A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift thought that England's anti-poverty proposals were so outrageously evil that nothing short of an absurd parody of them would suffice. His "Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick" is presented with a completely straight face. The irony is this: in the three centuries since, humanity has made it increasingly difficult to find evils so absurd that no one would actually attempt them, leaving modern-day Swifts with little material to work with anymore.

Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729). He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language and is less well known for his poetry. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms - such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, the Drapier - or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in A Modest Proposal, has led to such satire being subsequently termed "Swiftian".