ABSTRACT
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick (1729) is a staple of English literature classes everywhere. It’s crucial to properly understanding the essay that the reader get that it’s a work of (Juvenalian) satire; anyone who thinks Swift is actually advocating that the poor should cannibalize their children has gravely misunderstood him. But it doesn’t stretch the imagination too much to imagine that someone could misread the text that way—a child unaccustomed to satire, irony, and sarcasm, say, or maybe an adult who came across it in a strange context, alongside other, more forthright works. Now: what if this not-so-modest Swift actually convinced them of his solution to poverty?
