Auction Date:2012 Oct 20 @ 11:00 (UTC+1)
Location:38 Molesworth Street, Dublin, Dublin, ., Ireland
SWIFT ( Jonathan ). A proposal for giving badges to the beggars in all the parishes of Dublin. By the Dean of St. Patrick's. Printed for T. Cooper, 1737FIRST LONDON EDITION, 16-pages, large 4to, disbound and all edges uncut : a nice copy in a folding stiff-board slip-case."Teerink 756. Rothschild 2157. The first London edition ; an octavo edition appeared at about the same time in Dublin, but it is not clear which has precedence. This has long been a very difficult Swift title to find, in any form. For this London quarto the EST lists 14 locations (L, C, Ct, D ; CLU-C, CSmH, InU-Li, IU, KU-S, NjP, NNC, PPL, TxU ; Turnbull) ; also a copy at Yale, but none at Harvard or Pennsylvania, two of the very best Swift collections in North America. The Dublin edition is similarly rare. The only copy of any edition to appear at auction in the last fifty years or more was the Hollick copy of the Dublin printing, sold in 1980 for £1000. As to this fine London 4to edition we have never seen another on the market. One of Swift's last essays on the state of Ireland, and on the question of poverty in particular ; the text owes something to his masterpiece, A Modest Proposal, (first published 1729), although, ironically, the savage tone seems to reveal not so much the same mordant irony, for which it might easily have been mistaken, but a genuine contempt and disgust for the poor as a class. A workhouse had been established in Dublin in 1704, but it did little to relieve the poor or suppress begging. As a man who loved to walk the city streets Swift was disgusted by the beggars who swarmed in his way. In 1726 he presented a plan which would oblige beggars to wear a badge that would identify him and be, as it were, his licence to beg. The badges were to be of brass, copper or pewter and be firmly attached to the outside of the beggar's outward garment. By this mans beggars could be confined to their own parish. Any found straying could be whipped and sent back ; any foreigner or beggar not a native of Dublin could be, in accordance with the practice in England, apprehended and "sent from one Parish to another until they reach their own homes ... as for the aged and infirm" (found begging without a badge), it would not be necessary to flog them "it would be sufficient to give them nothing, and then they must starve or follow their Brethren". Although the scheme was in many ways impractical the archbishop adopted Swift's proposal and badges were distributed. But the beggars refused to wear them or wore them so that they could not be seen. Swift clung to this project and in 1737 produced the present pamphlet, uncharacteristically revealing his authorship. According to Ehrenpreis "the striking feature of this pamphlet is not the exposition of doctrine but the way it illustrates Swift's famous declaration that he gave his love to individuals rather than to communities of men. For any particular beggar Swift might instinctively feel compassion. Imaginatively he could join himself to the unique sufferer. However, when he thought of the poor as a class, he felt appalled by their collective faults and rejected them as he rejected the fine ladies in the filthy verse satires ... So hyperbolic and relentless is the language that an ill-informed reader might suppose the great ironist was impersonating a brutal misanthrope ..." Not only did Swift detest the poor as a class he seems to conflate them with the Irish in general : "To say the truth, there is not a more undeserving vicious race of human kind than the bulk of those who are reduced to beggary, even in this beggarly country ... I am confident, that among the meaner people, nineteen in twenty of those who are reduced to a starving condition, did not become so by what the lawyers call the work of God, either upon their body or goods but merely for their own idleness, attended with all manner of vices, particularly drunkenness, thievery, and cheating. This (Ireland) is the only Christian country where people contrary to the old maxim, are the Poverty and not the Riches of the Nation, so, the blessing of increase and multiply is by us converted into a Curse ... " As to the beggars who refused to wear their badges : "They are too lazy to work, they are not afraid to steal, nor ashamed to beg ; and yet are too proud to be seen with a badge ... They all look upon such an obligation as a high indignity done to their office. I appeal to all indifferent people, whether such wretches deserve to be relieved." Swift was noted for his charities to the poor and for his kindness to individual suffers. The apparently contrasting stance revealed in this pamphlet is not unique ; there is a very similar dichotomy in the work of Henry Fielding whose compassion for the individual shown in his imaginative work as a novelist is in sometimes surprising contrast to the Draconian repression, severity and apparent inhumanity of his proposals for social reform as seen, for example, in A proposal for making an effectual provision for the poor, 1753. Swift published this tract when he was on the verge of a decline which ended in dementia ; the pamphlet concludes with the plea of a tired old man: "I had some other thoughts to offer upon this subject : but as I am a desponder in my nature, and have tolerably well discovered the disposition of our people, who never will move a step towards easing themselves from any one single grievance ; it will be thought, that I have already said too much, and to little or no purpose; which hath often been the fate, or fortune of the writer, J. Swift."ENGLISH PRE 1801; IRELAND; DUBLIN; ECONOMICS; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
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