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A Brief Description Of A City Shower By Jonathan Swift

1019 Words5 Pages

This essay discusses the purpose of rural and urban landscapes in Jonathan Swifts ' works, by portraying the urbanisation in A Description of a City Shower and the rural scenery in A Modest Proposal. The essay also considers the context of the time Swift wrote the two works and describes the urban and rural setting to illustrate his viewpoint.

“The first readers of the "City Shower," when it appeared in the Tatter No. 238 (October 17, 1710), had, outside their own knowledge and sensibilities, nothing but a slightly misleading headnote to guide their interpretation of the poem. That headnote compared Swift 's city shower to 'Virgil 's land-shower... a shower of consequence... bringing matters to a speedy conclusion between two potentates of different sexes '” (Meaning 195). Before the poem A Description of a City Shower was written, storms and showers in poetry had never been set in the city, …show more content…

It is as if he was saying “you will come to London as a clean, pure and naïve individual and this city will stain you and ruin you forever.” A Description of a City Shower was written at the beginning of the 18th century, a time when the Government and the Aristocracy tended to spend their money excessively. This practice encouraged the lower classes to believe that the city was a place of great fortune, when in reality only a few managed to succeed. It was a time of great increase in poverty and prostitution, since for some prostitution was far better that working as a servant or not having a job at all. Some young women often resorted to such a mean to survive. In the entire poem Swift makes fun of urbanization, because it made the place so corrupted that even the elements of nature are polluted. “Swift 's urban landscapes tend to resemble his rural ones in their similar images of discord, ruin, and alienation”

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