Publisher's Synopsis
Differentiated book- It has a historical context with research of the timeIn Ireland, in the seventeenth century, there was a great deal of poverty, its worst stage was the famine of 1741 that killed hundreds of thousands of people.In 1760, Irish peasants unleashed their complaints with violence. The "Whiteboys."From the end of the 18th century Britain began to industrialize. In Ireland, industrialization was limited to the North, the South was still agricultural, with the export of meat and butter to Britain. With respect to the population in Ireland during this century it increased from less than 2 million people in 1700 to almost 5 million in 1800.According to Swift's text, the estimated population of Ireland in 1729 was 1.5 million people. After the revolution of 1688 there was a Protestant for every four Catholics. However, the former owned ten tenths of the earth. The Irish peasants were extremely poor and the children "as they get older, they either commit to theft due to lack of work, or they leave their homeland to enlist in Spain in the ranks of the Pretender, or they emigrate almost in slavery, to the Barbados Islands. "From the sixteenth century and then in the eighteenth century, poverty begins to be considered a social problem rather than individual. It is considered a risk for the possible social disorders that it can cause. It is that time distinguished between dignified and unworthy poverty. The "adapted poor" were part of the first, for example, those who were poor due to illness. In the second would be children who stole due to lack of work, of which Swift speaks. For them at that time, in Europe, there were hospices, a mixture of shelter-jail where old people, beggars, children, disabled were hospitalized and that, although theoretically they had a reeducational function, due to overcrowding, lack of resources, heterogeneity, the repression and the absence of freedom of the inmates, were a failure.