Jonathan swift was born in Dublin but during his life he switched between living in Ireland and England with his mother, as his dad died before he was born. During his time of living with his mother, Swift often saw her encounter many financial issues, which of course affected him and caused him to move in with his paternal uncle in Ireland. Obviously this lifestyle was distressing and like most people this affected his attitude and works later on in life.
However, Swift turned out to be a very competent person academically and placed his strengths into getting a BA degree. However, his troubled past could not be forgotten. This became obvious as he went into his main track of life. Although Swift had many jobs such as becoming secretary for Sir William Temple, and other interests such as poetry, Swift was most famous for being a prose satirist. This alone includes a lot of sarcasm and includes a lot of bitterness towards something, mostly towards a piece written by someone that the satirist does not agree with. This shows that Jonathan Swift’s upbringing and life caused him to be a rather cynical person but on the other hand it’s hard to blame him when he had to deal with a fatherless lifestyle in Ireland that was experiencing so much poverty at the time.
Swift wrote many satirical pieces however the one that he is most noted for is ‘A Modest Proposal’. Basically this proposal, one of many written by Swift, is his way of describing his opinion on the Irish society and how the state deals with poverty, especially among families with children. The Modest Proposal is in element what it says it is in my opinion, a dry and subtle way of Swift expressing his passionate opinion and is in some places rather humorous.
At the beginning of the proposal, Swift is clearly compassionate for the condition that Ireland’s mothers and their children are placed in, but by the second sentence, Swift enters into judgmental views. Swift drives the image of Irish mothers who are “forced to employ all their time” begging for food along with their children. He puts a heavy negative tone on these situations and focuses on it throughout his paper to later reinforce his point that anyone who can come up with an effective and true way that these children can be used to be productive members of society would be doing the nation a massive favour.
It is clear to me that the bitterness of Swift’s upbringing is being filtered into this piece of prose, however it is exaggerated in order for it to serve it’s purpose. In essence, this piece is to be a social comment on economics, which most would agree is usually a dry and dull area to cover, however Swift uses ludicrous and strange ideas as to how to solve many issues. After claiming that the current “problem solvers” of his time were rather inadequate, Swift forms an idea much more adequate – that the Irish should eat their children. In detail, Swift claims that a one year old child is a “most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food; whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled” and by eating their children, parents neither have to pay for food, poor children are not placed onto the streets so they do not become a nuisance to society, but also from a religious point of view, it also helps to prevent abortions. He furthers this whole idiotic idea by suggesting that “one male can serve four females” and that the others should be fattened and given away so they can be farmed into becoming a delicacy. He goes into further specifics that say that by harvesting children, Ireland can have some food that would be available all year round (unlike Potatoes, which many people were bitter towards at this time as it was during the Irish famine). The irony of this is that the way Swift puts ideas across makes it seem that he is assuming his audience automatically agree with him that eating children is the obvious and most ethical way to dealing with the social issue that Ireland were experiencing at the time. He also suggests that by this method, not only does the family benefit, but the landlord and the nation also benefit economically.
However, the audience needs to look past the ridiculousness of his suggestion as in essence, Swift is commenting on Ireland’s social and political issues. Not only this but it revealed to the reader of Swift’s past. I think that this is a very brave thing to do. Because of this, Swift’s audience gain a sense of why he feels the way he does and why he is so cynical towards the Irish’s ability to solve issues sensibly. This sense of honesty possibly makes the reader sympathetic to Swift’s views, and takes his views on, when he is satirising his nation’s attempt to deal with social issues.
It is generally understood that Swift offers a selfless and quite a humble opinion. However he makes it clear that other more selfish ideas are deemed to be wrong in contrary to his. An example of this is that Swift often satirises the work of Adam Smith, a well know empiricist and ‘founder of economics’. Smith was under the opinion that society had little impact on human nature. This view is satirised by Swift who thinks that society is clearly the foundation of human behaviour. As well as this, Jonathan Swift clearly empathises with the poorer end of society so when Adam Smith clearly shows favoritism for the more wealthy and insists that ‘wealth’ is those who appreciate art and have a good education; there is obviously clear confrontation between the two views.
In conclusion, although at times Jonathan Swift provides a very unique yet obviously unpractical view of how to improve a situation, his intensions are truly honorable. At times I do honestly think that he is going down wrong roads of how to deal with such problems but have found them entertaining nevertheless and they especially encourage me to read on further. It is by doing this that I realise that I am reading material from a man who has been truly affected by poverty in his country, whatever poverty is considered to be, and that he is trying to defend the type of people of whom he grew up with.
