A Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
Jonathan Swift
A Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
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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.
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.