SOURCE: Manlove, C. N. “Swift.” In Literature and Reality, pp. 114-24. London: MacMillan Press, 1978.

In the following excerpt, Manlove investigates the reader's propensity to sympathize with advantageous outcomes in A Modest Proposal at the expense of devious measures.

A Modest Proposal (1729)

This satire is rather more a test of the reader than is the Argument Against Abolishing Christianity. Given that the Irish are sunk in animal misery, and that they would welcome the scheme outlined (117-18 [The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, vol. 2, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939.]), how many of us have a sneaking sympathy with a method that takes advantage of the prevailing state of affairs rather than tries to change it with an idealism that so far has proved ineffectual? We may think it stark against the basic principles of humanity to make children into cattle to be slaughtered for the profit of the...