Swift's devastating satire suggesting the Irish eat their children — the sharpest essay ever written.
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Jonathan Swift proposed eating babies — and it remains the most devastating piece of political satire ever written in the English language.
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Free Audiobook · A Modest Proposal
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For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. by Dr. Jonathan Swift 1729 It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel…
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Jonathan Swift proposed eating babies — and it remains the most devastating piece of political satire ever written in the English language.
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- The Narrator (The Proposer)
- An unnamed projector who presents himself as a rational, public-spirited economist deeply concerned with Ireland's poverty crisis. He speaks in the calm, reasonable tone of a policy expert as he builds toward his 'solution.'
- The American Acquaintance
- A person in London whom the narrator cites as his authority that a well-nursed year-old child makes delicious, nourishing food. He is invoked as an expert source for the proposal's central culinary claim.
- The Worthy Person / True Lover of his Country
- A gentleman the narrator mentions in passing, who suggested a 'refinement' involving older children as a substitute for venison. The narrator politely disagrees with parts of this refinement.
- The Poor Mothers and Beggars
- The women described in the opening as crowding the streets and roads with ragged children, unable to find honest work, whose plight sets up the essay's supposed problem to be solved.
- The Landlords
- Absentee and resident property owners repeatedly referenced as having already 'devoured' the parents of Ireland through rent and oppression, framed as the natural customers for the proposal's 'commodity.'
Glossary
- Projector
- A person who designs schemes or plans, often used in the 18th century with a slightly mocking tone for someone with grand, impractical ideas.
- Breeders
- The narrator's term for poor women of childbearing age, treated in the essay as livestock valued for reproductive output.
- Papists
- A period term (often derogatory) for Roman Catholics, referenced by the narrator as the majority poor population he cynically proposes to reduce.
- The Pretender
- Refers to the Stuart claimant to the British throne; young Irish men are described as leaving to fight for him rather than starve at home.
- Fricasee / Ragoust
- French culinary terms for stewed or richly sauced dishes, used by the narrator to discuss how infant flesh might be prepared.
- Distress (legal term)
- An archaic legal term meaning the seizure of goods or property to compel payment of a debt, as in seizing a tenant's belongings for unpaid rent.
- Shambles
- An old term for a slaughterhouse or meat market, proposed by the narrator as a site for processing the children.
- Popish
- An archaic, often pejorative adjective meaning 'Roman Catholic,' used repeatedly by the narrator in his demographic calculations.
- Barbadoes (selling oneself to)
- A period reference to indentured servitude in the Caribbean colonies, mentioned as one desperate fate for impoverished young Irish people.
Table of contents
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