SOURCE: Ferguson, Oliver W. “Swift's Saeva Indignatio and A Modest Proposal.” Philological Quarterly 38, no. 4 (October 1959): 473-79.

In the following essay, Ferguson refutes the prior assumption that Swift was venting his saeva indignatio at England in A Modest Proposal, and instead proposes that Swift's anger was aimed at all social classes in Ireland.

For two hundred years readers have admired Swift's Modest Proposal as one of the greatest pieces of sustained irony in the language. No one has failed to note the brilliance with which Swift balanced the opposing tones of the tract: the economic projector's studied disinterestedness and his own rage. But too little attention has been given to the object of that rage or to Swift's real purpose in the Modest Proposal.

The traditional assumption has been that it was upon England, and not Ireland, that he was venting his saeva indignatio. Leslie Stephen called the tract...