Gulliver's Travels

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Gulliver's Travels arrived in London bookshops on the 28th of October 1726, priced at 8 shillings and 6 pence, and within days it had become the talk of the city. Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman behind the work, claimed he wrote it "to vex the world rather than divert it". That admission signals something unusual about the book in your hands. What looks like a tale of fantastical sea voyages is, at its core, a furious political satire aimed at courts, parliaments, philosophers, and humanity itself. The poet John Gay captured the book's reach in a phrase: "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery." And that strangely double life has never quite left it. Parents give it to children as an adventure story. Literary scholars read it as a Menippean satire. Political theorists study it as a critique of power. How did one novel come to hold so many different truths at once, and why did Swift go to such lengths to hide the manuscript from prosecutors before it ever reached a printer?

• 2. The Making of a Dangerous Book

  ›

  Swift was not writing alone when the first seeds of Gulliver's Travels were planted. Around 1713, he joined John Gay, Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, and others in the Scriblerus Club, a circle formed specifically to satirise popular literary genres. Swift was assigned two tasks: writing the imaginary memoirs of the club's fictional author, Martinus Scriblerus, and satirising the "travellers' tales" subgenre. The actual composition began in 1720, with the mirror-themed Parts I and II drafted first. Part IV followed in 1723, and Part III was written in 1724, a reversal of their eventual published order. Amendments were still being made while Swift was simultaneously writing his Drapier's Letters, a pamphlet campaign about Irish politics. By August 1725 the book was complete.

  The political danger was real. Gulliver's Travels was transparently anti-Whig in its satire, and Swift had already faced legal jeopardy over his Irish pamphlets. To protect himself, he most likely had the manuscript copied in someone else's hand so that his handwriting could not be introduced as evidence in court. In March 1726 he traveled to London, and the manuscript was delivered secretly to the publisher Benjamin Motte. Motte spread the typesetting across five printing houses simultaneously to accelerate production and discourage piracy. He also recognised a commercially significant work when he saw one. Fearing prosecution, however, he quietly cut or altered the most politically inflammatory passages, including the account of the rebellion of the city of Lindalino, and added material in defence of Queen Anne to Part II before sending it to press.

• 3. Four Voyages, One Mirror

  ›

  Lemuel Gulliver's first voyage, dated from the 4th of May 1699, ends with a shipwreck that deposits him among the Lilliputians, people less than 6 inches tall. The tiny scale of these people does not diminish their cruelty. Gulliver is charged with treason partly for urinating on the royal palace, his method of extinguishing a fire, and is sentenced to blinding. He escapes to the rival nation of Blefuscu, recovers an abandoned boat, and eventually sails home carrying some Lilliputian animals as souvenirs.

  The second voyage, beginning on the 20th of June 1702, reverses the geometry entirely. Abandoned on a peninsula of the continent of Brobdingnag, Gulliver is found by a farmer he estimates to stand roughly 72 feet tall, calculated from the man's stride of 10 yards. The farmer's daughter, Glumdalclitch, becomes his caretaker. Gulliver is put on display for money, fights giant wasps unleashed by a jealous court dwarf, is carried to a rooftop by a monkey, and eventually escapes when a giant eagle drops his traveling box into the sea.

  The third voyage, from the 5th of August 1706, brings Gulliver to Laputa, a flying island devoted to music, mathematics, and astronomy, whose citizens cannot convert their knowledge into anything practical. At the Grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi, researchers spend years trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and learn to mix paint by smell. Swift himself quoted one of these scientists directly: a man eight years into the sunbeam project who asked Gulliver for money "as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers". On the island of Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver speaks with the ghosts of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi. On Luggnagg, he meets the struldbrugs, people cursed with immortality but not youth, legally considered dead at eighty.

  The fourth voyage, which begins on the 7th of September 1710, takes Gulliver to the land of the Houyhnhnms after his crew mutinies and sets him adrift. There he finds rational horses ruling over savage, human-like creatures called Yahoos. He so admires the Houyhnhnms that he comes to despise his own species. When the Assembly of the Houyhnhnms expels him as a dangerous Yahoo with traces of reason, he is rescued against his will by a Portuguese captain named Pedro de Mendez, a wise and generous man whom Gulliver can barely tolerate. Back in England, Gulliver retreats to his stables and spends hours each day talking to horses.

• 4. Satire as Structural Argument

  ›

  Allan Bloom has argued that Swift's ridicule of the Laputan Academy represents the first serious challenge, by a modern liberal democrat, to societies that pursue scientific progress as an end in itself. The parody is pointed: the Grand Academy of Lagado is modelled on the Royal Society, which Swift openly criticised. A scholar named A. E. Case found, embedded in the Academy's cast of characters, many of the speculators who had been caught up in the South Sea Bubble. Swift's target was not simply bad science but the entire culture of the "projector", a type he had himself dabbled with in his younger years.

  Part I carries the heaviest load of political allegory. The wars between Lilliput and the rival island of Blefuscu mirror the long conflict between England and France. The Lilliputian court faction defined by high heels is widely read as a parody of the Tories, and the low-heel faction as a parody of the Whigs. The character Flimnap is generally interpreted as an allusion to Sir Robert Walpole, the Whig statesman with whom Swift had a personally difficult relationship.

  The book was also published seven years after Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and the scholar Warren Montag has argued in The Unthinkable Swift that Swift was systematically rebutting Defoe's optimistic claim that the individual precedes and can thrive apart from society. Swift considered that idea a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes. A small joke underlines the point: the captain who recruits Gulliver for the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson.

• 5. The Misanthropy Debate

  ›

  Critics who accused Swift of excessive misanthropy found an immediate ally in Viscount Bolingbroke, a friend of Swift's and one of the book's first readers. The British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray went further, calling the work "blasphemous" and arguing that its portrait of humanity was ludicrous and overly harsh. Members of the Whig party were also offended by what they read as a direct assault on their politics.

  Scholars Arthur Case, R. S. Crane, and Edward Stone have, however, argued that Gulliver's misanthropy is meant to be read as comic rather than cynical. Case traces its development through the fourth voyage: Gulliver initially resists identifying with the Yahoos, but once he concludes that the Houyhnhnms are morally superior, he assigns the Yahoo label to all of humanity, including himself. Crane connects this to a Latin formula prominent in academic circles during Swift's era, Homo est animal rationale, the idea that humans are rational animals. Swift, who had studied this type of logic at Trinity College Dublin, inverted the formula by giving reason to horses and stripping it from humanoids. Stone adds that Swift's contemporaries were already familiar with Beast Fables in travel writing, where animals outrank humans morally; readers would have recognised the joke rather than taken it as a sincere philosophical statement.

  The character of Captain Pedro de Mendez sits at the heart of this debate. Don Pedro finds Gulliver dressed in animal skins and speaking like a horse, yet treats him with patience and returns him safely to Lisbon. Some critics read Don Pedro as Swift's counter-argument to Gulliver's bleak conclusions, a demonstration that specific individuals can be decent even when their species, as a whole, is not.

• 6. Textual Battles and the 1735 Edition

  ›

  The version of Gulliver's Travels that Motte published in 1726 was not the version Swift had written. The alterations and omissions nagged at Swift for years. In 1735 the Irish publisher George Faulkner printed a collected edition of Swift's works, and Volume III was Gulliver's Travels. Faulkner had gained access to an annotated copy of Motte's edition prepared by a friend of Swift's generally believed to be Charles Ford. This copy reproduced most of the original manuscript, which had since been destroyed. Swift apparently reviewed proofs of Faulkner's edition, though this cannot be confirmed.

  Faulkner's edition restored much of what Motte had suppressed, and Swift added a letter, A letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson, in which he complained that Motte had so heavily altered the text that "I do hardly know mine own work". This letter, repudiating the keys, parodies, and continuations that had multiplied in the intervening years, now appears in most standard editions of the novel.

  One passage that Faulkner himself left out was the five-paragraph episode describing the rebellion of Lindalino against Laputa. Lindalino stood for Dublin, and the Laputan impositions represented the British attempt to impose William Wood's debased copper currency on Ireland, the same controversy Swift had fought through the Drapier's Letters. Whether Faulkner omitted it for political caution or because his source text lacked it is unknown. The passage was not restored to the collected works until a new edition in 1899.

• 7. Words That Escaped the Book

  ›

  The Lilliputians gave English and many other languages a new adjective. "Lilliputian" now means small and delicate, and the word has migrated into commercial life: a brand of small cigars, a series of collectable model houses called Lilliput Lane, and the smallest fitting in the Edison screw series, which measures 5 millimetres in diameter, all carry the name. In Dutch and Czech, the derivatives Lilliputter and liliputan describe adults shorter than 1.30 metres. Going the other direction, "Brobdingnagian" appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for very large or gigantic.

  The word Yahoo, meaning a rude or violent person, is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary with its origin attributed directly to Swift's novel. The egg-cracking controversy between Lilliput's Big-endians and Little-endians, which Swift invented as a satire on religious division over trivial doctrinal points, crossed into computer science. The terms "big-endian" and "little-endian" now describe two competing ways to arrange bytes in computer memory. The nomenclature was chosen ironically: the technical choice is not inherently important, but the incompatibility it creates between systems has fuelled persistent disputes among designers.

  Alexander Pope's five Verses on Gulliver's Travels pleased Swift enough that he included them in the second edition of the book. The work also attracted imitators almost immediately: the anonymously published Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput appeared in 1727, the French translator Abbé Pierre Desfontaines published a sequel featuring Gulliver's son in 1730, and Georg Philipp Telemann composed a Gulliver Suite for two violins without bass between 1728 and 1729, including movements named for the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, the well-mannered Houyhnhnms, and the naughty Yahoos.