The Big Idea
Observing a landscape crowded with beggars and starving children, the narrator presents a precise scheme to transform Ireland's vulnerable population into a marketable commodity. He argues that infants are a public burden and proposes that at one year old, they are a delicious food suitable for stews or ragouts. By treating children as livestock, he claims the nation can settle debts and provide tenants a way to pay their rent. The argument employs the cold arithmetic of butchers to emphasize the greed of landlords, who have already devoured the parents and now claim a legal right to consume their offspring as well.
Who's named
- The Pretender
A figure who must flee to Spain to find military service.
- Landlords
Property owners who have already economically devoured the parents of the poor.
- Persons of Quality
The wealthy target market for the proposed infant meat.
What it's really about
- Commodification
- Reducing human life to pounds, shillings, and carcasses.
- Political Inaction
- A rejection of sensible reforms that the public ignores.
Why it's memorable
- The suggestion that a child's skin could make admirable gloves for ladies.
- The calculation that a nursing child will grow to twenty-eight pounds in a year.
What it concludes
The proposal asks critics to question the poor themselves, who might prefer a quick death in infancy to a lifetime of starvation and rent debt.
For your book club
- Why the narrator uses the cold language of a statistician to describe human slaughter.
- The list of 'other expedients' that actually represent the author's real political suggestions.