Swift, a clergyman who was appointed the dean of St. Patrick's Church in Dublin, had written several pamphlets suggesting solutions to the horrific problem of poverty in Ireland. Out of deep frustration, after his ideas were ignored, he wrote "A Modest Proposal," a satire suggesting that if the English planned to "devour" the Irish poor anyway through high taxation, unfair pricing and terrible wages, they might as well allow the poor to make some money by selling their babies as delicacies to be eaten by the rich. He didn't seriously mean for anyone to adopt this proposal. His goal was to shock and shame people who thought of the poor only in economic terms into seeing them as real, suffering humans. He hoped horror at his narrator's idea would finally motivate the people with power to come up with a reasonable alternative to letting so many people suffer and starve.
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