Swift uses irony to show that the government needs to acknowledge and help these children make something of their lives, so they don’t become bums and thieves. They need to tend to and educate the children in order to prosper.

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.

The last paragraph is designed to convince the reader of the author’s absolute sincerity in advancing his “modest proposal.” To the untrained eye it may seem that what he’s proposing is pretty immoral, not to say downright revolting.

verbal irony

“A Modest Proposal” is the shortened title of a 1729 essay by satirist Jonathan Swift in which he ironically proposes that the people of Ireland sell their children as food. It is used ironically in the title of “A Modest Proposal” because the proposal is actually outrageous.

The full title of Swift’s pamphlet is “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick.” The tract is an ironically conceived attempt to “find out a fair, cheap, and easy Method” for converting the starving …

Why is a child under twelve considered useless? Children under the age of twelve are no saleable Commodity, and In the story it states even when they come to this Age, they will not yield above three Pounds, or three Pounds and half a Crown at most on the Exchange. They are considered useless.

The establishment of the English language in this country was most influenced by the inability to understand the language and the need for communication between people. Gaelic, the native language of the Irish, was spoken by the poorest and least learned strata of society.

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.

Swift cultivates an analogy between eating people and other ways in which people, or a nation, can be devoured. Swift’s aside about the fact that wealthy Irish landlords have already “devoured” most of the poor parents voices a protest against their exploitation of the peasants.

Swift seems to want the Irish to take better care of themselves so that their country does not remain in the terrible state in which it exists at that point. Since the narrator thinks selling babies for food is a great idea, we can reasonably assume that the ideas he thinks are terrible are actually good.

The purpose of Swift’s satirical essay is to call attention to the problems that were being experienced by the people of Ireland. He wanted the English (who ruled Ireland) to realize what they were doing and to put in place reforms that would solve the problems they had helped to cause.

That is, how would Swift want his reader to describe the persona he adopts? He wants the readers to view his speaker as reasonable, thorough, egalitarian, compassionate.

Reports of cannibalism among the Celts were not unknown, from ancient times up to Swift’s own day. In the first century BC, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote in his Geography that the Irish consumed their dead, particularly the bodies of their parents.