Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735) is a novel by Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. Swift's masterpiece is his most celebrated work and one of the indisputable classics of the English language. The book became tremendously popular as soon as it was published (Alexander Pope stated that "it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery") and it is likely that it has never been out of print since then. George Orwell declared it to be among the six most indispensable books in world literature. It is claimed the inspiration for Gulliver came from the sleeping giant profile of the Cavehill in Belfast.

Plot and Structure

The book presents itself as a simple traveller's narrative with the disingenuous title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, its authorship assigned only to "Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, then a captain of several ships". Different editions contain different versions of the prefatory material which are basically the same as forewords in modern books. The book proper then is divided into four parts, which are as follows.

Part I: A Voyage To Lilliput

The book begins with a short preamble in which Gulliver, in the style of books of the time, gives a brief outline of his life and history prior to his voyages. We learn he is middle-aged and middle-class, with a talent for medicine and languages and that he enjoys travelling. This turns out to be fortunate. Upon careful reading, this introduction proves to be one of the most satirical points in the book: laced with innuendos and other forms of ironic humour: a trademark of Swift's writing. On his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and awakes to find himself a prisoner of a race of 20cm high people, inhabitants of the neighbouring and rival countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu. After giving assurances of his good behaviour he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the court. There follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput which is intended to satirise the court of then King George I. After he assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudans (by stealing their fleet) but refuses to reduce the country to a province of Lilliput, he is charged with treason and sentenced to be blinded. Fortunately, Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu, where he builds a ship, and sails back home. The feuding between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscudans is meant to represent the feuding countries of England and France, but the reason for the war is meant to satirize the feud between Catholics and Protestants.

Lilliput and Blefuscu

Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Both are portrayed as being in the South Pacific and are inhabited by tiny people who are "not six inches high". The two are separated by a channel eight hundred yards wide. In the novel Gulliver washes up on Lilliput and is captured by the inhabitants while asleep. He discovers that Lilliput and Blefuscu are permanently at war because of differences over the correct way to eat a boiled egg from the rounded end according to the Blefuscuans, or from the sharp end according to the Lilliputians. The supporters of the differing views were called Big-endians and Little-endians. (These are sometimes incorrectly reversed in various sources; a helpful mnemonic is (L)illiput for little and (B)lefuscu for big.) This dispute was a mirror for the argument between consubstantiation and transubstantiation in the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. The causes of the war have also given us the computing term endianness. Lilliput is reputedly named after a real place on the shores of Lough Ennell near Mullingar, Co. Westmeath in the midlands of Ireland. The story is a parody of the European nations, particularly Britain and France, who were in Swift's view constantly at war over 'trivial' matters. Lilliput and Blefuscu were the names used in Samuel Johnson's retellings of the debates in Parliament. The word lilliputian has come into common usage, meaning 'very small sized'. The tiny people of Lilliput contrast with the giants of Brobdingnag whom Gulliver also met. 1

Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag

While exploring a new country, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 12 meters tall (the scale of Lilliput is approximately 12:1, of Brobdingnag 1:12) who treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. He is then bought by the King of Brobdingnag and kept as a favourite at court. In between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey he discusses the state of Europe with the King, who is not impressed. On a trip to the seaside, his "travelling box" is seized by a giant eagle and dropped into the sea where he is picked up by sailors and returned to England.

Brobdingnag
Brobdingnag is a fictional land in Jonathan Swift's satirical novel, Gulliver's Travels occupied by giants. Lemuel Gulliver visits the land after the ship on which he is travelling is blown off course to an unknown land and he is separated from a party exploring the unknown land. More plot details can be found under A Voyage to Brobdingnag. The adjective Brobdingnagian has come to describe anything of colossal size. Location The map printed as part of Part II of Gulliver's Travels appears to indicate that Brobdingnag is located on the northwest coast of California. The book claims that a very strong wind blew the ship off course by 400 leagues after it passed the Straits of Madagascar. Lemuel Gulliver claims to have discovered the land in 1703. Brobdingnag is claimed to be a peninsula six thousand miles long and three thousand miles wide. Further, it is claimed that a range of volcanoes up to 30 miles high separates the country from unknown land to the northeast. Lorbulgrud is claimed to be the capital with the king having a seaside palace at Flanflasnic. Swift was highly sceptical about the reliability of travel writings and the unlikely geographic descriptions parody many unreliable travel books published at the time which Percy Adams describes as "travel lies" (1). The drawings in Gulliver's travels are clearly based on cartographer Herman Moll's New Correct Map of the Whole World. Flora and Fauna The people of Brobdingnag are described as giants who are as tall as a church and whose stride is ten yards. All of the other animals and plants are in proportion. The rats are the size of large dogs and the flies are the size of birds, for example. Fossil records are claimed to show that the ancestors of the Brobdingnagians were once even larger. The King of Brobdingnag argues that the race has deteriorated. History and Government Gulliver relates that, in the past, there were battles between the monarchy, nobility and people resulting in a number of civil wars ending in a treaty. The monarchy is based on reason. The King of Brobdingnag finds European institutions and behaviour wanting in comparison with his country's. Based on Gulliver's descriptions of their behaviour, the King describes Europeans as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." (2) Swift intended the moral relationship between Europeans and Brobdingnagians to be as disproportionate as the physical relationship. The King of Brobdingnag is considered to be based on Sir William Steele, a statesman and writer, who Swift worked for early in his career. The army of Brobdingnag is claimed to be large with 207,000 troops including 32,000 cavalry although the society has no known enemies. The local nobility commands the forces with firearms and gunpowder being unknown. The King castigates Gulliver when he tries to interest the statesman in the use of gunpowder. The laws of Brobdingnag are simple and easy to follow. There is little civil litigation. Murderers are beheaded. Culture Brobdingnagian culture consists of history, poetry, mathematics and ethics; mathematics being a particular strength. Printing has been long known but libraries are relatively small. The king has the largest library, which contains a thousand volumes. The Brobdingnagians favour a clear literary style. Other uses There is also a filk group called the Brobdingnagian Bards. The largest bills in the world as recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records are the 100,000 Philippine peso Centennial commemorative bills, which are called brobdingnagian bills.

A voyage to Brobdingnag Gulliver's Travels Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag Imaginary countries: Brobdingnag 2

Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubdubdribb, and Luggnagg

Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates and he is abandoned on a desolate rocky island. Fortunately he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but utterly unable to use these for practical ends. The device described simply as The Engine is possibly the first literary description of something resembling a computer in history. Laputa's method of throwing rocks at rebellious surface cities also seems the first time that aerial bombardment was conceived as a method of warfare. He is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a Dutch trader who can take him on to Japan and thence to England. While there, he tours the country as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by blind pursuit of science without practical results in a satire on the Royal Society and its experiments. He also encounters the struldbrugs, unfortunates who are both immortal and very, very old. He travels to a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. The trip is otherwise reasonably free of incident and Gulliver returns home, determined to stay a homebody for the rest of his days. This part evidently inspired Isaac Asimov's story "Shah Guido G.", in which a future Earth is groaning under the tyranny of a flying city. Also the space-travelling cities of James Blish's 'Cities in Flight' series can be considered among the literary descendants of Laputa.

Floating island
This article is about the natural phenomenon. For the dessert, see floating island (dessert). For Angel Island, the floating island in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, see Angel Island (Sonic). Floating islands are a common natural phenomenon that are found in many parts of the world. They exist less commonly as a man-made phenomenon. Floating islands are generally found on marshlands, lakes, and similar wetland locations, and can be many hectares in size. When they occur naturally they are sometimes referred to as tussocks, floatons, or sudds. Natural floating islands are composed of vegetation growing on a buoyant mat consisting of plant roots or other organic detritus. They typically occur when growths of cattails, bulrush, sedge, and reeds extend outward from the shoreline of a wetland area. As the water gets deeper the roots no longer reach the bottom, so they use the oxygen in their root mass for buoyancy, and the surrounding vegetation for support to retain their top-side-up orientation. The area beneath these floating mats is exceptionally rich in aquatic lifeforms. Eventually, storm events tear whole sections free from the shore, and the islands thus formed migrate around a lake with changing winds, eventually either reattaching to a new area of the shore, or breaking up in heavy weather. Natural floating islands may have been the source of many "disappearing island" legends, such as those of surrounding the Isle of Avalon.

Laputa
Laputa is a fictional place from the book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Laputa is a flying island or rock with an adamantine base, that can be maneuvered by its inhabitants in any direction using magnetic levitation. Population of the island mainly consists of educated people, who are fond of mathematics, astronomy, music and technology, but fail to make practical use of their knowledge (the rest are their servants). They had mastered magnetic levitation and discovered the two moons of Mars (something which would not be discovered in reality for another 150 years), but couldn't construct welldesigned clothing or buildings - reason for this being that measurements are taken with instruments such as quadrants and a compass rather than with tapes. It is a male-dominated society; often, the wives of these men request to leave the island to visit the land below. However, these requests are almost never granted because the women never want to come back voluntarily. The ground below the floating island, within the region it can travel, is also controlled by the king of Laputa. The king, being a tyrannic ruler, controls the mainland mostly by threatening to cover rebel regions with the island's shadow, thus preventing sunlight and rain. In extreme cases, the island is lowered on the cities below in order to crush them, although this has not been successful every time, notably in the case of Lindalino. This has long been regarded as a satire on a state ruled by a Whig government, as opposed to the Tory government Swift personally advocated. 3

As "la puta" means "the whore," some Spanish editions of "Gulliver's Travels" use "Lupata" as an euphemism. It's very likely, given Swift's way of satire, that he was well aware of the Spanish meaning. Some find a parallel with Martin Luther's famous quote "That great whore, Reason", given Laputians' extreme fondness of reason. However, that Swift's intention was to mock the so-called "Age of Reason" is not without doubt, given the story-teller's great admiration of Houyhnhnms for their rational thinking.

Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms

Disregarding intentions at the end of the third part, Gulliver returns to sea where his crew mutiny to turn pirate. He is abandoned ashore and comes first upon a race of (apparently) hideous deformed creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly thereafter he meets a horse and comes to understand that the horses (in their language Houyhnhnm or "the perfection of nature") are the rulers and the deformed creatures ("Yahoos") are human beings at their most base. Gulliver becomes a member of the horse's household, treated almost as a favoured pet, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting human beings as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and he is expelled. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship that returns him to his home in England. He is, however, unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos; he becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables. The book finishes with a peroration against Pride that is ironically boastful and seems to be intended to show that Gulliver's reason may have turned. However, no definite answer is forthcoming from the text and critics have argued this point for years. It is interesting that this fourth voyage seems to have been the one that has most engaged literary critics over the years. Some readers chose to see it as proof of Swift's incipient mental deterioration (he died insane some 20 years after the publication of GT) and, most famously, William Thackeray described it as "filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging and obscene" (1853). SF writer Robert A. Heinlein made his own comment by inverting the scenario in Starman Jones, where a stray spaceship lands on a planet where carnivorous horse-like creatures dominate all other fauna including human-like creatures resembling Swift's Yahoos. These "horses" are the story's clear villains, who not only butcher and eat humans (local and extraplanetary alike) but also practice euthanasia of old and weak members of their own species. Swift's point is that the basic difference between humans and the Yahoos is largely artifice. Much of the plot is devoted to the Earth humans courageously fighting them.

Houyhnhnm
Houyhnhnms are a race of intelligent horses described in the last part of Jonathan Swift's satiric Gulliver's Travels. The name can be pronounced Whin-hin-ems, as if 'whinny' were linked to the -nym element of, for example, 'synonym'. Houyhnhnms contrast strongly with the Yahoos, savage humanoid creatures: whereas the Yahoos represent all that is bad about humans, Houyhnhnms have a stable, calm, and rational society. Gulliver much prefers the Houyhnhnms' company over the Yahoos', even though the latter are biologically closer to him. Interpretation of the Houhynhnms has been vexatious. It is possible, for example, to regard them as a veiled criticism by Swift of the British Empire's treatment of non-whites as lesser humans, and it is similarly possible to regard Gulliver's preference (and immediate division of Houyhnhnms into color-based hierarchies) as absurd and the sign of his self-deception. Book IV of Gulliver's Travels is the keystone, in some ways, of the entire work, and critics have traditionally responded to the subject of whether Gulliver is insane (and therefore just another victim of Swift's satire) or not by questioning whether or not the Houhynhnms are truly admirable. The Houhynhnm society is based upon reason, and only upon reason, and therefore the horses practice eugenics and genocide based on their analyses of benefit and cost. They have no morality and no religion, and therefore they are not particularly moved by pity or a belief in the intrinsic value of life. Gulliver himself, in their company, builds the sails of his skiff from "Yahoo skins." They have a poor concept of individuality; none of the Houhynhnms have names, and Gulliver's "Master" himself assents to Gulliver's eventual exile only because the other Houhynhnms ask him to. At the same time, the Houhynhnms have a society with perfect peace and efficiency, and they care for Gulliver for a while. 4

On the one hand, the Houyhnhnms have an orderly and peaceful society. They possess philosophy and have a language that is entirely pure of political and ethical nonsense. They possess, for example, no word for a "lie." They also have a form of art that is derived from nature. Outside of Gulliver's Travels, Swift had expressed longstanding concern over the corruption of the English language, and he had proposed language reform. He had also, in Battle of the Books and in general in A Tale of a Tub, expressed a preference for the Ancients (Classical authors) because their art was based directly upon nature, and not upon other art. On the other hand, Swift was profoundly mistrustful of attempts at reason that resulted in either hubris (e.g. the Projectors satirized in A Tale of a Tub or in book III of Gulliver's Travels) or immorality (e.g. the speaker of A Modest Proposal, who offers an entirely logical and wholly immoral proposal for cannibalism). The Houyhnhnms embody both the good and the bad side of reason, for they have the pure language Swift wished for and the immorally rational approach to solving the problems of humanity (Yahoos); the extirpation of the Yahoo population by the horses is very like the speaker of A Modest Proposal. When Gulliver returns to England at the end of Gulliver's Travels, he finds the smell and look of his countrymen intolerable. He regards all around him as Yahoos, and he goes to live the rest of his time in the stables, to be near his horses, whom he attempts to converse with. Some of Jonathan Swift's dark vision affects the subtext of the Planet of the Apes movies.

Motte
The book was a transparently anti-Whig satire and it is likely that Swift had the manuscript recopied so his handwriting could not be used as evidence if a prosecution should arise (as had happened in the case of some of his Irish pamphlets) and the manuscript was secretly delivered to the publisher Benjamin Motte. Motte, recognising a bestseller but fearing prosecution, simply cut or altered the worst offending passages (such as the descriptions of the court contests in Lilliput or the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defence of Queen Anne to book II, and published it anyway. The book was an instant sensation and sold out its first run in less than a month and continued to be published for a long while afterwards. Motte published Gulliver's Travels anonymously and, as is often the way with fashionable works, a slew of follow-ups (eg Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput), parodies (eg Two Lilliputian Odes, The firs on the Famous Engine With Which Captain Gulliver extiguish'd the Palace Fire...) and "keys" (eg Gulliver Decypher'd and Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World Compendiously Methodiz'd, the second by Edmund Curll who had similarly written a "key" to Swift's Tale of a Tub in 1705) were produced over the next few years. These were mostly printed anonymously (or occasionally pseudonymously) and were quickly forgotten. Swift had nothing to do with any of these and specifically disavowed them in Faulkner's edition of 1735. However, Swift's friend Alexander Pope wrote a set of five Verses on Gulliver's Travels which Swift liked so much that he added them to the second edition of the book, though they are not nowadays generally included.

Analysis and Overview

Gulliver's Travels has been called a lot of things from Menippean satire to a children's story, from protoScience Fiction to a forerunner of the modern novel. Broadly, the book has three themes:

a satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between religions. an inquiry into whether man is inherently corrupt or whether men are corrupted a restatement of the older "ancients v. moderns" controversy previously addressed by Swift in the Battle of the Books.

In terms of storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern :

The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become more malignant as time goes on - he is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his own crew. Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses he is genuinely surprised by the viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behavior of the Yahoos in the fourth part reflective of the behavior of "civilised" people 5

Each part is the reverse of the preceding part Gulliver is big/small/sensible/ignorant, the countries are sophisticated/simple/scientific/natural, forms of Government are worse/better/worse/better than England's. Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with its other coinciding part Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdningnag sees Europe in exactly the same light. No form of government is ideal the simplistic Brobingnagians enjoy public executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a Yahoo and equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad Gulliver finds a friend in each of his travels and, despite Gulliver's rejection of and horror toward all Yahoos, is treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at the novel's end.

Of equal interest is the character of Gulliver himself he progresses from a cheery optimist at the start of the first part to the pompous misanthrope of the book's conclusion and we may well have to filter our understanding of the work if we are to believe the final misanthrope wrote the whole work. In this sense Gulliver's Travels is a very modern and complex novel. There are subtle shifts throughout the book, such as when Gulliver begins to see all humans, not just those in Houyhnhnm-land, as Yahoos. Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, it is often derided as a children's story because of the popularity of the Lilliput section (frequently bowdlerised) as a book for children. It is still possible to buy books entitled Gulliver's Travels which contain only parts of the Lilliput voyage.

External links
Wikisource has original text related to this article: Gulliver's Travels

Online Text

Gulliver's Travels, available freely at Project Gutenberg An annotated version, one chapter per page. RSS edition of the text

Other Information

Gulliver's Travels: The Antithetical Structure Gulliver's Travels Deciphered, by Alastair Sweeny Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gullivers Travels, by George Orwell