Jonathan Swift
Irish author and clergyman
pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff
born Nov. 30, 1667, Dublin, Ire.
died Oct. 19, 1745, Dublin
Main
Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English
language. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he
wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and A Modest Proposal
(1729).
Early life and education
Swift’s father, Jonathan Swift the elder, was an Englishman who had
settled in Ireland after the Stuart Restoration (1660) and become
steward of the King’s Inns, Dublin. In 1664 he married Abigail Erick,
who was the daughter of an English clergyman. In the spring of 1667
Jonathan the elder died suddenly, leaving his wife, baby daughter, and
an unborn son to the care of his brothers. The younger Jonathan Swift
thus grew up fatherless and dependent on the generosity of his uncles.
His education was not neglected, however, and at the age of six he was
sent to Kilkenny School, then the best in Ireland. In 1682 he entered
Trinity College, Dublin, where he was granted his bachelor of arts
degree in February 1686 speciali gratia (“by special favour”), his
degree being a device often used when a student’s record failed, in some
minor respect, to conform to the regulations.
Swift continued in residence at Trinity College as a candidate for
his master of arts degree until February 1689. But the Roman Catholic
disorders that had begun to spread through Dublin after the Glorious
Revolution (1688–89) in Protestant England caused Swift to seek security
in England, and he soon became a member of the household of a distant
relative of his mother named Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, Surrey.
Swift was to remain at Moor Park intermittently until Temple’s death in
1699.
Years at Moor Park
Temple was engaged in writing his memoirs and preparing some of his
essays for publication, and he had Swift act as a kind of secretary.
During his residence at Moor Park, Swift twice returned to Ireland, and
during the second of these visits, he took orders in the Anglican
church, being ordained priest in January 1695. At the end of the same
month he was appointed vicar of Kilroot, near Belfast. Swift came to
intellectual maturity at Moor Park, with Temple’s rich library at his
disposal. Here, too, he met Esther Johnson (the future Stella), the
daughter of Temple’s widowed housekeeper. In 1692, through Temple’s good
offices, Swift received the degree of M.A. at the University of Oxford.
Between 1691 and 1694 Swift wrote a number of poems, notably six
odes. But his true genius did not find expression until he turned from
verse to prose satire and composed, mostly at Moor Park between 1696 and
1699, A Tale of a Tub, one of his major works. Published anonymously in
1704, this work was made up of three associated pieces: the Tale itself,
a satire against “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and
learning”; the mock-heroic Battle of the Books; and the Discourse
Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, which ridiculed the
manner of worship and preaching of religious enthusiasts at that period.
In the Battle of the Books, Swift supports the ancients in the
longstanding dispute about the relative merits of ancient versus modern
literature and culture. But A Tale of a Tub is the most impressive of
the three compositions. This work is outstanding for its exuberance of
satiric wit and energy and is marked by an incomparable command of
stylistic effects, largely in the nature of parody. Swift saw the realm
of culture and literature threatened by zealous pedantry, while
religion—which for him meant rational Anglicanism—suffered attack from
both Roman Catholicism and the Nonconformist (Dissenting) churches. In
the Tale he proceeded to trace all these dangers to a single source: the
irrationalities that disturb man’s highest faculties—reason and common
sense.
Career as satirist, political journalist, and churchman
After Temple’s death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin as chaplain and
secretary to the earl of Berkeley, who was then going to Ireland as a
lord justice. During the ensuing years he was in England on some four
occasions—in 1701, 1702, 1703, and 1707 to 1709—and won wide recognition
in London for his intelligence and his wit as a writer. He had resigned
his position as vicar of Kilroot, but early in 1700 he was preferred to
several posts in the Irish church. His public writings of this period
show that he kept in close touch with affairs in both Ireland and
England. Among them is the essay Discourse of the Contests and
Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, in
which Swift defended the English constitutional balance of power between
the monarchy and the two houses of Parliament as a bulwark against
tyranny. In London he became increasingly well known through several
works: his religious and political essays; A Tale of a Tub; and certain
impish works, including the “Bickerstaff” pamphlets of 1708–09, which
put an end to the career of John Partridge, a popular astrologer, by
first prophesying his death and then describing it in circumstantial
detail. Like all Swift’s satirical works, these pamphlets were published
anonymously and were exercises in impersonation. Their supposed author
was “Isaac Bickerstaff.” For many of the first readers, the very
authorship of the satires was a matter for puzzle and speculation.
Swift’s works brought him to the attention of a circle of Whig writers
led by Joseph Addison, but Swift was uneasy about many policies of the
Whig administration. He was a Whig by birth, education, and political
principle, but he was also passionately loyal to the Anglican church,
and he came to view with apprehension the Whigs’ growing determination
to yield ground to the Nonconformists. He also frequently mimicked and
mocked the proponents of “free thinking”: intellectual skeptics who
questioned Anglican orthodoxy. A brilliant and still-perplexing example
of this is Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708).
A momentous period began for Swift when in 1710 he once again found
himself in London. A Tory ministry headed by Robert Harley (later earl
of Oxford) and Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) was replacing
that of the Whigs. The new administration, bent on bringing hostilities
with France to a conclusion, was also assuming a more protective
attitude toward the Church of England. Swift’s reactions to such a
rapidly changing world are vividly recorded in his Journal to Stella, a
series of letters written between his arrival in England in 1710 and
1713, which he addressed to Esther Johnson and her companion, Rebecca
Dingley, who were now living in Dublin. The astute Harley made overtures
to Swift and won him over to the Tories. But Swift did not thereby
renounce his essentially Whiggish convictions regarding the nature of
government. The old Tory theory of the divine right of kings had no
claim upon him. The ultimate power, he insisted, derived from the people
as a whole and, in the English constitution, had come to be exercised
jointly by king, lords, and commons.
Swift quickly became the Tories’ chief pamphleteer and political
writer and, by the end of October 1710, had taken over the Tory journal,
The Examiner, which he continued to edit until June 14, 1711. He then
began preparing a pamphlet in support of the Tory drive for peace with
France. This, The Conduct of the Allies, appeared on Nov. 27, 1711, some
weeks before the motion in favour of a peace was finally carried in
Parliament. Swift was rewarded for his services in April 1713 with his
appointment as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
Withdrawal to Ireland
With the death of Queen Anne in August 1714 and the accession of George
I, the Tories were a ruined party, and Swift’s career in England was at
an end. He withdrew to Ireland, where he was to pass most of the
remainder of his life. After a period of seclusion in his deanery, Swift
gradually regained his energy. He turned again to verse, which he
continued to write throughout the 1720s and early ’30s, producing the
impressive poem Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift, among others. By
1720 he was also showing a renewed interest in public affairs. In his
Irish pamphlets of this period he came to grips with many of the
problems, social and economic, then confronting Ireland. His tone and
manner varied from direct factual presentation to exhortation, humour,
and bitter irony. Swift blamed Ireland’s backward state chiefly on the
blindness of the English government; but he also insistently called
attention to the things that the Irish themselves might do in order to
better their lot. Of his Irish writings, the Drapier’s Letters (1724–25)
and A Modest Proposal are the best known. The first is a series of
letters attacking the English government for its scheme to supply
Ireland with copper halfpence and farthings. A Modest Proposal is a
grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-spirited citizen
suggests that Ireland’s overpopulation and dire economic conditions
could be alleviated if the babies of poor Irish parents were sold as
edible delicacies to be eaten by the rich. Both were published
anonymously.
Certain events in Swift’s private life must also be mentioned. Stella
(Esther Johnson) had continued to live with Rebecca Dingley after moving
to Ireland in 1700 or 1701. It has sometimes been asserted that Stella
and Swift were secretly married in 1716, but they did not live together,
and there is no evidence to support this story. It was friendship that
Swift always expressed in speaking of Stella, not romantic love. In
addition to the letters that make up his Journal to Stella, he wrote
verses to her, including a series of wry and touching poems titled On
Stella’s Birthday. The question may be asked, was this friendship
strained as a result of the appearance in his life of another woman,
Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he named Vanessa (and who also appeared in his
poetry)? He had met Vanessa during his London visit of 1707–09, and in
1714 she had, despite all his admonitions, insisted on following him to
Ireland. Her letters to Swift reveal her passion for him, though at the
time of her death in 1723 she had apparently turned against him because
he insisted on maintaining a distant attitude toward her. Stella herself
died in 1728. Scholars are still much in the dark concerning the precise
relationships between these three people, and the various melodramatic
theories that have been suggested rest upon no solid ground.
Swift’s greatest satire, Gulliver’s Travels, was published in 1726.
It is uncertain when he began this work, but it appears from his
correspondence that he was writing in earnest by 1721 and had finished
the whole by August 1725. Its success was immediate. Then, and since, it
has succeeded in entertaining (and intriguing) all classes of readers.
It was completed at a time when he was close to the poet Alexander Pope
and the poet and dramatist John Gay. He had been a fellow member of
their Scriblerus Club since 1713, and through their correspondence, Pope
continued to be one of his most important connections to England.
Last years
The closing years of Swift’s life have been the subject of some
misrepresentation, and stories have been told of his ungovernable temper
and lack of self-control. It has been suggested that he was insane. From
youth he had suffered from what is now known to have been Ménière’s
disease, an affliction of the semicircular canals of the ears, causing
periods of dizziness and nausea. But his mental powers were in no way
affected, and he remained active throughout most of the 1730s—Dublin’s
foremost citizen and Ireland’s great patriot dean. In the autumn of 1739
a great celebration was held in his honour. He had, however, begun to
fail physically and later suffered a paralytic stroke, with subsequent
aphasia. In 1742 he was declared incapable of caring for himself, and
guardians were appointed. After his death in 1745, he was buried in St.
Patrick’s Cathedral. On his memorial tablet is an epitaph of his own
composition, which says that he lies “where savage indignation can no
longer tear his heart.”
Gulliver’s Travels
Swift’s masterpiece was originally published without its author’s name
under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. This
work, which is told in Gulliver’s “own words,” is the most brilliant as
well as the most bitter and controversial of his satires. In each of its
four books the hero, Lemuel Gulliver, embarks on a voyage; but shipwreck
or some other hazard usually casts him up on a strange land. Book I
takes him to Lilliput, where he wakes to find himself the giant prisoner
of the six-inch-high Lilliputians. Man-Mountain, as Gulliver is called,
ingratiates himself with the arrogant, self-important Lilliputians when
he wades into the sea and captures an invasion fleet from neighbouring
Blefescu; but he falls into disfavour when he puts out a fire in the
empress’ palace by urinating on it. Learning of a plot to charge him
with treason, he escapes from the island.
Book II takes Gulliver to Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are
giants. He is cared for kindly by a nine-year-old girl, Glumdalclitch,
but his tiny size exposes him to dangers and indignities, such as
getting his head caught in a squalling baby’s mouth. Also, the giants’
small physical imperfections (such as large pores) are highly visible
and disturbing to him. Picked up by an eagle and dropped into the sea,
he manages to return home.
In Book III Gulliver visits the floating island of Laputa, whose
absent-minded inhabitants are so preoccupied with higher speculations
that they are in constant danger of accidental collisions. He visits the
Academy of Lagado (a travesty of England’s Royal Society), where he
finds its lunatic savants engaged in such impractical studies as
reducing human excrement to the original food. In Luggnagg he meets the
Struldbruggs, a race of immortals, whose eternal senility is brutally
described.
Book IV takes Gulliver to the Utopian land of the Houyhnhnms—grave,
rational, and virtuous horses. There is also another race on the island,
uneasily tolerated and used for menial services by the Houyhnhnms. These
are the vicious and physically disgusting Yahoos. Although Gulliver
pretends at first not to recognize them, he is forced at last to admit
the Yahoos are human beings. He finds perfect happiness with the
Houyhnhnms, but as he is only a more advanced Yahoo, he is rejected by
them in general assembly and is returned to England, where he finds
himself no longer able to tolerate the society of his fellow human
beings.
Gulliver’s Travels’s matter-of-fact style and its air of sober
reality confer on it an ironic depth that defeats oversimple
explanations. Is it essentially comic, or is it a misanthropic
depreciation of mankind? Swift certainly seems to use the various races
and societies Gulliver encounters in his travels to satirize many of the
errors, follies, and frailties that human beings are prone to. The
warlike, disputatious, but essentially trivial Lilliputians in Book I
and the deranged, impractical pedants and intellectuals in Book III are
shown as imbalanced beings lacking common sense and even decency. The
Houyhnhnms, by contrast, are the epitome of reason and virtuous
simplicity, but Gulliver’s own proud identification with these horses
and his subsequent disdain for his fellow humans indicates that he too
has become imbalanced, and that human beings are simply incapable of
aspiring to the virtuous rationality that Gulliver has glimpsed.
Assessment
Swift’s intellectual roots lay in the rationalism that was
characteristic of late 17th-century England. This rationalism, with its
strong moral sense, its emphasis on common sense, and its distrust of
emotionalism, gave him the standards by which he appraised human
conduct. At the same time, however, he provided a unique description of
reason’s weakness and of its use by men and women to delude themselves.
His moral principles are scarcely original; his originality lies rather
in the quality of his satiric imagination and his literary art. Swift’s
literary tone varies from the humorous to the savage, but each of his
satiric compositions is marked by concentrated power and directness of
impact. His command of a great variety of prose styles is unfailing, as
is his power of inventing imaginary episodes and all their accompanying
details. Swift rarely speaks in his own person; almost always he states
his views by ironic indiscretion through some imagined character like
Lemuel Gulliver or the morally obtuse citizen of A Modest Proposal. Thus
Swift’s descriptive passages reflect the minds that are describing just
as much as the things described. Pulling in different directions, this
irony creates the tensions that are characteristic of Swift’s best work,
and reflects his vision of humanity’s ambiguous position between
bestiality and reasonableness.
Ricardo Quintana
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A Tale of a Tub
Jonathan
Swift
1667-1745
In A Tale of a Tub, Swift adopts the persona of a hapless,
pontificating satirist in order to savage a numberof
contemporary pieties and practices. Once the reader has battled
through a welter of Apologies, Addresses, Dedications, and a
Preface, the "author" of the piece introduces a religious
allegory which is supposed to depict the decadence of the
Catholic Church and the necessity of its Reformation. The tale
concerns three brothers who abuse their father's legacy of
coats—which they are forbidden to embellish by the terms of his
will.They proceed to wilfully misinterpret the will in order to
follow the dictates of fashion. One brother, Peter, swindles his
way into a position of great authority and wealth, while the
other brothers rebel and strip their coats of the fripperies
they had once coveted. The tale is complicated by the teller's
incompetence: he finds the allegory impossible to sustain and
cannot resist embarking on absurd tangents, including" A
Digression in Praise of Digressions."
Swift's main targets are witless propagandists for Calvinism,
but the flexibility of the genre, pushed to its limits by the
invention of an insane "author," sanctions free-wheeling
assaults which threaten the viability of Swift's own
perspective—even satire itself is satirized. The force of A Tale
of a Tub is attributable to this almost autonomous ironic
energy, capable of undermining anything with a power that even
Swift's subsequent and more famous masterpieces rarely equalled.
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A Modest
Proposal
Jonathan
Swift
1667-1745
Or, more properly, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children
of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents, Or the
Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public. The title
is long but Swift's propagandizing pamphlet is as succinct and
excoriating a work of satire as is possible to conceive. Penned
after its author returned to Dublin to become Dean of St.
Patrick's, the work expresses in equal measure contempt for
English policy in Ireland and for Irish docility in taking it. A
prolific writer, political journalist, and wit, Swift was
skilled at transforming outrage to glacial irony.
The proposal here is anything but modest; Irish children can
become less burdensome to their families and the state by being
eaten by the rich. Children might become quality livestock for
poor farmers. Young children, Swift suggests, are "nourishing
and wholesome" whether they are "stewed, roasted, baked, or
broiled" while older, less obviously tasty offspring might be
spared for breeding purposes. The abundant advantages include
reducing the numbers of "Papists'; providing much-needed funds
for the peasantry, boosting national income, and stimulating the
catering trade. Swift also satirizes the callousness of the
English protestant absentee landowners whose economics value
mercantilism ahead of labor power. While, across his oeuvre,
Swift is notoriously complicated in his politics, in this
pungent pamphlet, we find him at his savage best.
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Gulliver's
Travels
Jonathan
Swift
1667-1745
Everyone knows at least something about Gulliver's Travels.
Variously read and re-written as a children's story, a political
satire, a travel text, an animated film, and a BBC television
series, Swift's perennial classic has been bowdlerized, added
to, argued over, and adapted, but remains a constant presence in
any widely accepted canon of English Literature.
The narrative follows the adventures of innocent abroad, Lemuel
Gulliver, from misguided youth, through the distorting mirrors
of Lilliput and Brobdignag, onto the more enigmatic islands of
Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan, followed
by the crucially important land of the Houyhnhms and the Yahoos.
Swift masterfully inserts such locations into the blank spaces
of eighteenth-century maps (actually included in the first
edition) and follows the conventions of the contemporary travel
narrative with such precision that the real and the fantastical
coalesce. Our only guide is Gulliver, whose unwavering
confidence in the superiority of the Englishman and of English
culture is slowly and inevitably picked apart by the assorted
characters he encounters on his travels, some minute, some huge,
some misguided, some savage, others guided entirely by reason.
All offer comments to, and perspectives upon Gulliver, that
force readers to question their own assumptions.lt is a satire
that may have lost some of its immediate political force, but
one that still has a sting in its tail for us today, made all
the more effective as Swift stages the climax of the tales
within the bounds of the English nation-state.The vehemence with
which Gulliver eschews the company of his fellows for his horses
is an image that will remain with readers forever—for it is here
that it becomes clear that he is not the main target of the
satire. We are.
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GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
Type of work: Simulated record of travel
Author: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Type of plot: Social satire
Time of plot: 1699-1713
Locale: England and various fictional lands
First published: 1726
One of the masterpieces of satire among the world's
literature, Gulliver's Travels is written in the form of a
travel journal divided into four sections, each of which
describes a different voyage of ship's physician Lemuel
Gulliver. In each section he visits a different fantastical
society—Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and Houyhnhnmland—and
records the facts and customs of the country. Through Gulliver's
adventures and observations, Swift aims his at times savage
satire against the English people generally and the Whigs
particularly, against various political, academic, and social
institutions, and against man's constant abuse of his greatest
gift, reason.
Principal Character
Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon, sea captain, traveler and the
narrator of these travel accounts, the purpose of which is to
satirize the pretensions and follies of man. Gulliver is an
ordinary man, capable of close observation; his deceptively
matter-of-fact reportage and his great accumulation of detail
make believable and readable a scathing political and social
satire. On his first voyage he is shipwrecked at Lilliput, a
country inhabited by people no more than six inches tall, where
pretentiousness, individual as well as political, is ridiculed.
The second voyage ends in Brobdingnag, a land of giants. Human
gross-ness is a target here. Moreover, Gulliver does not find it
easy to make sense of English customs and politics in explaining
them to a king sixty feet high. On Gulliver's third voyage
pirates attack the ship and set him adrift in a small boat. One
day he sees and goes aboard Laputa, a flying island inhabited by
incredibly abstract and absent-minded people. From Laputa he
visits Balnibari, where wildly impractical experiments in
construction and agriculture are in progress. Then he goes to
Glubbdubdrib, the island of sorcerers, where he is shown
apparitions of such historical figures as Alexander and Caesar,
who decry the inaccuracies of history books. Visiting Lugg-nagg,
Gulliver, after describing an imaginary immortality of constant
learning and growing wisdom, is shown a group of immortals
called Struldbrugs, who are grotesque, pitiable creatures,
senile for centuries, but destined never to die. Gulliver's last
journey is to the land of the Houyhnhnms, horselike creatures in
appearance, possessed of great intelligence, rationality,
restraint, and courtesy. Dreadful humanlike creatures, called
Yahoos, impart tc Gulliver such a loathing of the human form
that, forced to return at last to England, he cannot bear the
sight of even his own family and feels at home only in the
stables.
The Story
Lemuel Gulliver, a physician, took the post of ship's doctor
on the Antelope, which set sail from Bristol for the South Seas
in May, 1699. When the ship was wrecked in a storm somewhere
near Tasmania, Gulliver had to swim for his life. Wind and tide
helped to carry him close to a low-lying shore where he fell,
exhausted, into a deep sleep. Upon awakening, he found himself
held to the ground by hundreds of small ropes. He soon
discovered that he was the prisoner of humans six inches tall.
Still tied, Gulliver was fed by his captors; then he was placed
on a special wagon built to his size and drawn by fifteen
hundred small horses. Carried in this manner to the capital city
of the small humans, he was exhibited as a great curiosity to
the people of Lilliput, as the land of the diminutive people was
called. He was kept chained to a huge Lilliputian building into
which he crawled at night to sleep.
Gulliver soon learned the Lilliputian language, and through his
personal charm and natural curiosity, he came into good graces
at the royal court. At length, he was given his freedom,
contingent upon his obeying many rules devised by the emperor
prescribing his deportment in Lilliput. Now free, Gulliver
toured Mildendo, the capital city, and found it to be similar to
European cities of the time.
Learning that Lilliput was in danger of an invasion by the
forces of the neighboring empire, Blefuscu, he offered his
services to the emperor of Lilliput. While the enemy
fleet awaited favorable winds to carry their ships the eight
hundred yards between Blefuscu and Lilliput, Gulliver took some
Lilliputian cable, waded to Blefuscu, and brought back the
entire fleet by means of hooks attached to the cables. He was
greeted with great acclaim, and the emperor made him a nobleman.
Soon, however, the emperor and Gulliver quarreled over
differences concerning the fate of the now helpless Blefuscu.
The emperor wanted to reduce the enemy to the status of slaves;
Gulliver championed their liberty. The pro-Gulliver forces
prevailed in the Lilliputian parliament; the peace settlement
was favorable to Blefuscu. Gulliver, however, was now in
disfavor at court.
He visited Blefuscu, where he was received graciously by the
emperor and the people. One day, while exploring the empire, he
found a ship's boat washed ashore from a wreck. With the help of
thousands of Blefuscu artisans, he repaired the boat for his
projected voyage back to his own civilization. Taking some
cattle and sheep with him, he sailed away and was eventually
picked up by an English vessel.
Back in England, Gulliver spent a short time with his family
before he shipped aboard the Adventure, bound for India. The
ship was blown off course by fierce winds. Somewhere on the
coast of Great Tartary a landing party went ashore to forage for
supplies. Gulliver, who had wandered away from the party, was
left behind when a gigantic human figure pursued the sailors
back to the ship. Gulliver was caught in a field by giants
threshing grain that grew forty feet high. Becoming the pet of a
farmer and his family, he amused them with his humanlike
behavior. The farmer's nine-year-old daughter, who was not yet
over forty feet high, took special charge of Gulliver.
The farmer displayed Gulliver first at a local market town. Then
he took his little pet to the metropolis, where Gulliver was put
on show to the great detriment of his health. The farmer, seeing
that Gulliver was near death, sold him to the queen, who took a
great fancy to the little curiosity. The court doctors and
philosophers studied Gulliver as a quaint trick of nature. He
subsequently had adventures with giant rats the size of lions,
with a dwarf thirty feet high, with wasps as large as
partridges, with apples the size of Bristol barrels, and with
hailstones the size of tennis balls.
He and the king discussed the institutions of their
respective countries, the king asking Gulliver many questions
about Great Britain that Gulliver found impossible to answer
truthfully without embarrassment.
After two years in Brobdingnag, the land of the giants, Gulliver
miraculously escaped when a large bird carried his portable
quarters out over the sea. The bird dropped the box containing
Gulliver, and he was rescued by a ship that was on its way to
England. Back home, it took Gulliver some time to accustom
himself once more to a world of normal size.
Soon afterward, Gulliver went to sea again. Pirates from a
Chinese port attacked the ship. Set adrift in a small sailboat,
Gulliver was cast away upon a rocky island. One day, he saw a
large floating mass descending from the sky. Taken aboard the
flying island of Laputa, he soon found it to be inhabited by
intellectuals who thought only in the realm of the abstract and
the exceedingly impractical. The people of the island, including
the king, were so absentminded that they had to have servants
following them to remind them even of their trends of
conversation. When the floating island arrived above the
continent of Balnibari, Gulliver received permission to visit
that realm. There he inspected the Grand Academy, where hundreds
of highly impractical projects for the improvement of
agriculture and building were under way.
Next, Gulliver journeyed by boat to Glubbdubdrib, the island of
sorcerers. By means of magic, the governor of the island showed
Gulliver such great historical figures as Alexander, Hannibal,
Caesar, Pompey, and Sir Thomas More. Gulliver talked to the
apparitions and learned from them that history books were
inaccurate.
From Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver ventured to Luggnagg. There he was
welcomed by the king, who showed him the Luggnaggian immortals,
or Struldbrugs—beings who would never die.
Gulliver traveled on to Japan, where he took a ship back to
England. He has been away for more than three years.
Gulliver became restless after a brief stay at his home, and he
signed as captain of a ship that sailed from Portsmouth in
August, 1710, destined for the South Seas. The crew mutinied,
keeping Captain Gulliver prisoner in his cabin for months. At
length, he was cast adrift in a longboat off a strange coast.
Ashore, he came upon and was nearly overwhelmed by disgusting
half-human, half-ape creatures who fled in terror at the
approach of a horse. Gulliver soon discovered, to his amazement,
that he was in a land where rational horses, the Houyhnhnms,
were masters of irrational human creatures, the Yahoos. He
stayed in the stable house of a Houyhnhnm family and learned to
subsist on oaten cake and milk. The Houyhnhnms were horrified to
learn from Gulliver that horses in England were used by
Yahoolike creatures as beasts of burden. Gulliver described
England to his host, much to the candid and straightforward
Houyhnhnm's mystification. Such things as wars and courts of law
were unknown to this race of intelligent horses. As he did in
the other lands he visited, Gulliver attempted to explain the
institutions of his native land, but the friendly and benevolent
Houyhnhnms were appalled by many of the things Gulliver told
them.
Gulliver lived in almost perfect contentment among the horses,
until one day his host told him that the Houyhnhnm Grand
Assembly had decreed Gulliver either be treated as an ordinary
Yahoo or be released to swim back to the land from which he had
come. Gulliver built a canoe and sailed away. At length, he was
picked up by a Portuguese vessel. Remembering the Yahoos, he
became a recluse on the ship and began to hate all mankind.
Landing at Lisbon, he sailed from there to England; but on his
arrival, the sight of his own family repulsed him. He fainted
when his wife kissed him. His horses became his only friends on
earth.
Critical Evaluation
It has been said that Dean Jonathan
Swift hated humanity but loved individual men. His hatred is
brought out in this caustic political and social satire aimed at
the English people, representing mankind in general, and at the
Whigs in particular. By means of a disarming simplicity of style
and of careful attention to detail in order to heighten the
effect of the narrative, Swift produced one of the outstanding
pieces of satire in world literature. Swift himself attempted to
conceal his authorship of the book under its original title:
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts,
by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of
Several Ships.
When Swift created the character of Lemuel Gulliver as his
narrator for Gulliver's Travels, he developed a personality with
many qualities admired by an eighteenth century audience and
still admired by many readers. Gulliver is a decent sort of
person: hopeful, simple, fairly direct, and full of good will.
He is a scientist, a trained doctor; and, as any good scientist
should, he loves detail. His literal-minded attitude makes him a
keen observer of the world around him. Furthermore, he is, like
another famous novel character of the eighteenth century—
Robinson Crusoe—encouragingly resourceful in emergencies. Why is
it, then, that such a seemingly admirable, even heroic
character, should become, in the end, an embittered misanthrope,
hating the world and turning against everyone, including people
who show him kindness?
The answer lies in what Swift meant for his character to be, and
Gulliver was certainly not intended to be heroic. Readers often
confuse Gulliver the character with Swift the author, but to do
so is to miss the point of Gulliver's Travels. The novel is a
satire, and Gulliver is a mask for Swift the satirist. In fact,
Swift does not share Gulliver's values especially his
rationalistic, scientific responses to the world and his belief
in progress and the perfectibility of man. Swift, on the
contrary, believed that such values were dangerous to mankind
and that to put such complete faith in the material world, as
scientific Gulliver did, was folly. As Swift's creation,
Gulliver is a product of his age, and he is designed as a
character to demonstrate the great weakness underlying the
values of the "Age of Enlightenment," the failure to recognize
the power of that which is irrational in man.
Despite Gulliver's apparent congeniality in the opening chapters
of the novel, Swift makes it clear that his character has
serious shortcomings, including blind spots about human nature
and his own nature. Book 3, the least readable section of
Gulliver's Travels, is in some ways the most revealing part of
the book. In it Gulliver complains, for example, that the wives
of the scientists he is observing run away with the servants.
The fact is that Gulliver—himself a scientist—gives little
thought to the well-being of his own wife. In the eleven years
covered in Gulliver's "travel book," Swift's narrator spends a
total of seven months and ten days with his wife.
Therefore, Gulliver, too, is caught up in Swift's web of satire
in Gulliver's Travels. Satire as a literary form tends to be
ironic; the author says the opposite of what he means.
Consequently, readers can assume that much of what Gulliver
observes as good and much of what he thinks and does are the
opposite of what Swift thinks.
As a type of the eighteenth century, Gulliver exhibits its major
values: belief in rationality, in the perfectibility of man, in
the idea of progress, and in the Lockean philosophy of the human
mind as a tabula rasa—or blank slate, at the time of
birth—controlled and developed entirely by the differing strokes
and impressions made on it by the environment. Swift, in
contrast to Gulliver, hated the abstraction that accompanied
rational thinking; he abhorred the rejection of the past that
resulted from a rationalist faith in the new and improved; and
he cast strong doubts on man's ability to gain knowledge through
reason and logic.
The world Gulliver discovers during his travels is significant
in Swift's satire. The Lilliputians, averaging not quite six
inches in height, display the pettiness and the smallness Swift
detects in much that motivates human institutions, such as
church and state. It is petty religious problems that lead to
continual war in Lilliput. The Brob-dingnagians continue the
satire in part 2 by exaggerating man's grossness through their
enlarged size. (Swift divided human measurements by a twelfth
for the Lilliputians and multiplied the same for the
Brobdingnagians.)
The tiny people of part 1 and the giants of part 2 establish a
pattern of contrasts that Swift follows in part 4 with the
Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. The Yahoos, "their heads and breasts
covered with a thick hair, some frizzled and others lank," naked
otherwise and scampering up trees like nimble squirrels,
represent the animal aspect of man when it is viewed as separate
from the rational. The Houyhnhnms, completing the other half of
the split, know no lust, pain, or pleasure. Their rational
temperaments totally rule their passions, if they have any at
all. The land of the Houyhnhnms is a Utopia to Gulliver, and he
tells the horse-people that his homeland is unfortunately
governed by Yahoos.
But what is the land of the Houyhnhnms really like, how much a
Utopia? Friendship, benevolence, and equality are the principal
virtues there. Decency and civility guide every action. As a
result, each pair of horses mates to have one colt of each sex;
after that, they no longer stay together. The marriages are
arranged to ensure pleasing color combinations in the offspring.
To the young, marriage is "one of the necessary actions of a
reasonable being." After the function of the marriage has been
ful-filled—after the race has been propagated—the two members of
the couple are no closer to each other than to anybody else in
the whole country. It is this kind of "equality" that Swift
satirizes. As a product of the rational attitude, such a value
strips life of its fullness, denies the power of emotion and
instinct, subjugates all to logic, reason, the intellect, and
makes all dull and uninteresting—as predictable as a scientific
experiment.
By looking upon the Houyhnhnms as the perfect creatures,
Gulliver makes his own life back in England intolerable:
I ... return to enjoy my own speculations in
my little garden at Redriff; to apply those excellent lessons of
virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms; to instruct the
Yahoos of my own family as far as I shall find them docible
animals; to behold my figure often in a glass, and thus if
possible habituate myself by time to tolerate the sight of a
human creature.
When Gulliver holds up rational men as perfect
man and when he cannot find a rational man to meet his ideal, he
concludes in disillusionment that mankind is totally
animalistic, like the ugly Yahoos. In addition to being a satire
and a parody of travel books, Gulliver's Travels is an
initiation novel. As Gulliver develops, he changes; but he fails
to learn an important lesson of life, or he learns it wrong. His
naive optimism about progress and rational man leads him to
bitter disillusionment.
It is tragically ironic that Swift died at the age of
seventy-eight after three years of living without his reason; a
victim of Meniere's disease, he died "like a rat in a hole." For
many years, he had struggled against fits of deafness and
giddiness, symptoms of the disease. As a master of the language
of satire, Swift remains une-qualed. He gathered in Gulliver's
Travels, written late in his life, all the experience he had
culled from both courts and streets. For Swift knew people, and,
as individuals, he loved them; but when they changed into
groups, he hated them, satirized them, and stung them into
realizing the dangers of the herd. Gulliver never understood
this.
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"A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT"
Illustrations by Arthur Rackham
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"A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT"
Illustrations by Milo Winter
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"A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT"
Illustrations by R.G. Mossa
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