Life
1700-62; c. landowner and iron-foundry in Co. Mayo; fled on murder charge; issued Reflections upon the Present Unhappy Circumstances of Ireland (1731) and The Benefits which Arise to a Trading People from Navigable Rivers (1729); presum. connected with Westport house and title of Lord Mayo. FDA
[ top ]
Commentary
James Ward, ‘Bodies of Sale: Marketing a Modest Proposal’, in Irish Studies Review, 15, 3 (August 2007), 283-94, incls. discussion on John Browne’s pamphlet The Benefits which Arise to a Trading People [ ... &c.], noting an advertisement by Richard Dickson who previously sold Swift’s Modest Proposal, and here described as ‘a much better Provision’, being a scheme of the creation of a canal; notes that Browne gave evidence as to the integrity of Wood’s halfpence and earned a personal reference in Swift’s third Drapier letter, and has hence been maligned in the secondary literature as a ‘signal example of an Englishman who glutted Ireland for petty advancement’ (Clayton D. Lein, ‘Jonathan Swift and the Population of England’, in Eighteenth-century Studies, 1975). Ward also outlines Swift’s subsequent friendly response to a request that the personal reference be excised from a new edition of the Drapier’s Letters, and some other complimentary remarks by Swift including his marginalia to Browne’s Essays on Trade and Coin in Ireland [held in Cambridge UL], espec. the suggestion therein that Irish linen be used for grave cloths (that the dead be buried ‘in home-spun Linnen’) a ‘hint, happily started by Mr Browne’ which, according to Swift, ‘hath since been successfully put into execution.’ (Ward, op. cit., p.290.)
[ top ]
References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1, selects Reflections upon the Present Unhappy Circumstances of Ireland (1731) and The Benefits which
Arise to a Trading People from Navigable Rivers (1729).
[ top ]