Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
Read by John Gonzalez · 1 chapter · 27 min
About the book
A Modest Proposal begins calmly, even reasonably. A careful and apparently compassionate speaker lays out the grave condition of the poor in Ireland: too many children, too little food, mothers begging in the streets. Then he offers a solution, and it is so monstrous that you may wonder whether you have misheard. Jonathan Swift’s famous pamphlet is a masterpiece of irony, in which an unruffled voice pursues a horrifying idea with perfect logic. The effect is not shock for its own sake. Swift is aiming at the attitudes of the wealthy and the policies that left a country starving, and the longer the speaker goes on, the more devastating the target becomes. At about half an hour, it is short enough to hear at one sitting, and so sharp that it will stay with you long afterwards. Be prepared to be disturbed, and to laugh, uneasily.
Introduction
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Irish-born writer and clergyman, best known today for Gulliver’s Travels. He was also one of the great satirists in English, and he spent much of his career writing about Irish affairs, often with fury at what he saw as English neglect and the indifference of Ireland’s own landlords. The pamphlet is divided into a series of arguments, calculations and objections, so that the speaker seems to prove his point with the dry method of an economist, which is exactly what Swift wanted.
A Modest Proposal dates from 1729. In this short pamphlet Swift adopts the voice of a calm public-spirited projector who suggests that poor, mostly Catholic, Irish families should fatten their children and sell them as food to the rich, mostly Protestant, landowners, thus solving the twin problems of starving children and poverty in a single stroke. The idea is deliberately outrageous. The shock is deliberate: the barbarity Swift wants his readers to see is not the proposal itself but the neglect that makes it thinkable. Satire of this kind depends on tone, and the piece has often been used as a model of irony. Its structure follows the style of contemporary economic tracts, and the mock-reasonable manner makes the underlying anger all the stronger.
The recording consists of one chapter of about half an hour and is read by a single LibriVox volunteer.
It is worth hearing today because it shows how a calm voice can be the most effective weapon, and because its questions about poverty and responsibility have not gone away.
Public domain
Jonathan Swift died in 1745: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text