A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal, with its full title 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, is a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift. A new edition is scheduled for release in 2026. The work runs to 39 pages and is catalogued under subjects including satire, political satire, social criticism, poverty, and Irish history, placing it within the tradition of eighteenth-century polemical literature. Swift's essay deploys irony to address the conditions of poverty in Ireland, presenting a deliberately outrageous economic argument as a means of social criticism. The text is a foundational work of English-language political satire and has been widely studied in the context of Irish history and eighteenth-century literature.