Seems terribly unlikely, but in our Poe’s Law age, I’m wondering if it could actually have happened. So, any records of people accepting Swift’s solution? If so, any indication that those people were serious, and not just playing along in the same nature as the original?
What about the more likely case of people becoming offended because they thought Swift was serious? Anyone get Poe’d?
(Bonus question: Are there any other examples of satire from before the 20th century where we have clear indications that some people took a ridiculous suggestion seriously and accepted it, or were offended because they thought the arguer was being serious?)
Not quite what you’re after but one of the most popular hymns in England, if not the most popular, Jerusalem, is a piss take of the Chruch of Engalnd and various other things especially a movement popular at the time which thought Jesus actually did visit (much like mormons I suppose).
Oddly the wikipedia page makes no mention of this but I’m sure of it.
I distinctly remember that when my high school English class read “A Modest Proposal” no one, not a single one of us, including me, understood that it was satire, and all of us were highly offended.
Even after our teacher carefully defined “satire” and explained what Swift was doing, a bunch of us were still offended.
We were not stupid, or illiterate. But satire isn’t always the easiest thing to pick up, especially if you’re a teenager.
Oh hell yes, I’ll bet they did. Today, with information widely and easily available, people still have all kinds of misconceptions. Obama’s birth certificate, anyone?
So to think that when A Modest Proposal was written everyone who was sophisticated enough to be able to read it was also sophisticated enough to know it was satire is–well, very optimistic about the intelligence of the human race.
Read the comments section of any online article making a point that is implied rather than expressly stated, and there are almost always people offended at the article as if it made the opposite point it was trying to make (in other words, the article agrees with the commenter but they mis-read it and think it says the opposite).
Surely there were people who had a hard time comprehensively reading back then, too. I don’t have a cite though and would be interested in reading one.
C.S. Lewis reported that one clergyman cancelled his subscription to the paper that was publishing his “Screwtape Letters” since the advice in those letters was so bad.
L Frank Baum wrote editorials advocating extermination of the Indians - I have no idea what the reception at the time was, but there are people today who take it seriously, though I think they were written in the same vein as “A Modest Proposal” (I’ll admit I could be wrong).
I wrote an op ed column for our local paper (a daily) proposing that to solve school over-crowding and low test scores we lay off the bottom 20% of students.
A colleague well connected to our school district said that about half the people she talked to thought it was serious.
I called it “A Modest Proposal for our Schools” but the guy who assigns headlines for the editorial page called it something boring and asinine - and clearly did not get it.
Our district, I am happy to say, does teach “A Modest Proposal” btw.
I remember in a lit class the teacher telling us that not only did some people take it seriously, but that they thought it was a good idea. I’d be curious to see if anyone comes up with any cites that proves or disproves this.
Huh. We read this as well in HS English (senior year, AP Lit). I’d say most of the class got it on the initial read, plus we spent like 3 days of lecture talking about it and satire. Plus IIRC before this we had done Gulliver’s Travels, and it was the late 90s, so we were all primed for sarcasm and satire.
When I took my Introduction to Sociology class in college, one of the first readings we were assigned was Body Ritual among the Nacirema. There was a fairly sizable percentage of the class who didn’t get that on first reading, either.
If anyone took it seriously (and I very much doubt it, other than the occasional half-wit) it certainly wouldn’t have been the Irish. Swift was well-known in Ireland for his support of his country against English governmental abuse. His famous and successful pamphlet campaign against the debasing of the Irish coinage, for instance (the Drapier’s Letters).
He was also of course a literary superstar in both England and Ireland and known as a satirist of genius.
It’s an internet thing. Basically, that religious fundamentalists are so crazy, it’s impossible to make an obvious parody of what they believe, because no matter how crazy the arguments you make are, actual fundamentalists are going to make those arguments.
Here’s a link to the discussion page of the Wikipedia article. Talk:A Modest Proposal - Wikipedia Back in 2005, some computer geek didn’t think the article was “notable” enough for Wikipedia. But maybe you can blame that on contemporary education. I did hear that someone prominent didn’t like Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. She recognized that it was satire, but she simply thought it was too ribald, or whatever adjective they used back then. Plenty of people probably “got” the satire, and just pretended they didn’t so they could be pissed off over the issue.
