A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal is Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay of 1729 about poverty and the treatment of the Irish poor. An invented speaker adopts the measured language of calculation to advance a proposal whose moral horror exposes the assumptions behind it. The distance between the speaker’s confidence and the human reality he ignores is the essay’s central device. Swift directs attention towards the reduction of vulnerable people to economic quantities and the failure of those with power to act responsibly. The carefully sustained irony makes the work an indictment of callous reasoning rather than a statement of the author’s proposed policy.