An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities in the City of Dublin : Swift’s Anglo-Irish Tract

Jonathan Swift’s satirical pamphlet An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities in the City of Dublin (published by George Faulkner in 1732) has been generally neglected. This may be in part because the main ‘abuses’ that it reviews are innocent looking street cries. However, its appearance in the volume of Irish Political Writings after 1725, in the Cambridge Edition of Swift’s works (2018), offers an opportunity for a complete reassessment. This article attempts to provide the first full analysis of the workings of the Examination. It situates the text within Swift’s writings as a whole and sets out its close relation to other satires by members of the Scriblerus group. In addition, it argues that the pamphlet, though centrally concerned with Dublin, relies heavily on matter drawn from the author’s earlier experience in London and his continuing interest in political affairs on both sides of the water. The narrator is an extreme Whig and Hanoverian with an almost paranoid obsession with Jacobites, whose seditious messages he detects underneath familiar street cries. He reverts constantly to the Oxford administration of 1710 to 1714, for whom Swift was the chief propagandist, and his principal target is its leader Robert Harley. The article concludes that Swift uses the British examples subliminally as a warning of the attitudes and intentions of the Hanoverian regime that extend to Ireland.