A Modest Proposal and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)

The solution of too-many green eyed children. Although the true irony lies in Britain's use of the Irish as one of several slave classes for hundreds of years. They should have realized we would out breed them at some point.

I used this free Kindle edition to teach the essay to my students in AP Literature and Composition. The essay is a remarkable piece of writing, and the free edition made it easy for me to obtain and read.

Great short read. Biting sarcasm speaking to politicians and faux politicians and the immorality of their statements. Build a wall or eat your children; either will solve our problems and make life better.

The satire that Me. Swift put to paper is something that people need to read. There is thought, argument & a decisive reasoning as to how this would have been implemented. I'm not saying it should but a definet intresing and enjoyable writing.

just a short review. absolutely amazing satire. even if you're not into satire from the 1700's, jonathan swift makes a plausable case for the consumption of useless babies (which i totally agree with). anything that curbs the population explosion is a plus in my book. even gives you recipe ideas along with the proposal, and talks about lazy 15 year old girls. (as an aside was mentioned in a sealab 2021 episode but not explained)

just a short review. absolutely amazing satire. even if you're not into satire from the 1700's, jonathan swift makes a plausable case for the consumption of useless babies (which i totally agree with). anything that curbs the population explosion is a plus in my book. even gives you recipe ideas along with the proposal, and talks about lazy 15 year old girls. (as an aside was mentioned in a sealab 2021 episode but not explained)

I would not recommend reading this unless you wish to be totally baffled. The subject of this proposal is unthinkable! Though it did make me laugh. I laughed at the thought of the speaker actually thinking this is a solution.

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift is a great story that anyone would enjoy. Even though it was made in 1729, it still fits in well with our modern style of writing. I read this book in order to learn about the genre of satire so that I could write one myself, and I can say it taught me what I needed to know. This story was a great satire and thought well. A Modest Proposal is about the famine in Ireland, where the author proposed the eating and farming of babies. He proposes how mothers who can’t support their children may sell them to their baby farm in order to feed Ireland. This story is realistic fiction which helps give some idea behind what he is saying. There aren’t any characters in this story excluding the first person perspective from Swift. The normal high-school student would find this interesting because of how it is written in a comical way. People who like this book will probably like other stories of the same genre. However, people who don’t enjoy this book probably don’t like the idea of even joking about eating children and might find that offensive.

When Jonathan Swift published "A Modest Proposal" in October of 1789, he had determined to alleviate what he saw as the unnecessary plight of the starving poor of Ireland. For centuries the Irish had lived under the often harsh thumb of England which placed very many hardships on them. The English Parliament tended to view the Irish as a conquered people who existed only for the benefit of the mother country. Restrictive financial laws guaranteed that most of the revenue produced in Ireland would find its way into the coffers of the English treasury. Restrictive trade laws ensured that goods manufactured in one part of Ireland could not be transported and sold to another. And most egregious of all was the prevailing tendency of wealthy English landowners to hire landlords to run estates, villages, and apartments of all squalid sorts in Ireland while all the while charging exorbitant rents to those who could ill afford those rents. It is against the totality of what Swift saw as a massive wave of a lack of basic human care and sympathy for the downtrodden Irish that convinced him to write a tract that he hoped would draw attention to the inhuman conditions under which the Irish had to live. To accomplish this goal, Swift chose to write in a style with which he had a long familiarity--a mixing of bitter satire with biting irony. In essence, "A Modest Proposal" is an extended use of this mixture to present what would have otherwise been seen as an appalling use of cannibalism under the guise of a misplaced socially acceptable benevolence.

The structure of the essay is more than slightly reminiscent of the tracts that were then current. Authors of such tracts were fond of critiquing what they saw as the sociological issues of the day. Swift must have seen an opportunity to reveal his proposal to feed the starving masses of Ireland in a forum with which readers could instantly identify. However, where the vast majority of these other pamphlets were utterly serious in tone, Swift chose to mask his thesis using tones which range from stark realism to the outrageously ironic. The irony begins with his narrator, one who is at first portrayed as a man of benevolence, intelligence, and in possession of a strong moral conscience. The narrator commences with a grim description of Ireland's poverty-stricken female beggars who have with them numerous bedraggled ragamuffins. This opening leaves the reader to assume that the narrator's sympathies rest unerringly with these unfortunates. Almost immediately, however, Swift undercuts this incipient benevolence with the suggestion that his sympathy is mixed with other and contrasting emotions. His acknowledgment that these beggar children will eventually turn highwaymen or war with England is the first in a long line of hints, modest or otherwise, that his true purpose is an ill-defined series of pokes and retorts at England and surprisingly enough at Ireland itself. As Swift quickly enough gets to his central thesis that the babies of Ireland are to be fattened and slaughtered as food, the reader begins to wonder what he is supposed to make of Swift's narrator. As the narrator uses the soothing and disarming language of sociological rhetoric to advance his proposal to reduce Ireland's excess population by eating its youngest members, there is the initial tendency for the reader to view the narrator as the villain. However, Swift had far more in mind than merely to ridicule one man. Rather, it was his purpose to use the narrator as a sounding board by which he could assail his true targets: the wealthy of England who profit from the collective misery of Ireland and the Irish themselves who could so willingly even eagerly participate in their own degradation and ruination.

Swift's first target are the landlords "who as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children." These landlords are symbolic of their masters, the landed English gentry who act like financial vacuum cleaners, sucking up the wealth of Ireland and placing it in the pockets of gentry. His second target is the entire Irish population whom he pictures as willing collaborators to their own moral and spiritual dissolution. It is by no means easy to distinguish which group holds Swift's greatest contempt. If it is true that the English are the original destroyers of the Irish social fabric, then it is probably equally true that the native Irish do not resist with any force the allure that money holds as the means to fatten the tables of the wealthy. Swift makes it clear that his view of the foibles of human weakness is based solely on the monetary. The interest of the English with reference to Ireland is based entirely on the number of pounds and shillings that can be safely extorted to the coffers in London. The only offer that the English make to the Irish is similarly based on the assumption that the Irish are a race with no sense of integrity or shame and can be manipulated by the Almighty Buck.

Toward the end of the essay, Swift's irony drifts into the truly morbid. His narrator is exasperated by the failure of anyone to come up with an alternative that is less bloody. He groans that he has no desire to entertain "other expedients," all of which are the non-ironic commonsense proposals that if given a chance might actually serve to help the Irish without resort to cannibalism. But of course, these proposals were never given the chance. By the end of the essay, the reader realizes that there was nothing "modest" about either the proposal or the narrator. The narrator's closing claim to impartiality is an ironic afterthought that a claim for benevolence does not equate to its actuality. And this may be Swift's ultimate comment on satire.

My review is based on the Penguin Revised Edition of "A Modest Proposal and Other Writings." Jonathan Swift was a seventeenth century Horatio Alger. Swift rose from obscurity to become the famous Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. He had an earned Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College in 1702. It is not as an academic or ecclesiastical leader that we remember Swift. It is for his satirical pen warmed up in the flames of seventeenth century controversies from the Tory-Whig disputes (Swift was a torrid Tory supporter) to Anglican-Dissenting Church wrangles to the Irish-English troubles. Swift was a Hibernian hero as he railed against the use of debased English coinage in Eire, the poverty of the Irish and the plights of his countrymen living in an undeveloped land.
In the Penguin Edition a wide ranging selection of writings by Swift are included. There is his famous satirical essay "A Modest Proposal" in which he suggests that the English pay the Irish for cannibalization of Irish babies
and essays on the need to industrialize Ireland. Swift calls on the Irish to refuse to buy English products. A short play is included showing Swift's love of double entendre and the English language. Several letters to "Stella" are included as well as correspondence with such famous authors as Alexander Pope. A 100 plus page glossary, notes and list of Swift's contemporaries makes this Penguin a handsome edition. The writing is over 300 years old and may be hard for some American readers to comprehend. Swift wrote much more than just "Gulliver's Travels" and this book proves he is still worth reading.

In a day such as ours, where the vitriolic drivel of the culture wars drowns out any meaningful dialogue, we could sure use the biting satire of Swift once again to help frame better questions. His blunt yet nuanced critique of English elitism laid bare the hubris behind their mistreatment of the Irish, yet avoided the insipid and redundant ad hominem attacks so prevelant today.

Before you consider purchasing the Kindle version of this title, check the preview. It appears to me to be nothing more than a typewritten copy of the title essay. It is not the Penguin edition at all. It does not, for example, include the satire, Meditation on a Broomstick, for example. Caveat emptor.