SOURCE: Rawson, C. J. “A Reading of A Modest Proposal.” In Augustan Worlds, edited by J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones and J. R. Watson, pp. 29-50. Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1978.

In the following essay, Rawson examines various segments of A Modest Proposal and their effects on popular interpretations of the reading.

The title is famous, but still bears examination: A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick.¹ The form of title is that of many ‘modest proposals’ and ‘humble petitions’ which appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘dealing with economic problems, particularly with problems concerning population, labor, unemployment, and poverty’.² It captures accurately the conventional postures: concern for the public good, profitability, the air of planned or scientific management of human material. It is...