A Modest Proposal By Jonathan Swift

Words: 805
Pages: 4

Jonathan Swift wrote this essay focusing on the people who were starving in Ireland in the early 18th century. This essay is about the challenges the impoverished Irish people were undergoing socially and econimicly. This can perhaps be said to be the central subject matter in this essay. However, even at the midst of other challenges that these people underwent, Swift was mainly concerned with the issue of hunger that had befallen them than all the other challenges. This is due to the fact that Jonathan Swift’s main reason for writing the essay was to address the hunger and economic issues that the Irish people were experiencing. Swift states “therefore whoever could find out a fair cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the public as to have …show more content…
In “A Modest Proposal” Swift states “young healthy child well nourished is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food”(699) in the hopes that the audience will get upset by the suggestion he put forward of eating and selling poor children. This he does intentionally so as to provoke an emotional response in his readers as well as to challenge them into taking action in solving the problem. This is because their continued silence and ignorance of this matter was compared or the same as, to sacrificing the children as he had suggested in his essay. This was a strategic move on his side in the essay, it was mainly targeting the paternal feelings of human beings; a very tender and soft place to concentrate on, when addressing people, and one that is likely to cause them to act. However, to some extent it can be noted that his efforts were not very successful because we still have poor people who are