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What it argues
Gulliver's Travels presents itself as the plain memoir of Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship's surgeon who undertakes four extraordinary voyages. In Lilliput, he is a giant among tiny people absorbed in petty factional politics. In Brobdingnag, he is the tiny creature, observed by giants who find his species morally repugnant once he explains European civilization to them. In Laputa and the Academy of Lagado, he encounters scientists so devoted to abstract reason that they have destroyed agriculture and reduced their country to poverty. In Houyhnhnmland, he finds a society of rational horses who regard humans (the vile Yahoos) with contempt, a conclusion he eventually endorses so thoroughly that he cannot bear the smell of his own family.
Swift's satire operates at multiple levels simultaneously. The first two voyages are the most enjoyable and most legible: Lilliput is transparently English and French court politics, Brobdingnag a vehicle for Swift to have a foreign monarch deliver a withering verdict on European civilization. The third voyage is the weakest (it was written last and feels sprawling), but the fourth is the most disturbing — by the end, Gulliver has gone mad with misanthropy, and Swift refuses to make it entirely clear whether Gulliver's contempt for humanity is Swift's own or the satirist's most extreme self-portrait.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Lilliput voyage establishes Swift's method: political absurdity rendered so literally that it becomes impossible to miss. Factions fighting over which end of an egg to break are Whigs and Tories, or Catholics and Protestants — take your pick.
- 2.
The Brobdingnag voyage turns the satirical instrument around: from Europe's perspective we are giants with power, but from the outside — the King's perspective — we are 'the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.'
- 3.
The third voyage's Academy of Lagado is the most direct attack on the Royal Society: scientists extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, building houses from the roof down, softening marble for pillows. Reason untethered from practical life becomes its own absurdity.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and clergyman who is widely considered the greatest prose satirist in the English language. He was born in Dublin and spent most of his adult life in Ireland, serving as Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral from 1713. His works include A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, A Modest Proposal, and his Journal to Stella. Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, was an immediate bestseller and made him internationally famous. He was a committed Irish patriot and a ferocious political polemicist who deployed irony as a weapon of sustained fury.
