A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift
A Modest Proposal
ClassicsHumor & SatireNonfictionPolitics & SocietyEssays
3 chapters·25m listening
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"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift is a satirical essay written and published in 1729. The work shockingly suggests that Ireland's poor could solve their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the wealthy. Through sustained irony and deadpan humor, Swift uses this outrageous premise to mock hostile attitudes toward the poor and expose the dehumanizing policies of British colonial rule. The essay remains celebrated for its dark wit and biting social commentary.
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
Published anonymously in Dublin in 1729, A Modest Proposal is presented as a sober policy paper on the poverty of Ireland. Its author, a reasonable-sounding projector, calculates the number of children born to poor families and arrives at his remedy: that they should be sold, at a year old, as food for the wealthy. Jonathan Swift keeps the voice calm and the arithmetic precise, and the horror lies in how naturally the argument proceeds. The essay turns the language of economic improvement against the landlords and policies that treated the Irish poor as a commodity, and near its end the speaker lists, only to dismiss, the practical reforms that might actually have helped.
Characters
The Proposer — Narrator
A calm, well-meaning projector who has studied Ireland’s poverty for years and sets out, with careful figures, his plan to sell the children of the poor as food for the rich.
The American acquaintance — The Proposer’s informant
A “very knowing American” in London who has assured the Proposer that a healthy, well-nursed child of a year old makes a delicious and wholesome food.
The worthy person — A patriot with a refinement
A “true lover of his country” who suggests that boys and girls of twelve to fourteen could replace the venison the gentry have lost, an idea the Proposer politely declines.
Psalmanaazor — The worthy person’s source
The “native of the island Formosa” said to have told how the bodies of executed young people were sold there as delicacies; in reality George Psalmanazar, a famous impostor who invented his Formosan origins.
The mothers of Ireland — The poor
Women seen begging on the streets, roads and cabin doors, followed by three, four or six children in rags, with whose plight the essay opens.
The landlords — The intended customers
The owners of Irish land who, the Proposer observes, have already devoured most of the parents and so seem to have the best title to the children.
About the author
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, clergyman and pamphleteer, and Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin for the last thirty years of his life. He published Gulliver's Travels anonymously in 1726 as a genuine sailor's narrative, complete with maps, and it sold out in a week. His pamphlets defended Irish interests against English economic policy so effectively that a reward was offered for his name, and A Modest Proposal — which recommends that the Irish poor sell their children as food — remains the most savage piece of irony in English. He left his estate to found a hospital for the mentally ill.