Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal for 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” may be the most famous/notorious piece of satire ever written.
In the essay, published in 1729, Swift began by realistically detailing the grim condition of Ireland’s poor. Then, considering that Ireland’s landlords “have already devoured most of the parents” metaphorically, Swift declared that these same landlords therefore “seem to have the best title to the children”—literally.
Swift’s modest proposal was that the poor breed their children as food for the elites. Tapping into the New World discourse of cannibalism, Swift wrote,
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
“Once regarded as a denunciation of the market economy,” writes historian Ian McBride, the scathing essay “is now celebrated as a bitter anti-colonial polemic.” The English would certainly, Swift wrote, “swallow up” the entire Irish nation if they could. Yet McBride argues that “England is a distant presence” in the essay. Swift’s main target was the Irish gentry, the Anglo-Irish landed elite.
They were also known as the “Protestant Ascendency,” the minority that ruled the majority Catholic island from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Swift was one of them. Born in Ireland to a father who had come over from England as a settler-colonialist, Swift rose to the heights of the Deanery of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the central church of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. The Very Reverend Jonathan Swift was Dean, or senior cleric, of St. Patrick’s from 1713 until his death in 1745.
McBride sets the political context for Swift’s savage indignation by noting that 1727–1729 saw three successive harvest failures in Ireland.
“As prices rose steeply, food riots erupted in southern ports, large-scale emigration from the north began and thousands died from hunger, malnutrition and disease,” he writes. Amidst the human disaster, Swift was beyond frustrated after a decade of penning “futile protest against Ireland’s constitutional and economic subordination.”
Swift’s brief against the gentry—even though they were the ones who essentially paid his salary—was harsh, especially when it came to the practice of enclosing and converting land from tillage to pasturage. Arable land necessary for the feeding of people was being turned into land for the feeding of livestock. As with the enclosures in England and Scotland, villagers were uprooted and dispossessed to make way for sheep and cattle. Sheep, as Thomas More had noted as early as Utopia (1516), had become devourers of men.
Irish butter may now an internationally marketable commodity, but in Swift’s day, the Irish peasantry fought back against their replacement by cattle by maiming and driving the unfortunate cattle off cliffs. The Irish Parliament, elected on an extremely limited franchise (Irish Catholics couldn’t vote for most of the eighteenth century), responded with a bill to prevent the maiming of cattle in 1711.
More to Explore
The Anatomy of Melancholy at 400: Still Good Advice
Swift responded with what McBride calls an ironic demand for “a gruesome experiment in livestock farming designed to expose the barbarism of the enclosure movement.” Instead of sheep and cattle, what not human babies? The landlord class, Swift was saying, was clearly savage enough for that.
As McBride details, all this was part of a “wider clerical campaign against rapacious landlords and graziers.” In this, Swift had an ally in the (Anglican) archbishop of Dublin, who expressed a “genuine compassion” for the poor that Swift “carefully eliminated from his own writings.” (Swift was often exasperated with the peasantry.)
Weekly Newsletter
“A Modest Proposal” is “a distinctively Irish critique of a distinctively Irish process of reconquest and recolonization,” concludes McBride. (These are “re-” because the English colonization of Ireland beginning in the sixteenth century was seen as both an extension of, and a transformation of, the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonization of Ireland.)
The Swiftian thing is, “A Modest Proposal” doesn’t seem so outlandish in the early twenty-first century, when a minuscule minority of ultra-wealthy devour the future. And since children are the future…
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
