One great work, every day
by Jonathan Swift(1729)
“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.”
Jonathan Swift(1729)
Swift suggests, with impeccable logic, that the Irish poor might ease their burden by selling their children as food to wealthy English landlords. Published anonymously in 1729, it remains the most famous satire in English, the model against which all subsequent savage irony measures itself. The pamphlet form, the reasonable tone, the statistical arguments: everything about it mimics the economic improvement tracts of the time, making the horror of the proposal emerge gradually, terribly, from familiar rhetoric. It cannot be defused by explaining that it is satire. The anger is real.