In brief
Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon from Nottinghamshire, makes four voyages and is cast up four times among people unlike any in Europe: the six-inch Lilliputians, the giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted philosophers of the flying island of Laputa and its neighbours, and finally the Houyhnhnms, rational horses who keep a race of filthy, naked, human-shaped animals called Yahoos. He comes home from the last voyage unable to bear the smell of his own wife.
Children have read the first two voyages as fairy tales for three centuries, and the book survives that. But it was written, as Swift told Alexander Pope in 1725, “to vex the world rather than divert it”. It is a satire on politics, war, science, learning, the body and, at the end, on the human claim to be a rational animal at all.
The argument
Each voyage changes the scale and so changes what Gulliver can see. Among the Lilliputians he is a giant, and their ambitions, wars and quarrels look as petty as they are. Among the Brobdingnagians he is a toy, and it is his own country that shrinks. When he proudly explains English government, wars and history to the King of Brobdingnag, the king concludes that “the bulk of your natives” are “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (Part II, ch. 6). The point is not that small is bad or large is good. It is that what we take for greatness is a matter of where we stand.
The fourth voyage turns from size to kind. The Houyhnhnms are governed wholly by reason; they have no word for lying, and when Gulliver tells his master of ships and countries beyond the sea, the horse replies that he must be mistaken, “or that I said the thing which was not” (Part IV, ch. 3). The Yahoos are what is left of a human being once reason is subtracted: greedy, lustful, quarrelsome and dirty. Gulliver, who looks like a Yahoo in clothes, has to decide which he is. Swift’s letter to Pope stated the thesis behind this: he wanted to prove that man is not a rational animal, only an animal capable of reason. The book’s last pages put the weight on pride, the vice that lets a creature so made think itself the measure of things.
The shape of the book
The four parts are built to answer each other. Parts I and II are a matched pair, small and great, and the first is the most political: Lilliput’s court, parties and wars are a scale model of England’s. Part II is gentler and sadder. Gulliver is cared for by a nine-year-old girl, exhibited for money, kept as a pet by the queen, endangered by wasps, rats and a monkey, and finally lectured by the one good king in the book. Part III is a loose tour of several places, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and Japan, with satire on science, history and the wish to live for ever. Part IV is the longest and most unified, and everything earlier turns out to have led to it.
There is a frame around the four parts that is easy to skip and should not be. A note from Gulliver’s cousin, Richard Sympson, introduces the book as a true record (The publisher to the reader). A letter from Gulliver himself, added in the 1735 Dublin edition and dated 1727 (Letter to Sympson), complains that “after above six months warning, I cannot learn that my book has produced one single effect according to my intentions”. Gulliver expected the Yahoos of England to reform at once on reading him. That letter, printed first, means we meet the narrator’s madness before we meet his travels.
The voice
Swift’s great trick is to give the book to a dull man. Gulliver writes like the plain-spoken travel narratives of his day, books by navigators such as William Dampier: dates, latitudes, wind directions, measurements, the price of things. He is precise, credulous, a little vain, and without irony. He reports that the Lilliputians conveyed him to their capital on a frame “moving upon twenty-two wheels” (Part I, ch. 1) with exactly the same care as he will later report the vices of Europe. The satire works because the narrator never sees it.
That plainness lets Swift make the absurd sound matter-of-fact and the familiar sound absurd. Lilliput’s two parties, Tramecksan and Slamecksan, are distinguished “from the high and low heels of their shoes”, and the heir to the throne wears one of each, “which gives him a hobble in his gait” (Part I, ch. 4). Its religious war is over which end of an egg to break, and “eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end”. Told straight, these are no sillier than the realities they stand for. That is the joke, and the charge.
The targets
Politics
Readers have long taken Lilliput as England under the Whigs: Flimnap the treasurer, who dances on the rope “an inch higher than any other lord” (Part I, ch. 3), as Robert Walpole; the high and low heels as Tories and Whigs; Blefuscu as France. Gulliver saves the palace from fire by urinating on it, and the empress, “conceiving the greatest abhorrence of what I had done”, vows revenge (Part I, ch. 5). Within two chapters he is impeached, and the emperor’s famous mercy is a proposal to “put out both your eyes” (Part I, ch. 7). Gratitude at court lasts exactly as long as usefulness.
War and power
Gulliver offers the King of Brobdingnag the secret of gunpowder, describing with pride how it can tear ships apart and batter cities. The king is horrified, and gives instead his own view, 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 all politicians together (Part II, ch. 7). Gulliver’s verdict is that the king is narrow and ignorant. In Part III the flying island keeps the land below in order by hovering over rebellious towns to cut off their sun and rain. The account of the city of Lindalino resisting it, generally read as Ireland, was left out of the early editions as too dangerous (Part III, ch. 3).
Science and learning
The Laputans are so lost in mathematics and music that servants must strike them with a bladder to make them listen. At the Academy of Lagado, a parody of the Royal Society, one projector “had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers” (Part III, ch. 5), and others try to build houses from the roof down and to write books by machine. The Brobdingnagian scholars, unable to classify Gulliver, decide he is lusus naturæ, a sport of nature, and Gulliver’s dry remark that this is “exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe” (Part II, ch. 3) is one of his sharpest asides.
Death and the body
Swift was unusually frank about bodies. In Brobdingnag every human surface is magnified into disgust: skin, sores, smells, lice. In Luggnagg Gulliver hears of the Struldbrugs, people born immortal, and imagines the wisdom and riches he would gather if he were one. Then he learns that they live for ever but keep ageing, and are declared legally dead at eighty (Part III, ch. 10).
The people
Gulliver
Not a fixed character but an instrument Swift retunes in each voyage: a giant who is still a tool of the emperor, a pet who boasts of his country, a tourist who notices nothing, and at the end a convert who has taken his lesson too well. His one constant is that he never understands what he is telling us.
Glumdalclitch
The farmer’s daughter in Brobdingnag who sews his clothes and carries him in a box. He calls her “my Glumdalclitch, or little nurse” (Part II, ch. 2), and she is the only person in the book who loves him without wanting to use him.
The King of Brobdingnag
The nearest the book comes to a wise ruler: practical, humane, impatient with mystery in government. He is also the one who calls us vermin. Swift puts his own judgement in the mouth of the most decent man Gulliver meets.
Gulliver’s master and Pedro de Mendez
The grey horse who takes Gulliver in, questions him and finally, at the assembly’s insistence, sends him away; and the Portuguese captain who picks him up afterwards, “a very courteous and generous person” (Part IV, ch. 11), whom Gulliver can barely stand to be near because he is a Yahoo. Don Pedro is Swift’s quiet evidence against his narrator.
The problem of the horses
Everything in Part IV turns on whether Swift means us to share Gulliver’s conclusion. At home he buys “two young stone-horses” and converses “with them at least four hours every day” (Part IV, ch. 11). Of his family he writes, “I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me, at the farthest end of a long table” (Part IV, ch. 12).
The Houyhnhnms themselves are not simply ideal. Their reason is never “a point problematical”, Gulliver says; Gulliver’s master can hardly understand “the meaning of the word opinion” (Part IV, ch. 8). They have no love that is not general benevolence, no grief at death, and they debate whether to exterminate the Yahoos. Critics have split into a “soft” reading, in which the horses are a cold utopia and Gulliver a fool for worshipping them, and a “hard” one, in which they are Swift’s real standard and the misanthropy is earned. The book supports both, and the tension between them is its life. What it does not allow is the comfortable middle position in which humans are fine as they are. The final chapter makes the point: Gulliver can tolerate “a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool”, but not “a lump of deformity and diseases, both in body and mind, smitten with pride” (Part IV, ch. 12).
How it was made
Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, served the Tory ministry of Harley and Bolingbroke in London as its leading pamphleteer from 1710, and after its fall in 1714 retreated to Ireland as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, a post he had held since 1713 and kept for the rest of his life. The idea of a satirical travel book seems to go back to the Scriblerus Club, the circle of Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot and others formed in 1714 to mock false learning. Swift wrote the book in the early 1720s, the fourth voyage before the third, in the same years he was writing The Drapier’s Letters against a new copper coinage for Ireland.
It appeared anonymously in London on 28 October 1726, published by Benjamin Motte as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, “by Lemuel Gulliver”. Motte, afraid of prosecution, softened or cut the most dangerous passages. Swift complained, and George Faulkner’s Dublin edition of 1735 restored much of the text and added the letter to Sympson. The Lindalino episode was not printed until 1899.
Readers and critics
It was an immediate success. John Gay wrote to Swift within weeks that it was read by everyone, “from the cabinet-council to the nursery”. Samuel Johnson was dismissive in conversation: once you had thought of big men and little men, he said, the rest was easy. The Victorians mostly hated the fourth voyage. Thackeray, lecturing in 1851, called its moral horrible and shameful, and Swift’s reputation as a misanthrope and a madman, partly drawn from the last voyage and partly from his last years, hardened.
The twentieth century took him more seriously. George Orwell’s essay “Politics vs. Literature” (1946) admired the book while disliking the politics he found in it, a Tory anarchism contemptuous of the common man, and still put it among the books he would least like to lose.
Afterlives
The book gave English “Lilliputian” and “Brobdingnagian”, and “Yahoo” for a boor; the founders of Yahoo! said they took the name from Swift. In 1980 the engineer Danny Cohen used “big-endian” and “little-endian” for the two ways of ordering bytes in computer memory, and the terms stuck. Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) borrowed the device of scale; Laputa reappears as the flying castle of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1986). On screen there are the Fleischer brothers’ animated film of 1939, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) and a television serial of 1996 with Ted Danson. Most versions stop after Brobdingnag.
How to read it
- Read the letter to Sympson first and again at the end. It tells you how the voyage to the Houyhnhnms left the man who wrote the book.
- Do not stop after Part II. The first two voyages set up a question that only the fourth answers.
- Distrust Gulliver, not only the people he meets. His pride in Brobdingnag and his despair at home are both part of the satire.
- Read Part III for its set pieces. The Academy of Lagado and the Struldbrugs are among the best things in it; the rest can be taken quickly.
- Look up the allegory, then forget it. Knowing that Flimnap is Walpole helps; the book matters because it still fits governments Swift never saw.
Read next
- Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729). The same deadpan reason, applied to Irish poverty, in a dozen pages.
- Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704). His first great satire, on religion and learning, and the book Queen Anne is said never to have forgiven.
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719). The sober, plain-voiced travel memoir that Gulliver’s manner echoes.
- Voltaire, Candide (1759). Another innocent sent round the world to find out how bad it is.
- Thomas More, Utopia (1516). The ideal commonwealth the Houyhnhnms answer, and which Gulliver’s letter names.