A Modest Proposal
A Modest Proposal (1729) is a classic satire written by Jonathan Swift - the full title 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 proposal in question was for the poor to sell their children to be slaughtered for meat, thereby bringing in valuable income for the family.
Written as an attack on the indifference of landlords to the state of their tenants, and the political economists with their calculations on the schemes to raise income, the entire piece is written in a deeply ironic tone, with scathing comments about the state of the poor and their landlords such as: "I grant this food may be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords, who as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children."
The satirical intent of A Modest Proposal was misunderstood by many of Swift's peers, and he was harshly criticized for writing prose in such exceptionally "bad taste."
External Links
- The full text of "A Modest Proposal..." is in the public domain available from Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=1080&full=yes)
- HTML version of the full text (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~benjamin/316kfall/316ktexts/swift.html)
To-day everything seemed to
sweet and lively dreams which had become disagreeable and nauseous;
yet she could not forget. And what had all that to do with the region
of bar home, by the edge of a sound with changing waters, under pale
hill, and every.html">every.html">every green-shuttered house stood there and held silence
loved a man and believed in his love for her, and suddenly he had
Had she changed? Was she no longer the same? And all the eternal
but her mother.html">mother.html">mother had understood every bit of it, and had been very
which knew and yet should not have known; her mother understood this
scrutinizing her face in order to know where her thoughts were. All
her and with such futile despair stroked the bars of the bench; they
side.html">side to side in his hot bed. When she did this and looked at the hand,
the distance, how pain quivered through every feature of the delicate
showed at the temples beneath the soft skin.
She was very sorry for her little girl, and would have loved to have
words of comfort she could think of, but she had the conviction that
not be expressed in loud words, not even between a mother and
is building for joy and happiness, these words may become an obstacle,
has spoken hears their whisper in the soul of the other, imagines.
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