Gulliver's Travels Introduction

In A Nutshell

You might have heard people call Gulliver's Travels a satire. A satire is a (generally funny) fictional work that uses sarcasm and irony to poke fun at the general patheticness of humanity – our weakness, our stupidity, all that jazz. Some of our favorite satires include The Onion and The Daily Show . But if you love twenty-first century satire (like we do), you should check out the eighteenth century – those guys were huge fans of a good satire. In fact, some of the greatest thinkers of the eighteenth century, including poet Alexander Pope, mathematician John Arbuthnot, and our main man, Jonathan Swift. could not get enough satire. They even started a club, the Scriblerus Club. to express their general contempt for humanity and for bad writing in particular.

Thus, we think it's fair to say that the early eighteenth century was a good time for haters. This was lucky for Jonathan Swift, since he's like the king of haters – one of the greatest writers of satire that English literature has ever seen.

In fact, Swift had a lot of cause to despise people, because he had a somewhat disastrous public life. Swift was an Irish clergyman who regularly came to London to participate in the political and literary scene under Queen Anne. While Jonathan Swift began life as a Whig (Britain's liberal party in the eighteenth century), he eventually became a prominent Tory (a member of England's conservative party).

Tories favored royal authority and the national church (Anglicanism). The Tories also opposed increased power for the Parliament, the English equivalent of the American Congress. Swift may not have believed as strongly in the divine right of kings as some dyed-in-the-wool Tories (as you might guess from his satire of kings in Gulliver's Travels ). Still, he did generally side with political conservatives on the issues of the day.

Everything seemed to be going relatively well until George I took the English throne in 1714. With George came a strongly pro-Whig Parliament. The Whigs were the political enemies of the Tories, and Swift found himself up a creek without a paddle. Facing the end of his political life, Swift headed back to Ireland, becoming dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin (source ). This feud between the Whigs and the Tories provides the primary political material for Gulliver's Travels – for more specifics, check out our "Character Analysis" of the Lilliputians.

Swift completed Gulliver's Travels in 1725 and published it through London printer Benjamin Motte in 1726. Swift wrote to Motte under an assumed name, Richard Sympson, to arrange the novel's printing. Motte was so concerned with being charged with treason for publishing Gulliver's Travels that he tried to tone down the political content of several parts of the novel (source ). The fact that Swift couldn't even use his own name when planning his book's publication, and that the publisher tried to censor its content, gives us a sense of exactly how offensive Gulliver's Travels must have been when it was written.

Outraged that Motte rearranged his original text, Swift finally sent Gulliver's Travels to another press for printing. The 1735 edition, printed by George Faulkner in Dublin, restores the novel in its complete form and includes a nasty little letter supposedly from "Captain Gulliver" criticizing the 1726 edition's changes. But even Motte got a happy ending: Gulliver's Travels sold out its first printing in 10 days. Everybody read it, and now here we all are, ready to get to the nitty gritty of Lemuel Gulliver and his travels.