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Jonathan SwiftA Modest Proposal
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1729A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Key FiguresCharacter Analysis
Jonathan Swift
Born in 1667 in Dublin, Ireland, Jonathan Swift was a prolific satirist, novelist, poet, and pamphleteer. He frequently wrote in defense of greater Irish autonomy amid a period of fraught political tensions with England. A Modest Proposal reflects these pro-Irish attitudes by mocking elites who fear any reform that might offend England.
Despite his passionate advocacy for the economic and political self-sufficiency of Ireland, Swift’s personal views on England are complex. Born to English parents, Swift lived much of his young life in England and became a part of the inner circle of Queen Anne’s Tory government. Swift only returned to Ireland upon failing to win an expected church appointment in England. Writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, English critic Leslie Stephen states that Swift considered his return to Ireland a form of exile that would force him to live “like a rat in a hole.” (Stephen, Leslie. “Jonathan Swift.” Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 1885.)
Equally complex are Swift’s attitudes toward Catholicism. A devout Protestant, Swift supported the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which King James II, a Catholic, was deposed and replaced by his Protestant daughter Queen Mary II. Moreover, he served as a high-ranking clergyman at St. Patrick’s in Dublin, the central cathedral of the Church of Ireland. According to Robert Mahoney, director of the Center of Irish Studies at the Catholic University of America, “though generally considered an ancestor of Irish nationalism for his resistance to British encroachments upon Irish rights, [Swift’s] Ireland was a Protestant kingdom and mainly an Anglican polity.” (Mahoney, Robert. “Jonathan Swift as the ‘Patriot Dean.’” History Ireland, vol. 3, no. 4, Winter 1995.)
Yet in A Modest Proposal, Swift roundly mocks the bigotry of Anglo-Irish Protestant elites against Catholics. His alignment with Catholics was likely rooted in his empathy for poor Irish men and women, the majority of whom were Catholic. Swift himself acknowledged these contradictions, writing, “[A] lover of liberty, I found myself to be what they called a Whig in politics [...] But, as to religion, I confessed myself to be an High-Churchman [of the Anglican Church].” (Fox, Christopher. The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003.)
Aside from A Modest Proposal, Swift’s most famous work is Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Though often read as a children’s tale, Gulliver’s Travels is as satirical as A Modest Proposal, offering a sophisticated critique of various forms of European government and philosophy.
Mental and physical illness plagued Swift during the last decade of his life. Before his death at age 77 in 1745, Swift committed the bulk of his estate to founding a hospital for the mentally ill which still exists today.
The Narrator
Though ostensibly written in Swift’s voice, A Modest Proposal is told by a narrator who represents an exaggerated version of an Anglo-Irish elite. The essay derives its satirical humor from the irony between what Swift believes and what the narrator says. While Swift himself belongs to the same class as the narrator, they differ in opinion on a host of issues—not least of which is the belief that eating babies is reasonable and good. For example, throughout his life Swift decried the absentee landlords who from their comfortable homes in England preyed on poor Irish families. By contrast, the narrator is deeply sympathetic toward the landlords, noting favorably that his proposal would be of great benefit to them. He writes, “The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be made liable to distress and help to pay their landlord’s rent, their corn and cattle being already seized, and money a thing unknown” (56).
Furthermore, while both the narrator and Swift are Protestants, the narrator’s dehumanizing bigotry toward Catholics stands in contrast to Swift’s more tolerant attitude. Scholars admit that Swift’s thoughts on Catholicism are complicated. Yet given the choice between poor Catholics and wealthy Protestants—particularly those who leave their home country of Ireland—Swift prefers to align himself with Catholics. Meanwhile, the narrator refers to Catholics as “the principal breeders of the nation as well as our most dangerous enemies” (56) before praising “many good protestants, who have chosen rather to leave their country than stay at home and pay tithes against their conscience to an episcopal curate” (56).
In a final dig at the Anglo-Irish elite who seek to solve Ireland’s social woes through barbarity, Swift’s clueless narrator claims to be innocent of any personal bias in furthering his proposal. The essay’s last sentence reads, “I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past childbearing” (58). While the narrator views his lack of any financial incentive as proof of his sincerity, in truth this reveals the extent to which people who prescribe solutions for social ills are rarely in the same position as those they supposedly aim to help. This dynamic is recognizable even today in the 21st century, when there is no shortage of “solutions” designed to alleviate poverty put forth by individuals who have never been hungry a day in their lives.
William Petty
Born in 1623, William Petty was an English economist and philosopher who pioneered the ideas of political arithmetic and laissez-faire economics. Although he died over 40 years before the publication of A Modest Proposal, his work remained enormously influential in Swift’s era and is emblematic of the type of economic utilitarianism Swift seeks to lampoon. Like Petty, Swift’s narrator justifies his economic proposal through cold mathematics, willfully ignoring the plainly disastrous humanitarian effects of eating the children of the poor. Certainly, Petty never advocated for anything like mass infanticide as a way of addressing social ills. Yet when his mathematical approach and philosophy of economic utilitarianism are pushed to their limits, Swift’s narrator views baby-eating as a logical conclusion. By effectively turning workers and their children into commodities—as Petty and other 17th- and 18th-century economists tended to do—they are assigned little value despite what they can offer in a marketplace. To the narrator, therefore, it stands to reason that value should be extracted and circulated in the economy whenever possible, even if it means devouring impoverished one-year-olds.
Despite Swift’s implicit contention that Petty’s brand of economics is ill-suited to addressing poverty in 18th-century Ireland, as a theoretician Petty remains one of history’s most important economists, having influenced economic thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
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