Headnote

Composed spring 1729; published posthumously, 1762; copy text SwJ 433 & 1765 (see Textual Account).

The Letter on M’culla was an unfinished response to James Maculla's attempt to reverse the scarcity of coins in his A New Scheme Proposed, to the People of Ireland (1728) and to his privately trying to gain Swift's approval for the project. The ongoing problem of Irish coinage was also tackled by Thomas Prior in 1730 (Observations on Coin in General. With some Proposals for Regulating the Value of Coin in Ireland). The general movement in economic thought at this time was towards an acceptance of paper currency (see James Kelly, ‘Jonathan Swift and the Irish Economy in the 1720s’, ECI 6 (1991), 7–36; Patrick Kelly, ‘“Conclusions by no Means Calculated for the Circumstances and Condition of Ireland”: Swift, Berkeley and the Solution to Ireland's Economic Problems’, in Aileen Douglas et al. (eds.), Locating Swift: Essays from Dublin on the 250th Anniversary of the Death of Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998, pp. 47–59). Maculla was moving towards this principle, but his interim solution was the (unduly complicated) offering of promissory notes on copper; Swift (for whom the absence of an Irishmint was a prime concern) was anyway suspicious of the idea of paper currency and was unsympathetic towards the thinking behind such proposals. In the case ofMaculla, the impracticality of the scheme allowed him to dismiss such projects, and to indulge in some political arithmetic of his own.

Swift's objection to the workings of the scheme, and latent suspicion of the motives behind it meant that when Maculla's plan did not succeed, the need to finish and publish the pamphlet apparently passed, after its initial composition (usually placed in spring 1729). It was first published in 1762, by George Faulkner, and reprinted three years later by Deane Swift in a text with significant differences, complicated further by an extant partial manuscript.

ON M’CULLA's PROJECT

Sr,

You desire to know my opinion concerning Mr. M’cullas Project, of circulating notes stampd on copper, that shall pass for the value of halfpence and Pence.