A Modest Proposal is a satirical essay written anonymously in 1729 suggesting the poor Irish sell their children as food to the wealthy.
In this seriously written essay Swift targets the English government, scorning cruelty towards the poor Irish Catholics.

One book leads to another....
After listening to the audiobook "Food: A Love Story", by Jim Gaffigan...a hilarious walking companion...
I quoted a Bizzarre Line from Jim..."Maybe All Americans should just eat starving people from other nations"....
my mind went elsewhere with that line ( the complete opposite with Jim... but laughed anyway)....

So....getting a little more serious --
During the comments *Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)*, asked me if I had read/listened to Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". I hadn't!

Doing a little research about the 'very short' satire...I first downloaded it on my Kindle for 'free' and read it...
Still interested ...I downloaded the audiobook ...and listened to it

The idea 'behind' "A Modest Proposal" starts with a much deeper profound purpose than Gaffigan's "Food", book. Sure, Gaffigan may had hit the button on a political- social issue with is 'eating starving people from nations', -- by accident... But Jim wrote about Food ... primarily because he likes to eat. It's a topic he knows about, and he's a comedian.

Jonathan Swift had a clear intention with this 'tongue-and-cheek' ....( hilarious and somewhat repulsive), satire. His short story was definitely a Political and social issue satire. This book was first published in 1789. There were many starving and poor people in Ireland.
Reading & listening to this small satire gave me a deeper appreciation for St. Patrick's day which was just celebrated a few days ago.
Irish people were living in villages owned by wealthy English landowners..and for years lived under the power of The English Parliament. Swift set out to address the serious issue of poverty.
His 'modest' proposal was to eat useless babies ...( by his calculations there were about 120 thousand)... which would help curb the population growth.
Swift's imagination of profits and benefits, ( for wealthy England), from the Irish babies skin --( ladies gloves - men's boots)...was so creepy. .... It was all creepy ... with the
undertone being a very sad time in history.

Given how absurd this 'entire' story is -- I can only conclude Swift was pointing out the obvious ridiculousness ----people were fighting over land, money, and religion...when people were 'starving'. The modest proposal wasn't 'modest' at all... It was an earthquake ... Hoping to wake people up and move people into more humane actions.

This proposal made by J. Swift for combating poverty and overpopulation is as simple as it is ingenious.

But that's the problem with simple and ingenious ideas: There must be someone to find them. Swift was a far-sighted visionary. Although expressed at the end of the 18th century the solutions depicted in his text are still relevant to modern society. I am sure some grave problems of today would be fairly easy to solve. With only some slight modifications to Swift's proposal hunger and poverty would disappear almost overnight! Or the increasingly pressing problem of refugees pulling into Europe? Solvable! Someone should make an entry in Brussels, or give the parliamentarians there this highly topical essay to read. It will surely find a lobby.

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Unbelievably funny satire that is painfully relevant today, a couple hundred years after it was written.

#lerosclássicos

"A young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

Fiquei ligeiramente chocada e nauseada com esta “Proposta Modesta” de Jonathan Swift para “evitar que os filhos dos pobres na Irlanda se convertam num fardo para os seus pais ou para o país”, mesmo sabendo que era um autor satírico, o que me levou a verificar a data em que foi escrita. 1729.
Sendo irlandês de nascença, Swift propõe que, para acabar com os inúmeros pedintes que se fazem acompanhar por várias crianças, que mais tarde, por sua vez, se tornarão pedintes e ladrões, os pais simplesmente os vendam com um ano de idade para servirem de refeição aos ricos. É uma sátira elevada ao absurdo, muitíssimo bem explanada como se de um plano sério se tratasse, enumerando várias vantagens, como ser uma fonte de rendimento para os católicos pobres poderem pagar aos senhorios protestantes, ou ser um produto nacional que pode ser exportado, ou fortalecer os laços entre os membros da família:
“Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, their sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage."
Confirmo: 1729.
Para rematar, só posso dizer que, se Swift tivesse nascido dois séculos depois, poderia ter sido um excelente guionista dos Monty Python.

With the high costs of living, the expenses of educating, clothing, feeding and generally raising children to majority, the solution, as presented in Jonathan Swift's satire, A Modest Proposal, should perhaps be revisited again and given consideration. And please, before you get out the rope to lynch me, realize this is said very tongue-in-cheek. A good read. Hmm, could use a little more salt.

Still very funny. I approached it with certain skepticism because I always assume that humor is one of the aspects of culture that ages the worst, which is fine, but it does make reading works like these a tad more tedious, and frankly, it wasn't the case here. It's still very enjoyable.

there is no better way to kick off a semester of literature than a modest proposal. one smart ass student always tries to derail the conversation with an early declaration of the proposal’s satire, but no one listens, and within moments i have a class of fifty - sixty students angry, frustrated, and sometimes rabid as i take swift’s ironic side and ask the students, with all the seriousness i can muster (which is quite a bit), if we shouldn’t give it a try? i follow that up with “why not?” after “why not?” then smack them upside the head with their universal humanist superiority complex, and force them to think. it’s so new to them they leave hating me or loving me. but they do leave thinking. poor bastards. except that one mormon in the front row. he never leaves thinking anything other than how superior he is. and what a dipshit i am.

Read all my reviews on http://urlphantomhive.booklikes.com

I first came in contact with Swift's Modest Proposal in school where we read certain passages. I was immediately smitten with the nice way in which he wrote his satire. It is so businesslike that it is almost hard at first glance not to agree with his arguments and business strategy. That is, of course, only until you stop for a moment to consider what he has just proposed.

This collection shows it nicely, I would certainly recommend reading it.

Little Black Classics #8

Oh my! Politics and babies and something else I shan't name without spoilers. Review to follow.

OK if you’re going to read this, you probably don’t wanna read too much of my review because I can’t do one without spoilers.


Of course if you already know what it’s about, then the spoilers won’t matter.

The proposal involves reducing poverty with child gifts. In other words cannibalism could really reduce some of the issues people face in Ireland.

I mean, this is a really old book and I kind of knew what it was about before I read it, so I wasn’t that shocked but I could see if somebody didn’t know that it was satire. They well might be shocked because it’s not always easy to tell.



Or maybe I’ve read so much that I’ve just become a bit desensitized. Instead of being that shocked I was rather grossed out.



I won’t deny the brilliance of the writing, but I think I’d have enjoyed it more had I read it as a kid.

Kids have a sort of innocence where they don’t get as desensitized or jaded.

For example, “ the lottery@ and “an occurrence at owl creek bridge” were both introduced to Me through English and literature classes.


I kind of wish this had been too, because the two above-mentioned stories absolutely shocked me and seared themselves into my brain where they still live .


Anyway, it’s really sharp and a biting satire, a searing indictment of the privileged.

So I’d say you probably want to read it. I also say that I seem to be using the word searing quite frequently in this review.

Τι σκέφτομαι όταν ο πρωθυπουργός μας λέει «πού είναι τα πρωτάκια μας;».

The famous satirist, author of Gulliver's Travels, wrote several political texts vituperating against the hopeless condition of his native Ireland and the ineptitude of its British rulers (thank God, things have much improved since!). This short volume includes a few of these texts. In one of them, Swift compares man to a broomstick, a glorious animal turned upside-down and defeated; in another, he gives a list of conditions that make a country prosperous and goes on to demonstrate that Ireland meets practically none; in another still, he vilifies some of the customs in use at the time in Dublin, like town crying, leaving piles of excrements on the pavement and so on.

“A Modest Proposal”, which gives this volume its title, is another of these polemical texts, where Swift uses a straight-faced, shocking humour (something that might not pass the censorship of political correctness today), advocating that poor people’s children, instead of being mouths to feed, should be sold to the butcher and “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout”, for the enjoyment of the rich people of Dublin... I am just wondering why he left out sautéing, frying and braising à la Matignon...

All this is written in jest of course, but when you get ten pages of this sustained cannibalistic sarcasm, the laughter becomes quite sour indeed. The fact that Tertullian’s Apology might have inspired this text does not come as a surprise. The problems raised by Swift are still topical and, with a bit of imagination, his lampoon could become, for our time, a vindication of vegetarianism or a blueprint for some dystopian novel.