More handpicked essays just for you.
A short note on Jonathan Swift
Rhetorical analysis essay example
Summary on jonathan swift life and acomplishments essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift is a dehumanizing and horrific satire. Through the narrator the author satirizes the cruel situation between the English protestants and Irish Catholics. Swift uses the narrator to channel his criticisms. He wants his readers to believe that he is actually offering a modest proposal that will solve Ireland’s problems of famine, poverty, as well as overpopulation. This is seen as ironic since his scheme is not modest at all nor it is seen as a rational solution to Ireland’s issues. The true freightment of the proposal becomes evident when the narrator outlines his plan for selling the children of the the poor to the rich, for the rich to eat them as a delicacy.
As the proposal begins, the narrator seems
…show more content…
concerned about the well-being of the weakened Irish society and offers a solution to the poverty and famine. As he explains how bad the situation is, he presents his solutions that he understands is more economical and considerate. Although Swift uses a character, one can still feel his anger at the circumstances and the carelessness of the government on the text. This character continues to explain how the issue of the country is that we are keeping the children, the cost of raising them exceeds the profit the parent’s can make under the circumstances they find themselves in. Parents do not have the means to support their children and therefore through the future generations there will only be beggars and the poverty will continue. As the reader understands the text, they also understand that something must be done to solve this problem. And so the narrator offers a solution. He understands that “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 so he offers that a reasonable number of children should “be offered to sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom...” Even though the solution, the cannibalism of babies, seems like an absolutely twisted joke, the narrator says it with such a matter that it becomes almost impossible to the reader not to agree. “I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection,” he mentions as he proposes his cannibalistic idea. He speaks in such a manner that the readers may find themselves rereading each sentence because of the calmness and straightforwardness of his words while making his proposal. As the readers approach to following passage, which is also mentioned above, they start to pick up the sense of irony in Swift’s proposal:”I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.” The author states that his proposal will be very beneficial to parents, the country, and even children and that anyone who may disagree should “first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner” he prescribes. Swift backs up his ingenious scheme with previous accounts of success by gentlemen in America and other parts of the world. This shows that his idea is credible because it has worked on previous occasions. This wondrous idea has so many benefits that it’s hard to see how anyone would be so close-minded to disagree. For instance, poor tenants would have something of value which could help them pay rent and also it would greatly increase the sales at taverns where the cooks would strive to find the best recipes for their new delicacy. Finally it would be a great advantage to those getting married, where as they could sell their children for profit The narrator explains the proposal by using calculations and statistics, which it uses to inform the readers of the sex of the children and the age range of those who will be sold. He also includes methods in which the children are made more profitable. Through these cold calculations English protestant are accused for their brutal political and economic oppression to the Irish Catholics. It is insinuated that the English would willingly be more than glad to eat the Irish without need of this proposal though Swift does make a slight shift from blaming the English to also blaming the Irish. For they had recognized the horrible situation and yet stood with crossed arms. The politicians and rich Irish population were not the only ones to blame, but those from the poor as well. Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is a very effective satire.
The entire text, from its beginning to end, is written with such an irony. Irony becomes very effective when trying to get a message across. He states that the English devours the Irish and uses this as a foundation for his proposal. He uses this metaphor to state that since the parents are already being devoured by the landlords, they should just feed their children to them as well and that by doing this they can receive a profit. The readers can find his work to be horribly sad since one can understand the extreme poverty that the Irish suffered and the unfair policies that did not allow them to better the circumstances. The narrator also mentions heartlessly that the old and sick are a problem since “it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected” and there’s is nothing that one could or should do since they are already slowly dying. The satire in this text allows the reader to know the extreme circumstances the Irish faced everyday. It gives the readers an image of the Irish society actually being devoured by this unjust government that they would actually have in mind and be at any time prepared to accept his
proposal.
In Swift’s satirical essay he stated the main issue to be the hunger and starvation of Irish country and their lack of money to support oneself. He said the complication was they themselves don’t have food, to many families in poverty, and that the Englishman took their land and charging high prices for rent. Swift makes this argument because he too is an Irish men and he struggles to see his fellow men parish in the streets. He desires his people to stand up against England and take back what’s theirs. He argues that the Irish...
The essay “A Modest Proposal” written by Johnathan Swift takes a satirical view on how to solve the starvation issue in Ireland. Swift suggests an obviously satirical solution of eating children around the age of one. He used irony, ambiguity, and ethos to emphasize the satirical nature of the essay and present a captivating idea to the audience.
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is an attempt to bring attention to horrible the condition in which the poor or destitute people in Ireland are living in. His argument that children of these improvised people should be sold to “the persons of quality and fortune” (A Modest Proposal) for consumption, is Swift’s gruesome way of saying you might as well eat the babies, if no one is going to actually try to fix the problems of the poor in Ireland.
The issue is that there is a growing number of poor and starving women and children living on the streets of Ireland that are a burden to the public and the country. The context is that these homeless and starving women and children are left to fend for themselves on the streets. Jonathan Swift is making the argument from the point of a concerned citizen who has spent years among the poor in Ireland studying the situation and trying to come up with a solution. Johnathan Swift used the example that those who visit Ireland and see the streets crowded with women and children that are beggars conclude that Ireland is a very poor, overpopulated country full of beggars and that they look down upon their country that is in such poor shape. His bias is that as a citizen living in Ireland, he does not want to be looked down upon by other countries. His targeted audience seems to be the citizens of the country and those in higher up positions who ...
In 1729, Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal”. It is a satirical piece that describes a radical and humorous proposal to a very serious problem. The problem Swift was attacking was the poverty and state of destitution that Ireland was in at the time. Swift wanted to bring attention to the seriousness of the problem and does so by satirically proposing to eat the babies of poor families in order to rid Ireland of poverty. Clearly, this proposal is not to be taken seriously, but merely to prompt others to work to better the state of the nation.
In eighteenth century Ireland, the nation was in a famine and an epidemic of poverty due to the high prices of land and food. Jonathan Swift saw a problem, so he wrote and spread what we call today, A Modest Proposal. Swift’s essay is satirical. He exaggerates and gives inaccurate statistics to deliver a thesis that runs deeper than the explicit one about eating babies. While much of the essay seems to imply that Swift’s persona eats babies, there are some instances where Jonathan hints at the ironic themes of the writing.
Pamphlets were often used to spread ideas throughout Ireland in the late 1600s, however, many were discarded and ignored. “A Modest Proposal,” by Jonathan Swift, uses the pamphlets to his advantage by proposing a ridiculous idea to show how messed up the state of Ireland was. Swift proposed that the babies of all the poor would “contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands” or in other words, improve Ireland 's economic problems and standard of living (Swift). His main reason for proposing this drastic idea was because women continued to have children they could not provide food or anything for in some cases and Swift’s idea would make the children “beneficial to the public” (Swift). For these reasons, Swift looks at not only the politicians to blame for the poor conditions but the citizens of Ireland as well. In “A Modest Proposal”, Swift uses harsh
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a shocking satire that discusses the dire poverty in Ireland. It says if one is born poor they will stay that way unless society puts them to use. Children are food to be eaten. In an economic slump children will be used to feed and clothe Ireland’s population. Swift’s purpose for writing A Modest Proposal was to call attention to the exploiting and oppressing by the English to the Irish. He wanted to shock his readers by proposing his “modest” proposal. He presents selling babies as food to reduce overpopulation. This causes the reader to disregard this suggestion. Swift wanted to raise awareness on the issue that was haunting Ireland. Throughout A Modest Proposal, Swift effectively uses verbal irony, diction, and sentence structure to achieve his purpose of making people realize that there are problems in society that needed to be handled in a reasonable manner. He also wanted to help advance the country’s trade, provide for infants, relieve the poor and help the rich. Swift ultimately wanted to get people thinking about actual solutions that could solve their current problems.
"A Modest Proposal" has been hailed by literary critics as one of Jonathan Swift's greatest satirical works. The essay takes the form of a proposal that sets out to offer a solution to the problems of overpopulation and poverty in 18th century Ireland, a...
Jonathan Swift is the king of satire, known for his seemingly unorthodox works throughout the early 18th century. Swift capitalizes on his arguments by hooking a targeted audience with expert use of logic, tragedy, and character. In “A Modest Proposal” Swift uses exaggerated rhetoric and irony to emphasize his disdain for the troubles facing Ireland throughout the turn of the 17th century. Most of Ireland has succumbed to poverty due to English bullying and therefore Swift developed a do-it-yourself solution for those most affected by these hard times. Jonathan Swift effectively persuades poverty-stricken mothers to sell their needy children as consumable meat for Ireland’s betterment through the use of ethos, pathos, and logos in his satire “A Modest Proposal.”
The essay, A Modest Proposal, is a proposal to end the economic dilemma in Ireland by selling the poor’s children, at the age of one, for food. The narrator states, “I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their father, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance” (Swift). According to this proposal, by selling the children for food to the wealthy in Ireland many problems will be resolved. The poor mothers will earn money to live on and will not have to raise children, the wealthy will have a new meat source and “an increase in his own popularity among his tenants” (Sparknotes), and the economy will improve because of all of the market action. In the narrator’s eyes, this proposal equals an all around win for the people of Ireland and he cannot see any objection to his plan.
An Oxford University graduate, Jonathan Swift, in his article, A Modest Proposal, proposes a solution to Irelands growing poverty in the 18th century by proposing the selling and eating of innocent babies. Swift’s purpose is to state the benefits that the poor would gain from selling their one year old children to the wealthy to eat them. He takes on a concerning tone in order to convince the people of Ireland to consider and adopts his obscene plan.
Jonathan Swift, a well-known author, in his essay “A Modest Proposal,” implies that the Irish people should eat children so that they can better their chances of survival. Swift supports his implication by describing how his proposal will have many advantages such as, eliminating papists, bringing great custom to taverns, and inducing marriages. He comes up with an absurd proposal to eat and sell the children to the elite so the Irish can have a brighter future. His purpose is to show that the Irish deserve better treatment from the English. Throughout his essay, Swift uses sarcasm, satire, and irony.
In “A Modest Proposal,” Swift employs a satirical tone to mock both the callous attitudes towards the poor and the poor themselves. Swifts “modest” solution to the fiscal and social issues going on in Ireland is nothing but the opposite, as he proposes that the impoverished should sell their infants as food for money. In using the word “modest” to describe his proposal of eating Irish infants and/or offering their flesh as a source of clothing, Swift makes the sarcasm of his story evident from the beginning. By using such an inconspicu...
During the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift was distributing pamphlets around Ireland in hopes of promoting intellectual growth in his homeland. As he noticed this was not making an impact, he decided to address the problems in Ireland with a different approach. Jonathan Swift took to paper and constructed “A Modest Proposal”, a satirical piece that proposes a humorous solution to the social, economic, and political problems in Ireland. Swift’s proposal suggests that babies who are born to poor families become a source of food for public, which benefits Ireland by reducing the overpopulation and adding to the food supply. In “A Modest Proposal”, Jonathan Swift uses satire to draw attention to his argument that the problems in Ireland are greatly affecting his homeland; in doing so, he portrays the themes of class division, suffering, and greed.