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Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift is one of the most celebrated and most read books in the English language — a satire so comprehensive and so bitter about human nature that it has outlasted the specific political targets it originally aimed at and become a permanent image of humanity's self-deception. Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, is shipwrecked or abandoned successively in four countries: Lilliput (where the inhabitants are six inches tall), Brobdingnag (where they are sixty feet tall), Laputa (a floating island of impractical scientists and philosophers), and the land of the Houyhnhnms (a race of rational horses who are served by the Yahoos, a debased form of humanity). Each voyage is an angle of satirical vision: Lilliput's wars over which end to break an egg are the Wars of Religion and the English party squabbles over trivialities; Brobdingnag's giant king's contempt for European politics is a way of making those politics look small; Laputa's scientists are the Royal Society; and the Houyhnhnms' rationality, which Gulliver eventually prefers to human society, is an image of what humanity would have to become to earn the self-regard it already has.
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Gulliver's Travels (1726)
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Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift·1726
Gulliver's Travels — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gulliver's Travels a children's book?
The first two voyages (Lilliput and Brobdingnag) have been adapted as children's books so frequently that most people's first encounter with Gulliver is a bowdlerized version of the tiny people and the giant. The original is absolutely not a children's book: it is a savage satirical attack on human pride, political hypocrisy, scientific pretension, and above all on the self-congratulatory species that calls itself rational. The Yahoos, who appear in the fourth voyage, are presented as humanity stripped of its pretensions — and their resemblance to actual humans is the point that Swift never lets his reader escape. The ending, where Gulliver cannot endure the company of his wife and children because they smell like Yahoos, is deeply uncomfortable.
What is Swift attacking in Gulliver's Travels?
The satire operates on multiple levels. In Lilliput, it attacks English party politics (the High Heels and Low Heels are Tories and Whigs; the Big-Endians and Little-Endians are Catholics and Protestants) and military glory. In Brobdingnag, the giant king's revulsion at Gulliver's account of European history ('the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth') is Swift's most direct statement of his contempt for the species. In Laputa, it attacks the Royal Society's abstract scientific projects and the impractical optimism of theoretical reason divorced from practical life. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, it attacks the human claim to rationality itself — the Houyhnhnms are rational, the Yahoos are human, and the distinction flatters neither.
Who was Swift satirizing personally in Gulliver's Travels?
Lilliput contains portraits of specific political figures: the Emperor of Lilliput is George I; Flimnap (the Treasurer) is Robert Walpole, the Whig Prime Minister; Bolgolam (the Admiral) is the Earl of Nottingham. The affair between Flimnap's wife and Gulliver refers to a rumor about Walpole's wife. But the satire extends far beyond personal attacks — Swift is attacking the type of politician, the type of scientist, the type of rationalizing human, not just specific individuals. The Tory Swift had been excluded from the highest offices of the church (he was Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, rather than a bishop) and he wrote Gulliver's Travels partly in frustrated exile from the English political scene he had hoped to shape.
What is the significance of the Houyhnhnms in Part IV?
The fourth voyage is the most philosophically ambitious and the most unsettling. The Houyhnhnms are rational horses who govern their society entirely by reason, feel no passions, and have no word for 'lie' in their language (they call lying 'saying the thing which is not'). Gulliver, having lived among them, cannot readjust to human society because he now sees humans as Yahoos — animals governed by appetite and self-deception rather than reason. Critics have debated whether Swift intends the Houyhnhnms as ideal humans should aspire to be, or as a satire of cold rationality (they also have no love, no art, no religion, no imagination). The most convincing reading is probably that Swift is attacking both human Yahoo-ness and the cold rationalism that would replace it — the human condition as impossible either way.
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