October 2026 was the 300th anniversary of the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. To mark the occasion, Dr Robin Eagles explores Swift’s career and how his writing satirised the state of British politics during the reign of George I.
On 28 October 1726 the press carried advertisements for a new book, published in two volumes: Travels into several Remote Nations of the World. By Lemuel Gulliver. [Daily Courant, 28 Oct. 1726] No mention was made of the identity of the author. Around a month later there was a follow-up publication, ‘beautifully printed’ and priced sixpence, which offered a key and explanatory notes on Gulliver’s journeyings. This was said to have been authored by Signor Carolini di Marco, ‘A Noble Venetian now residing in London’ and was addressed as a letter to Dean Swift, finally giving the game away on the main book’s author. [Evening Post, 22-24 Nov. 1726]
By the time he published Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift was in his late fifties. He had been born in Dublin in 1667, the second (posthumous) son of another Jonathan Swift and Abigail Erick. His first major patron was the retired diplomat, Sir William Temple, and he spent significant periods working as Temple’s secretary and then as Temple’s literary executor.
During Queen Anne’s reign, Swift established himself as an important author in his own right and a contributor to propaganda for the Tory party. His most important connection was with Robert Harley (later earl of Oxford), the former Country Whig who had emerged at the head of a re-energized Tory party.
In spite of his talents and cultivation of influential contacts, Swift was disappointed of the kind of promotion in the church that he was looking for. Queen Anne refused to elevate him to a bishopric and he had, instead, to make do with being made dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin. From there, Swift increasingly concentrated on his writing, and by the spring of 1726 had in his possession a new manuscript ready for the press.
Gulliver’s Travels featured the fictional excursions of Lemuel Gulliver, the younger son of a Nottinghamshire gentleman, first as a ship’s doctor and latterly as the captain of his own expedition. In his first adventure Gulliver finds himself shipwrecked in Lilliput, an empire located somewhere in the South Seas, inhabited by a race of humans standing around six inches tall (with animals to match). In his second, Gulliver, the ‘Man Mountain’ of Lilliput finds the situation reversed in Brobdingnag (somewhere off the coast of western America) where he becomes the object of fascination for a race of giants. Having survived both of these adventures, Gulliver experiences the floating island of Laputa (and the very real empire of Japan) before his final voyage leaves him marooned in the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, the former cultivated, talking horses, the latter bestial humans.
To this day, it is the first two adventures that are remembered most. In both Lilliput and Brobdingnag Swift gave full range to his powers of satirising the state of British politics. Although Gulliver dated the majority of his travels to the period bridging the end of the reign of William III and the reign of Anne, Swift’s account was quite as much, if not more so, about the state of affairs during the reign of George I, by which time he was very much out in the cold and his former patron, Oxford, out of favour.
Gulliver’s enemy, Flimnap, was a poorly hidden caricature of Sir Robert Walpole. Contests at Court for appointment to the orders of the Garter, Bath or Thistle, were lampooned in the distribution of blue, red and green silken cords. Religious dissensions between Britain and France, between Catholics and Protestants, were sent up with the long-running feud between the empires of Lilliput and neighbouring Blefuscu over whether or not to eat boiled eggs from the pointy or round end (the little-endians and big-endians). The Prince of Wales (future George II) was satirised for his tendency to seek accommodation between the Whigs and Tories. In Lilliput political loyalties were reflected in the height of heels worn on shoes, and the prince gave away his attempts to please both sides by having shoes of uneven height.
Gulliver’s conversations with the king of Brobdingnag revealed some of the absurdities of the British political system. Once Gulliver had explained in guileless fashion the composition of Parliament, the king queried whether it could really be as superlative as Gulliver had implied:
How it came to pass, that people were so violently bent upon getting into this assembly, which I allowed to be a great trouble and expense… this appeared such an exalted strain of virtue and public spirit, his Majesty seemed to doubt it might possibly not be always sincere…
Swift’s tales of the flying island of Laputa and the accompanying trip to the Academy of Lagado (a thinly disguised reference to the Royal Society, where members engaged in bizarre – but real – experiments) seem not to have endured so well. Even at the time this part of Gulliver was not as popular. John Gay and Alexander Pope recounting the book’s reception to Swift in November 1726, informed him that the critics thought ‘the flying island… the least entertaining’. The final stage of his progress, among the civilized horses and savage humans, appears to have been thought ‘too severe’.
Despite such reservations about the second half, Gulliver was a runaway success. John Arbuthnot wrote to Swift on 5 November, just a week after publication, predicting that the book would have ‘as great a run as John Bunyan’ (Pilgrim’s Progress) and let him know that he had seen the Princess of Wales reading the book and noted her enjoying the sections lampooning her husband, ‘the hobbling prince’.
Indeed, so successful was Gulliver that some appear to have assumed that the story, or at least the character, was real. Arbuthnot noted talking about it to the earl of Scarbrough, ‘who is no inventor of stories’, and that he had mentioned meeting a ship’s captain who assured him: ‘he was very well acquainted with Gulliver’. The captain even pointed out a mistake: Gulliver, he was sure, lived in Wapping and not Rotherhithe. Correspondence appeared in the press at the end of November, purporting to be from Gulliver’s aggrieved brother, Ephraim, who had advised against publishing what he referred to as ‘their’ travels. [Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 26 Nov. 1726] In May the following year, another newspaper announced that Gulliver himself was to be in the audience at the new playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but noted that precautions had been put in place to make sure he was not mobbed. [Daily Journal, 25 May 1727]
What was clear from the very outset was that with Gulliver Swift had succeeded in creating a character, and a world, that appealed across ages, classes and interest groups. If caricatured, Swift portrayed a world familiar to many. The former temple in which he lived on Lilliput was very likely based on Westminster Hall. The palace, where he extinguished a fire by urinating on it, could easily have been St James’s or Hampton Court. The book’s greatest strength was that it might be read merely as comical science fiction, or as a detailed exposition on the nature of humanity. Equally, it could be seen as a devastating critique on the state of politics in Britain in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. As Gay and Pope concluded:
From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the Cabinet-council to the nursery… the whole town, men, women, and children are quite full of it. [Woolley, iii. 47]
It is, no doubt, for this reason that Gulliver has endured so well for 300 years.
RDEE
Further Reading
Joseph McMinn, ‘Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), writer and clergyman’, The Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009)
The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift: ed. D. Woolley (5 vols, Oxford, 1999-2014)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. P. Dixon and J. Chalker (London, 1967)
