The vast majority of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” reads like a scientific treatise, packed with facts and figures as it seems that Swift has assembled a persuasive case for actually raising the children of Irish poor families in the same philosophical manner that farmers raised sheep, cattle and pigs for slaughter, even going into the various cuts of meat that would be available.
However, as the reader nears the end of this treatise, he descends into a chiding tone that asks the reader to conduct some internal self-questioning to determine his position on the issue. Swift, writing as a priest, had a relatively comfortable income, but his Irish compatriots who had to rely on agricultural production to bring in the very means of subsistence suffered mightily.
The years of famine did not reduce the taxation from the British Crown in London one bit, which is what particularly engaged the wrath of the satirist. His point is that the “eating of the young citizens” (Swift, 1729) is what, in a metaphorical way, the British government is already doing, so his heavy sarcasm points out that there is little effective difference between the existing British treatment of the Irish poor and the way that his proposal would render conditions.
It is not until the last paragraph that Swift turns to the reader and makes his point clear, and in the paragraphs preceding the ultimate one, the pacing of the syntax slows down. One could argue that his target is two-fold – the Irish local authorities as well as the distant Crown in London – because both entities are draining the Irish poor with tax bills that take the food out of their children’s mouths. Because of this unending tax burden, Swift argues, the Irish poor have no way out of their debt and generational poverty. One can see this argument when Swift asserts, “I desire those politicians who dislike my overturethat they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year oldand thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes, as they have since gone through” (Swift, 1729) in that last paragraph.
He then goes on to list those misfortunes specifically: oppressive landlords, having to pay rent when they don’t have a job or any other monies, the plight of those who had no home but still had to find a way to survive in the cold Irish weather. This last paragraph represents a complete rhetorical shift from the academic language of the bulk of the essay, as he shifts from an almost dry, clinical analysis of the benefits of cultivating young Irish children for slaughter to this boiling invective about the inhumane treatment of the poor in Ireland.
It is difficult to understand the full impact that such a paper would have had on the reading public in Swift’s day. In our own time, we are almost bathed in satire. Just about every late-night television program incorporates parody in the bulk of their segments, and such satirical websites as The Onion make it their business to publish satire disguised as faux news items on a daily basis. In Swift’s time, this sort of writing was unheard of, and so the vast majority of Swift’s readers would have sat there, mouths slowly opening wider in shock, as the ideas that he was outlining became more and more specific. By the time they made it to the surprise ending – if they even made it that far without slamming the essay to the table or the floor in anger – they would have been outraged already. Setting that surprise ending where it is, with just a paragraph left for the reader to process Swift’s true intention, ensures that the reader still is in the throes of that anger that had built up through the essay but now has to turn that anger in a new direction, without a lot of text left for them to read as they look for solace, look for something to help them feel better.
This, of course, is what is masterful about holding that surprise so close to the very end. Even in modern times, conversations about social inequality and the plight of the poor tend to make people’s eyes glaze over in a combination of discomfort and indifference, and if Swift had started out announcing his actual rhetorical intention, it is likely that people would have yawned and crumpled up the pamphlet, as they had likely heard other appeals for the poor but had already decided that those who are needy were simply intended to be that way thanks to God’s design (this deriving from a strain of Calvinism that would follow the Pilgrims and many others who came to the New World and become an insidious part of the Puritan work ethic and larger American culture). By moving his true main idea to the very end, he ensures that his writing will get the maximum amount of attention, and that his point will have a much more visceral impact on the reader than it would have otherwise. By combining this moral diatribe with the intellectual heft of the form of the academic treatise, Swift leaves the reader overwhelmed by the specificity of his information, and by the ferocity of his anger toward the government entities who are too busy sucking the lifeblood out of their people to pay attention to their well-being. He was writing at a time when charity was something that people bestowed even more begrudgingly than they do now, but this essay was an important factor in shifting social attitudes in a more compassionate direction.
References
Swift, J. (1972). Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". Victorianweb.org. Retrieved 24 July 2016, from http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/swift/modest.html
