Showing posts with label Jonathan Swift. Show all posts

Monday, August 4, 2025

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

A painting portraying Gulliver being tied up by the island people of Lilliput

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

Not suitable for children

20 NOVEMBER 2022,

, bullying, misogynistic and that is before you start discussing toilet humour which the 18th century seemed to be obsessed with. Yet we continue to treat Gulliver’s Travels as a children’s story. The land of the little people and of giants, deftly ignoring the other two lands which Gulliver goes to before he returns home. It is also a book full of historical and literary references which would have been obvious to the 18th-century reader but not familiar to modern readers.

Review / Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels

by Jonathan Swift

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 3 / Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

James Topham

Updated on August 22, 2020

There are few great satirists who manage to judge their work so finely that it can be considered both a rip-roaring, fantastical adventure story suitable for children and adults alike, as well as a searing attack on the nature of society. In his Gulliver's Travels, Jonathon Swift has done precisely that and has bestowed upon us one of the great works of English literature in the process. A tale recognized far more widely than it is read, the story of Gulliver--a traveler who is, in turns, a giant, a tiny figure, a king and an idiot--is both excellent fun, as well as thoughtful, witty and wise.

Lovable … Mae Munuo in Gulliver's Travels at the Unicorn Theatre. Photograph: Marc Brenner

Gulliver’s Travels review – bedroom voyage to the world of Jonathan Swift

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 3 / Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

Unicorn theatre, London
Bewitching video and ingenious sets combine in a staging that turns the 18th-century adventure into an escape for a troubled student

Arifa Akbar
Thursday 17 March 2022

This radical reimagining of Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century tale of a shipwrecked surgeon is less a biting social satire and more a journey into imagination and fantasy as a refuge from the real world.

Jonathan Swift by William Makepeace Thackeray

Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervas

Jonathan Swift
by William Makepeace Thackeray

IN treating of the English humourists of the past age, it is of the men and of their lives, rather than of their books, that I ask permission to speak to you; and in doing so, you are aware that I cannot hope to entertain you with a merely humorous or facetious story. Harlequin without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised to go and see Harlequin—a man full of cares and perplexities like the rest of us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask or disguise or uniform he presents it to the public. And as all of you here must needs be grave when you think of your own past and present, you will not look to find, in the histories of those whose lives and feelings I am going to try and describe to you, a story that is otherwise than serious, and often very sad. If Humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best we regard him, esteem him—sometimes love him. And, as his business is to mark other people’s lives and peculiarities, we moralize upon his life when he is gone—and yesterday’s preacher becomes the text for to-day’s sermon.

Book Review 003 / Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels

by Daniel Defoe

1726

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 3 / Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

Edge of Known

September 6, 2018

Book Blurb: Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs.

The 100 greatest novels of all time / No 4 / Gullivers's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

The 100 greatest

novels of all time

No. 04

Gullivers's Travel

by Jonathan Swift

(1726)

Robert McCrum
Sunday 6 October 2013

On the island of Lilliput: a colour print from an 1860s edition of Gulliver’s Travels.

even years after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, the great Tory essayist and poet Jonathan Swift – inspired by the Scriblerus club, whose members included John Gay and Alexander Pope – composed a satire on travel narratives that became an immediate bestseller. According to Gay, Gulliver was soon being read “from the cabinet council to the nursery”.

In its afterlife as a classic, Gulliver’s Travels works on many levels. First, it’s a masterpiece of sustained and savage indignation, “furious, raging, obscene”, according to Thackeray. Swift’s satirical fury is directed against almost every aspect of early 18th-century life: science, society, commerce and politics. Second, stripped of Swift’s dark vision, it becomes a wonderful travel fantasy for children, a perennial favourite that continues to inspire countless versions, in books and films. Finally, as a polemical tour de force, full of wild imagination, it became a source for Voltaire, as well as the inspiration for a Telemann violin suite, Philip K Dick’s science-fiction story The Prize Ship, and, perhaps most influential of all, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver (to give its original title) comes in four parts, and opens with Gulliver’s shipwreck on the island of Lilliput, whose inhabitant are just six inches high. The most famous and familiar part of the book (“Lilliputian” soon became part of the language) is a satirical romp in which Swift takes some memorable shots at English political parties and their antics, especially the controversy on the matter of whether boiled eggs should be opened at the big or the little end.

Next, Gulliver’s ship, the Adventure, gets blown off course and he is abandoned on Brobdingnag whose inhabitants are giants with a proportionately gigantic landscape. Here, having been dominant on Lilliput, Gulliver is exhibited as a curious midget, and has a number of local dramas such as fighting giant wasps. He also gets to discuss the condition of Europe with the King, who concludes with Swiftian venom that “the bulk of your natives [are] the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

In the third part of his travels, Gulliver visits the flying island of Laputa (a place-name also referenced in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove), and Swift mounts a dark and complicated assault on the speculations of contemporary science (notably spoofing the attempted extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers). Finally, in the section that influenced Orwell (Gulliver’s Travels was one of his favourite books), Swift describes the country of the Houyhnhnms, horses with the qualities of rational men. These he contrasts with the loathsome Yahoos, brutes in human shape. Orwell would later echo Swift’s misanthropy, looking ahead to a time “when the human race had finally been overthrown.”

At the end of it all, Gulliver returns home from his travels in a state of alienated wisdom, purged and matured by his experiences. “I write,” he concludes, “for the noblest end, to inform and instruct mankind… I write without any view to profit or praise. I never suffer a word to pass that may possibly give the least offence, even to those who are most ready to take it. So that I hope I may with justice pronounce myself an author perfectly blameless…”

When he died in 1745, Swift, remembered as “the gloomy Dean”, was buried in Dublin with the famous epitaph “ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (where fierce indignation can no further tear apart his heart) inscribed on his tomb.

A note on the text:

Swift probably started writing Gulliver’s Travels in 1720 (when Crusoe fever was at it height), and delivered the manuscript to the London publisher Benjamin Motte in March 1726. The book was published, anonymously, at top speed. Motte, who sensed a bestseller, used several presses to foil any attempt at piracy, and made many cuts to reduce the risk of prosecution. The first edition appeared, in two volumes, on 26 October 1726, priced 8s 6d, and sold out its first printing in less than a week. In 1735 the Irish publisher, George Faulkner printed a collection of Swift’s works. Volume III became Gulliver’s Travels, based on a working copy of the original manuscript. The textual history of Gulliver’s Travelsnow becomes incredibly complicated, and Swift later disowned most versions, including Motte’s first edition, saying it was so much altered that “I do hardly know mine own work”. Later scholarly editions of Swift have to choose between Motte and Faulkner, but whatever the version it has never been out of print since the day it first appeared.

Three more from Jonathan Swift

A Tale of a Tub (1704); A Modest Proposal, an essay (1729); Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739)

THE GUARDIAN

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Jonathan Swift / Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver’s Travels, although known as a classic children’s adventure book

by SALVATORE INCARDONA

27 SEP 2011

Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift created this story about a sea-loving physician who travels to imaginary foreign lands; his vessel is shipwrecked and taken over by pirates but behind these events there is Swift’s satire to the political events in England and Ireland. He makes fun of academics, scientists, and politicians who value rationalism. At its first publication, the novel did not show Swift’s name because the author feared government persecution.

The book is still considered one of the best examples of satire ever written. The author’s acute observations about the corruption of people can still conform to today’s reality, almost three centuries later.

Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput and Blefuscu

The book starts with a short introduction in which Lemuel Gulliver, gives a brief summary of his life before his voyages. In the course of his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself prisoner of people less than 6 inches high, who live in the rival country of Lilliput. After giving assurances of his good intentions, the Lilliputians give him a place to stay and he becomes a favorite of the court. From there, the book follows Gulliver's observations about the Court of Lilliput. He is given the permission to wander around the city with the agreement he would not harm the Lilliputians. Gulliver helps the Lilliputians to suppress their neighbors, the Blefuscudians, by stealing their fleet; however, he disagrees on downgrading the country to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the court. Gulliver is then charged with betrayal and sentenced to be blinded. But with the help of a kind friend, Gulliver is able to escape to Blefuscu, where he finds an abandoned boat and sails out; he is later saved by a passing ship which takes him home.

Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag

When the sailing ship Adventure is forced to change its course because of a storm and crashes into land, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and later found by a farmer who is 72 feet tall; the farmer brings Gulliver home and his daughter takes cares of him. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. The Queen of Brobdingnag hears the news and wants to see the show; she likes Gulliver and she buys him to keep him as a favorite at court.

As Gulliver is too small to use their gigantic chairs, beds, knives, and forks, the queen buys a small house just for Gulliver so that he can be carried around in it. In the book, this is referred to as his "travelling box." Gulliver discusses the state of Europe with the King; however, the King is not impressed with Gulliver's opinion. Thus, on a trip to the coast, his travelling box is snatched by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box right into the sea where he is picked up by some sailors, who takes him back to England.

This book compares the moral to the representative man, the latter of whom is clearly shown to be the lesser of the two.

Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan

After Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates, he is stranded next to a desolate rocky island, close to India. He is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to music and mathematics, however, unable to use them for practical ends.

While there, Gulliver tours the country as the guest of a low-ranking aristocrat; he sees the ruin brought by blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and the Royal Society. At The Grand Academy of Lagado great resources are employed on researching completely ridiculous and unnecessary schemes like extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons.

Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to wait for a trader that can take him to Japan. However, while waiting, he takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where he visits a magician and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures; in Luggnagg he encounters the struldbrugs, poor people who are immortal, forever old, complete with the infirmities of old age, and considered legally dead at the age of eighty. After arriving to Japan, Gulliver tells the Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix", which the Emperor concedes. Gulliver returns home, where he decides he wants to stay until the end of his life.

Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms

Regardless of his decision to remain at home, Gulliver returns to the sea as the captain of a merchantman as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is compelled to find new members for his crew, because he believes the old crew has turned the rest of the crew against him. His crew revolts against him and decides to leave him as soon as they touch land and to continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes across a race of repulsive and deformed humans for which he develops an immediate and vicious antipathy. Shortly after he meets a horse and comes to understand that they call themselves Houyhnhms, which in their language means "the perfection of nature", and that they are in charge; whereas the deformed creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their base form.

Gulliver becomes a member of the horse's household, and begins to admire and imitate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, while rejecting the Yahoos. However, a gathering of the Houyhnhnms determines that Gulliver is a danger to their civilization, and banishes him.

He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is shocked to learn that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo himself, is a wise, polite, and generous person. He returns to his home in England, but he is not able to accept living among Yahoos and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, avoiding his family and his wife, and spending time in the stables speaking to the horses.

This book uses crude metaphors to describe human immorality; the Houyhnhms are symbolized as not only perfected nature but also the emotional emptiness which Swift maintained that devotion to reason brought.

Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer; born in Dublin, Ireland, as the only son of Jonathan Swift and Abigaile Erick Swift. He studied at Kilkenny Grammar School between 1674 and 1682 and at Trinity College between 1682 and 1689. He received his M.A. in 1692. He took numerous trips to London and became famous for his satiric essays. Between 1702 and 1714, Swift was one of the most important figures in the political and the literary life of London.

WALL STREET INTERNATIONAL

Sunday, October 6, 2013

The 100 best novels / No 3 / Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 3

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels comes third in our list of the best novels written in English. Robert McCrum discusses a satirical masterpiece that's never been out of print

Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday 6 October 2013

On the island of Lilliput: a colour print from an 1860s edition of Gulliver's Travels. Photograph: Alamy

Seven years after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, the great Tory essayist and poet Jonathan Swift – inspired by the Scriblerus club, whose members included John Gay and Alexander Pope – composed a satire on travel narratives that became an immediate bestseller. According to Gay, Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery".

In its afterlife as a classic, Gulliver's Travels works on many levels. First, it's a masterpiece of sustained and savage indignation, "furious, raging, obscene", according to Thackeray. Swift's satirical fury is directed against almost every aspect of early 18th-century life: science, society, commerce and politics. Second, stripped of Swift's dark vision, it becomes a wonderful travel fantasy for children, a perennial favourite that continues to inspire countless versions, in books and films. Finally, as a polemical tour de force, full of wild imagination, it became a source for Voltaire, as well as the inspiration for a Telemann violin suite, Philip K Dick's science-fiction story The Prize Ship, and, perhaps most influential of all, George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver (to give its original title) comes in four parts, and opens with Gulliver's shipwreck on the island of Lilliput, whose inhabitant are just six inches high. The most famous and familiar part of the book ("Lilliputian" soon became part of the language) is a satirical romp in which Swift takes some memorable shots at English political parties and their antics, especially the controversy on the matter of whether boiled eggs should be opened at the big or the little end.

Next, Gulliver's ship, the Adventure, gets blown off course and he is abandoned on Brobdingnag whose inhabitants are giants with a proportionately gigantic landscape. Here, having been dominant on Lilliput, Gulliver is exhibited as a curious midget, and has a number of local dramas such as fighting giant wasps. He also gets to discuss the condition of Europe with the King, who concludes with Swiftian venom that "the bulk of your natives [are] the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

In the third part of his travels, Gulliver visits the flying island of Laputa (a place-name also referenced in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove), and Swift mounts a dark and complicated assault on the speculations of contemporary science (notably spoofing the attempted extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers). Finally, in the section that influenced Orwell (Gulliver's Travels was one of his favourite books), Swift describes the country of the Houyhnhnms, horses with the qualities of rational men. These he contrasts with the loathsome Yahoos, brutes in human shape. Orwell would later echo Swift's misanthropy, looking ahead to a time "when the human race had finally been overthrown."

At the end of it all, Gulliver returns home from his travels in a state of alienated wisdom, purged and matured by his experiences. "I write," he concludes, "for the noblest end, to inform and instruct mankind… I write without any view to profit or praise. I never suffer a word to pass that may possibly give the least offence, even to those who are most ready to take it. So that I hope I may with justice pronounce myself an author perfectly blameless…"

When he died in 1745, Swift, remembered as "the gloomy Dean", was buried in Dublin with the famous epitaph "ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit" (where fierce indignation can no further tear apart his heart) inscribed on his tomb.

A note on the text:

Swift probably started writing Gulliver's Travels in 1720 (when Crusoe fever was at it height), and delivered the manuscript to the London publisher Benjamin Motte in March 1726. The book was published, anonymously, at top speed. Motte, who sensed a bestseller, used several presses to foil any attempt at piracy, and made many cuts to reduce the risk of prosecution. The first edition appeared, in two volumes, on 26 October 1726, priced 8s 6d, and sold out its first printing in less than a week. In 1735 the Irish publisher, George Faulkner printed a collection of Swift's works. Volume III became Gulliver's Travels, based on a working copy of the original manuscript. The textual history ofGulliver's Travels now becomes incredibly complicated, and Swift later disowned most versions, including Motte's first edition, saying it was so much altered that "I do hardly know mine own work". Later scholarly editions of Swift have to choose between Motte and Faulkner, but whatever the version it has never been out of print since the day it first appeared.

THE GUARDIAN