Section1 : Historical Background and Biographical Information

• The rise of the novel in the 18th century

Section2 : Summary of Gulliver's Travels

Section4 : Characterization
• Lemuel Gulliver as the representative of the common man
• The Lilliputians as the representatives of the pettiness and pride in the
human beings. Also represents the corruption in court - politcs
• The Brobdingnagians as the representatives of goodness in mankind
• The Laputans as the representatives of those with wisdom who do not know
how to use it for the betterment of the society
• The Houyhnhnms as the representatives of reason and common sense while
the Yahoos represent the beastly nature of mankind
• Don Pedro de Mendez as an example of the man in whom one can see the
best in human beings

Section5 : Themes
• The use and abuse of power – the right of a person to rule, favouritism, the
ends to which aperson will go to gain power
• Pride and its absurdity – misplaced pride and how it can ruin a person
• Bodily functions – to show the irrationality of pride in the intellect when
seen as divorced from the body
• Individual and the Society – the feeling of isolation in one's own society,
unable to become part of the society that you really care for
 • Knowledge and Wisdom – society's well-being depends on the use of both
equally otherwise ruin will happen, faulty reasoning

Section6 : Conclusion
• Gulliver's Travels – a satire, a folk-myth, a realistic novel
• An overview of the critical reception of the novel

The Novel in the 18th Century and Jonathan Swift

The novel as we know it today developed during the 18th century. Many causes
led to this development: expansion of the reading public, growth of a new middle
class, economic reasons etc. Publishing became a profitable business thanks to
the spread of literacy and of reading as a form of entertainment among the
wealthy middle class. The creation of the circulating libraries led to an increase
in the reading public. The 18th century novel was also called the realistic novel
as is evident from its concern with the realistic depiction of middle class life,
values and experience, showing the development of individual characters. Ian
Watt in his influential account of the emergence of the novel connects it with the
growth of the middle classes in the eighteenth century which created a readership
anxious to read of itself and its values. This is evident in the works of the most
important novelists of the time - Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel
Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. Some of them were devoted to
writing because, as an effect of the Test Act of 1673, being Roman Catholics or
Dissenters, they were forbidden to hold any important position in society and
chose to become novelists or journalists. The age also saw the rise of female
writers among whom Aphra Behn is credited to be the first woman writer to earn
a living by her pen. Other female writers include Fanny Burney, Elizabeth
Carter, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft et al. The decline of
drama in the eighteenth century was also partly responsible for the rise of the
novel. After the Licensing Act of 1737, drama lay moribund. The poetry of the
age too, except for the brilliant example of Pope's works, was in a state of some
disarray.
The 18th century was one in which wit and reason came to the forefront of
literature in the form of satires. Satirical literature exposed the superficial follies
and moral corruption of the society during the neoclassical period in Britain.
Satires during this period aimed at pointing out the shortcomings of society
through ridiculing accepted standards of thought, exposing Britain’s flaws and
chastising the hypocrisy of the time. Enlightenment writers Alexander Pope and
Jonathan Swift used different mediums of satire, different types of logic and
different targets of ridicule in order to shine a light on separate aspects of British
society. This provided a much-needed criticism of the profuse moral corruption
of a society that sometimes seemed to forget the true ideals of its Enlightenment
age where rationality was supposed to reign over fanaticism.
Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667, in Dublin though both his
parents were English. At the age of fourteen he enrolled in Trinity College,
Dublin, from which he received his B.A. degree in 1686. Swift was studying for
his master's degree when political unrest prompted him to leave Ireland for
England in 1688. He obtained the position of secretary to the English Whig
politician Sir William Temple. In 1694, Swift was ordained as a priest in the
Church of Ireland and worked as a country parson in Northern Ireland. In 1696
he returned to Moor Park, where he remained until Temple's death in 1699. In
autumn of the same year, he took up a post in Ireland as chaplain to the Earl of
Berkeley. Swift's poems mainly consist of odd verses to his friends, attacks on
his political and private enemies, etc. His Cadenus and Vanessa (1712-13) deals
with his affection for Esther Vanhomrigh. His first noteworthy work was The
Battle of the Books published in 1704. The theme of his work was the dispute
between the ancient and the modern authors. The famous passage where the bee
argues down the bitter remarks of the spider is one of Swift's most well-regarded
efforts. A Tale of a Tub, also published in 1704 (though it was written in 1696) is
regarded by many as his best work. It reveals his power at its highest. Between
1701 and 1704 Swift paid several visits to Leicester and London where he
became the friend of Addison, Pope and Steele. Together they formed a literary
club, the Martinus Scriblerus Club, to satirize the abuses of modern learning.
Book III of Gulliver's Travels was later to result from this project. During his
stay in London, Swift wrote a number of pamphlets on Church questions and
some poems on London life which were published in the Tatler.
Though Swift had written pamphlets in support of the Whig party, he fell into
conflict with the party and changed his allegiance to the Tory party in 1710. He
attacked the Whigs in the Examiner (a Tory periodical founded by Viscount
Bolingbroke) and in a series of pamphlets. To this period belongs the Journal to
Stella. It gives us glimpses of the inner Swift who was vain, arrogant, ambitious,
crafty but none the less a generous and considerate friend and a loyal ally. When
the Tory government fell from power in 1714, Swift's writings lost popularity
and he went to Dublin, where he became Dean of St Patrick's. There he devoted
much energy to Irish affairs and in the course of time attained extraordinary
popularity. His Drapier's Letters (1724) made him famous in Ireland. In 1726
Swift published Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The World, which later
became known as Gulliver's Travels. It was so controversial that it was not
published in a full, uncensored version until ten years later. Alexander Pope’s
observation on the reception of Gulliver's Travels was: "It is universally read,
from the cabinet council to the nursery," and it is widely believed that it has
never been out of print since then. The British author George Orwell declared it
to be among the six indispensable books in world literature. Swift took up the
cause of the impoverishment of Ireland by England, and wrote pamphlets such as
the satire A Modest Proposal (1729), in which he suggests that the problems of
famine and overpopulation in Ireland could be solved by selling the babies of
poor Irish people as food for the rich.
Swift's friends remarked that he grew increasingly bitter with age. He suffered
from congenital deformity and abnormality in the brain and became insane in the
end. Swift died in Dublin on October 19, 1745. He wrote his own obituary,
"Lines on the Death of Dr Swift," which contained the following lines: "He gave
the little wealth he had / To build a house for fools and mad, / And showed by
one satiric touch / No nation needed it so much."
Gulliver's Travels – Summary
The novel Gulliver's Travels is divided into four parts, each dealing with a
unique island which the narrator Lemuel Gulliver reaches by chance. A married
surgeon from Nottinghamshire, England, Gulliver has a taste for traveling. On
the first voyage on the ship Antelope, he is washed up on an island called Lilliput
which is inhabited by tiny people about 6 inches tall. They capture Gulliver as he
sleeps and carry him to their capital city, where they keep him chained inside a
large abandoned temple outside the city walls. Gulliver becomes a great friend of
the Emperor of Lilliput, who introduces him to many of their customs. For
example, the Emperor chooses his officials based on who performs best at a
special kind of rope dancing. The Emperor asks Gulliver to help him in his war
against Blefuscu, the neighbouring kingdom. Gulliver agrees and uses his huge
size to capture all of Blefuscu's navy. The jealousy of admiral Skyresh Bolgolam
and the treasurer Flim nap forces Gulliver to escape to the island of Blefuscu in
order to save his life. Fortunately for him, a human-sized boat washes ashore on
Blefuscu and he rows in it to safety. He is picked up by an English ship and
returns to England. On his second voyage, Gulliver ends up on the island of
Brobdingnag. The Brobdingnagians are giants 60 feet tall and they treat him like
an attraction at a fair. Gulliver comes to the attention of the Brobdingnagian
Queen, who keeps him as a pet. She is amused by his tiny size and his behaviour.
She employs Glumdalclitch, the farmer's daughter, to look after Gulliver and to
teach him their language. While Gulliver lives at the palace, he is constantly in
danger: bees the size of pigeons almost sting him, a puppy almost tramples him
to death, a monkey mistakes him for a baby monkey and tries to force feed him.
These incidents result in him losing some of the pride and self-importance he had
gained in Lilliput. The Brobdingnagian King reinforces this new sense of
humility. After Gulliver describes to him all that he can think about English
culture and history, the King decides that the English sound like tiny little pests.
He absolutely refuses to accept Gulliver's gift of gunpowder because such
weapons will inevitably pave the way to horrible violence and abuse. Finally,
Gulliver leaves Brobdingnag by a strange accident and returns home to England.
During his third voyage, Gulliver gets marooned on a small island by pirates. As
he is sitting on this island, he sees a shadow passing overhead: a floating island
called Laputa. He signals the Laputians for help and is brought up by rope to
their island. The Laputians are dedicated to only two things: mathematics and
music. But their love of equations makes them really incompetent at practical
things like making clothes or building houses. As a result of the Laputians'
abstract science, the residents of the continent below, Balnibarbi, have been
steadily ruining their farms and buildings with new-fangled "reforms." Gulliver
also visits Glubbdubdrib, an island of sorcerers where he gets to meet the ghosts
of famous historical figures, and Luggnagg, an island with an absolute monarchy
and also some very unfortunate immortals, who never age. He makes his way to
Japan and then back to England. His final voyage takes Gulliver to an island
which is home to two kinds of creatures: the beastly Yahoos who are violent,
lying, disgusting animals and the Houyhnhnms, who look like horses. The
Houyhnhnms govern themselves with absolute reason. They do not even have
words for human problems like disease, deception or war. The Yahoos are
human beings. They are just like Gulliver, except that Gulliver has learned to clip
his nails, shave his face, and wear clothes. In Houyhnhnm Land, Gulliver finally
realizes the true depths of human nature, culture and society. He grows so used to
the Houyhnhnm way of life that, when the Houyhnhnms finally tell him to leave,
he immediately faints. Gulliver obediently leaves the land of the Houyhnhnms,
where he has been very happy, but he is so disgusted with human company that
he nearly jumps off the Portuguese ship carrying him home. Once Gulliver
returns to his family, he feels physical revulsion at the thought that he had sex
with a Yahoo female (his wife) and had three Yahoo children. He can barely be
in the same room with them. We leave Gulliver slowly reconciling himself to
being among humans again, but he is still sad on not being with the
Houyhnhnms. In fact, he spends at least four hours a day talking to his two
horses in their stable.
Form and Literary Devices
Swift's Gulliver's Travels uses the form of popular travelogues of the time. Thus
the popularity of this novel, at the time of its publication, lay in the contemporary
readers' avid consumption of travel writings. Swift uses a lot of nautical jargon
and descriptions modelled on ship-logs to create an atmosphere of reality. He
even places the locations of his fictitious journeys in regions visited by the most
famous travel writer of the period, William Dampier. Gulliver's Travels shares
some of the excitement of a real traveller's tale. The narrator, Lemuel Gulliver is
a seaman in his own right. He starts out as a ship's surgeon and goes on to
become the captain of different ships by the end of the novel. This quality made
the novel a children's classic as the basic plot arouses in us a curiosity to know
what happens to Gulliver and what he will find next. Travelogues also provide
the readers with a chance to know the culture and life of other nations and to
make a comparison with one's own country. A savage may be more civilised than
the so-called civilised voyager. Gulliver's progressive disillusionment with his
own society and his preference for the Houyhnhnms' civilised world is an
extreme example of this thought.
Gulliver's Travels is essentially a satire on human follies. Satire is a genre in
which human or individual vices are exposed by means of ridicule, derision,
burlesque, irony, or other methods, with the intention of bringing about
improvement. It is usually witty, and often very funny. However, its purpose is
not to make readers laugh but to criticise an event, an individual or a group in a
clever manner. John. M. Bullitt in Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire
(1966) says that, "In its most serious function, satire is a mediator between two
perceptions-the unillusioned perception of man as he actually is, and the ideal
perception, or vision, of man as he ought to be,". According to J. A.
Downie(Jonathan Swift: Political Writer, 1984), while in the first and second
voyages the focus of the criticism is on the English society and man within this
society, the third and fourth voyages deal with human nature itself. However, all
these ideas overlap as the journey progresses. Much of the Lilliputian adventure
is focused on the king's court and courtly favours. The fickle-mindedness of the
king comes out in the scene where Gulliver refuses to help him in his thirst for
power. The courtiers are willing to jump over a rope to attain royal favours. The
two political parties are differentiated on the basis of the heels of the shoes. This
shows how little the difference between the Whigs and the Tories was. The
Christian religious differences about whether the host was actually
transubstantiated and became flesh or was a symbol is reduced to the petty
quarrel between the Big-Endians and the Small-Endians. Though Lilliput has a
set standard like any other country, Swift likens them to humans when they do
not live up to their standards by exhibiting ingratitude for Gulliver's help and
accuse him of high treason. This incident provides the most bitter satiric attack
on hypocrisy, ingratitude and cruelty. In the Brobdingnagian voyage, human
pride in physical appearance is attacked through Gulliver's perspective of the
Brobdingnagians. The narrator's own pride in himself and his country is reduced
to ashes. Gulliver's offer of gunpowder underlines the fact that he is a typical
member of his race. He cannot understand the Brobdingnagian king's refusal to
accept his offer which will help him in overcoming his enemies. Here Swift
alludes to the eagerness with which European nations would leap at such an offer
as an aid to waging war against their neighbors.
Ricardo Quintana in his work The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift (1965)
mentions that the satire in the third voyage attacks both the deficiency of
common sense and the consequences of corrupt judgment. The Laputan voyage
mainly focuses on the criticism of intellectuals such as scholars, scientists,
philosophers et al who are so caught up in theories and theoretical knowledge
that they forget the practical side of life. The misuse of reason is elaborately
described in the chapters referring to the experiments conducted at the Grand
Academy of Lagado. The subject of immortality is brought out through the case
of the Struldbrugs. According to Swift to live in perpetuity is equal to a living
death. He affirms that superior reason and pride will not protect humans from the
natural laws of physical death. Swift points to the fact that reason is not enough
and immortality will only make things worse. The final voyage to the
Houyhnhnms seems to argue that it is only properly developed reason that can
uplift humans to their true potential. Ironically, it is the horse-like Houyhnhnms
who possess this rather than the human Yahoos. Thus in the last voyage, "Swift
is attacking the Yahoo in each of us", says Ernest Tuveson in the edited work
Swift: A Collection of Critical Essays (1964). This voyage also takes a dig at war,
lawyers, money and most important of all – Imperialism. Swift implies that the
real goal of imperialism is greed and not the upliftment of the less fortunate races
and peoples. Thus by using the medium of satire, Swift wants the readers to be
shocked out of their pride at being the so-called superior race.
Characterization
Gulliver's Travels is strewn with different people who symbolically represent
different aspects of humanity. Moreover as George Orwell mentions in his essay,
“Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (1946), “In
Gulliver's Travels humanity is attacked, or criticized, from at least three different
angles, and the implied character of Gulliver himself necessarily changes
somewhat in the process.”
Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator, is the embodiment of a middle-class Englishman
who is morally upright and honest. It is through his eyes that the reader sees and
judges the people he encounters. But as his journey progresses, he becomes less
tolerant and more judgmental of the nations he visits and consequently, of his
fellow human beings.
William Bragg Ewald states in The Masks of Jonathan Swift (1954) that, "As a
satire, the main purpose of Gulliver's Travels is to show certain shortcomings in
18th century English society...". Though small in size, the Lilliputians as a race
are pompous, hypocritical, self-important, cruel and dangerous. They represent
the pettiness and small-mindedness of the English, in particular and humankind
in general. Several persons and incidents from the English political life are
believed to be referred to in this section. Flimnap, the Lord High Treasurer and
most agile of the rope-dancers is thought to be modeled on Sir Robert Walpole
who was the leader of the Whig Party and the first Prime Minister of England.
The Lilliputian King is a tyrant. He is willing to execute his subjects for trivial
reasons and has no qualms in the sudden shifting of his loyalty. His agreement to
Gulliver being blinded and starved, which he claims exemplifies his mercy and
justice, is a satirical reference to King George I's treatment of captured Jacobite
rebels. King George had them executed after he had been lauded in Parliament as
merciful. Reldresal, Lilliput's Principal Secretary of Private Affairs and
Gulliver's friend, embodies the treachery of politicians. It was he who came up
with the plan of blinding and starving Gulliver to death in order to get rid of him.
This plan is ironically represented as an example of mercy. The Lilliputian
political parties - the Low Heels and the High Heels- represent the Whig and
Tory parties of Swift's time. By making the Lilliputians tiny, Swift is trying to
puncture the self-importance of England and humankind.
The Brobdingnagians represent the goodness in mankind. They are big not just
physically but also morally, large-hearted in spirit and soul. Vice has not yet
spread to their government system. The Brobdingnagian King is shocked by
Gulliver's account of English politics and society and calls them ‘the most
pernicious Race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon
the surface of the Earth’. He refuses Gulliver's offer of gunpowder as he cannot
see any good coming out of it. Though the Brobdingnagians treat Gulliver
kindly, yet they see him as an exhibit. This points to the relative and unreliable
nature of power. William. A. Eddy in Gulliver's Travels: A Critical Study (1963)
says about this power equation, "The effect of reducing the scale of life in
Lilliput is to strip human affairs of their self-imposed grandeur. Rank, politics,
international war, lose all of their significance. This particular idea is continued
in the second voyage, not in the picture of the Brobdingnagians, but in Gulliver
himself, who is now a Lilliputian.” Thus the powerful Gulliver of Lilliput is
powerless in Brobdingnag. Probably this was a warning of Swift to the English
of his time that the arrival of a larger or more powerful country's force could
easily put an end to their dominance on the world stage.
The Laputans, engrossed only in mathematics and music, pay no attention to
practical matters. The only result of their expertise in astronomy is their great
fear of cosmic accidents. Their inattentiveness to their environment makes them
incapable of normal conversation. Hence they require servants with “flappers”
who strike their ears and mouth to alert them to listen or speak. The Laputan
King lives on the floating island and does not care at all about what is happening
in the country below. The Academy Professors of Balnibarbi plan reforms
without considering their effects in the real world. The model for these
professors are the scientists of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of
Natural Knowledge as many of the experiments Swift mentions were either
carried out or proposed by these scientists. Lord Munodi is the traditionalist who
is against the unreliable theories of the Academy. Hence he has a fine, strong
house and his estate and tenants are flourishing as opposed to the others who had
followed the Academy's reforms. The Struldbrugs are an immortal race of
humans who age without dying, thus they instruct humans regarding the
undesirability of immortality.
Reason and virtue are represented by the Houyhnhnms, the horses. They
subjugate their individuality for the good of the race as a whole. They do not
have individual names or characteristics and treat each other with respect and
kindness. Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master is not given a name and is portrayed as a
wise, compassionate and just man who welcomes him to his family.
Unfortunately, he is left with no choice but to ask Gulliver to leave the island as
he is not a Houyhnhnm but only a superior sort of Yahoo. Houyhnhnm reason
does not allow Gulliver to become a part of their culture. Though the Yahoos are
humans, they represent the bestial nature of man. They are greedy, violent,
avaricious and destructive. They are kept as slaves by the Houyhnhnms and do
the harder, baser work. An important distinction drawn between them and
humans is the fact that humans are endowed with reason unlike the Yahoos. But
even with reason, humans have a tendency to choose evil over good. Thus the
Yahoos represent humans at their worst.
Don Pedro de Mendez is an important character in the novel. He is the captain of
the ship that picks up Gulliver after he leaves the island of the Houyhnhnms. He
is kind, generous, courteous and offers Gulliver his best suit of clothes. He is a
representation of the best in mankind. It is important to note that Swift chose a
member of the Catholic nation to represent the positive qualities of mankind at a
time when England defined its friendship based on the adherence of other nations
to the Protestant religion. However Gulliver turns a blind eye to the goodness of
Don Pedro de Mendez seeing him only as a Yahoo.
– Themes
One of the major themes in Gulliver's Travels is the use and abuse of power.
Despite their smallness, the Lilliputians wield considerable power over Gulliver.
They take advantage of his kind, non-aggressive and gullible nature. The
Lilliputian king is a vain, glorious and despotic ruler who executes people for
trivial matters. His ministers are selected based on their ability to leap and creep.
The Brobdingnagians, on the other hand, can dominate others through their
superior size, but they do not do so. Except for the farmer who was willing to
work Gulliver to death for his personal gain, the Brobdingnagians do not abuse
their power. The king only wishes to work for the good of the people. He rejects
the offer to know the secret of making gun powder on humanitarian grounds.
Swift also questions the right of certain people to hold power over others. The
Laputan king is of the opinion that since he is well versed in theoretical
knowledge, he has a right to rule the Balnibarbians. But to the readers he appears
as a ridiculous man who is not fit to rule a country.
According to J. A. Downie (1984), the Laputan society is an example of Swift's
point that an excess of speculative reasoning can also be negative by cutting one
off from the practical realities of life which, in the end, doesn't serve learning or
society. Lord Munodi's common sense and practicality makes him an ideal
character for a ruler. But the Laputans view him as hopelessly backward and
unfit to take care of his own property. The qualities possessed by the
Houyhnhnms which give them the power to rule over the Yahoos can be seen in
a different light when one thinks about the debate in the council over the very
existence of the Yahoos.
Pride forms another important theme in the novel.According to John. M. Bullitt
(1966) pride is what enables man to "deceive himself into the belief that he is
rational and virtuous when, in reality, he has not developed his reason, and his
virtue is merely appearance". The Lilliputians are proud of their military. But a
simple invasion by the humans can totally crush them. The absurdity of their
misplaced pride is shown in the incident in which they arrange a military parade
in view of Gulliver's exposed nether regions. The stay with the Brobdingnagians
shows the destruction of human pride and vanity in appearance. When Gulliver
sees the bodily features and functions at a close range, he understands the
unattractiveness of the human body with its pores and pimples. As William. A.
Eddy (1963) says, “all the transactions of life, all passion, and all social
amenities, which involve the body, lose their respectability in Brobdingnag." The
Laputans are proud of their knowledge in mathematics and music but they are
impractical in doing everyday things like building a house, tailoring clothes or
even in ruling the country. Their pride makes the countrymen starve to death.
Their wives wait for a chance to escape from the floating island to the land
below. Towards the end, Gulliver himself becomes a victim of pride when he
rejects humanity on the ground that they are Yahoos. He turns a blind eye to the
virtue of Don Pedro and he cruelly rejects his wife and family.
In the whole text of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe never mentions his hero's bodily
functions. But Swift in Gulliver's Travels places considerable emphasis on the
bodily and excretory functions of the hero. This provides a satirical
counterweight to the tendency of his age which championed man as a rational
creature. Swift was quick to remind humanity that they were made of the same
skin, blood, and bone as the animals, and shared their basic needs, appetites, and
functions. The rationality and superiority based on that are just layers of
pretensions that cover this truth.
In Gulliver's Travels Swift raises the question of the conflict between the
individual and the society. During most of his travels, Gulliver does not become
one with the society that he visits. Even when he returns to England, he is not
interested in staying and leaves as quickly as possible. It is only in the country of
Houyhnhnms that he wishes to stay, and be assimilated in to it. The Houyhnhnm
country is unique because it subjugates the individual for the good of the society
as a whole.
Nobody can become attached to their children because they may be assigned to
another family that has a shortage of children. Here mates are chosen for the
good of the race and not by individual preference. In his essay, George Orwell
(1946) refers to the Houyhnhnm system as an anarchist society where everyone
has to comply to the exhortions of the General Assembly. Orwell further says
that Swift approves of this kind of thing because among his many gifts neither
curiosity nor good-nature was included. Thus the hero Gulliver ridiculously tries
to become one with this society where reason rules by imitating the gait and
speech patterns of the Houyhnhnms. But they decide that he is not one of them
and expel him. When Gulliver is saved by the merchant ship, he tries to escape
from it. He even refuses to wear the clothes provided by Don Pedro and feels
comfortable in his Houyhnhnm clothes.
In Gulliver's Travels, Swift emphasizes that knowledge is not equivalent to
wisdom. Though Lilliputian politicians have knowledge, they have to creep and
leap to gain power. Another example of faulty reasoning can be seen in the Egg
incident. The Laputans have theoretical knowledge but they do not have the
wisdom to combine it with practical situations. Hence the people whom they rule
starve. A man's education is incomplete if he cannot combine knowledge with
wisdom.
Conclusion
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a satire which dissects humanity and lays
bare the pettiness of the humans. It is the most savage attack upon humanity ever
made in literature. It was Swift who said,'' I heartily hate and detest that animal
called man,'' and in Gulliver's Travels he goes on to prove it. He magnifies man
into a giant in Lilliput and then in the second voyage diminishes him to a play
thing. In Laputa man is at the pinnacle of his wisdom but is still a fool. In the last
book, Swift finds charity and sagacity in animals rather than in man. Thus he
denounces man forever. The first two voyages have a charm that then transforms
into brutality as the story progresses. But apart from this bitter satirical attack,
Gulliver's Travels is still very popular as a children's story. It is also at once a
folk-myth, a fantasy and a classic in the realism genre.
Since its publication, Gulliver's Travels has polarised people's opinion into the
two extremes of warm admiration or utter disgust. The immediate response by
Swift's friends on its publication was one of praise and admiration. The
enthusiasm of his fellow Scriblerus Club members like Alexander Pope, John
Gay and John Arbuthnot comes as no surprise since they shared his sense of
satire. The group who was against it consisted of the church-goers who felt that
Swift had depreciated the works of God in his work and his political rivals like
Lady Montagu, Jonathan Smedley et al. Samuel Richardson was appalled by
Gulliver's Travels, especially Book IV. But Henry Fielding's response was
different. He applauded Swift for his wonderful work. Gulliver's Travels was
noticed in the wake of the First World War. The violence of the war made the
similarity between the humans and the Yahoos felt more than ever. Though the
book had its defenders, most of them were disappointed with Swift's supposed
misanthropy. But he was a man who was not just aware of the flaws of his fellow
beings but also of their virtues. Whatever the critics may say, nothing can efface
Gulliver's Travels from being one in the list of the world's most famous books.