A Modest Proposal

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Critique 1: A Modest Proposal The purpose of this paper is to critique an essay written in 1729 by author Jonathan Swift titled, ”A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the public.” Swift's essay addressees the poverty, homelessness, and hunger that was going on in Ireland. On the surface the essay is actually written up as a proposal giving Swifts solution to these problems, which is selling the babies of Ireland’s indigent population at one year of age, to Ireland’s elite population to be used as a food source (2). Swift's proposal goes on to discuss in detail outlandish reasoning of how selling these infants would not only cut down Ireland's population, it would generate financial benefits for both the indigent women by giving them money to care for themselves, and their landlords who would receive their rent, and the wealthy would have new delicacy to eat (3). It isn't until almost half way through his proposal that Swift actually states eating babies as his solution. Once he does, his writing changes and the reader starts to question the seriousness of his essay. His meaning starts to come out from between the lines as the reader identifies the hypocrisy in his statements of Irish women having abortions, “sacrificing the poor innocent babies”, the contradiction in his statement of “decreasing the population” as a benefit of his proposal and the inaccurate information in his statement that “newborns weigh 12 pounds” (2-3 ). His essay is pointing out how the Irish people are feeding their own problem continuing to have babies by lacking to manage their lives and the religious prejudices surrounding them as Catholics. Once you realize Swifts writing style purposely mirrors the thought process of the wealthy English population and the sarcasm
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