A Modest Proposal

In shaping what is widely considered to be one of the most important works of satire in the English language, Swift structures his essay with great care. Roughly the first third of the essay reads like a sincere effort to expose and address the horrifying conditions faced by the poor in Ireland during the early 18th century. In the first lines the narrator characterizes the sight of female beggars surrounded by their broods of starving children as “a melancholy object” (52), later citing this as evidence that Ireland is in a “present deplorable state” (52). These ostensibly genuine lamentations leave the reader unprepared when the narrator finally reveals his grotesque solution to Ireland’s social ills, lending even greater shock value to an already startling proposition. The “modest” in the essay’s title serves a similar purpose by leading the reader to believe that the forthcoming proposal will seem perfectly reasonable to the average Dubliner. As is often the case with comedy today and throughout history, the element of surprise Swift fosters is key to the joke.

These techniques also serve a larger purpose beyond shock value and humor. In characterizing a scheme of utter inhumanity as modest and reasonable, Swift lampoons heartless attitudes toward the poor held by other pamphleteers and social scientists of the 17th and 18th centuries. In the narrator’s cold accounting of poor women and children as little more than commodities in an economic equation, there are clear echoes of English economist William Petty. In justifying the need for laissez-faire governance—a term attributed to Petty that cautions against undue government interventionism in markets—Petty relied on a method known as “political arithmetic,” which viewed market actors as little more than variables in a mathematical equation. While Petty is rightly revered for having introduced mathematical and statistical rigor to the study of markets, his methodology alone fails to account for the social and human costs of economic systems.

Swift’s narrator engages in a similar methodology at numerous points in the essay. When casually explaining the benefits of his baby-eating proposal, the narrator writes:

Whereas the maintenance of 100,000 children, from two years old and upward, cannot be computed at less than 10s-a-piece per annum, the nation’s stock will be thereby increased 50,0001. per annum, beside the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom who have any refinement in taste (56).

By juxtaposing a supposedly rigorous example of political arithmetic with an absurd evocation of refined gentlemen devouring infants, this quote witheringly captures the grimness of economic philosophies like Petty’s, which tend to view members of a community solely in terms of the value they create in a market. This is also part of Swift’s larger endeavor to use hyperbole to unveil the absurdity of prevailing modes of economic and political thought by pushing their precepts to a logical conclusion. That this conclusion involves such an extraordinary and ghastly social taboo thus reveals the inherent flaw in the mode of thought Swift aims to critique.

In addition to his use of political arithmetic, Swift employs other methods that were common among his contemporaries, including a persistent tendency to lean on the authority of others to bolster his argument. For example, readers need not take the humble narrator’s word for it that the meat of one-year-old children is delicious and nourishing; his “very knowing American” (53) acquaintance can attest to this piece of culinary gospel. Although the American’s identity is unknown, elsewhere Swift cleverly subverts this method of argument more explicitly by appealing to the authority of “the famous Psalmanazar, a native of Formosa” (55). While modern readers are unlikely to ascertain the meaning of this allusion, most 18th-century readers would immediately recognize it as a reference to George Psalmanazar, an infamous imposter who gained notoriety by claiming to be a native of Taiwan, which Europeans at that time called Formosa. By the time Swift published A Modest Proposal, Psalmanazar was already thoroughly discredited. Thus, by relying on the authority of a known scoundrel, Swift undermines his narrator’s own theories as well as the theories of the writers he seeks to parody, who regularly engage in similar arguments from authority.

Although Swift is rightly considered one of Europe’s earliest satirists, the art of satire has its roots in ancient Roman literature, particularly the works of Horace and Juvenal. While Horatian satire generally takes the form of gentle mockery, Juvenalian satire—the genre to which A Modest Proposal belongs—is far more abrasive. Swift subtly nods to these ancient influences toward the end of the essay when his narrator soundly rejects a series of more sensible reforms to address poverty in Ireland. Using a technique common to Roman satire known as paralipsis, the narrator’s rejection of proposals he views as inferior to his own draws attention to the revenue-boosting initiatives Swift supports in real life, like buying Irish-made goods and taxing absentee landlords.

While they aren’t explicitly central to A Modest Proposal, ongoing political tensions between Ireland and England in the 18th century provide important context to the essay. Many in Ireland—including Swift—viewed the social woes detailed here as a consequence of England’s legal, political, and economic subjugation of Ireland. Though nominally a kingdom with its own parliament, Ireland existed at that time as a client state of England that was subject to its laws. So despite the fact that Swift mentions England by name only once—when his narrator celebrates the fact that his proposal will not offend Ireland’s English overlords—England casts a long shadow over the author’s depiction of a nation faced with debilitating poverty.

Among the most destructive of these England-approved statutes were the Irish Penal Laws of 1695, which set heavy restrictions on Catholics’ religious freedoms and their ability to own land. Because the majority of Ireland was Catholic, these laws decimated the Irish economy. Catholics were further subject to Protestant absentee landlords, many of whom lived in England and therefore circulated Irish rent payments in the English economy rather than the Irish economy. Though a Protestant himself and a dean at the National Cathedral of the Church of England, Swift clearly aims to lampoon his own class of Anglo-Irish Protestant elites by aligning his narrator with these landlords and having him celebrate the fact that his infanticidal proposal will disproportionately affect Catholic families.

It is difficult to piece together an accurate and comprehensive picture of the reaction to A Modest Proposal among Swift’s contemporaries. In one of the few surviving responses to the essay, Swift’s friend Lord Bathurst of England toys with the author’s concept, playfully extending the thought experiment to include the devouring of unwanted members of Parliament. If Bathurst’s reaction is any indication, some elites may have taken almost a morbid satisfaction in Swift’s characterization of their dehumanizing policies against Ireland’s poor.

Whatever the contemporary response, modern writers and performers continue to evoke and emulate A Modest Proposal in the 21st century. Swift’s technique of exaggeration and emulation endures through the work of satirists like Stephen Colbert, whose hyperbolic persona on The Colbert Report can be seen as a spiritual successor to Swift’s narrator. Colbert himself even acknowledged this when, following a controversy surrounding an insensitive anti-Asian tweet, the television personality evoked the hashtag #CancelSwift. More recently on Jonathan Swift’s 350th birthday in 2017, humorist Alexandra Petri penned an article in The Washington Post criticizing Roy Moore supporters titled, “Why Alabamians Should Consider Eating Democrats’ Babies.” (Petri, Alexandra. “Why Alabamians Should Consider Eating Democrats’ Babies.” The Washington Post. 30 Nov. 2017.)