Headnote

Composed 1729; published posthumously, 1765; copy text 1765a (see Textual Account).

Usually dated towards the end of 1729, and another piece that was unpublished in Swift's lifetime (eventually appearing first in Deane Swift's Works of 1765), the Proposal responded in part to the possibility of imported wine duty being increased, and its publication was partly obviated by the tax being voted through in December 1729 (see Ferguson, p. 156; Ehrenpreis, vol. III, pp. 644, 646, who finds the worry over wine duty incongruous), which is also why the pamphlet seems possibly unfinished.

Swift was not alone in his general argument about trade and patriotism, and there were many contemporaneous attempts to promote Irish manufacture: the funeral in 1729 of the Speaker of the Irish Commons, William Conolly, was marked by his wife distributing scarves as a patriotic statement (see Patrick McNally, ‘William Conolly’, DIB). Moreover, on 10 November 1731, a bill in the Irish Parliament obliging all persons to be buried in woollen cloth was introduced by Swift's friend Eaton Stannard. It was not successful.

A PROPOSAL THAT ALL THE LADIES AND WOMEN OF IRELAND SHOULD APPEAR CONSTANTLY IN IRISH MANUFACTURES. WRITTEN IN THE YEAR M DCC XXIX.

There was a treatise written about nine years ago to persuade the people of Ireland to wear their own manufactures. This treatise was allowed to have not one syllable in it of party or disaffection, but was wholly founded upon the growing poverty of the nation, occasioned by the utter want of trade in every branch, except that ruinous importation of all foreign extravagancies from other countries. This treatise was presented, by the Grand-jury of the city and county of Dublin, as a scandalous, seditious, and factious pamphlet. I forget who was the foreman of the city Grand-jury, but the foreman for the county, was one Doctor Seal, register to the Archbishop of Dublin, wherein he differed much from the sentiments of his Lord. The Printer was tried before the late Mr. Whitchet, that famous Lord Chief-Justice; who, on the bench, laying his hand on his heart, declared upon his salvation that the Author was a Jacobite, and had a design to beget a quarrel between the two nations.