A Modest Proposal 1043the wealthy for food. The essay uses unsentimental
agricultural and economic language to emphasize
the benefits of this scheme, including a world with
less Catholic “papists,” income for the nation and for
parents, and an expansion of the culinary expertise
of British chefs. Very telling is the final section of
the satire, which rebuffs all other proposals. This fol-
lows the Romans: After appearing to give a serious
proposal that is too horrendous to be considered, the
author offers a list of the options he truly believes so
the reader will realize their efficacy. Indeed, Swift
had written in favor of the 10 expedients his Modest
Proposal persona rejects. Hence, the goal of this sat-
ire is to urge the powerful to help the Irish by real-
izing that their unjust policies are killing people just
as surely as if they were raising the poor as animals
to be slaughtered and eaten at their tables.
Kelly MacPhail
commodIFIcatIon/commercIaLIzatIon
in A Modest Proposal
To achieve his goal in A Modest Proposal, Jonathan
Swift intentionally adopted a writing persona that
would be shocking to his readers. The opinions rep-
resented by the narrator and Swift’s actual opinions
are, in fact, opposites, as Swift’s real aim is to help
the starving poor people of Ireland. He hopes to
effect changes in the unfair political situation set on
Ireland by England, to change the workings of the
Irish economy, and to challenge common stereo-
types about Irish Catholics. To do this, he adopts a
persona who is calculating and shrewd and who, in
the deaths of Irish children through starvation and
disease, sees only the problem of lost profits through
an unharvested commodity. The genius of Swift’s
satire is in the narrator’s unapologetic belief in
policies that are obviously loathsome, so that readers
quickly identify and vilify them.
Economic concerns are central to A Modest Pro-
posal. The narrator claims he has reflected on the
situation and has found other schemes lacking. He
is concerned with people only as commodities and
thus ironically distorts the 18th-century expression
“People are the riches of a nation.” The expression
is not taken in the usual sense—that the people’s
industry and hard work make a nation prosper-
ous—but in valuing them as commodities similar
to beef cattle. Swift’s persona employs the language
of agricultural economics to depict the people as
animals: A child is “dropped from its dam,” and the
useful segment of the population is mathematically
calculated by numbering female “breeders” and sub-
tracting probable miscarriages and diseased infants
that cannot be brought to market. Otherwise, the
only option for the poor is begging, the “lawful
occupation” of poor women and children. The life of
a petty thief is the best to which children can aspire,
which is regrettable because they have to be sup-
ported financially until they can become proficient
at the art of thievery around age six.
The narrator’s mathematical formula projects
a harvest of 120,000 babies, 20,000 of which are
reserved for breeding purposes, including one male
in four to later “serve” the females. This leaves
100,000 infants made fat and plump for the table
through extra nursing in the last month. He calcu-
lates that a typical child, so raised, will reach sale-
able weight at 28 pounds and render four family
meals and some fine skin gloves or boots. This nets
a profit of eight shillings for the mother, who will
then be “fit for work till she produces another child.”
He argues that only babies are fit for consumption,
as the flesh of adolescent males is too tough, and
females give a greater profit by being kept for breed-
ing purposes. Just as vegetables have specific harvest
seasons, the narrator posits that March would be the
most plentiful month for Irish “infant’s flesh,” given
the “popish” custom of so many women giving birth
nine months after the end of Lent; this alludes to
the further “collateral advantage” of decreasing the
excess number of “papists.” The narrator summa-
rizes his position by enumerating the benefits of his
scheme: fewer Catholics; income for the poor, with
no child-rearing costs; money for the Irish economy;
a flourishing of new culinary skills; and honest mar-
riages among the poor, whose men would now treat
their wives as they would a mare in foal and would
compete to bring the largest baby to market.
Swift’s true feelings appear when his narrator
admits that the food would be rather expensive, but
that the landlords would be the proper consumers
as “they have already devoured most of the parents.”
Indeed, one of the traditional characteristics of
the satire is an apparent dismissal of other options