I remember as a young child seeing the 1939 American animated film of Gulliver’s Travels at a local movie theater, I suppose as a 20th anniversary “re-release.” Though dealing only—and not very faithfully—with Gulliver’s first voyage, to Lilliput, it made a tolerably entertaining children’s story. Indeed, the book is often put forward as a children’s novel, presenting imaginative voyages to far lands where the inhabitants are tiny humans, or giants, or intelligent horses. Of course, those who market it as a children’s story have clearly never actually read the book, and might be surprised, as I was as a child perusing my parents’ copy of the text, to find descriptions of one of the ladies in waiting to the giants’ queen in Brobdingnag balancing the diminutive Gulliver on her nipples, or others thinking nothing of discharging hogsheads of urine in his presence. And getting to Gulliver’s fourth voyage, when the female Yahoo, in great heat, leaps upon poor Gulliver and tries to mate with him, may be really confusing for a lad thinking he’s perusing a children’ book.
So throwing out the wildly inaccurate notion that Gulliver’s Travels is intended for tender youths, let’s embrace the real intent of Jonathan Swift’s best-known work: it is a book that uses fantasy and science fiction to comment satirically, often bitterly, on human nature and the state of eighteenth-century society, particularly in Britain, and particularly the workings of the government. In its own time, the book was a popular success, the playwright John Gay declaring that Swift’s book “is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.” Other contemporaries, though, condemned the book for going too far in its misanthropy, perhaps confusing Gulliver’s opinions with Swift’s own. Swift probably expected the objections, but may have been surprised by this book’s success, since as he put it, he had written Gulliver’s Travels “to vex the world rather than divert it.”
In the nearly 300 years since its initial publication, Gulliver’s Travels has remained a popular classic of English literature. Although probably more accurately considered a prose satire rather than a “novel” in the usual sense of the word, it is a lengthy work of prose fiction and so is included in the Guardian’s list of the “100 Greatest Novels in the English Language,” as well as the Observer’s list of the “100 Greatest World Novels.” The Norwegian Book Clubs’ 2002 list, published in conjunction with the Nobel Society, also named Gulliver’s Travels as one of the “100 Greatest World Novels.” The book was ranked as number 55 on the 2015 BBC survey of the “100 Greatest British Novels,” as chosen by book critics from outside Britain. And on the PBS “Great American Read” of 2018, Swift’s “novel” ranked as number 75. On the “Greatest Books of All Time” web site, based on its examination of more than 400 “greatest book” lists, Gulliver’s Travels came in as 26th among English language novels. And I am including it as number 83 (alphabetically) on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
Swift’s book may have begun as a result of Swift’s involvement with the Scriblerus Club, an informal group of London satirists that included Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot. Henry St. John and others. Bent on satirizing popular literary genres through the writings of their imaginary “founder” Martinus Scriblerus, the club charged Swift, sometime around 1714, with satirizing the genre called “Travelers’ Tales.” According to the OED, “Travelers’ Tale” referred to “A story about a person’s travels or about the unusual characteristics, customs, etc., of a distant or foreign place, typically regarded as exaggerated or untrue.” A current definition (online “your dictionary”) focuses on the last part of this and defines “travelers’ tale” as “An account that cannot be believed; a tall story; a whopper.” Popular travelers’ tales, like the 14th century Travels of John Mandeville, regularly included fabulous descriptions of Cyclopes, anthropophagi, the phoenix and weeping crocodiles, and Blemmyes (i.e. “men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders”).
Whatever Swift produced for the Scriblerus Club, he began turning it into a book by 1720, when he wrote parts I and II of Gulliver, with their complementary lands of tiny and gigantic inhabitants. In 1723 Swift wrote what would become part IV of the book, concerning the land of the Houyhnhnms—rational talking horses—and finally in 1724 part III, regarding the flying city of Laputa, and islands—Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib—that made up a portion of its empire. The book was published anonymously in 1726, being a text manifestly critical of the Whig government under Robert Walpole, though 21st-century readers are not likely to see the connections without some sort of guide. Swift’s satire of absurd governmental policies, however, is broad enough to apply just as well to modern instances.
Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator of the text, relates his first voyage, to Lilliput (from 1699 tom1702), in part I. Here the shipwrecked Gulliver, washed ashore on an unknown island, falls asleep on the shore and wakes to find himself captured and bound by the island’s inhabitants, who are all less than six inches tall. Eventually Gulliver learns the local language and is given free license to walk about in the capital city so long as he doesn’t step on any inhabitants. He becomes a favorite at the royal court, and when war looms with the neighboring island of Blefuscu Gulliver defeats the enemy by wading the shallow sea between the islands and dragging the enemy’s entire fleet to Lilliput. When he refuses to completely subdue Blefuscu and make its people subject to Lilliput, though, he is considered a traitor, and when he puts out a fire by urinating on the royal palace he is sentenced to be blinded. He escapes to Blefuscu, where he finds an abandoned boat and rows out where he is rescued by a passing ship. What Swift seems to emphasize in his Lilliputians is the smallness, the pettiness of human bickering: the Lilliputians, for instance, are divided into two bitterly opposed parties who differ over which end of a soft boiled egg one should break first while eating. The big-enders and the little-enders, Swift seems to suggest, are the equivalent of England’s Whigs and Tories, or perhaps Protestants and Catholics, whose differences may be similarly little-minded.
Gulliver’s second voyage (1702 to 1706) is to Brobdingnag, where when his ship is blown off course he is abandoned somewhere on the northwest coast of North America. He is discovered by a farmer who stands 72 feet high, and uses him as a curiosity to show around the land for money. When, overworked and underfed, Gulliver grows sick, the farmer sells him to the queen, and the man’s daughter Glumdalclitch is brought into the queen’s service to take care of Gulliver. The queen has a small dollhouse made for Gulliver to live and be carried around in. The tiny man spends much of his time discussing European politics and history with the king, who shows great disdain at Gulliver’s descriptions of war, guns and canon. Like Gulliver in Lilliput, the giant king sees the wars of Europe as pettiness. One day, Gulliver’s doll house is carried off by a Brodingnagian Eagle and dropped in the sea, where he is rescued by another passing ship.
The bad luck that follows Gulliver’s seafaring career continues in his third voyage, to Laputa and its environs, from 1706 t0 1710. Here he is marooned by pirates on an island in the Indian Ocean, but is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, which in Swift’s proto-Sci-Fi text uses magnetism to stay aloft. Laputa governs its empire by “bombing” with large rocks any rebellious islands. When Swift presents Laputa subduing a rebellion and imposing its will in the city of Lindalino, he is satirizing the British policy toward Ireland (a country which, being by now Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Swift was eager to defend). Later, In a satire of the British Royal Society, Swift presents a culture blindly devoted to science and “progress” without considering the practical problems involved—as members of the academy are at work on such harebrained schemes as extracting sunlight from cucumbers or softening marble blocks into pillows. He visits the island of Glubbdubdrib where a magician conjures up the ghosts of Homer and Aristotle, Brutus and Caesar, to hear their views on items of contemporary interest. He also learns of a rare group of people, the struldbrugs, who have been granted eternal life. When Gulliver becomes excited over the possibilities of such a gift, he is disappointed to learn that eternal youth is not part of the struldbrugs’ lot, and they simply become older, more sickly, and less intellectually competent as the years, and centuries, go by. Finally, Gulliver is able to board a ship for Japan, from whence he makes his way back to England.
Gulliver’s fourth voyage (1710-1715) is to the land of the Houyhnhnms, those famous talking horses that our narrator ultimately prefers to human beings. Now captain of his own ship, Gulliver is marooned by a mutinous crew on another unknown land. Here he comes across a race of savage human-like creatures who are despised by every other species and have no reason but have all the vices—greed, violence, lust, deviousness, selfishness—that humankind possess. Adopted by an enlightened Houyhnhnm and learning the horses’ language, Gulliver spends long hours telling his master about European politics, and listening to his master’s rational pronouncements on human beings’ Yahoo-like endeavors—the creation of instruments of war being particularly heinous (as it had been for the king of Brobdingnag). Impressed by the culture of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver would like to stay in this land forever, but the Houyhnhnms decide he is simply a Yahoo with reason, and insist he must leave and go back to his own country. He takes a boat into the sea and is rescued by a Portuguese ship commanded by the kindly Captain Pedro de Mendez, and returned to England, where, seeing his wife and children as Yahoos, he spends most of his time in his stables, talking to his horses.
It is tempting for a reader to side with Gulliver by the end of the book, and consider chucking all human relationships to live with his horses. After all, the four voyages have characterized human beings as petty (in Lilliput), gross (in Brobdingnag), impractical and domineering (Laputa) and brutish (Houyhnhnm land). Swift’s proto-novel was published seven years after the great success of what is often considered the first English novel, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, that optimistic paeon to human nature and ingenuity and the victory of a single human survivor in what could have been a hopeless marooning on an unpopulated island. Certainly one of the things that Swift wanted to do was provide a corrective reality check to that optimistic view of human potential. But let’s not forget that the term “Gull” in the eighteenth century was another word for “fool,” and it’s no coincidence that the name of Swift’s protagonist indicates one who lives foolishly.
A reader tempted to join Gulliver in the stables needs to keep two major details in mind: The first is the character of Don Pedro, Gulliver’s rescuer after his flight from Houyhnhnm land. Contrary to Gulliver’s view of all humans as Yahoos, Don Pedro treats the apparently mad refugee, who only makes sounds like a horse, kindly and with great sympathy. He is unwavering in his kindness and compassionate, unselfish care for this castaway that chance has foisted upon him. The Portuguese captain displays not a single Yahoo trait. Clearly Gulliver’s lumping all humans into the “Yahoo” category is mistaken.
Secondly, the Houyhnhnms themselves are not the angelic beings Gulliver tends to suggest they are. Governed solely by reason, they are lacking in emotion, and therefore lacking in that very human quality of love. A careful reader will note the passage where “the regulation of children is settled: as for instance, if a Houyhnhnm hath two males, he changeth one of them with another who hath two females.” Later on, a widowed Houyhnhnm goes on with her life without a hitch (see what I did there?):
the mistress and her two children came very late; she made two excuses, first for her husband, who, as she said, happened that very morning to shnuwnh. The word… signifies, “to retire to his first mother.” Her excuse for not coming sooner, was, that her husband dying late in the morning, she was a good while consulting her servants about a convenient place where his body should be laid; and I observed, she behaved herself at our house as cheerfully as the rest.
This same lack of what we might call the “milk of human kindness” lies behind the Houyhnhnms’ resolve to wipe out the entire species of Yahoo, either by what can only be called genocide, or more “humanely” by castrating all male Yahoos so that they may no longer propagate. In the meantime, they use the Yahoos they are able to domesticate as slaves. (Here, too, Swift may be commenting on the British policy in Ireland). Only a very gullible reader see what I did there?) can see the Houyhnhnms as the perfect species.
The book has been adapted to the screen many times and in several languages. Aside from that popular 1939 animated children’s movie mentioned earlier, it was famously filmed the first time in a silent 1902 production by classic French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Richard Harris starred in a 1977 British/Belgian film, and Ted Danson in a 1996 TV miniseries. Most recently Jack Black starred in a 2010 American film. But the problem with film versions of Gulliver is that the most significant parts of Swift’s book are the conversations between Gulliver and the representatives of the lands he visits, and this does not make for exciting screen time. Don’t rely on watching a film adaptation. Nothing, in this case, substitutes for the original.