“A Modest Proposal” “A Modest Proposal” was a satirical essay written by Jonathan Swift depicting the horrific conditions of Ireland and the lives of the Irish people in 1729 during the great famine. Swift portrays and attacks the cruel and unjust tyranny of Ireland by the English and mocks the Irish people at the same time. However, Swift's opposition is indirectly presented. Swift is able to do so by using the persona, irony, in order to expose the horrendous corruption and poverty that the Irish had to endure, and at the same time present them with realistic solutions to their miserable lives. The author uses satire to accomplish his objective because it is the most effective way to awake the people of Ireland into seeing their own corruption.
Swift draws on the long-standing perception among the English and the Anglo-Irish ruling classes of the Irish as a barbaric people. Swift neither confirms nor negates this assumption altogether. He indicts the Irish Catholics for the extent to which they dehumanize themselves through their baseness and lack of self-respect. He also, however, admonishes those who would accuse the poor for their inhumane lack of compassion. And, he critiques the barbarism of a mode of social thought that takes economic
Since no one accepted a realistic proposal he offered, “a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food.”He was suggesting that poor Irish families could sell their children as food to the wealthy for money. His satirical proposal was meant to mock the heartless attitudes towards the poor and British policy in Ireland. In this proposal, Swift also wanted to search for a solution for, “preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country.” Life was so difficult that begging was the only way families could survive. The streets were filled with mothers who begged for money or food for their children. Children would usually be sold as slaves, become thieves, or leave Ireland to fight.
He wanted to show his audience the desperation of the situation that Ireland, his home country, was put through. This was a result of the unfair treatment and neglect from Britain. Swift wanted the British to see the effects of their cruelty and what the extremely unfortunate predicament has caused the Irish to cook up as a solution! You got it – babies. Swift’s reliance on irony and satire were clever in writing his piece.
The essay is certainly a Juvenalian satire that is aimed at making his contemporary readers recognize the kind of cold, calculating inhumanity of blunt rationalism when used to address social problems such as poverty and overpopulation.”(Nicole Smith) “Ireland in the 1720s was a dependent kingdom of the recently-formed United Kingdom. Hampered by England's mercantilist trade policies, dominated religiously by the Anglican Church of Ireland, Ireland's chiefly Roman Catholic, Gaelic-speaking population toiled in penury. The Cromwellian and Williamite land confiscations of the seventeenth century left the Irish peasant subject to "rack-rent" exploitation. Sequential bad harvests in 1728 and 1729 aggravated already dour circumstances, and Swift responded with A Modest Proposal.” (Ralph Stevens Pendexter). Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, and he received the
summery A modest proposal is about a proposal for getting use of the children who are born poor. The speaker thinks that it is sad that the female beggars waste all their time to feed all of their children instead of having a descent job. If anyone could find a way to give these children a future in common wealth, in his opinion, they will deserve to have a statue of them as preserver of the nation. He wants to find a solution on this problem, and he got an idea himself. His idea is roughly to let the mothers of poor children provide them with milk for 1 year, and then he will take care of them and make them contribute to the feeding and partly clothing of thousands.
There is a saying, “Money is the root of all evil.” This is true if the money is obtained through ill-gotten ways. What happened to Tom Walker is symbolic of what can happen to any human consumed by greed. He or she will lose their soul to the obsession. There were many important themes present in this story that relate to choices we make and the consequences that comes with it. Money and material things do not truly satisfy a person's life or make a person happy.
This quote portrays the greed contained in people, "He was on the point of foreclosing a mortgage, by which he would complete the ruin of an unlucky land-speculator for whom he had professed the greatest friendship." (Irving 8). Tom had basically been the Devil himself, supporting the fact that the Devil is a mere isomer of his counterpart,
Thomas Jefferson once said that, “man is the only animal which devours his own kind.” This quote, showing the selfishness of mankind, is most historically applicable to the economic climate in 18th century Ireland, where lower class Irish were subject to exploitation from their wealthier absentee landlords. Essayist Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” is a call to action for the struggling Irish delivered by his harsh and cruel satire. First, Swift addresses the issue and makes an appeal to pathos by portraying a common sight in Dublin, a “[beggar] of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags” (675). Swift brings to the audience’s attention the overwhelming amount of poverty that plagues the city, evoking sympathy and pity. This image will play a role in guiding the reader’s emotion throughout the essay.
Fitzgerald condemns the American Dream of the 1920’s through his representation of the wealthy as immoral and materialistic people because their wealth has corrupted them and they only look out for themselves. Tom typifies the immoral, greedy, wasteful and the reckless lifestyle of the wealthy. ”They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”(179). By including these lines Fitzgerald tells the reader that wealth and selfishness during the