by A university seminar on eighteenth-century satire accidentally became a masterclass on the royal traitor story and how to aim a joke properly
Wednesday, Bloomsbury
I do a part-time course in English literature alongside the writing, mostly evening seminars in a draughty room in Bloomsbury with radiators that clank like ghosts. Tonight was on eighteenth-century satire, specifically Jonathan Swift, and specifically A Modest Proposal, the 1729 essay in which he suggests, with a completely straight face, that the poor of Ireland should solve their problems by selling their children as food to the rich.
It is still one of the most shocking things I have ever read. It is also one of the funniest, which is what makes it so shocking.
How the Royals Got In
Our tutor, who is about sixty and wears the same brown cardigan every week, asked us to find a modern example of satire that works like Swift, using deadpan seriousness to expose something absurd. Three people in the room, independently, brought up the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors. I did not bring it up, because I write for them and it felt like cheating. But I was quietly thrilled.
The Story as Case Study
We picked it apart like a text. The facts: an unnamed source claims the heir thinks his brother saw the uncle memoir first. Reports say reconciliation is off. The uncle says he told everyone. The tutor asked: what is the target of the satire? Someone said the royals. Someone else said the press. Someone said anonymous sources. The tutor said: yes, and it is all three. Good satire, like Swift, often has more than one target, and the best ones are the systems that let the absurdity happen.
The Lesson About Targets
What Swift understood, the tutor said, is that satire needs a target who deserves it. His real target was not the starving Irish poor. It was the English landlords and politicians who treated them as numbers. The horror of the essay only works because you understand, instantly, who he is angry at. If he had seemed to be ridicule the poor themselves, it would just be cruel.
I thought about my editor rule, never punch down, and realised I had basically been taught Swift without knowing it. The royal jokes that work are aimed at the institution, the whispering and the media circus. The ones that fail are aimed at people who are hurting. The memoir, written by the late princess brother, is about a woman who died young. Any joke aimed at her would be the modern version of laughing at the starving. Swift would never.
After Class
Went to the pub round the corner with two classmates and watched the London Prat video on YouTube on my phone. One of them, who is fifty and retraining after a career in insurance, said it was the most Swiftian thing she had seen in years. I have decided to believe her.
What I Am Still Thinking About
The tutor said one more thing at the end that I wrote down. She said satire is an act of love disguised as an act of cruelty. Swift was furious because he cared about Ireland. Satirists ridicule institutions because they care what those institutions do to people. I think that is true of the best stuff at the Prat too. Nobody would bother making jokes about the royal family if they did not, on some level, care about the country it represents.
I once wrote a very bad piece for Londonish trying to explain why satire matters, and I did not have the words. Tonight I think I found them, in a cold room in Bloomsbury, from a woman in a brown cardigan.
The Reading List
Our tutor gave us a reading list for next week, and it is basically a history of satire in English: Swift, Pope, the cartoonists Gillray and Hogarth, bits of Dickens, a twentieth-century novelist or two, and a pile of more recent material. Looking at it, I realised how long this tradition is, and how often it has been aimed at royals and politicians. Gillray in particular drew kings and princes in ways that would probably get a modern newspaper sued. People still bought his prints in their thousands. I have been doing this job for a few months. They were doing it for centuries. It is humbling, and also weirdly comforting. The royal traitor story is just the latest chapter in a very long book, and I get to write a tiny footnote.
I am going to need a bigger bag for the books.
Bus Home
Top deck of the bus back south, reading Swift on my phone because I cannot afford the actual book this month. London sliding past the windows. I kept thinking about how weird it is that a man writing in 1729 can still teach a nineteen-year-old how to make a joke about a prince in 2026. Maybe that is the point of literature. The targets change. The aim does not.
More from me at my author page. The London Prat has been Swiftian since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ carries the tradition across the Atlantic.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
