ABSTRACT
It is hard for the modern reader, more familiar with the gruesome irony of Swift's Modest Proposal than with conventional formulas of pamphleteering, to realise that the title would be taken quite straight and give no hint of shocks to follow. Swift's ways of animalising Ireland and the Irish are clearly not ironic in that simple compassionate sense presupposed by many readers of the Modest Proposal. If there is, in Swift as in Auden, a complaint about inhumane attitudes as expressed through language, it has relatively less place in Swift's total effect. And his tendency to talk of the Irish Catholics as 'things' and 'beasts' is almost as great in his direct utterances as in the parodied voice of the Modest Proposer. Swift's celebrated, proto-Malthusian use of dehumanised economic jargon must be seen in the light of the complexities.
