In the Library
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift, 1729
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 3k words
£1.99
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A young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food.
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About the book
It begins in the calm, civic voice of a man who has done his arithmetic. He has counted the beggars in Dublin's streets, weighed the cost of their children against the nation's wealth, and arrived, regretfully, sensibly, at a solution: that the infants of the Irish poor be fattened and sold to the tables of the rich, a delicacy at a year old, the skin good for gloves. Jonathan Swift never once raises his voice. That is the horror, and the genius. The essay reasons so coolly, cites such tidy figures, anticipates objections so courteously, that you understand with a cold drop in the stomach exactly what indifference looks like when it learns to speak like policy. It is the most savage thing ever written about the way the comfortable discuss the starving, and it works because it refuses, to the last decorous sentence, to wink. Read it and you will never trust a reasonable tone again.