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Eighteenth-Century Life 29.2 (2005) 3-24



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John Graunt, Sir William Petty, and Swift's Modest Proposal

Bryn Mawr College
It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.
—Sir Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
I

Many years ago George Wittkowsky demonstrated persuasively the relationship between early mercantilist writings concerning Irish poverty and Jonathan Swift's devastating parody of those writings in A Modest Proposal (1729).1 Swift imitated the style and methods of argument of early pamphleteers in order to hold up to public view their implicit values—mostly economic efficiency—and their blithe ability to overlook the human costs and consequences of their recommendations. The result, as everyone knows, is a mordantly ironical mock-pamphlet in which an ostensibly well-meaning gentleman residing in Ireland confidently envisions a new delicacy for discriminating palates and a new source of revenue for the poor through the sale and eating of Irish babies. Swift's proposer calmly buttresses his arguments with the tools of rational calculation—prices and proportions, social statistics and economic consequences—and even as he advances his [End Page 3] own notions, he glancingly reveals the cruel and enduring realities of Ireland's social misery. Although his specific proposal is monstrous and unacceptable, his general position is both clear and understandable: desperate times call for desperate measures.

Wittkowsky also demonstrates that A Modest Proposal had many antecedents over the previous seventy years in the netherworld of pamphleteering and the modest proposer himself is a composite of many voices raised to promote one or another scheme to benefit the public. Nonetheless, he singles out for attention earlier works by two especially influential writers: John Graunt, the pioneering statistician and demographer, and Sir William Petty, the social theorist who was a significant originator of "political arithmetick," what we today call economics. It is their methods and implicit values that ultimately stand behind the confident social and financial projections of Swift's proposer. Wittkowsky closes his argument with a rhetorical flourish: "May it not be said that A Modest Proposal is, in part, at least, the creation of whatever muse presides over the spirit of political arithmetic?" (101).

I wish to expand upon Wittkowsky's suggestion of a relationship between Swift's satire and the writings of Graunt and Petty, and to do so by seeing them as something more than straight men undone by the deft subversions of Swiftian irony. In fact, they were fully as able as Swift, and all three were penetrating and original thinkers in their respective fields—Graunt in statistical analysis, Petty in social and mathematical modeling, and Swift in satire. What is more, all three were reasoners in public, writers who brought their wares to a single marketplace, the disorderly and leveling world of freelance pamphleteering. In that competitive environment overstatement was a norm, "expertise" was self-proclaimed and often anonymous, and good ideas could easily fail to win recognition. All three, then, had to establish their own authority to speak out and also to find ways of holding the attention of potential readers.2

To notice the relative equality of the abilities of Graunt, Petty, and Swift allows a new and different appreciation of the parodic relations among their writings and in particular the complex exchange of energies between original documents and parodic doubles. All parody succeeds by establishing a recognizable kinship with an earlier work, and because kinship implies a relationship that necessarily runs both ways, parodies can never stand chastely apart from their sources, nor can parodists themselves ever be wholly disengaged from those whom they imitate, whether knaves or fools, enthusiasts or dreamers. In fact, unlike most other forms of satire, parody [End Page 4] is empowered but also unavoidably compromised by its origins; by its very nature it is belated, derivative, often spoken in a borrowed voice. It seeks to expose through mimicry the style, outlook, manner, and values of someone...

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