Swift’s opening is a brilliant rhetorical feint, apparently inviting the reader into a well-researched examination of Ireland’s social conditions, especially among its beggars. But, finally, this approximately 4,000-word essay exhibits Swift at his merciless best, satirising his society’s heartless indifference to the plight of the poor as well as the long-term cruelty of the British government’s policies towards its Irish neighbour.
Some critics suggest that Swift saw major similarities between the plight of the Irish poor and the helpless Christians, and note that he felt an obvious affinity for Tertullian. Juvenal aside, scholarly debate about the inspiration for the Modest Proposal fingers several classical sources, particularly the Roman essayist Tertullian’s Apology, a satirical attack against Roman persecution of the early Christians. “It is a melancholly Object to those who walk through this great Town, or travel in the Country when they see the Streets, the Roads, and Cabbin-doors crowded with Beggars of the Female Sex, followed by three, four, or six Children, all in Rags, and importuning every Passenger for an Alms.” Besides, it bore the unmistakable marks of his style:
Swift published it anonymously, but his authorship soon got out. Fierce indignation was undoubtedly the chief inspiration for Swift’s blistering Juvenalian satire A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, one of the most savage and powerful tracts in the English language, a masterpiece of sustained, even relentless, irony.
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