Headnote

Composed September 1726; published posthumously, 1765; copy text SwJ 479 (see Textual Account).

This fragment is dated September 1726, and was written in the aftermath of the Drapier's Letters. The giving of badges to licensed beggars was not uncommon in contemporary Ireland, and this was Swift's first attempt at a subject which was discussed in Sir William Fownes's Methods Proposed for Regulating the Poor, in 1725. It joined considerable contemporary writing concerned with poverty and vagrancy, particularly with regard to the distress in the countryside and how such problems moved into Dublin (see Introduction, above, pp. xxx, lxxii). The practice of badging resident beggars was already borrowed from England, where the Poor Law intended to admit the aged and infirm, but not sturdy beggars. The Irish never enacted this, but seemed to adopt the idea of returning beggars to their own parish (a process already operative in the north of Ireland and some Dublin parishes). Swift himself was seeking to interest Archbishop King in his proposal, both as a friend and because of King's interest in poverty: King's papers in Marsh's Library (Z.3.11) contain a number of writings relating to the Dublin workhouse and to the problem of poverty more generally.

As well as its relation to the context of Swift's other pamphlets on the social effects of Irish economic problems from 1728 (most famously AModest Proposal), Swift would return to the abiding question of controlling vagrancy in 1737, in hismore extensive Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars (see below, pp. 305–19). Upon Giving Badges was first published posthumously in 1765, though the present copy text – the manuscript from the Forster Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum – has not been published before.

UPON GIVING BADGES TO THE POOR

The continuall Concourse of Beggars from all Parts of the Kingdom to this City having made it impossible for the severall Parishes to maintain their own Poor, according to the antient Laws of the Land. Severall Lord Mayors did apply themselves to the Lord Archbp of Dublin, that His Grace would direct his Clergy and the Churchwardens in the sd City, to appoint Badges of Brass, Copper or Pewter to be worn by the Poor of the severall Parishes.