Gulliver’s Travels: Jonathan Swift’s Four Voyages and a Savage Satire of Humanity
Brilliant and sharp, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is not simply an entertaining adventure story. Each of the worlds Gulliver visits displays features of the world Swift lived in, often in the caricatured, inflated form that is a satirist’s stock in trade. By the end, Gulliver has decided there is no hope for human beings: he was a fool to think he could bring reason and truth into their lives, for humans are all Yahoos, and Yahoos they will remain.
Author: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
Title: Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Format: English paperback (Penguin Classics), 336 pages, edited by Robert DeMaria Jr.
Scope: Satirical travel narrative in four parts
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0141439491 (ASIN 0141439491)
Lilliput
There are four voyages in Swift’s title, and each begins with a misfortune that leaves Gulliver shipwrecked, marooned or lost at sea. In the first, he is washed up on the shores of Lilliput and wakes to find himself tied down by hundreds of tiny threads. He soon realises he is a captive in a land of tiny people; compared with them, he is a giant.
The Lilliputians put Gulliver to work, first as manual labour, then in a war with their neighbours caused by a dispute over which end of an egg should be broken. The people turn against him when he puts out a fire in the palace by urinating on it.
Brobdingnag and Laputa
Gulliver makes it home, but soon longs to go out into the world again. This time he finds himself in a land where he is tiny compared with the giants who live there. After many close encounters with the land’s huge animals, and some fame for his tiny size, he escapes Brobdingnag, a place he dislikes for the coarseness of its people, when a bird carries off the box in which he lives and drops it into the sea.
On his third voyage Gulliver passes through several lands, including one whose people quite literally have their heads in the clouds: their island, Laputa, floats above the ordinary Earth. They are refined intellectuals who spend their time on utterly useless pursuits while others live below them like slaves.
Swift’s Targets
Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, published the book anonymously in 1726 as the supposed memoirs of a ship’s surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver. Its satire is often precise. In Lilliput, a bitter war over which end of an egg should be broken parodies the religious quarrels between Catholics and Protestants, and the rival factions of high heels and low heels mock Tories and Whigs. In the flying island of Laputa and the Academy of Lagado, with its scientists trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, he ridicules the projects of the Royal Society. In a letter to his friend Alexander Pope, Swift said he wrote the book to vex the world rather than divert it.
Words It Gave Us
Gulliver’s Travels has left traces in everyday English: "Lilliputian" for anything tiny, "yahoo" for a crude person, and even computer science, where "big-endian" and "little-endian" describe the order of bytes in memory. The darkest invention may be the Struldbrugs, immortals who never die but keep growing older and more miserable, a brutal answer to the dream of living for ever.
The Houyhnhnms
Gulliver’s final voyage takes him to something close to a utopia: a land of rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, served by brutish human creatures called Yahoos. The longer he stays, the less he can bear his own species, and he returns home a changed and embittered man.
Read it as a children’s adventure and you will enjoy the first two voyages; read it as an adult and you will find one of the sharpest satires ever written about politics, science and human pride. The Penguin Classics edition’s notes explain the contemporary targets.
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