A Modest Proposal

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A Modest Proposal (full title: 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 Publick) was written in 1729 by Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. It starts off like a modern essay detailing the hardships of the Irish people who are living in poverty and how the current means of fixing the problem are inadequate. Then Swift presents his own idea, ostensibly relayed from an "American friend":

"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."

Needless to say many people found Swift's little joke about how the poor could sell their children to the rich for food to be in poor taste. Others were shocked and appalled. They didn't get the joke.

The original can be found here.

Tropes used in A Modest Proposal include:

• Baby Factory: Technically baby farms, but the same basic idea.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: It starts out normally enough...
• Don't Explain the Joke: Completely averted.
• Eats Babies / I'm a Humanitarian: The whole point.
• Get Thee to a Nunnery / Have a Gay Old Time: Something like that - to Swift's contemporaries, the label "American" would suggest a barbaric person.
• Hypocritical Humor: Swift regrets that he cannot contribute to these scheme, as his youngest child is nine, and his wife is already past her childbearing years.
• Kill the Poor: More like, "Make The Poor Sell Their Children For Food," but you get the idea.
• People Farm: its the whole point
• Poe's Law: Perhaps the Trope Maker. Swift's over-the-top satire was taken at face value and discussed as an earnest and feasible solution for the Irish poverty problem.
• Refuge in Audacity
• Sarcasm Mode: Near the end, Swift lists out a series of efficient, intelligent measures that would actually help the entire English economy, and adds that of course these are entirely too outlandish to ever work.
• Sarcastic Title: One of the earliest examples.
• Stealth Parody: So intricate that it wasn't recognized as such for some time. It helped that the British reading public was so convinced of its correctness in disdaining the Irish that they couldn't see that Swift was attacking that very conviction.
• Wham! Line: You have to start reading from the beginning to get the full impact of the line quoted in the introduction.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Swift says that one fourth of the children saved for breeding should be male, and that "one male will be sufficient to serve four females." If one fourth of the children are male, each would have to "serve" three, not four females.
  • It was probably a subtle hint that the narrator didn't know what he was talking about.