A Moest Proposal Jonathon Swift

Jonathon Swift wrote A modern Proposal as an attempt to tell the Irish to do something with themselves; something positive and productive as a unified country, in order to bridge the gap of inequality between Ireland and England. Swift was an Irishman that resented that he would not be recognized as a person of high authority in England because of his birthplace. Swift created a call to arms for the Irish in A Modest Proposal that suggested order creates beauty and the Irish had it within them to fix everything, if they would just get up and go. A Modest Proposal uses satire and sarcasm to get the Irish people on their feet and ready to put Swift’s real solutions into action to better the country of Ireland as a whole.

Shocking the reader with such a suggestion as eating human children is exactly what Swift needed to get his point across in the early 18th century. One could not simply state “Hey, I do not approve of the King’s opinion and I believe inequality exists in this country; I think people should change how they act.” Not one person would be inclined to read that piece and more than likely the author would be sent to prison for treason. The absurd tone Swift uses in A Modest Proposal allows Swift to state his true feelings, listing off problems he sees all around him, attacking the “Pretender” King and the Roman Catholic Church without too much fear for his life. Problems that occur in Swift’s world include: too many poor Irishmen begging on the streets, an overall ragged economy, and bad relations between family members, mostly due to stress from society. Swift creates a seemingly simple solution to all of these problems and more: fatten up the children of the poor and sell them as food. This fixes everything in Swift’s mind: creating income for poor families, economy improves and relations between family members would become much better.

Swift sees problems in his world that run much deeper than a bad economy; the existence of blatant inequality...