A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift’s 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 (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49596687-a-modest-proposal) is a landmark eighteenth-century satire that exposes how polite “reason” and economic improvement can mask cruelty. First published anonymously in 1729, the pamphlet adopts an icily rational tone to criticise prevailing attitudes to poverty, policy, and Ireland.

At its core, Swift builds a chillingly “reasonable” narrator who treats human beings as entries in a ledger, weaponising arithmetic, market logic, and polished prose. Drawing on the conditions of eighteenth-century Ireland and the pamphlet culture of the time, the text turns the language of reform against itself to show how rhetoric can dehumanise.

Themes explored in the book:

• The Satiric Persona and Deadpan Irony: How Swift’s cool, managerial voice sustains the piece’s irony, making the moral horror visible precisely through a tone of calm calculation.
• Economics as Rhetoric, Numbers, Prices, and “Improvement”: The strategic use of statistics, cost–benefit language, and household arithmetic to mimic policy argument and reveal its blind spots.
• Colonial Context and Power: The Irish setting, English rule, and landlordism as the unspoken backdrop; who is being criticised, and why that matters for interpretation.
• Language, Dehumanisation, and Moral Shock: How euphemism, technocratic jargon, and polite style can strip away personhood; the ethics and limits of shock in satire.
• Pamphlet Form, Audience, and Reception: The conventions of the short political pamphlet, its intended readers, and the text’s afterlife as a touchstone of political satire.

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This meetup will be based around a presentation of some of the core ideas from A Modest Proposal. This will provide a foundation for discussion, but the conversation is open to your insights and reflections. Whether you’re new to Swift or revisiting this classic, come along and share your perspective!
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