A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Augustan satire · 1729

A Modest Proposal

By Jonathan Swift · (Published 1729) · All Jonathan Swift books

Word Count ~3,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 10 minutes (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #1080

Source Edition Project Gutenberg #1080

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Read the opening of A Modest Proposal

It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in stroling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.

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 fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the publick, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars: it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age, who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them, as those who demand our charity in the streets.

The projector goes on from this sight to the arithmetic of the kingdom. Download the complete 1729 pamphlet.

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Further Reading

More satire from the same shelf

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Gulliver’s Travels

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Candide

By Voltaire · Voltaire’s answer to optimism

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: Summary, Characters & Themes

This page is a summary and analysis of A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, with the historical setting, the argument of the pamphlet, the way its irony works, section summaries and the free download links. Swift published it anonymously in Dublin in 1729 in the voice of a projector, a writer with a scheme. The scheme is to sell the surplus children of the poor as food. Everything else is the performance of a reasonable man thinking a monstrous thing through to its practical details, and that performance is what makes the piece unbearable to read quickly. The whole pamphlet runs to about three and a half thousand words, barely a quarter of an hour of reading, and the brevity is part of its design.

The author is Jonathan Swift, and the text of A Modest Proposal itself has a long critical history. An Anglo-Irish clergyman, he had been Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin since 1713 and had spent the 1720s writing about Irish grievances rather than the London party politics that had first made his name. The Drapier’s Letters against a patent for copper halfpence made him popular in 1724 and 1725, and A Short View of the State of Ireland in 1728 described a country being drained of its money. A Modest Proposal appeared in 1729 with no author’s name on its title page and no preface to explain it. Readers guessed quickly enough, and the caution was reasonable, because the pamphlet names the people it accuses and a joke about eating children reads badly out of context.

The form is a parody of the project, the printed scheme for improving trade, revenue or population that every eighteenth-century administration was offered. Projectors wrote in a fixed register: state the grievance, number the people, cost the remedy, answer objections, promise the public good. Swift copies that register exactly, and the accuracy is the joke. His projector counts one and a half million souls in the kingdom, two hundred thousand couples whose wives are breeders, and a hundred and twenty thousand poor children born each year, then asks how they are to be reared. Because the tone never falters, the argument cannot be dismissed as madness; it has to be answered as policy, and it cannot be answered. The pamphlet is a trap, sprung by the reader’s own good manners.

Under the recipe runs an indictment with several counts. Landlords who have, in the projector’s phrase, already devoured the parents are said to have the best title to the children. Absentee owners take rent out of the country and spend it in England. The Penal Laws kept the Catholic majority out of land, office and the universities, and the talk of lessening the number of Papists is the sectarian logic of the settlement spoken plainly. The poor appear as breeders, carcasses and saleable commodities because the accounts of the kingdom already described them that way. The cannibalism is not an invention, it is a translation, and the translator keeps his head down. The pamphlet is not an attack on the poor; it is an attack on the sentence already on everyone’s lips.

The last pages change the temperature. Having waved away every objection, the projector names the measures he refuses to discuss: taxing absentees, buying only Irish goods, rejecting foreign luxuries, teaching landlords at least one degree of mercy. That list is the pamphlet’s real argument, and its position is the point, because the modest proposal is what is left when every reasonable remedy has been refused in advance. The closing paragraph, where the speaker mentions that he has no children to sell, is a joke and a confession at once. The man with no children to sell is the same man who has spent forty pages pricing other people’s. The text used here is the Project Gutenberg transcription (#1080). For the same voice at length there is Gulliver’s Travels, and Candide is the nearest French cousin.

Historical Context

The pamphlet appeared at the end of a bad decade. Harvests failed repeatedly in the late 1720s, oatmeal and potato prices rose beyond what labourers could pay, and there was no poor law in Ireland to fall back on. Begging was a trade, and the beggars in the first paragraph are at work: mothers with three, four or six children at their heels, asking every passer-by for alms. The projector’s figures assume two shillings a year to nurse a beggar’s child, and count cottagers, labourers and four fifths of the farmers among the poor. The numbers are the pamphlet’s own evidence.

The political economy behind the pamphlet was a colonial one. Rents went to absentee landlords who spent them outside the country; the woollen manufacture had been curtailed by statute at the end of the 1690s to protect English cloth; the Irish parliament answered to London under an act of 1720 that asserted the right of the English parliament to legislate for Ireland. The Penal Laws excluded Catholics from land, public office and the professions. A kingdom with its own parliament and church establishment was treated, in practice, as a dependency, and its people as a population to be counted and managed.

Swift had been Dean of St Patrick’s since 1713 and was the most effective writer on the Irish side. The Drapier’s Letters, published in 1724 and 1725 against a patent for copper coinage, showed that a pamphlet could move a crowd; the affair made him a hero in the streets and a nuisance to Dublin Castle. A Short View of the State of Ireland in 1728 set out the country’s poverty in exactly the statistical manner that A Modest Proposal would later turn inside out. This pamphlet was printed in Dublin in 1729, anonymously, and sold for a few pence.

Key Characters & Literary Archetypes

• The Proposer: An unnamed projector with a scheme, figures, respect for the public good and no visible pity. He says he has turned his thoughts to it for years and weighed other men’s projects, and he never sounds like a monster, which is the point. A monster would be easy to refuse. He sounds like a Dublin official writing a memorandum, and that resemblance is the accusation.
• The begging mothers: The women of the first paragraph, followed by three, four or six children, importuning every passenger for an alms. They get one sentence of pity and then become material for arithmetic, counted as breeders and priced at two shillings a year. They never speak. The reader hears them in the opening; the projector’s silence about them is where the horror accumulates.
• The landlords: The absentees and rack-renters who, in the projector’s phrase, have already devoured most of the parents. They are the pamphlet’s real cannibals, and the logic that gives them the best title to the children is a landlord’s logic applied without flinching. They never appear in person; the projector says he grants this food will be somewhat dear, and that it is therefore very proper for landlords, who have the best title to the children. Swift’s first readers knew some by name.
• The knowing American: A London acquaintance who supplies the central fact, that a year-old child is a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food, stewed, roasted, baked or boiled. The figure is a device as much as a character: the testimony comes from outside, from a travelled man, and carries the authority colonial knowledge had for English readers. His word warrants everything that follows, and the projector accepts it without a pause.
• The worthy patriot: A friend with a refinement, who proposes meeting the shortage of venison with the bodies of lads and maidens between twelve and fourteen. The projector refuses on practical grounds, that male flesh is tough from exercise and female flesh would be lost to the breeding stock, and notes only in passing that some might think it cruel. Even reform is argued as butchery here.
• The politicians who object: The last section addresses them and asks where they will find food and clothes for a hundred thousand useless mouths, and whether they would rather the poor had been sold at a year old. The reader is included in the address. The objectors get no voice of their own, only a question already framed as unanswerable.

Core Literary Themes

• Irony without a wink: Swift never breaks the mask, so the reader must supply the judgement the prose withholds. There is no aside, no wink, no but seriously; the argument proceeds to its horrible end with the courtesy of a man who expects to be thanked. A satire that explained itself would be a sermon, and the reader would be safe. Here the reader has agreed with the arithmetic for several pages before noticing what it counts, and the shame of that agreement is the moral effect.
• People as livestock: The projector’s vocabulary does the work of the argument. Children are breeders, carcasses, joints and dishes; the sexes are rationed like sheep; the skin becomes gloves and summer boots; the meat is in season after Lent. Once the substitution has been made, every following sentence is consistent, and the consistency is the indictment. Swift is showing that a way of speaking about the poor already existed in his readers’ mouths, and that it needed only to be followed a little further to arrive at the table.
• The language of improvement: The pamphlet is a parody of the project, and it could not have been written without a shelf of real ones. Its enemy is not appetite but the habit of treating a country as figures to be optimised, in which every problem has a remedy with a price and a profit, and nobody has to look at the people being counted. Swift borrows the apparatus, the population tables, the costings, the objections answered, the promise of public benefit, and lets it run until its logic eats the subject.
• Charity and contempt: The beggars are a grievance before they are people. The opening calls the sight melancholy, then converts the sight into a number, and the rest of the argument is the working out of that conversion. The pity in the first paragraph is real, and it is also the pity that licenses the scheme, because a man who pities a beggar from a distance can pity him all the way to the market. Swift’s readers were being asked to notice how much of their benevolence was bookkeeping.
• The remedies he refuses: The list near the end is the pamphlet’s political programme, and it is placed where it can be mistaken for an interruption. Tax the absentees, buy Irish goods, give up foreign luxuries, teach landlords mercy: these are measures Swift had argued for elsewhere, and the projector rejects them as visionary because they require the people who profit from the present arrangement to change it. The modest proposal is offered as the only practical alternative, and it is the only one that asks nothing of the rich.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of A Modest Proposal?

A Modest Proposal is short enough that a badly made ebook can ruin it in a minute: a pamphlet has no chapter breaks to hide behind, and a stray blank line or a broken paragraph will break the rhythm of the argument. This edition keeps the 1729 text as one continuous piece, with the long eighteenth-century sentences intact and no modernised punctuation to smooth them out. The title-page formula is there, the projectors’ spelling is there, and the closing paragraph sits where Swift put it, at the very end.

Three files are offered because readers differ. The EPUB reflows on a phone or a tablet and keeps the paragraphing; the AZW3 is for Kindle devices and carries the same text, with the title page and the closing paragraph in place; the KEPUB is built for Kobo readers, which handle bookmarks and pagination better in that container. All three are DRM-free and unabridged, and none of them needs an account or a shop to stay readable. A pamphlet is the easiest thing to carry and the easiest to lose, so take all three if you like.

It is also a text that rewards a second reading, and the page is arranged for that. The sections below follow the argument in order, from the street to the arithmetic to the six advantages and the list of remedies the speaker refuses. If you are reading it for a class, the questions at the end take up the parts readers usually argue about: whether Swift means any of it, why the mask never slips, and what the last paragraph is doing. Read the pamphlet first, then the sections; the irony is easier to feel than to explain.

• Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1080 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
• Made for reading Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1080 — the complete 1729 pamphlet, unabridged, with the title-page formula.
• Made for reading Complete and unmodernised The whole argument as Swift printed it, including the six advantages, the refused remedies and the closing paragraph, with eighteenth-century spelling and capitals kept.
• Made for reading One continuous argument No chapters invented to break a pamphlet into pieces: the text runs as it was printed, and the section summaries below are a guide for the reader, not a division of the file.

Part of: Classic Fiction · Public Domain Books Explained