This came out when the people were starving in hundreds through famine,
and the dead were left unburied before their own doors. English
civilization was shamed by the sight. His sarcasm was never applied with
more deadly seriousness of purpose. There is no strain in the language
with which the state of matters is described: the very simplicity and
matter-of-fact tone that are assumed, make the description all the more
telling. With the calm deliberation of a statistician calculating the food
supply of the country, Swift brings forward his suggestion. No work of
Swift has been more grievously misunderstood. Some have esteemed it a
heartless piece of ridicule, a callous laugh raised out of abject misery.
The interpretation is as wrong as the Frenchman who took it as a grave and
practical suggestion, and who fancied that Swift in sober earnest proposed
that infants in Ireland should be used for food. In truth the ridicule is
but a thin disguise. From beginning to end, it is laden with grave and
torturing bitterness. Each touch, if calm and ghastly human, is added
with the gravity of a surgeon who probes a wound to the quick. There is
nothing like it in all literature.