He, however, considered himself more English than Irish, and his loyalty to Ireland was often ambivalent in spite of his staunch support for certain Irish causes. The complicated nature of his own relationship with England may have left him particularly sympathetic to the injustices and exploitation Ireland suffered at the hand of its more powerful neighbor. Particularly in the s, Swift became vehemently engaged in Irish politics.
He reacted to the debilitating effects of English commercial and political injustices in a large body of pamphlets, essays, and satirical works, including the perennially popular Gulliver's Travels. A Modest Proposal, published in in response to worsening conditions in Ireland, is perhaps the severest and most scathing of all Swift's pamphlets. The tract did not shock or outrage contemporary readers as Swift must have intended; its economics was taken as a great joke, its more incisive critiques ignored.
Although Swift's disgust with the state of the nation continued to increase, A Modest Proposal was the last of his essays about Ireland. He wanted the English who ruled Ireland to realize what they were doing and to put in place reforms that would solve the problems they had helped to cause.
Answer Expert Verified. He presents selling babies as food to reduce overpopulation. This causes the reader to disregard this suggestion.
The main idea of the actual story has to do with decreasing the overpopulation by selling babies as food. Swift suggests that the wealthy purchase the infants of the poor and serve them as a delicacy.
He desired to gain religious and political power in England. Swift believed it was his duty to help maintain stability between political and religious forces in Ireland as well as England. He was an advocate for Anglicanism, which had to resist the forces of Roman Catholicism and Protestant Dissenters. He began his political career as Whig, but rejected their association with the dissenters. However he rejected the Tory belief of the divine right of Kings, and thought that the ultimate political power of England should rest in the hands of the people.
It was then maintained by the relationship between Parliament and Kings that protected individual rights and resisted tyranny. Political, economic, and religious struggles plagued England and Ireland in the mid 18th-Century. The English made laws to oppress and destroy the Irish economy by downright forbidding trade of high success industrial products such as woolen goods.
Concerned with the inequities of policies enacted by the Whig prime minister and the depletion of the Irish economy, Swift composed many politically driven works in hopes to restore Ireland socially, economically, and politically. This work attempts to free Ireland from what Swift believed to be its worst enemy; itself. Who does swift blame in a modest proposal? How is the modest proposal ironic? What is the main theme of a modest proposal? What are the advantages in a modest proposal?
Did the Irish eat babies?
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