On Swift – Clare Bucknell in LRB in 2017:

“This way of looking at the world – the truth-telling, the commitment to particularity, the unswerving interest in the things most people would rather ignore – was held up by contemporary advocates as the essence of satire, and the thing it was best at. Satire scourged, exposed and illuminated: it was, depending on the metaphor you preferred, a physician’s tonic for the body politic, an extra-judicial arm of the law or, in a particularly popular image, a mirror held up to man’s conduct. (Swift proposed a subtle variation on the last of these, noting sardonically in his preface to The Battle of the Booksthat ‘satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.’)”

(…)

“At 14 – by no means unusually young for the time – he was enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he did well in Greek and Latin and badly in philosophy, and barely squeaked through with a degree (awarded ‘by special grace’) five years later.
Little is known about these early years, and much of what we do know comes from Swift’s own sketch of his life, written at some years’ distance and not always with total dedication to the facts. What he recounts should be read, in any case, in the light of his general feelings on the subject of literary biography: as he explains in the preface to A Tale of a Tub, knowing that an author composed a certain piece of writing ‘in bed in a garret’, or that another piece was ‘begun, continued, and ended, under a long course of physic, and a great want of money’, may not tell you much worth knowing about the writing itself. Leo Damrosch’s biography from 2013 acknowledges the problem and skirts around those periods of Swift’s life where speculation would have to play a considerable part in filling in the blanks.* Stubbs, by contrast, uses the piecemeal nature of the record as the basis for discussions of everything from the educational Puritan ‘godly books’ Swift might possibly have read as a child, to Charles I’s imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight (Sir William Temple, Swift’s patron, briefly toured there in 1648 as a young man).”

(…)

“One of the most obscene things about A Modest Proposal is its delicacy – the time and attention lavished on the little things, the precision, the finickiness. It matters to the Proposer that ‘a little pepper or salt’ should be used if a family is to save up some of its child meat for boiling rather than eating it fresh. It matters to him whether butchers present children ready carved, or whether customers might prefer to take them home alive and ‘dress them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs’.”

(…)

“His satire asks the question about Enlightenment rationality no one wants to ask: if its intellectual methods can be co-opted to advocate so compellingly for savagery, how can we justify condemning the savagery without looking critically at reason too?”

(…)

“Swift died at home in the deanery in October 1745, having been passive and almost speechless for three years following a series of strokes and an agonising attack of orbital cellulitis (his left eye swelled up ‘as large as an egg’, such that it ‘took five people to stop him from ripping out his eyes’). In the epitaph he composed for his tombstone, he pronounced himself a ‘strenuous champion of liberty’, returning to the words of the ‘impartial’ obituarist in the final section of Verses on the Death of Dr Swift: ‘Fair libertywas all his cry;/For her he stood prepared to die.’ He wanted to be remembered as an outsider turned insider turned outsider, the man who had come from small beginnings to know courts and politicians and then rejected them; he wanted it to be acknowledged, as he wrote in Verses, that for his troubles he had suffered ‘continual persecution’ at the hands of Walpole’s ministry and its slavish propagandists (forgetting, for the moment, that he had once been a hired pen himself); and he wanted to remind those who passed by his tomb in St Patrick’s that he had been a saviour of the common Irish people, though a common man himself.”

(…)

“The new tone goes unnoticed in Stubbs’s account because to his mind Swift went to his grave uncommitted: as a thoroughly ‘reluctant rebel’, pulled in different directions by private and public impulses, given to disavowing investments even as he made them, for ever holding something in reserve. This is, in the main, a sympathetic approach to the life, drawing out the remarkable processes of suppression that had been required to keep the ‘emotional deprivations’ Swift suffered in childhood and later life safely underground; and it is alive to ambiguity, never failing to take into account the self-undercutting that shadows even the most intolerant-looking of Swift’s intellectual positions.”

Read the article here.

Satire requires delicacy Irony requires even more delicacy.

Add a little pepper or salt if you want to save the child’s meat for boiling.

A goods satirist knows that his satire should always contain some practical advice.