A Modest Proposal

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, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift in 1729. The essay suggests that poor people in Ireland could ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the elite. Swift's use of satirical hyperbole was intended to mock hostile attitudes towards the poor and anti-Catholicism among the Protestant Ascendancy as well as the Dublin Castle administration's policies in general. In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.