A Modest Proposal

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1729

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Essay Analysis

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Reform Efforts’ Failure to Address Income Inequality

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. In the parlance of the 21st century, that’s too long and complex to fit on a sign—or in a tweet. Rather, his reforms are far-reaching and demand both political and spiritual commitment.

Aside from its patent barbarity, the narrator’s proposal is not unlike many of the solutions in vogue at the time Swift wrote A Modest Proposal. For example, scholar George Wittkowsky likens the child-eating scheme to a more extreme version of various proposals under serious consideration at the time, including one that involved “running the poor through a joint-stock company.” (Wittkowsky, George. “Swift’s Modest Proposal: The Biography of an Early Georgian Pamphlet.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 4, no. 1, 1943.) Thus, Swift’s choice to frame his own sincere proposals negatively through the voice of a clueless and sadistic narrator serves two purposes. First, it attracts the reader’s attention in a way that a sober, thoughtful, and persuasive list of difficult solutions would not. Second, it undermines the more flashy one-size-fits-all solutions offered by many of Swift’s contemporary pamphleteers.

The Dehumanizing Attitudes Held by the Rich Toward the Poor

Swift’s disturbing depiction of how Anglo-Irish elites like his narrator view the poor runs along two vectors. The first, more visceral vector involves the narrator’s use of the language of livestock and animal husbandry to describe the poor. When explaining how to prevent undue population declines, the narrator states that the male-to-female ratio of “breeders” will be one to four, “which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine” (53). On the topic of how his proposal will improve marital relations, he writes, “Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, their sows when they ready to farrow” (57). Most gruesomely, the narrator recommends “buying the children alive [rather] than dressing them hot from the knife as we do roasting pigs” (54). All of this highlights the dehumanizing attitudes held by members of Swift’s social class against the poor.

While the language is clearly exaggerated for a perverse comedic effect, the livestock comparisons follow naturally from a second, more pervasive vector of dehumanization: treating human lives as commodities. Like the aforementioned “joint stock exchange” for poor people, many of the economic proposals of Swift’s era treated workers as little more than variables in an equation designed to maximize market growth. As previously stated, this mathematical approach was pioneered by economist William Petty, whose methodologies Swift subtly emulates here. These ideas were also consistent with broader attitudes among the nascent class of early European industrialists.

According to scholar Robert Phiddian, the rise of global mercantile capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in a major shift in how business elites viewed labor. In a 1996 academic journal article, Phiddian writes that A Modest Proposal is a response to “the mercantilist view [that] no child was too young to go into industry [...] [The] somewhat more humane attitudes of an earlier day had all but disappeared and the laborer had come to be regarded as a commodity.” (Phiddian, Robert. “Have You Eaten Yet? The Reader in A Modest Proposal.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 1996.) Echoing Phiddian, Princeton English professor Louis A. Landa characterizes A Modest Proposal as a rejection of the prevailing economic mantra of Swift’s time: “People are the riches of a nation.” According to Landa, “Swift is maintaining that the maxim—people are the riches of a nation—applies to Ireland only if Ireland is permitted slavery or cannibalism.” (Landa, Louis A. “A Modest Proposal and Populousness.” Modern Philology, vol. 40, no. 2, 1942.)

The Political and Religious Tensions in Early 18th-Century Ireland

Given the political and religious ramifications of A Modest Proposal, it is important to consider Ireland’s social dynamics in the era when Swift wrote his essay. In 1688, around 40 years before the publication of A Modest Proposal, the Glorious Revolution led to the deposition of King James II, a Catholic, by his Protestant daughter Mary II. Because England viewed Catholicism as a threat to the sovereignty of the English throne and the Anglican Church, England worked to stymie a potential Catholic re-ascendancy by passing a series of discriminatory Penal Laws intended to limit Catholics’ religious freedom and their ability to hold land and titles. Though nominally its own kingdom, Ireland was effectively England’s client state and therefore subject to its laws. And because most Irish were Catholic, the Penal Laws disproportionately impacted them, essentially rendering them second-class citizens.

It is within this political and religious context that Swift’s narrator proposes his infant-devouring scheme. Although the narrator is understood to be Irish, he is clearly a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class. Therefore, rather than side with his fellow Irishmen in the spirit of national pride, the narrator’s dominant concern is to formulate a social and economic plan that does not offend England. Moreover, the narrator makes no attempt to hide his anti-Catholic bigotry, delighting in the fact that his proposal will operate primarily as a way of thinning out the ranks of Catholics, described here as “our most dangerous enemies” (56).

When taking into consideration these contextual and historical elements, A Modest Proposal becomes something other than satire alone. It is a snapshot—albeit an exaggerated one—of the political attitudes of the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite in the early 18th century.