SOURCE: Tilton, John W. “The Two ‘Modest Proposals’: A Dual Approach to Swift's Irony.” Bucknell Review 14, no. 3 (1966): 78-88.

In the following essay, Tilton suggests that A Modest Proposal may be interpreted in two different ways; one concerning the aesthetic art of satire and the other as a contemporaneous utilitarian commentary.

Supposedly agreement was reached long ago on the peculiar mode of Swift's irony in A Modest Proposal. If any principle seemed to be established in Swiftian criticism it is that a persona functions as the putative author of the Proposal. In the public-spirited Irish economist who methodically, reasonably develops a plan to alleviate the distress of the Irish poor, Swift is parodying the political arithmeticians of the time and exploding their basic tenet, the popular economic dictum that “People are the riches of a nation.”

But this recognition of a putative author created by Swift to be the...