the document as “a Contrivance to Fright us; or a Project of some Printer, who hath a Mind to make a Penny by publishing something upon a Subject, which now employs all our Thoughts in this Kingdom” (10:27). Swift once again calls attention to the homology between writing and coining by suggesting that any paper published on the Wood’s halfpence controversy is as good as money to printing houses and booksellers on either side of the Irish Sea. He implies that Wood also, in addition to the news item in Harding’s paper, authored A Report of the Committee of Lords, and insinuates that “the Committee had a greater Concern for his Credit and private Emolument” than for Ireland’s institutions of government. Indeed, writes the drapier, the report has “the Turn and Air” of a pamphlet pitting Wood against those institutions (10:27). Swift suggests that the report is tantamount to an illegal printing because it was published without the permission of the committee in question and before the government and privy council of Ireland had received it (10:28).
A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland even goes so far as to claim that “Wood prescribes to the News-Mongers in London, what they are to write,” further linking minting and printing by saying that Wood works in both professions in England, where he has authority that he does not yet have in Ireland, due to the successful boycotting of his coins. The drapier here discusses a Dublin reprint of one of Wood’s London articles as something produced by “some obscure Printer, (and certainly with a bad Design)” (10:53). The phrase “bad Design,” in this passage, denigrates not only the intentions of the publication, which threatens to divide the population because of its anti-Catholicism, but also the style of both the publication and Wood’s coining, smearing Wood and those printers who collaborate with him. But, he writes, “If the Pamphlets published at London by Wood and his Journeymen, in Defence of his Cause, were Reprinted here, they would convince you of his wicked Design, more than all I shall ever be able to say” (10:63). He highlights the distinction between himself as working in the public interest and writers for Wood as working in the private interest, referring to the latter as “Hirelings” (10:63, 10:66). Further, he says that Wood so censors the English public sphere “that no London Printer dare publish any Paper written in Favour of Ireland“ lest they offend him by circulating opinions unfavorable to his project (10:64). The drapier smears Wood’s writing style and personal manners by reference to his mint work, claiming that both savour “too much of the Kettle and the Furnace; and came entirely out of Wood’s Forge” (10:67). The term “forge” functions to link the production of metal with the production of counterfeits, suggesting that Wood’s coin is a forgery and that his words are fiction.
Because this covert discourse on the metaphorical coining of words by printing presses relies on the literal coining of money in mints, the Letters’ overt discussion of the legal relationship of minting to issues of sovereignty is central to the effectiveness of this strategy of homogenizing coining and printing. When the drapier calls attention in the second letter to Ireland’s former “Liberty of Coining for our selves” (10:16), he simultaneously invokes A Proposal for the Universal Use of Manufacture’s plea for “the liberty of spinning and weaving” wool and publications, extending it to encompass currency. In questioning whether the king’s outsourcing of minting to private sources is legal, he asserts the right of Ireland’s inhabitants to refuse Wood’s halfpence. Doing so provides him with the opportunity to discuss not only the history of coining in Ireland but also traditional, medieval, notions of the sovereign’s responsibilities in the fiscal arena. John Harding was prosecuted for printing the fourth letter, an indication that Swift, by calling attention to this relationship too subversively, crossed the line, actually infringed on the territory of the monarch by advocating for Irish independence in this arena too explicitly. Because the pattern of the Drapier’s Letters is to migrate from a discourse on minting towards one on printing, his discussion of the right to coin brings the discourse back full circle, suggesting that publishing can be Ireland’s medium of coining.
When Swift spoke of Ireland’s former liberty to mint for its own territory, he was referring to a right that it had had throughout the Middle Ages but which had been eliminated in 1506. Ireland had continual problems maintaining an adequate supply of coin in the early modern period because it was deprived of this central prerogative of government, one that would have enabled the kingdom to regulate its economy for its own purposes. Because the English monarch regularly drew coinage out of Ireland in the form of rent to the tune of £20,000, he or she traditionally provided a subvention to the Irish Exchequer to keep the economy it managed prosperous.7 During Charles I’s financial difficulties in the 1630s, the king reversed this subvention; the lord lieutenant of Ireland insisted that, in the exceptional circumstances of the king’s fiscal emergency, Ireland should contribute to the English Exchequer.8 Further, Charles I proclaimed that sterling would be Ireland’s official currency in order to make this reversal of currency flows meaningful for the English economy.9 In the eighteenth century, Ireland lacked circulating coin primarily because it had no means of encouraging its traders to bring gold and silver back to Ireland in exchange for their exports instead of imported commodities. If there had been an Irish mint, they could have taken any foreign bullion and coins they received for their exports and converted them into sterling that could be used in domestic commerce.10 In these circumstances, foreign commodities like English books served as a form of commodity money that merchants received in exchange for the Irish goods they exported. In light of this history, the wool trade explored in A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture looks even more like a metaphor for the book trade, for if wool was Ireland’s main export, the problematic imported products can be seen as “counterfeit” English publications received in lieu of coin.
Swift’s strategy in arguing against the halfpence, given the history of minting for Ireland, is threefold. First, he claimed that the halfpence were compromised because they were being coined by a private minter, not by the king’s mint. Second, he complained that the halfpence being coined were base, mixed with more inferior metals than copper, which recalls earlier impositions by arbitrary monarchs incapable of circulating coin without the use of force. Third, he contended, by reference to precedents, that the coins were minted outside of Ireland, which was related to the fact that they had been produced without the consent of the Irish Parliament. All three of these strategies, though they revisited a more medieval understanding of minting’s role in sovereignty, attempted to assert the more modern and democratic idea that the Irish Parliament should have had some say in whether Wood’s halfpence were to be disseminated in Ireland.
In the first argument, the question of the extent of the king’s power to mint money for Ireland and England dominates the second, third, and fourth letters. The drapier stipulates that the monarch so clearly has the sole “Prerogative of coining Copper for Ireland and for England” that it is “not the present Question” being debated (10:34). As Jotham Parsons has argued, this prerogative was so ingrained in Western thinking that it went without saying throughout the early modern period and well into the eighteenth century, partly because it was regarded also as the sovereign’s obligation.11 The problem that Swift was confronting was not the prerogative itself but the twofold question of whether the monarch could privatize that right and compel subjects to take privately minted coins in payment. For example, a passage in Some Observations says that the drapier does not think that “the King can by Law Declare any thing to be current Money,” though “the King hath a Prerogative” to outsource coining (10:37). Countering the latter claim, the drapier objects to the notion “that a King of England may, at any Time, coin Copper Money for Ireland; and oblige his Subjects here to take a piece of Copper under the Value of half a Farthing, for half a Crown, as was practiced by the late King James; and even without that arbitrary Prince’s Excuse, from the Necessity and Exigences of his Affairs” (10:39). James II had indeed coined base money for Ireland, to pay for troops during the Jacobite War of 1689–1691 when he was defending his right to the throne of the three kingdoms against William III of Orange. By invoking this historical precedent, Swift exclaimed that the imposition of coin by an English monarch without consulting the people of Ireland was “derogatory” and “evasive” of the “Liberties, or Privileges of the Subjects of Ireland” (10:39). The first letter had cited ancient law that ordained “that no King of this Realm should Change, or Impair the Money, or make any other Money than of Gold or Silver without the Assent of all the Counties, that is, as my Lord Coke says, without the Assent of Parliament” (10:9). Further, Swift claimed in the fourth letter that “compelling the Subject to take any Coin, which is not Sterling, is no Part of the King’s Prerogative” (10:55), further reminding his Irish readers that they are permitted under the law to refuse Wood’s coins.
In the second argument against the halfpence, Swift conveyed that the quality of Wood’s coinage, not just the fact that it was not sterling, was even more derogatory to the Irish people. The terms “Brass” and “Brass Coin”—references to the base metals intermixed with the copper of Wood’s halfpence that recalled the coinages of James II—are used repeatedly throughout the Drapier’s Letters to signify that the coins are not even copper. This epithet compares Wood’s halfpence with that earlier, debased coinage of a monarch considered arbitrary and failed, who could not get his coin to circulate and thus lost the right to be king (10:19). Wood “certainly produced the worst Patterns [of coins] he could find; such as were coined in small Numbers by Permissions to private men, as Butchers Half-pence, Black-Dogs, and the like; or, perhaps, the small St. Patrick’s Coin which passeth now for a Farthing” (10:33). Even those coins, the drapier argues, were heavier and of a “better Metal” than what Wood has produced (10:33). Further, he claims that the coin is unworthy of being stamped with the king’s face (10:21, 10:137).
This observation concerning debasement leads to his third argument—that even if outsourcing minting has been proven to be legal, past royal patents granting that right had stipulated that the coin at least be subject to Irish legal authority by being produced at private mints in Ireland. The seventeenth-century coinage of John Knox, for example, had required the minter to “be obliged to receive his Half-pence back, and pay Gold or Silver in Exchange for them” (10:30), language that Wood’s patent did not contain. In 1694 and again in 1698, an Irish minter named Roger Moor was forced to stop production because too many people had come to him to redeem his copper halfpence for gold and silver (10:30). Swift argued that, even if these earlier private minting contracts provided a precedent for Wood’s patent, their coinage was better and of more certain legal authority than his. Further, the fourth letter disputes the legal basis for Wood’s contract via a discussion of the processes by which the Knox and Moor patents were approved. These previous patents had been “passed under the great Seal of Ireland, by References to Ireland; the Copper to be coined in Ireland,” whereas “Wood’s Patent was made under the great Seal of England, the Brass coined in England, not the least Reference made to Ireland ” (10:56). In short, the drapier says, the coinage has not obtained the consent of the Irish people or their representatives and “all Government without the Consent of the Governed, is the very Definition of Slavery” (10:63).
All three of these argumentative strategies attempt to attribute hubris to Wood; he is setting himself up as a king by claiming powers of minting that were not only not specified in his contract but would be considered illegal even if they were. Swift called Wood a “little impudent Hard-ware-Man” and a “diminutive, insignificant Mechanick,” but naming him a “little Arbitrary Mock-Monarch” most thoroughly encompassed his infringements upon the rights of Irish subjects and perhaps the king himself (10:18–19). For this reason, the Irish should be “ashamed” to have to tell foreigners that the “Image and Superscription” on the halfpence is that of George I, when their caesar, in this case, is really William Wood (10:21). From the perspective of the drapier, a David defending the true sovereign, Wood is the “uncircumcised Philistine” Goliath, who, in a chainmail coat and helmet made of “five Thousand Shekles of BRASS,” has attempted a breach of Ireland’s sovereignty (10:49).
The drapier’s fifth, six, and seventh letters—A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Molesworth, A Letter to the Lord Chancellor Middleton, and An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament—react to the prosecution of the printer of the fourth letter and attempt to “keep up that spirit raised against this destructive Coin of Mr. Wood ” (10:106). John Harding had been arrested for printing two passages of A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland: its discussion of the King’s answer to the Irish House of Lords’ letter concerning Wood’s patent and its discourse on whether Ireland was an unequal kingdom dependent on England’s institutions of government. The latter item was taken as inciting rebellion (10:69–70, 10:84, 10:xviii). In the course of legal proceedings, a Dublin grand jury refused to indict Harding, which led to a contentious debate over whether a judge could legally dismiss a grand jury in such circumstances (10:73). Further, no witnesses came forward naming the author of the Drapier’s Letters, a fact regarded as a gesture of the drapier’s success in generating patriotic Irish public opinion (10:81, 10:xix–xxiii). The controversy surrounding the fourth letter was, in essence, an authentication crisis in which initially the drapier was considered by legal authorities to be an illegitimate, counterfeit public voice, but his victory in the case constructed a new form of Anglo-Irish political legitimacy out of that opinion. Consequentially, the three letters that followed A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland were “written by one who knows that his cause is almost won” (10:xxiv).
A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Molesworth reads as further incitement of the Dublin book trade to keep publishing tracts condemning Wood’s halfpence and can be taken as a key to the Letters that reveals the meaning of the metaphors governing the weaving/writing trope. It first apologizes to printers, self-effacingly saying that “as you deal in the most worthless Kind of trash, the Penny Productions of penniless Scriblers; so you often venture your Liberty, and sometimes your Lives, for the Purchase of half a Crown” (10:79). The drapier complains that because the Dublin press is under “so strict an Inspection” due to the fourth letter, printers ignorant of the legal content of such writings often are “punished for other Men’s Actions” (10:79). As a consequence, he feels compelled to reveal his identity via an autobiographical passage in which he claims authorship of A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture. He explains to Molesworth that in 1720, he was the one who took him into his shop and showed him “a Piece of black and white Stuff, just sent from the Dyer; which you were pleased to approve of,” signaling not only that the textile “stuff ” was the textual earlier pamphlet, but that it had received the sanction of the Anglo-Irish nobility (10:82). He recounts how he wrote the pamphlet against those who argued that “the People of England would be offended, if our Manufactures were brought to equal theirs,” further indicating that his discussion of the wool trade was also a metaphor for the creation of a domestic Irish print industry (10:82). He describes the Letter to the Shopkeepers—the first letter— as a continuation of the 1720 pamphlet geared towards “the lower and poorer Sort of People” who wanted “a plain, strong, coarse Stuff, to defend them” against British publications, which are referred to as “cold Easterly Winds” (10:82). The “second and a third Kind of Stuffs”—A Letter to Mr. Harding and Some Observations—were “for the Gentry” (10:83). But the “fourth Piece”—A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland —was fit for “the best Lord or Judge of the Land” (10:83). However, those nobility who wore it (read it) felt a Shuddering in the Limbs and had thrown it off in a Rage; cursing to Hell the poor Drapier, who invented it” (10:83). As a consequence, said the drapier, he had resolved “never to work for Persons of Quality again,” except for Molesworth and “a very few more” (10:83). Because, however, he gave “the whole Profit” of these tracts to “the Dyers and Pressers”—the skilled print trademen, commoners of the kind that made up a city’s juries—he is protected from both the nobility’s wrath and that of the British (10:83). The drapier refers to his current letter as a “Piece of Stuff ” that is “made only from the Shreds and Remnants of the Wool employed in the Former” but that will only be good enough to distribute to Molesworth’s tenants (10:83). Finally, he calls upon “the Makers of Songs and Ballads” to continue the boycott, expanding the print campaign into another medium (10:93).
A Letter to the Lord Chancellor Middleton is the only one of the letters to be signed by Swift as himself, yet it Nonetheless ranks as one of the Drapier’s Letters because it helped maintain the boycott of Wood’s halfpence. In it Swift says that he was “offering new Arguments, or enforcing old ones, to refresh the Memory of my Fellow Subjects, and keep up that good Spirit raised among them” by the drapier (10:100). It encourages the further dissemination of patriotic opinion by saying that “it is every Man’s Duty, not only to refuse this Coin himself, but as far as in him lyes, to persuade others to do the like” (10:100). Further capitalizing on his victory in the aborted prosecution of the printer and writer of the fourth letter, it links “foreign” opinion and bad coinage to England and, by doing so, builds a conception of faithful Irish public opinion as equaling sound coinage. The letter says that to advocate against the half-pence is not seditious because the letters claimed to be defending George I and his ministers, but it intimates that the letters may have exploited an already existing rivalry between the Irish and the English (10:103). Defending press freedom in Ireland, it claims that the controversy over Wood’s halfpence would be regarded as normal in London, where Parliament is “very reserved in limiting the Press” and where it is customary for legislative disputes to be handled in pamphlets (10:107). He says that if Wood’s halfpence were imposed upon the English, “many Drapiers would have risen to pester the World with Pamphlets” in London (10:112), suggesting that the print controversy in Ireland is only exceptional because it is taking place in what increasingly appears to be a colony, not a sister kingdom. The letter expresses concern that poorer people might still be tempted to adopt the halfpence because they “are easily frighted, and greedy to swallow Misinformations,” so Swift claims that he may have to carry the torch of the drapier, “to revive and preserve that Spirit raised in the Nation” (10:111). He tips his hat to the drapier for successfully mobilizing a national Irish public sphere: “For several Months past, there have more Papers been written in this Town… than, perhaps, hath been known in any other Nation, and in so short a Time” (10:113).
By the time Swift wrote the final letter as the drapier, An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament, he was able to claim that he was writing in “great Security” because the Irish public had risen to his call for a boycott and defended him from prosecution (10:123). He was performing his “Duty in serving [his] Country,” a phrase that capitalized upon and expanded the patriotic enclosing of a national public sphere that his earlier letters accomplished (10:123). The letter revisits the spinning trope, complaining that Ireland’s wool (writing) is “returned upon us, in English Manufactures, to our infinite Shame and Damage” and of the “Affectation among us, of liking all Kinds of Goods made in England “ (10:129). To encourage the domestic literate classes to consume Irish publications, he recommends that the “Clergy would set us an Example, by contenting themselves with wearing Gowns, and other Habiliments of Irish Drapery,” which would be “some Incitement to the Laity” (10:135). He again condemns Wood’s publicists—his “Favourers, Abbettors, Supporters” and “Softners, Sweetners, Compounders, and Expedient-mongers” (10:138). He does so in a manner that links false representations of the public’s interest to counterfeit currency, arguing that these writers “thought they were better Representers of his Majesty, than that very Coin, for which they are secret or open Advocates” (10:138). In this phrase, public opinion and coinage are linked under the sign of the sovereign, pitting the drapier’s faithful coin/opinion against Wood’s attempts to undermine legitimacy and legality in Ireland. Swift, accordingly, requests that Ireland be granted a limited “public Mint” to match his public prints (10:138).
Given how the Drapier’s Letters expand A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture’s wool-based trope with the minting/printing homology, they should be taken as evidence of the existence of a sustained media campaign on behalf of the Monti. The Anglo-Irish elite had established the economic base of their fledgling state with the founding of the Debt of the Nation in 1716, and that base required a superstructure of ideology to sustain it. A Proposal may have mobilized the Dublin print industry for the production of domestic cultural capital, but the Wood’s halfpence controversy provided Swift with the opportunity to assert the importance of that capital by comparing sovereignty over the printing press with sovereignty over minting. The Drapier’s Letters thereby linked the components of early modern nationalism—power of the word, authority over minting, and prerogative over the law—in a way that made the case for Irish independence. They did so, however, in manner that did not argue for new rights but asserted a traditional semi-independence that claimed loyalty to the English monarch but freedom from the intrusion of England’s other branches of government.
II
By the time Swift began writing the Drapier’s Letters, he was a latecomer to a fight that had largely been fought by the Irish Parliament, the Commissioners of the Revenue, and the rest of the Anglo-Irish elite in government positions. As Christopher Fauske has noted, “It is too easy to forget that the work Swift [had] undertaken in the guise of M.B. Drapier was begun only when the matter it addressed was all but resolved.”12 The significance of his letters, however, lay not in any official role they played in the culture but rather in how they mobilized public opinion. It is important to note that the first of Swift’s Drapier’s Letters was published by Harding a month after the Irish Parliament was prorogued in February 1723/24—a Parliament that in several addresses asked the king and the lord lieutenant to cancel Wood’s halfpence for its revenue consequences and other reasons. As Swift noted in the fall of 1724 in the drapier’s seventh letter, An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament, he saw the Parliament as the representative voice of the Irish nation: “I look upon your unanimous Voice to be the Voice of the Nation; and this I have been taught, and do believe to be, in some Manner, the Voice of God ” (10:127). Swift, however, became this “voice of the nation” when Parliament adjourned. The public sphere, or more specifically the Irish print culture, had assumed the representing function in the absence of parliamentary meetings, and Swift became the icon of this nationalist world of print. It would take Lord Lieutenant Carteret’s offer of a reward for the name of the author of the fourth letter and Chief Justice Whitshed’s unsuccessful attempts to prosecute the printer of it to fully lionize Swift in the public eye. M. B. Drapier was everybody and nobody, the perfect vehicle for a rebellious Irish Anglican Nation, and as such stood as the perfect forged identity for a population suffering from a lack of voice in its affairs, especially after the Declaratory Act.
The history of Wood’s halfpence affair began in 1719 when William Wood obtained a royal patent for coining copper halfpence and farthings for the Kingdom of Ireland from the Duchess of Kendal, the mistress of King George I. The Irish Commissioners of the Revenue became aware of the patent’s existence in 1722, as the patent permitted coining to take place from 25 March of that year, the beginning of the fiscal calendar. Besides the political concern in Anglo-Irish circles that the patent was granted without consulting the Irish Parliament, the sheer amount of copper to be coined was daunting because of its potential Gresham’s Law effect—the fear that a huge influx of copper halfpence would drive silver and gold coinage out of the country. Irvin ehrenpreis wrote, “In fact, whatever polemicists might say, the kingdom could well have used ten or twenty thousand pounds in copper coins. What terrified the Irish was that Wood was entitled to ship them more than a hundred thousand pounds worth, with no effective regulation of the quality or even of their number.”13 The patent provided that over a fourteen-year period, Wood could coin “Three Hundred and Sixty Tonns of Copper,” a figure that translated into at least £100,800 worth of copper coinage. Given that contemporaries estimated the total coin circulating in the Kingdom of Ireland to be £400,000 in various denominations, this worry was justified.14 One of the reasons given for the patent was that Ireland had a shortage of small coin. The small coin was mostly in sterling silver, and it was already being lost to Britain because bankers and others were profiting from exchanging this silver for gold, which was more valuable in Ireland than in surrounding countries. For this reason, gold and silver British sterling coins were valued at a premium much higher than other European coin circulating in Ireland, and they were the standard currency for payment of Irish rents and taxes.15
The amount of actual circulating currency in Ireland in the mid-1720s was open to conjecture. The quantity of paper banknotes of private Irish bankers in circulation during this period is not known, as they were not receivable by the revenue collectors, but some have ventured to guess that these notes made up the majority of the currency, over and above these specie amounts.16 Of the coin in circulation, little seems to have been in the form of actual British sterling gold and silver, only “a few Moydrs and pistols” in Portuguese and French currency, respectively.17
These high denomination foreign gold coins came to Ireland because gold was more valuable by the standards of Ireland’s money of account than elsewhere and thus had more purchasing power in currency exchange and when foreign traders bought Irish commodities.18 These monetary facts of Ireland under Britain’s mercantilist economic policy render problematic some passages in the Drapier’s Letters that refer to an insistence on sterling payment of rents. Sterling comes to play a much larger, more ideological role in the letters: it is not merely a medium of exchange but comes to stand as a symbol for the community of readers Swift is constructing. The Letters are a mix of monetary and constitutional argumentation and indicate that Swift was primarily concerned for the fate of his own Anglican class, or at least those subscribing to the Monti. A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland, the fourth letter, makes it clear that Swift was addressing not “everybody in Ireland” when he addressed the “Whole People,” but rather only the Anglican Irish. He spoke of an Anglican triumphalism when he wrote, “One great Merit I am sure we have, which those of English Birth can have no Pretence to, That our Ancestors reduced this Kingdom to the Obedience of ENGLAND” (10:55). The “we,” here, is exclusively those Anglicans who conquered and colonized Gaelic and Catholic Ireland. “Our Neighbours [the English] whose Understandings are just upon a Level with Ours (which perhaps are none of the Brightest) have a strong Contempt for most Nations, but especially for Ireland: They look upon Us as a Sort of Savage Irish, whom our Ancestors conquered several hundred years ago” (10:64). Here, the “Englishness” of Swift’s Anglican class is constructed by a disavowal of the “Irishness” attributed to it by British natives, a disavowal constitutive of the hybrid Anglo-Irish identity of the Irish Anglicans. To fend off the allegations of Irishness that Englishmen attributed to Irish Anglicans and to preserve Englishness in the refusal of nominal hybridity, Swift rejects the claim by William Wood that it is the Irish who are opposing his halfpence (10:67). Admittedly, this rejection of an Irishness for the Anglican community is made to refute Wood’s inference that the resistance to the halfpence is a Jacobite effort; yet this does not diminish the significance of Swift’s construction of a distinctly Anglo-Irish readership in these comments. Swift’s efforts to assert the proper identity of the opposition to Wood’s halfpence demonstrate that the opposition was primarily Anglican in character and could demand, or “take it for granted,” that the disenfranchised Irish Catholic majority of rent-payers would follow its opinions on monetary policy. The public opinion that counts in Swift’s pamphlet war, this passage seems to indicate, is that of the Anglican Irish nation.
The Letters, however, while concerned with Anglican identity and public opinion, needed to broaden their appeal. For Swift, there was a problem in identifying what or who the Anglo-Irish public was—an issue faced by eighteenth-century European writers and politicians in general. J. C. Beckett has tackled this problem directly, disagreeing with popular interpretations of A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland that say it is addressed to a demographically inclusive Irish audience.19 S. J. Connolly concurred, writing that “the text insisted that those who rejected Wood’s coin were in fact ‘the true English people of Ireland,’ whose ancestors had reduced the kingdom to obedience.”20 Though there were many anonymous pamphlets written in the same controversy claiming that women, Quakers, Catholics, beggars, and other outsiders were supporting Swift’s effort, there is some doubt as to whether these writings were organically representative of those communities. Sabine Baltes has suggested that such tracts may have been propagandistic efforts by Swift or another member of the established church and its laity to create an echo-chamber of opinion, persuading a broader demographic of their views through the use of such personas. Indeed, she argues that high officials in the Church of Ireland and Irish Parliament may have recruited Swift to write such appeals to low culture.21 It is not for nothing, then, that James Kelly has called Swift an “opinion maker,” one who was modeling the views that all residents of Ireland were supposed to have.22
The earlier controversy, over the Bank of Ireland project, had been more explicit in defining the Irish public to be the wealthier elite of the established church, advantaged by the land settlements of the post-1688 era, who controlled Parliament. Hercules Rowley, an anti-bank pamphleteer, reminded readers of all the hard work that had gone into passing penal laws against allowing Catholics to serve in Parliament, work at the university, or purchase land. He predicted that if the bank went forward, Catholics would “be no longer at any Loss in disposing of their Money, for they may lay it out in purchasing Bank Stock;… in that Case they will have the sole Management of the Bank. Whether this will not as much weaken the Protestant Interest, as the Act against the Growth of Popery strengthen’d it, I leave you to judge.”23 Rowley not only feared that a national Bank of Ireland and its paper money would create an Irish moneyed interest that would soon become more powerful than the Anglican landed interest, but that this moneyed interest would be composed of the Catholics, who constituted a disenfranchised 80 percent majority of Ireland’s population. As Edith Johnston-Liik notes, Catholics, as well as Dissenters such as Presbyterians, were not allowed to participate even when the Bank of Ireland was finally established in 1782, mainly because of the oaths that the bank’s directors were required to take concerning their adherence to the Church of Ireland’s articles of faith.24 The Drapier’s Letters, accordingly, can be taken initially as appealing to a limited, Protestant readership.
Yet, could that community of Anglo-Irish Protestants be considered the Irish public? There was a clear difference of meaning in the eighteenth century between “the public” and “the people.” Roger Chartier has written that at least in France, “Between the people and the public there was a clear break. From Malesherbes to Kant, the line of demarcation ran between those who could read and produce written matter and those who could not.”25 This notion is echoed in British Studies by J. A. W. Gunn, who sees that eighteenth-century publics were small: “Undoubtedly, Britain was then the home of public opinion, though of a small public.”26 Despite the fact that so many printed works from the controversy were directed at “the people,” such as Swift’s Letter to the Whole People of Ireland, A Word or Two to the People of Ireland, A Short Defence of the People of Ireland, and many others, there is no doubt that “the people” were being roused in support of the establishment. Because more established Anglo-Irishmen received payments for rent and goods in small denomination coinage—the only coinage a common person might be in possession of—the elite had to mobilize commoners by advising them to refuse these coppers in exchange.27 Such persuasion and behavior modification would help guarantee that the wealthy would continue to collect the more valuable silver pence as usual. This manipulation had become so patently obvious to the more literate that satire targeting the intended audiences themselves began to appear. A Creed for an Irish Commoner and Wood’s Confession to the Mobb of the City of Dublin—works perhaps by Swift—push the limit of textual impersonation to the point where they are obviously ridiculing the “people” or “mob” before their very faces. Indeed, Anne Cline Kelly has described how the author and such imitators constructed such a public via the various “Swifts” in circulation.28 Swift, over the course of his career, was engaged in the manufacture of consent in this way; but in the specific case of the Drapier’s Letters, his work strove to secure broad consensus on the decision to refuse Wood’s patent and coins, a decision that the Anglo-Irish elite had already made.
Swift’s trick in this propaganda effort was the typical strategy of the eighteenth-century professional writer and politician. Keith Michael Baker, writing of the use of the term “public opinion” in contemporary France, says that it was deployed to invent constituencies that the writer could claim supported him: “one can understand the conflicts of the Pre-Revolution as a series of struggles to fix the sociological referent of the concept in favor of one or another competing group.”29 Thomas Crow concurs, “A public appears, with a shape and a will, via the various claims made to represent it.”30 Noting that the Enlightenment ideal of universality was related rather cynically to the effort to expand a writer’s, government’s, or movement’s appeal, Harold Mah argues that “the public sphere is a fiction, which, because it can appear real, exerts real political force. The enabling condition of a successfully staged public sphere is the ability of certain groups to make their social or group particularity invisible so that they can then appear as abstract individuals and hence universal.”31 Accordingly, governments and other established groups strive to co-opt other claimants to the public’s opinion through intervention in print controversies—propaganda and disinformation—in order to seem more universal and representative.32 The “Drapier” is the perfect narrator for this strategy because his invisibility—an anonymity that still seems familiar enough to Dubliners—makes his plea seem that of Everyman. Publicity’s secret, as Jodi Dean has argued, is to create such universality through the use of tactics of invisibility, anonymity, and omission.33
Swift’s rhetoric of liberty and property was part of a general trend in Anglophone Atlantic thought occasioned by a theory of subjectivity and citizenship that was attempting to restore virtue to public action by suggesting that land ownership integrated the personality. J. G. A. Pocock has discovered this landed-class political ideal within an “ideology of real property” in which “land, whose stability—as opposed to the mobility of goods and money—set men free to be the rational political creatures which they were by nature.”34 This putatively organic means of substantiating individual authority—a means that granted “intrinsic value” to the subject and “innateness” to his soul through his land—was part of a contemporary fashion in thinking in which a naturalized autobiographical sense of an autonomous, unified subjectivity was equated with the historiographical process of transmitting land titles to the next generation. Land ownership was regarded as “necessary if the individual was to practice virtue in a republic,” because it could “confer independence on the individual” and involve him in as few as possible contingent relations with other individuals.35 The problem of binding the contingencies threatening the individual’s political agency, in this model, is resolved in the pre-lapserian image of a self-perpetuating farm. The contingency of contracting one’s liberty with contemporary peers is restricted by a covenant with the dead in which the land itself perpetuates, as if through the form of a single human body, a multigenerational personality whose origins are located in a redeeming but inaccessible past. Soil is taken as the substantive medium of continuous referral to that past and the natural rights and liberties it confers. It thereby serves as the proof of present “disinterested” virtue, the genealogical source of an authorizing rhetoric of identity, and the underwriting depository of the landed class’s moral capital. Where societal modernity had brought about a subject derived negatively from his “extrinsic” contractual connection with the community and the state, this ideology attempted to substitute a positively derived subject constituted by the “intrinsic” properties and proprietorship of the soil.36 The Anglo-Irish Monti was the most exemplary effort at institutionalizing this ideology.
Yet, the liberty promised to the Anglican nation by its monopolistic proprietorship of the land, within this theory, was mediated by property in money: rent payments. It is perhaps for this reason that Swift was able to write in the seventh Drapier’s Letter, “When the Value of Money is arbitrary, or unsettled; no Man can well be said to have any Property at all” (10:128). Property, for Swift, was no longer prior to money; the maintenance of the “real” that land ownership represented was now codependent with the “imaginary” realm of discourse and commodity exchange. Only sovereignty could provide the proper working of these functions; legal security of the Monti’s land and the medium in which the income from it was communicated demanded it.
Swift’s fear of Wood’s copper halfpence, I argue, was partly driven by the pressure to return British sterling silver and gold to these landlords. In the first of the Drapier’s Letters, A Letter to the Tradesmen, Shop-Keepers, Farmers, and Common-People of Ireland, he says that the predominantly Catholic tenant farmers are legally bound by their leases to pay their rents in sterling:
For suppose you go to an ALE-HOUSE with that base Money
[Wood’s halfpence], and the Landlord gives you a Quart for
Four of these HALF-PENCE, what must the Victualer do? His
BREWER will not be paid in that Coin, or if the BREWER should
be such a Fool, the Farmers will not take it [Wood’s halfpence]
from them for their Bere [barley], because they are bound by their Leases to pay their Rents in Good and Lawful Money of England, which this is not, nor of Ireland neither, and the Squire
their Landlord will never be so bewitched to take such Trash
for his Land, so that it must certainly stop some where or other,
and wherever it stops it is the same thing, and we are all undone.
(10:6)
The country squire or landlord is envisioned as the normal endpoint of the nation’s exchanges of money, and one whose appetite for sterling will impede the circulation of Wood’s halfpence and the commerce of Ireland. This appetite, and opposition to the halfpence, was partly driven by the fear that if landlords received other media of exchange, the currency would have to be converted into sterling at a high rate of exchange.37 Landlords did not want to lose income through currency exchange when they attempted to get money also negotiable in Britain during periods in which they lived there, as absentee landlords. The insistence on sterling in A Letter To the Tradesmen, Shop-Keepers, Farmers, and Common-People of Ireland comes across as more of a stern warning to the largely Protestant commercial classes of their dependence on the landed class for the circulation of any currency, let alone a copper coinage unacceptable for rent payments. Swift wants them to know that because of sterling rent payments and landlords’ appetite for them, he anticipates a catastrophe for the Irish economy if it is flooded with a huge supply of Wood’s copper halfpence, which he thinks, by Gresham’s Law, will drive all gold and silver, sterling or not, out of circulation in Ireland (10:7–8).
The Irish economic system was not, however, dominated exclusively by the Anglo-Irish lay landlords and their demands for sterling rent. Church of Ireland clergy were expecting tithe-payments and rents of their church lands to be paid in sterling. Most importantly, the Irish Commissioners of the Revenue were not permitted to collect taxes in any form but sterling. These additional sterling-interested forces were also arrayed against the circulation of Wood’s halfpence. Sterling rent payments were the basis of the Church of Ireland’s business, and clergymen opposed Wood’s halfpence for that reason.38 Swift, in the fourth letter, explained the revenue consequences of Wood’s halfpence upon the church by suggesting that the Church of Ireland primate, Boulter, would have his rental income reduced by seven-eighths.39
The central issue concerning the sterling standard, however, was the question of the form in which government revenue would be collected. This issue affected the maintenance of the Anglo-Irish state and its obligations to the empire more directly than the private problem of rent. When the news first arrived in Ireland that Wood’s patent had been granted, the Irish Commissioners of the Revenue reported that the circulation of Wood’s pence would injure the Irish revenue and therefore Ireland’s parliamentary patronage system: “The Mischiefs 41 Their fear was not only the possibility that Gresham’s Law would take effect and drain the kingdom of gold and silver if the halfpence were circulated, but also that government, which secures property through law, would be seriously compromised if civil servants were compelled to take pay in copper halfpence instead of sterling.
William King, a member of the Irish House of Lords as well as an archbishop, was quick to notice the implications for the Treasury, which were that great amounts of the copper halfpence would be collected in revenue. He knew that most taxes came from the ordinary consumption of common people and that the consequent surge in small change transactions in copper would affect the kingdom’s financial system as a whole.42 This concern took on large dimensions, so much so that the revenue commissioners gave orders to the tax collectors not to accept any of Wood’s halfpence. In this they were guided by the Parliament, which in the fall of 1723 had composed addresses to King George I asking that the revenue commissioners not be required to receive the halfpence in taxes.43 Wood had apparently already tried to get around this problem of the revenue commissioners’ orders by attempting to negotiate with a commissioner about accepting the coins.44 The British government had ordered the commissioners to accept them in tax collection, and the English Privy Council overrode the Irish revenue commissioners’ decision against the halfpence.45 The order attempted to take away the Irish government’s central argument against Wood’s halfpence—the claim that it would have negative revenue consequences—in the hope of promoting the halfpence’s circulation in the kingdom. In effect, it ended official Irish government resistance to the halfpence, leaving the cause to the pamphleteers, who could only attempt to influence public opinion against the halfpence so no one would accept them.
This revenue argument displays another logic when considered with the question of payments to civil servants. Another British concern was army pay. One Irish commentator wrote, “The best and most useful part of his Majesties Army is maintained and supported by us.”46 The vast bulk of the British army’s regiments were supported by the taxation of Ireland. Regiments that Ireland paid for were based not only in that country but also in Gibralter, North America, and across the empire. The use of Ireland as a barracks for the British army served the dual purpose of justifying Irish support through revenues and keeping rebellious elements such as Catholic Jacobites under control. A petition from the people of the city of Cork discussed how discontented the army would be if it had to take payment in Wood’s halfpence.47 “The Humble Petition of the Grand Jury of the County of Dublin” agreed with this sentiment, worrying that potential “great Confusion between your Majesty’s Army and your other Subjects” caused by receiving army pay in Wood’s half-pence would be “disabling both for a chearfull Concurrence in the Defence of your Government in case of any foreigne Invasion in Favour of an attainted Popish Pretender.”48 In this way, Anglican anxiety about the Catholic population and the threat of Jacobitism became tied to the sterling revenue issue. Additionally, the pay of the army was an important source of currency circulation, as soldiers purchased goods from tradesmen. A recent return to Ireland of some regiments had brought £40,000 in circulating sterling back to Ireland, so military pay was viewed as a reinvestment in Ireland’s economy, as long as the regiments remained within Ireland to spend it.49
Swift, when writing later about an initiative to lower the value of Ireland’s coin or “money of account” to help resolve the gold-from-silver Gresham effect, also took notice of the appointees who would have to be paid in the consequently less valuable money. His Reasons Why We Should Not Lower the Coins Now Current in this Kingdom names just some of those appointees who had to be paid in sterling:
For, first, until the Kingdom be intirely Ruined the Lord Lieutenant and Lords-Justices must have their Salaries. My Lords the Bishops, whose Lands are set a fourth part value, will be sure of their Rents and their Fines. My Lords the Judges, and Those of other Employments in the Courts, must likewise have their Salaries. The Gentlemen of the Revenue will pay Themselves; and as to the Officers of the Army, the Consequences of not paying Them, is obvious enough: Nay, so far will those Persons I have already mentioned be from suffering, that, on the contrary, their Revenues being no way lessen’d by the fall of Money, and the prices of all Commodities considerably sunk thereby, they must be great Gainers. (13:119–120)
Although he is writing on another problem entirely, and in a later period, these observations about some of the recipients who will pay themselves first is important in understanding the total stakes of the sterling revenue question in the 1720s. All of these posts went to members of the Anglican establishment (either British or Irish), and their spending, at those times that they actually resided in Ireland, supported the rest of the economy. Yet this fact does not explain the obsession with sterling in particular as the premier form of money in a country that only had a “money of account” benchmarked against it.
In one of the great paradoxes of the Wood’s halfpence episode, £300 sterling was promised to whoever reported the name of the author of the fourth of the Drapier’s Letters—a reward the irony of which lay in that it was to be tendered by Lord Lieutenant Carteret and an Irish Privy Council who were ostensibly seeking to persuade people to take the half-pence.50 More or less admitting defeat through this offer, Carteret and the Irish Privy Council italicized “sterling”—as if it represented the highest point of desire in the kingdom. The sterling medium seems to affect government decisions in the 1720s, especially as they relate to pensions and civil employments.
The concern over the halfpence, strong enough to produce a boycott of them in Ireland, was overblown, and it would have been unnecessary if Ireland had adopted a paper currency that contained very small denomination bills. When Wood obtained a patent to coin and introduce “Rosa Americana” copper pence into the colony of Massachusetts in 1722, the colonial legislative assembly there responded by printing paper pence. There were “£500 in small change bills issued to prevent William Wood from introducing Rosa Americana base copper coinage into circulation in New England.”51 Swift was well aware of this previous successful boycott of a Wood patent, writing in his third letter, “To the Nobility and Gentry of the Kingdom of Ireland,” that “He [Wood] hath already tried his Faculty in New-England, and I hope he will meet at least with an EQUAL RECEPTION here; what That was I leave to the Publick Intelligence” (10:44). Ehrenpreis noted that all the colonies suffered from this currency problem because of British mercantilist policy, writing, “The situation in the American colonies was comparable. So the Irish crisis was only a local instance of a general grievance. In the whole course of the controversy over Wood’s patent I don’t believe the Irish ever recognized this truth, which would of course have weakened their case.”52 To reason why no one in Ireland recommended the solution to the small change crisis of printing paper currency would be to ask how money and its institutions had developed differently in the two colonies. Massachusetts had been printing a public paper money since 1690, while Ireland had refused a public paper money in 1721. The Massachusetts notes tended to be negotiable only in the other New England and North American colonies, which limited their use internationally or elsewhere in the empire. If Ireland had adopted a similar paper money, it would likely have been passable only within Ireland. Sterling in Ireland played some sort of interkingdom role, providing a mobility to those Anglican elites who possessed it and wished to have a negotiable currency when they lived as absentees in Britain. The fetish for sterling was bound up with notions of the “Englishness” of the Anglo-Irish, simultaneously bolstering the English portion of their tenuous hybrid identity.
III
The corpus of early-eighteenth-century Irish political economic writing of which the Drapier’s Letters are a part presents epistemological questions that very much bear on Swift’s constitution of Anglo-Irish hybrid identity and literature. This corpus largely relies on the sterling fetish to perform its evaluation of economic action, which may have served to create the “facts” of Irish political economy, ones legitimated by the obsession with sterling and the “Englishness” for which it stood. The sterling fetish bridges the gap between the intrinsic and nominal value of coinage within the abstraction of Ireland’s money of account. The status of evidence and fact, the Anglo-Irish economic discourse of the period suggests, was largely dependent on sterling as the sign of the presence of a “real” general equivalent organizing all commensurability in the British Isles.
This question of determining what counts as evidence of eighteenth-century Irish economic production is difficult because contemporaries faced a significant problem: how to organize a representation of a region lacking the independent political, financial, and cultural institutions—or its own standard medium of exchange—that could supply the process for making such a representation convincing. The polemical component of eighteenth-century Irish economic writing amounts to a complaint that there were no interior state governing bodies that could adequately justify any representation of the existence of an economic system. All assessment was therefore predicated on the necessity of giving written form, in the absence of a fully authorized legislative assembly, to the community that was making value judgments and producing standards. Under these conditions, print culture would have to assume some of the representing and legitimating function of institutions like the degraded Irish parliament. Print, if it were to be an effective medium of communication during this “crisis in representation,” would have to contain markers that pointed to the existence of a legitimate body of readers for whom its writers spoke.53 This necessity of promulgating a public body may help account for Irish economic writing’s audience-hailing discourses on the legal constitution of Irish readers and writers who generated a body of political and economic writing supporting its internal hegemony over other demographic groups and its external fiduciary relationship with British institutions. Because of the disparity in security between Irish and English Anglicans, Ireland’s ascendant minority lacked the consensus and autonomy necessary to achieve the developments their British counterparts were attaining across the water. The dependence upon the prescriptive moral character of the Anglican community of descriptive attempts to represent the Irish economy makes apparent the sectarian basis of the economic knowledge being formulated at the time.
Irish demographic conditions of the period suggest that “political economy was partisan, prescriptive, tendentious. Claiming to be non-sectarian and non-political, it performed a vitally important ideological function for the political and religious establishment in defending existing socio-economic relations.”54 Far from being objective, political economy was evident as a discipline that supported the ascendancy of the Anglican minority. In Ireland, it lacked the distance from its ideological support and from its object of study that would be necessary to cultivate a more purely theoretical approach to economic evaluation. Consequently, the economic writing of Irish Anglicans tended to be more practical and less theoretical.
Salim Rashid has recognized the Anglican nature of eighteenth-century Irish economic writing.55 He also has pointed to the nontheoretical note of Irish economists, observing that they “wrote in a pre-analytical age” and that they “made an effort to relate their conclusions only to some immediate practical problem and not to some axiomatic foundation.”56 He suggests that the unavailability of that theoretical capacity placed writers in a position to address only single pragmatic issues not necessarily theorized within picturesque descriptions of the economic landscape as a whole.
This detachment of the Irish school’s practical economic observations from theory, the product of this political situation of its writers, could, on the other hand, affirm the factuality of its observations if the period’s conceptions of epistemology are considered. The category of the “fact” in seventeenth-century political economy was premised on just such a disjunction of observed particulars from a theoretical plan. Mary Poovey cites Francis Bacon’s elevation of “deviating instances” to the level of “fact” in order to describe how facts were considered “nuggets of experience detached from theory.”57 Bacon’s valorization of particular instances was related to the emerging idea that proper knowledge was disinterested and therefore independent of theory, which was viewed as the interested, preconceived, and formulaic structure of knowledge. To be taken as supporting evidence, facts had to have an autonomous materiality that, ironically, would Nonetheless make general theoretical knowledge available.58 Irish economic writing’s focus on isolated economic problems, and its presence as a deviating corpus of writing expressing aberrant economic events, lends it factuality if we follow Baconian criteria. Facts were to be free of the theoretical structure of general knowledge by a process of independent verification in the medium of another division of labor. Ironically, only mediation could provide the immediacy Bacon valued as the practical key to the truth and factuality of the objective world.
Bacon’s fantasy that this mediation would not itself be interested and productive of the representation of fact provokes this question: How, and in the medium of what body, was evidence of eighteenth-century Irish economic events established as fact? We know that economic events were indeed “deviating instances,” inasmuch as they were only noted during difficult economic times: “The gloomy picture of Ireland painted in the years of suffering and scarcity has been accepted as being applicable to the period as a whole, because for the better years writings are few and a written corrective of the darker years is thus lacking.”59 These deviating conditions, and the Irish school’s nontheoretical “effort to relate their conclusions only to some immediate practical problem and not to some axiomatic foundation,” might be enough to establish the factuality of the economic information contained in these pamphlets.60
L. M. Cullen has promoted an opposite model for the factuality of economic evidence, stressing that the “facts” of the Anglo-Irish school of political economy were the product of a sedimentary discourse in which repetition of supporting evidence throughout these pamphlets established the very commonplace nature of “facts” that Bacon’s emphasis on singularity and deviation was trying to overcome. Cullen makes this point by discussing the readerly context in which the generally scarce and contingent facts of the eighteenth-century Irish economy were legislated.61 Facts, within Cullen’s view of how they were deployed in Irish economic polemic, were established in an interaction between writer and audience that took place over the course of controversialist pamphleteering. Used enough times in the exemplum segments of these economic disputations, and assented to and repeated by other readers and writers, evidence would grow into fact. Within the context of the Anglo-Irish school’s writings and contrary to Bacon’s view, they were the product of the interested representations of theoretical, knowing minds that were being conditioned by the experience of writing and reading.
Given the dominance within these writings of a more deliberative paradigm for the establishment of fact, Bacon’s model of the worthiness of deviating instances may only be of value in the Irish context for describing negative economic episodes. The event of a rise in publication may tell us that something economic happened, but the evidence marshaled within those documents was dependent for its factual status on the deliberations of a readership who would reproduce it in more writing. The manner in which that readership was constituted, then, becomes the primary problem to address in asking how economic information was made into fact.
The lack of interior governmental agency, the uncertain boundaries of “national” production, and the nonstandardized nature of economics forced all economic analysis into a confrontation with the problem of postulating itself as a subject and positing Ireland as a polity to be studied. Irish economic writing of the period was caught between political economy’s immaturity as a discipline and Ireland’s liminal status as a nation. These factors, combined with the instability of Ireland’s Anglican regime, conspired to make a more theoretical viewpoint inaccessible to economic writers.
The problem in both English and Anglo-Irish political economy was finding a standard of evidence for economic action, a means through which economic data could be measured. The role of sterling in the effort to delimit and define communities subject to the British government, in both “national” schools of economic thought, was largely to provide this standardization. This function, aside from being the primary responsibility of the sovereign, had been established by English and Irish parliamentary acts that made sterling the only receivable currency for taxes. Through this process, sterling acquired an epistemological value in addition to its monetary value. Confidence in sterling was also belief in the British empire, a faith that also signified Englishness. Certitude in economic knowledge proceeded from a standard medium of exchange that, as the Wood’s halfpence affair makes clear, was no longer merely intrinsically valuable but, more importantly, nominally valuable in that its English name and authorizing stamp had acquired greater value than the silver or gold content of a pistole, moidore, or other foreign unit of currency.62 Because Ireland was already using an imaginary money of account in this period, this observation should be taken as particularly important in the analysis of colonial economies. The materiality of sterling was of significance in Ireland only after its nominal evaluation—in short, the coin itself was the certification of transactions that had already been made in the discourse of accounting.
Accordingly, value had to be modeled as a sign within the discursive apparatus of political economy, via the printing press. Political economy itself was the disciplinary process through which this modeling was accomplished. The negotiation of the value of money was not the only effect of this process; a model of the exchanging subject was also achieved: “This subject changes across the long eighteenth century, from one defined by social relations and their obligations (status) to a free and equal subject defined by exchange (contract), a depersonalized, abstract subject defined by the free and equal exchange of commodities.”63 Where sterling is the unit of measure and exchange, this subject becomes nominally or abstractly English as political economy in the British Isles performs this modeling. To the extent that a polity in Britain’s inner empire measures economic effects based upon data such as sterling revenue receipts, the polity and its subjects are invented as English in character. This is particularly true of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, the English portion of whose hybrid identity was constituted and maintained by its attachment to the mother country’s currency.
Another way of understanding how the sterling fetish in Irish political economy constructed the Anglophile subject is through Bruno Latour’s concept of the “factish.” This term blends the processes of fetish-making and the kind of fact-making that Anglo-Irish political economy attempted. Srinivas Aravamudan has explained Latour’s term by saying that it “refuses the primitive-modern distinction” inasmuch as it suggests the constructivist notion that facts, supposedly rationally evaluated empirical objects, are fetishistically constructed by belief.64 The empirical claims of Irish political economy, when considered as the process of making “factishes,” continuously defaulted to belief-claims about the Englishness of the Anglo-Irish polity. Sterling, within the discourse of Ireland’s money of account, served as the site for material redemption and innate proof of nominal Englishness, a product of the factishes made by Irish political economy. In this way, the object of knowledge—sterling—shaped the general epistemological framework for an empire and nation.
The sterling “factish” linked the regions of the British Empire by providing mobility to an English consciousness craving a material proof of an identity that was more mobile than one based on land, and thus could be current throughout the empire. As an English commodity that by law could not be exported from the isle of Britain, sterling had rarity, and therefore an enhanced reified status and corollary ability to reify abstract, Enlightenment, English subjects. Ireland’s decision to have all rents and taxes paid in sterling reveals not only a practical concern for acquiring currency negotiable at a high standard throughout the empire but also an allegiance to that which could connect the Irish Anglican political nation to the mother country. The rents of absentee landlords were taken as proof of this fact. Though Swift often chastised his caste for absenteeism, he mainly wished to help it sustain its wealth longer. His writings of the late 1720s, including A Modest Proposal, did not so much object to their rents, collection of interest on investment in the Monti, or transport of their wealth to England when they lived as absentees. Rather, he taught them to conceal the consequences of it more effectively and to create a print media capable of constructing a nationalism that would support their domination of Ireland.
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