![]() ![]() ![]() What he did do was to show, articulately and forcefully, that Swift's chilly logic can be extended to contemporary circumstances without loss of fitness or rigour. The journalist Eamon McCann's new "Modest Proposal", delivered on Tuesday evening as part of a season at the South Bank of modern responses to classic essays, couldn't hope to match the shocking effect of the original. ![]() "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London," he wrote, "that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout." He proposed, therefore, to eliminate poverty in Ireland at a stroke by the establishment of a market in child-flesh - this dainty meat to be sold only to landlords, who "as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children". In 1729, Jonathan Swift put forward "A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burthen to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public". ![]()
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