“A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.”

Presented in the guise of an economic treatise, the essay proposes that the country ameliorate poverty in Ireland by butchering the children of the Irish poor and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords. Swift’s proposal is a savage comment on England’s legal and economic exploitation of Ireland.

After several attempts to instigate policies with parliament, Irish writer Jonathan Swift channeled his ire into A Modest Proposal, a satirical pamphlet that posited child-eating as the only viable solution to the country’s famine.

Why does the speaker of A Modest Proposal think the food he proposes is “very proper for the landlords”? Because they figuratively devoured everything the parents owned already. thought of this plan being acceptable and as indication that the essay is a satire.

Ironic, Cynical The narrator “humbly” proposes his thoughts on cannibalism as if they’re perfectly legitimate, ignoring the fact that they break every rule in the book (9).

A Modest Proposal: Thesis, Purpose, Audience, Essay. Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country,. and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public” is that poor parents should raise as many children as possible and sell them for food.

Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” begins with Swift’s ironic persona preparing the reader for his outrageous solution to the problem of poverty in Ireland. Swift’s dark satirical solution is to eat the Irish babies, which would bring in profit and decrease the surplus population of Ireland.

The elevated style of A Modest Proposal—a parody of scientific papers presented to the Royal Society—indicates that Swift’s audience consists of men much like himself: learned, intelligent, politically conscious. In order for a parody to work it has to be possible to identify what exactly is being parodied.

Despite its power as a piece of rhetoric, A Modest Proposal did not lead to any lasting changes for Ireland’s rural poor; and just over a century later, thousands would perish in the Great Potato Famine.

Swift’s persona, the narrator of the text, actually does not suggest that the Irish eat their own babies; rather, he makes the incredibly immodest proposal that the Irish peasants sell their one year-old babies to the wealthy British as a new food source. Now, Swift does not actually want them to do this.