A Modest Proposal
Upon his appointment as Dean at St. Patrick's, Swift arrived at the cathedral and found an anonymous poem on the front door: 'Look down, St. Patrick, look we pray/ On thine own church and steeple;/ Convert thy dean on this great day;/ Or else, God help the people.' Willing to dispense a few pennies to hungry orphans as he walked to work, Swift also had his own ideas about solving Ireland's poverty and food shortage. In October 1729, he produced his A Modest Proposal, in which in fourteen logic-filled pages the narrator suggests solving the problem by the breeding up their infants as food for the rich. This is a later printing of his classic satire.