Gulliver's Travels
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First published anonymously in 1726 under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels presents itself as the extraordinary travel journal of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon whose voyages carry him from the miniature kingdom of Lilliput to the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, and onwards to stranger territories still. Each new land reveals a society governed by its own peculiar customs, ambitions and absurdities, offering Swift a fresh perspective from which to expose the vanities and contradictions of his own world.
Beneath its inventive adventures lies one of literature’s sharpest works of satire: a searching examination of political power, scientific pretension, religious conflict and the frailties of human nature. Swift’s comic precision and unsettling vision make the book at once a brilliant entertainment and a deeply sceptical portrait of civilisation. Frequently adapted for younger readers, its original complexity and darker passages reveal a work far removed from a simple children’s adventure, and one of the defining achievements of eighteenth-century English prose.
From the book
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
— Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
On Gulliver’s Travels
“Whether the excellence of Gulliver’s Travels is in the conception or the execution, the power is somewhere, and it is a power that has moved the world.”
— William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets