A Modest Proposal and Other Stories

First published anonymously in 1729, ‘A Modest Proposal and Other Stories’ is a Juvenalian satirical essay by Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and Anglican cleric. Swift is assumably the greatest prose satirist in the English language and is less well known for his poetry.

Swift points out that disadvantaged Irish might ease their economic problems by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. This overstatement satirizes heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as Irish policy in general.

This essay is greatly held to be one of the most remarkable examples of sustained irony in the history of the English language. Much of its scare value emanates from the fact that the first part of the essay explains the difficulty of famished beggars in Ireland so the reader is spontaneous at the surprise by Swift's solution coming ahead in the other half.

Born in 1667, Jonathan Swift was an Irish writer and cleric, best known for his works Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, and A Journal to Stella, amongst many others. Educated at Trinity College in Dublin, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity in February 1702 and eventually became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Publishing under the names of Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, and M. B. Drapier, Swift was a prolific writer who, in addition to his prose works, composed poetry, essays, and political pamphlets for both the Whigs and the Tories, and is considered to be one of the foremost English-language satirists, mastering both the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. Swift died in 1745, leaving the bulk of his fortune to found St. Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles, a hospital for the mentally ill, which continues to operate as a psychiatric hospital today.

Jonathan Swift(1667- 1745), a poet, satirist, and clergyman, published many satirical works, among them A Modest Proposal. Robert DeMaria, Jr. is Henry Noble McCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. He has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature.