A Modest Proposal

Lore & Background

Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country' appears in Volume 7 of Gateway to the Great Books. This volume also includes works by Francis Bacon, David Hume, Plutarch, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Ruskin, William James, Arthur Schopenhauer, Michael Faraday, Edmund Burke, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. (Note: Dante, John C. Calhoun, Carl von Clausewitz, and Thomas Robert Malthus appear in Volume 10 of the set, not Volume 7.) The Gateway set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published in 1952 by the same editors. The set included selections of short stories, plays, essays, letters, and extracts from longer works by more than one hundred authors. The selections were generally shorter and in some ways simpler than the full-length books included in Great Books of the Western World.

Reader's Guide

In the Gateway to the Great Books set, Swift's essay is grouped with other nonfiction works in Volume 7, which focuses on 'Man and Society II'. The volume includes a range of essays and documents addressing social and political themes. The Gateway set included an index similar to the Great Books' Syntopicon, along with reading plans of increasing difficulty. Hutchins wrote an introduction explaining the relevance of categories including 'Man and Society'. The set contained biographical notes on authors and editorial introductions to selections, which were generally not included in the Great Books. The Gateway volumes were single-column with large, readable type. Although the editors maintained that many selections were appropriate to readers as young as seventh-grade students, the set included material challenging for the most experienced reader.

Did You Know?

• Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' is included in Volume 7 of the Gateway to the Great Books set, published in 1963.
• The Gateway set was edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, with Clifton Fadiman as associate editor.
• Volume 7 includes works by Francis Bacon, David Hume, Plutarch, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant, among others.
• The Gateway set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published in 1952.
• The set included an index similar to the Great Books' Syntopicon, along with reading plans of increasing difficulty.