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Summary Of A Modest Proposal By Jonathan Swift

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1.
In his “A Modest Proposal” (1729), Jonathan Swift claims that Ireland is experiencing debilitating social issues because of England’s unjust policies.
Swift indirectly exposes the social issues that exists in Ireland by proposing a satirical solution to them.
Swift surfaces these issues in order to promote helping the poor and making them become beneficial members of society.
The author uses a satirical frame to address public issues, thus he mostly is directing his essay towards the general public in Ireland, the victim, and England, the culprit.

2. When one considers the satirical frame of “A Modest Proposal,” Swift’s persona implicitly mimics an individual who is serious and knowledgeable on the burdens Ireland is undertaking …show more content…

Swift dehumanizes poor mothers in paragraph six, which details how he calculates the number of poor children in Ireland. He starts by estimating the number of women capable of producing children, claiming that there are“two hundred thousand Couple whose Wives are breeders” (Swift, 6). Notice that Swift labels these women as breeders, a title that is regularly used to address animals. In the following paragraph, Swift transitions to dehumanizing children by stating that children are too worthless to be a “saleable Commodity” (Swift, 7). In this statement, he implies that children’s value can be measured in beans, apples or any other consumer product. This helps prepare the audience for Swift 's proposal that children should be eaten. Later, he quantifies Children by giving them a dollar amount: children “will not yield above three Pounds, or three Pounds and half a Crown at most on Exchange” (Swift, 7). This further prepares the audience for upcoming proposal because the quote suggests that human consumption holds financial benefits. When Swift finally makes his proposal to eat children, he lowers the value of human life by comparing their worth to that of “Sheep, black Cattle, [and] Swine” (Swift, 10). As the essay progresses, Swift continues to devalue children, and although these devaluations explicitly support the author’s proposal, they are mainly used to highlight the living conditions in Ireland. For instance, Swift calculated the number of poor families in order to

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In fact, he refers to “A very worthy Person, a true Lover of his Country, and whose Virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased, in discoursing on this matter, to offer a refinement upon my Scheme”(17). As a result, Swift shows that even the most patriotic person to both Ireland and Britain (since Ireland was under British control at the time) realizes that within this current situation of poverty, this proposal is a solution and can be acted out in many different

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Popular essayist and satirist, Jonathan Swift, in his pamphlet, “A Modest Proposal,” (which at first was anonymously published) is proposing a solution to end the famine in Ireland. He adopts a sarcastic and straightforward tone in order to explain his outrageous proposal to the Irish public. Swift’s purpose is to bring to light the terrible situation of the Irish people and to propose a way to fix it. In this pamphlet, he proposes to end the famine by outrageously suggesting eating and selling Irish children. Swift begins his pamphlet by describing the sad and poor Irish streets with mothers and child beggars in rags.

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At the time when Swift’s proposal was made, Britain’s dictatorial reign in Ireland had left the nation in poverty and disarray. Criticising a nation was much easier to do in a joking tone or be harder to read rather than direct and upfront. Swift wanted to discuss these issues and found by writing in satire he could have the readers’ attention in way that a seriously written piece could not reach. Satire is present when Swift convinces the audience that he is an empathetic individual introducing the proposal with a sophisticated and compassionate manner beginning in the sentence, "I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection (1)," luring the reader into a sense of false trust as he begins the descriptions of the poor in Ireland. The reader is led to believe at first that this is a serious essay however it is not until deep into the proposal the reader can see how Swift uses satire to propose his thoughts found in the sentence, “a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled;” continuing on that, “no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust (1).”

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