Gulliver's Travels

Overview

Four voyages, about three hundred pages, published anonymously in 1726 and an immediate sensation. Swift was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin, a failed politician and the most dangerous pamphleteer of his age, and he arranged for the manuscript to be dropped at a publisher’s door by a stranger.

The frame is a hoax and part of the joke. This is presented as a genuine travel narrative by Lemuel Gulliver, ship’s surgeon, complete with latitudes, dull nautical detail and a prefatory letter in which Gulliver complains that the publisher altered his text and that mankind has failed to reform in the six months since publication.

The four parts are not a series of adventures. They are four attempts on the same target from different distances: humanity seen as small, as large, as ridiculous, and finally as an animal.

What happens

In Lilliput, Gulliver is shipwrecked among people six inches high and wakes tied down by threads. The comedy is of scale, and under it sits a precise political allegory: the parties are distinguished by the height of their heels, the great religious war is between those who break eggs at the big end and those who break them at the little, and the way to high office is to jump highest over a stick held by the emperor. Gulliver serves the state, puts out a palace fire in a way the court cannot forgive, and is charged with treason. The sentence, blinding rather than death, is presented as mercy.

In Brobdingnag the proportions reverse. Gulliver is a toy for giants, kept by a farmer, exhibited for money, endangered by a wasp and a monkey, and disgusted by skin seen close up. He gives the king a proud account of English institutions over several audiences and the king, having listened carefully, delivers the verdict about pernicious little odious vermin. Gulliver then offers the secret of gunpowder as a gift and is horrified to be refused.

The third voyage is the loosest and the funniest. Laputa is a flying island of mathematicians so lost in abstraction they need servants to flap their ears when someone speaks, and it holds the land below in subjection by hovering over it. At the Academy of Lagado, projectors work on extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, reducing human excrement to its original food, and building from the roof down. In Glubbdubdrib Gulliver calls up the dead and finds history is largely lies. In Luggnagg he meets the Struldbruggs, who are immortal, and learns they do not stay young: they are senile, hated and legally dead at eighty.

The fourth voyage is the one that unsettles people. Gulliver is marooned in a country ruled by rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, who keep a species of filthy humanoid brutes called Yahoos. He learns the language, describes European war, law and medicine to his master, and is slowly convinced that he is a Yahoo with a veneer. He wants to stay. The Houyhnhnms hold an assembly and expel him as dangerous. He builds a canoe of Yahoo skins, is rescued against his will, and returns to England where he cannot endure his family, buys two horses, and talks to them for four hours a day.

How to read it

Read the fourth voyage as the destination. The first three are preparation, and readers who stop after Lilliput have read a comedy rather than the book.

Do not assume Gulliver is Swift. That is the single most useful thing to hold on to. Gulliver is a decent, literal, credulous man who adopts the opinions of wherever he is, and by the end he has gone mad in a particular way, worshipping the horses and loathing his own species. Swift gives you a third character in the fourth voyage, the Portuguese captain Pedro de Mendez, who is generous, patient and human, and whom Gulliver cannot bear to look at. Mendez is there on purpose.

Read the notes. The Lilliputian politics map onto specific people, Walpole and Bolingbroke and George I, and the High Heels and Low Heels are Tories and Whigs. You can enjoy it without, but DeMaria’s notes turn a general satire into a much sharper one.

Watch the flatness of the prose. Swift writes like a ship’s officer filing a report, and the horror of the fourth voyage arrives in the same measured sentences used for the tides.

The common misreading is that the Houyhnhnms are Swift’s ideal. They are rational, passionless, incapable of lying, indifferent to the death of a spouse, and they debate exterminating the Yahoos in terms that do not read well after the twentieth century. Whether Swift admires them, or is showing that reason without feeling is its own monstrosity, is the central argument about this book, and it is worth forming your own view before reading anyone else’s.

Questions it raises

• Is Gulliver’s final misanthropy the conclusion the book has been arguing for, or the disease it is diagnosing?
• The Houyhnhnms have no word for lying and no grief. Is a society without those things better than ours or less than human?
• The King of Brobdingnag judges England by plain moral standards and finds it vile. Is his view privileged, or is he just another islander with local prejudices?
• Swift attacks the Royal Society through the Academy of Lagado. Was he attacking bad science, or the idea that knowledge should be useful at all?
• Why does Swift place Pedro de Mendez, obviously good and obviously human, at the very end?
• If satire is meant to reform, and Gulliver complains that nobody reformed, what is this book for?