Structure

“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift is a satirical essay or pamphlet. This type of text uses parody and exaggeration with the purpose of ridiculing and criticising certain aspects, which in this case are socio-political aspects of Irish society.

As with any essay, the text presents the author’s argument to the public in a structured manner. However, in “A Modest Proposal” the argument is an exaggeration and a parody: that eating small children of poor people would reduce poverty in Ireland.

The text follows a traditional structure: title, introduction, main body, and conclusion—elements that we outline next.

Title

The title of the essay announces its topic: 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 Public. The rather long title makes it clear that the author’s intention is to offer a solution to poverty by focusing on the children of poor people.

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Introduction

The introduction of the text presents the problem that the narrator offers a solution to. It describes the issue of poverty in Ireland, which is made worse by the large number of children that poor families often have:

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Main body

The main body presents the reasons why the speaker has decided to tackle the problem of poor children and a detailed analysis of their numbers and situation: “As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation.” (p. 2, ll. 3-6);

There only remain an hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, how this number shall be reared and provided for, which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible… (p. 2, ll. 27-31)

Notice that the author intentionally starts from an erroneous assumption; that these children are useless to society and a burden. The reason for putting forward this point of view is to draw attention to the fact that at the time Irish and British society, and particularly the upper classes, generally acted as if they saw the poor as a burden, even if they didn’t usually state this view out loud.

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Conclusion

The conclusion mentions that the speaker’s proposal focuses solely on Ireland, and should not be imposed on other countries. He points to other potential solutions to the problem but dismisses them as being impractical (although this is satirical, as all these potential solutions have been proposed by Swift in serious pamphlets). He suggests that these ideas are impractical, not because they would not work, but because no-one has ever made any attempt to put them into practice.

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