Swift's A Modest Proposal

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2009

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most brilliant and shocking satires ever written in English – Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Masquerading as an attempt to end poverty in Ireland once and for all, a Modest Proposal is a short pamphlet that draws the reader into a scheme for economic and industrial horror. Published anonymously but written by Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal lays bare the cruel presumptions, unchecked prejudice, the politics and the poverty of the 18th century, but it also reveals, perhaps more than anything else, the character and the mind of Swift himself.With John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London and Ian McBride, Senior Lecturer in the History Department at King’s College London.

Transcript

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0:46.0	Hello, 1729 was a very bad year for the Irish people who worked the land.
0:51.0	Three failed harvests and oppressive laws meant times were dire. Poverty, disease and famine were the lot of life and had been for a while.
0:59.0	But then came an idea to solve Irish poverty once and for all. It was published in a short
1:03.8	pamphlet with a long title, a modest proposal for preventing the children of the poor people
1:08.7	in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the public. It's known more
1:14.3	conveniently as a modest proposal. A modest proposal was published anonymously but written by
1:19.4	Jonathan Swift three years after Gulliver's travels and it's one of the most chilling
1:23.8	and brilliant satires in English. It lays bare the cruel presumptions,
1:27.7	unchecked prejudice, the politics and the poverty of the 18th century, but it also
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