A Modest Proposal

The portrait Swift paints of life in early 18th-century Ireland is exceptionally grim. In addition to the essay’s early imagery depicting mothers begging in the street to feed their children, the sheer fact of the narrator’s horrifying proposal—exaggerated though it may be—emphasizes the severity of the conditions faced by Ireland’s poor. These inequities are further laid bare when the narrator estimates that of the 200,000 wives of a reproductive age, a mere 30,000 possess the means to care for children.

As a pamphleteer and reformer, Swift possessed his own ideas about the best way to address Ireland’s economic ills. They are included in the essay in a list of reform proposals the narrator soundly rejects; a good way to ascertain Swift’s true feelings about a matter is to reverse all the opinions held by the narrator. One might question why, if Swift had a clear idea of what Ireland must do to address its economic woes, he didn’t simply write a straightforward tract recommending these very reforms.

Yet unlike the narrator’s proposal, Swift’s reforms cannot be boiled down to a simple cure-all like “eating the babies of the poor.” He recommends purchasing predominantly Irish-manufactured goods, taxing absentee landlords, rejecting factionalism, and embracing moral and spiritual qualities on a national level.