A Modest Proposal

About this book

A Modest Proposal is a short pamphlet published anonymously in Dublin in 1729. Its full title explains that it is a scheme for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public. The author was Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and already famous for Gulliver’s Travels. The proposal, delivered in the calm voice of a public-spirited economist, is that the Irish poor should sell their infants as food for the wealthy.

The essay is the standard example of sustained irony in English, and the phrase “a modest proposal” has entered the language to describe any outrageous suggestion made with a straight face. It lasts because the technique is perfectly controlled. Swift never breaks character, never signals the joke, and lets the arithmetic do the work of the outrage.

The story

There is no plot. The speaker, a reasonable man concerned about beggars in the streets of Dublin, surveys the problem of poor children, considers and rejects other schemes, and then sets out his own. He has, he says, consulted an American acquaintance on the matter. He calculates numbers, weights, prices and seasons, considers the benefits to landlords, tavern keepers and the national economy, and answers possible objections. Near the end he lists, as things not worth discussing, the practical reforms that Swift himself had spent years advocating.

Themes and historical context

Swift wrote the pamphlet after a run of bad harvests and at a time when Irish trade was restricted by English law, absentee landlords drew rents out of the country, and famine was a recurring fact. He had already published other pamphlets on Irish economic grievances under his own name and under pseudonyms, including the Drapier’s Letters of 1724. A Modest Proposal was his angriest and most compact statement of the case.

The essay’s targets are several at once: English policy toward Ireland, the Irish landlord class, the Irish themselves for their failure to act, and the fashionable new habit of treating people as figures in a calculation. The speaker’s language borrows from the political arithmetic of the period, which measured national wealth in heads of population and units of produce. By applying that language without any moral brake, Swift shows where it leads.

Readers sometimes ask whether anyone at the time took the proposal literally. The historical record on first reactions is thin, and this page makes no claim about them. What is well established is that the pamphlet was reprinted and that it has been read as satire ever since.

Who should read it

At around 3,400 words, A Modest Proposal can be read in twenty or thirty minutes. The difficulty is in the prose rather than the length: Swift’s sentences are long, the spelling and some vocabulary are of 1729, and the irony depends on the reader knowing a little about Ireland’s situation. A brief look at the Wikipedia background section before starting repays the effort. Students usually meet it in a composition or literature course; general readers who have enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels will recognize the same voice working at full strength.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg text was prepared by an anonymous volunteer and David Widger. It keeps the pamphlet’s original long title.