Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver’s Travels is the masterpiece of Jonathan Swift and one of the great satires of world literature. It presents itself as the sober memoir of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon and later a captain, who makes four voyages and is cast away each time in an unknown land: Lilliput, whose inhabitants are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land of giants sixty feet high; Laputa, a flying island of mathematicians and musicians lost in abstraction, with its neighbouring lands; and the country of the Houyhnhnms, rational and virtuous horses who keep as beasts of burden the Yahoos — filthy, greedy, lustful creatures who are recognisably human. Each voyage changes Gulliver’s perspective on his own country and his own species, until, after the last, he can hardly bear to be near his wife and children and spends his days talking to his horses.

Published anonymously in 1726, it was an instant success and has never stopped being read — by children as an adventure among tiny people and giants, by adults as a merciless anatomy of politics, science, war and human pride. Swift wrote to Pope that he meant it “to vex the world rather than divert it.”

At a glance

The story

The book opens with a letter from Gulliver to his cousin Sympson complaining about errors in the printing and with a note from the publisher; Gulliver insists on his own truthfulness.

Lilliput. In 1699 Gulliver sails on the Antelope to the South Seas; the ship is wrecked, and he swims ashore, falls asleep, and wakes to find himself tied down by hundreds of threads and covered by tiny men, “not six inches high”, armed with bows and arrows. He is in Lilliput. The Lilliputians feed him (it takes 1,728 of their rations to equal his), carry him to their capital on a huge cart drawn by 1,500 horses, and chain him in an old temple. The emperor’s officers search his pockets and make an inventory, describing his watch as a “wonderful kind of engine” that is perhaps his god, since he consults it so often. Gulliver learns the language and wins his liberty by swearing to obey a series of articles. He is called the Quinbus Flestrin, the “Great Man-Mountain”.

He discovers that Lilliput’s court is full of intrigue. Ministers win office by rope-dancing before the emperor — whoever leaps highest gets the post — and courtiers compete for coloured silk threads by leaping over or creeping under a stick. Two political parties, the Tramecksan and Slamecksan, are distinguished by high heels and low heels (Tories and Whigs); the heir to the throne wears one high heel and one low, so that he hobbles. Lilliput is at war with its neighbouring island Blefuscu over the proper way to break an egg: the emperor’s grandfather cut his finger breaking an egg at the larger end, so his father decreed that all eggs be broken at the smaller end; the “Big-Endians” rebelled, fled to Blefuscu, and the two nations have fought for “six and thirty moons” — a satire on the wars of Catholic and Protestant over doctrinal differences (“all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end”).

Gulliver wades across the channel and tows away the entire Blefuscudian fleet, becoming a hero; but when the emperor wants him to reduce Blefuscu to a province and enslave its people, Gulliver refuses, and falls from favour. When the empress’s palace catches fire, he puts it out by urinating on it — and the empress, though saved, is mortally offended. A friend at court warns him that he has been impeached for treason; the “lenient” sentence, proposed by his friend the Principal Secretary, is that he be blinded and gradually starved. Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu, finds a full-sized boat washed ashore, and sails home. He takes with him tiny cattle and sheep, which he exhibits for profit.

Brobdingnag. Two months later he sails again. In 1703 he lands with a party on an unknown coast to fetch water; the others flee from a monstrous giant, and Gulliver is left behind in a field of corn “forty feet high”. A reaper picks him up as a curiosity. In Brobdingnag everything is enormous; Gulliver is now as tiny relative to the giants as the Lilliputians were to him. The farmer exhibits him for money at fairs; the farmer’s nine-year-old daughter, Glumdalclitch (“little nurse”), cares for him tenderly. The queen buys him. At court he is the plaything of everyone: the queen’s dwarf drops him into a bowl of cream; a monkey carries him to the roof; he fights off wasps the size of partridges and rats the size of mastiffs. The maids of honour undress in front of him as if he were nothing, and he is disgusted by their huge, blotched skins and their smells — the beauty of human bodies depends on distance.

The King of Brobdingnag, a wise and humane ruler, asks Gulliver about England. Gulliver proudly describes its parliament, courts, wars, finances and history. The king, after questioning him closely, delivers the most famous judgement in the book:

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Gulliver, to win favour, offers to teach the king how to make gunpowder and cannon, which would make him master of all his subjects. The king is horrified and forbids him to mention it again on pain of death. Gulliver condescendingly attributes this to “narrow principles and short views”. The Brobdingnagians’ learning is practical — morality, history, poetry, mathematics applied to useful things; the king says that “whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind… than the whole race of politicians put together.”

After two years, while Gulliver is on a trip to the coast in his travelling box, an eagle seizes the box and drops it into the sea, where an English ship picks him up. Home again, he finds everything absurdly small and shouts at people as if they were deaf.

Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and Japan. In 1706 his ship is taken by pirates, and he is set adrift. He sees an island floating in the air — Laputa, the flying island, kept aloft by an enormous magnet. Its rulers are so absorbed in mathematics and music that they need servants called “flappers” to strike them on the mouth and ears with bladders filled with pebbles to make them speak or listen. Their clothes are covered with astronomical and musical symbols; their food is cut into geometrical shapes; they cannot build a house with right angles; they live in constant terror of cosmic catastrophes. Their wives, neglected, escape to the land below. The king controls his territories below by hovering over rebellious towns to block out the sun and rain, or by dropping the island on them.

Below lies Balnibarbi, ruined by its “projectors”. At the Grand Academy of Lagado — a satire on the Royal Society — scientists work at absurd schemes: extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, turning excrement back into food, building houses from the roof downward, ploughing with hogs, breeding naked sheep, softening marble for pillows, teaching language by eating wafers inscribed with propositions, and abolishing words altogether by carrying objects to point at. A writing machine produces books on every subject by randomly turning words. The political projectors propose sensible ideas — paying ministers according to merit — which are considered mad, and other schemes, like reconciling parties by sawing politicians’ brains in half and swapping the halves.

On Glubbdubdrib, the island of sorcerers, the governor summons the dead for Gulliver: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar and Brutus, Homer and Aristotle (who have never met their commentators), and the ancestors of modern nobles, revealing that modern history is a pack of lies. In Luggnagg he learns of the Struldbrugs, people born with a mark on their foreheads who never die. Gulliver imagines the wisdom and happiness of such immortality — and is told the truth: they grow old and keep on ageing, losing their teeth, hair, memory and senses, envying the dead, declared legally dead at eighty, despised and miserable. He loses all desire to live for ever. He sails to Japan, where he avoids trampling on the crucifix by pretending to be Dutch, and returns home.

The Country of the Houyhnhnms. In 1710 Gulliver sails as captain of a merchant ship. His crew mutiny and maroon him on an unknown shore. He meets a herd of hideous, hairy, naked creatures that climb trees and attack him with excrement — the Yahoos — and is rescued by two horses who speak to each other in a language of whinnies. They are the Houyhnhnms (pronounced roughly “whinnims”), whose name means “the perfection of nature”. They are rational, peaceful, truthful and orderly. They have no word for a lie (they call it “the thing which was not”), no concept of evil, no war, no government but a general assembly, no disease, no fear of death. They marry for the sake of the race, raise their young by reason, and die without grief.

Gulliver’s horse master takes him into his house. Gulliver hides his body under his clothes, terrified of being taken for a Yahoo — which, physically, he obviously is. As he learns the language, he describes Europe to his master: its wars (“sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions”), its lawyers who prove “that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid”, its doctors, its drunkenness, its money. The master concludes that Europeans are Yahoos with “some small pittance of reason”, which they use only to “aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us.”

Gulliver comes to worship the Houyhnhnms and to loathe the Yahoos — and himself. When a young female Yahoo, seeing him bathe naked in a stream, embraces him with lust, he can no longer deny that he is one of them. The Houyhnhnms’ general assembly, disturbed by a Yahoo with reason who might lead the wild Yahoos to rebellion, decrees that he must leave. Heartbroken, Gulliver builds a canoe of Yahoo skins and sails away. Picked up by a Portuguese ship, he finds its kind captain, Don Pedro de Mendez, repellent simply because he is human; he tries to jump overboard. At home in England, he faints when his wife kisses him; he cannot bear the smell of his family; he buys two horses and talks to them for four hours a day. He ends the book wishing he could tolerate humans if only they were not proud: “I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician… but when I behold a lump of deformity, and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience.”

Themes

Perspective. The first two voyages invert one another. In Lilliput Gulliver is a giant among pygmies whose pride and politics look absurd; in Brobdingnag he is the pygmy, and his pride in Europe looks contemptible to the wise giant king. Swift uses scale, as Locke and the new microscopes had shown, to reveal that beauty, grandeur and importance are relative.

Politics. Lilliput satirises the court of George I and the Whig ministry of Robert Walpole (the rope-dancing Flimnap), the Tory leaders’ impeachment in 1715 (Gulliver’s own impeachment), the war with France, and the party conflicts that divided England. Brobdingnag offers a model of a humane, practical, limited monarchy. Laputa’s domination of Balnibarbi satirises England’s rule over Ireland (the town of Lindalino, which resists the flying island by building magnetic towers, is Dublin, resisting Wood’s coinage).

Science and reason. The third voyage mocks speculative science detached from human use, and the fourth asks what pure reason would actually be like. The Laputans are reason gone mad; the Houyhnhnms are reason perfected — and chillingly without love, grief or passion. They debate whether to exterminate the Yahoos.

Human nature. The fourth voyage is the most disturbing thing Swift wrote. Is the book saying that humans are Yahoos? Or is Gulliver’s final misanthropy itself satirised — his worship of the cold, horse-faced Houyhnhnms another kind of pride, contrasted with the decency of Captain de Mendez? Critics have split into “hard” readers (the Houyhnhnms are Swift’s ideal and humanity is damned) and “soft” readers (Gulliver has gone mad, and Swift means us to reject both extremes and recognise ourselves as rationis capax — capable of reason, but not rational by nature).

Travel writing and truth. Gulliver is a parody of the earnest, detailed, self-promoting travel writer, and the book mocks the gullibility of readers who believed such tales; one Irish bishop reportedly declared that the book was “full of improbable lies, and for his part, he hardly believed a word of it.”

Reception and afterlife

The book sold out within a week. Readers argued over its political targets; Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot wrote comic verses supposedly by its characters. Later, abridged and sanitised versions of the first two voyages made it a children’s classic. Thackeray, horrified by the fourth voyage, called it “filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene”. Orwell loved it, read it repeatedly from childhood, and wrote that the Houyhnhnms’ society anticipates totalitarianism. It has been adapted into films (the Fleischer animation of 1939; Jack Black, 2010), and influenced Voltaire’s Micromégas, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and countless dystopias.

In conversation

• Lilliputian — tiny or petty; Brobdingnagian — gigantic.
• Big-Endians and Little-Endians — trivial differences that cause great quarrels (and, in computing, byte order).
• A Yahoo — a crude, brutish person; the Struldbrugs — the nightmare of endless old age.