Hanging Up To Half A Dozen Bankers A Year Poem by gershon hepner

Thomas Keymer, who teaches at the University of Toronto, reviews a new edition of Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub ('Modest Proposal, ' TLS,1/7/11) . He rejects the way that Swift has been 'retrofitted' as a model of liberal humanitarianism or post-colonial analysis. His broadside against Thomas Sawbridge, a cleric, acquitted of rape in Dublin by buying his victim off reflects his basic disapproval of the depredations in England and Ireland of a corrupted Whig elite:

The same targets may be seen all over Swift, not lest in his rather prescient wish of 1728 (gleefully repeated by journalists both sides of the Irish Sea) 'that a law were enacted to hang half a dozen bankers every year, and thereby impose at least a short delay to the further ruin of Ireland, '

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