Tiny Emperors, Flying Scientists and Talking Horses: Why Gulliver's Travels Was Never Just a Children's Book

No, not really. Gulliver's Travels is often shelved with children's books because of its tiny people and giants, but Jonathan Swift wrote it as a political satire, a sharp attack on human nature, European governments and the fashionable travel books of his day. Children can enjoy the first two voyages as adventure stories, and many abridged picture-book versions stop there. Read the whole book as an adult, though, and you find a much stranger and angrier work: flying scientists who try to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, immortal people who are miserable because they keep growing old, and a final voyage in which the hero decides that horses are wiser than humans and can no longer bear to live with his own family. This guide explains who Swift was, what happens in all four parts, who the main figures are, what the satire is aimed at, and which of its invented words are still part of everyday English.

Who was Jonathan Swift?

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on 30 November 1667 and died on 19 October 1745. He was an Anglo-Irish writer, essayist, satirist and Anglican clergyman, and many readers regard him as the greatest satirist of the Georgian era. In 1713 he became dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, which is why he is still often called "Dean Swift".

Swift liked to hide behind other names. He published his works under pseudonyms such as Isaac Bickerstaff and M. B. Drapier, or with no name at all, and Gulliver's Travels itself pretends to be written by its narrator, Lemuel Gulliver. His dry, straight-faced irony became so recognisable that this kind of satire is now called "Swiftian"; his most famous later example is A Modest Proposal (1729), the essay that coolly suggests poor Irish families could solve their troubles by selling their babies as food. Knowing that this is the same man who wrote Gulliver helps a lot: the calm, reasonable voice is part of the joke.

How the book was written and published

Nobody is sure exactly when Swift began. Some accounts link the idea to around 1713, when Swift and friends such as Alexander Pope and John Gay formed the Scriblerus Club to make fun of popular literary genres, including the "travellers' tales" that were so fashionable at the time. Swift's letters show that the real writing began in 1720: he wrote Parts I and II first, Part IV in 1723 and Part III in 1724, and the book was complete by August 1725.

Because it was a political satire aimed at the Whig government, it was risky to publish. Swift probably had the manuscript copied by someone else so that his own handwriting could not be used as evidence, and in 1726 the copy was secretly delivered to the London publisher Benjamin Motte. Motte, afraid of prosecution, cut or softened the most dangerous passages and published the book anonymously in two volumes on 28 October 1726. It was an immediate success. The poet John Gay joked that it was read by everyone "from the cabinet council to the nursery", and Swift himself said he had written it "to vex the world rather than divert it". A fuller text, closer to what Swift wanted, appeared in George Faulkner's Dublin edition of 1735.

The four voyages in brief

Part I: Lilliput. After a shipwreck, the ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver wakes up on a beach as the prisoner of a race of tiny people. The Lilliputians are hospitable but nervous about his size, and they turn out to care enormously about trivial matters: which end of a boiled egg you crack open has split the nation into bitter factions. Gulliver helps them against the rival island of Blefuscu by dragging away its whole fleet, but when he refuses to help conquer Blefuscu completely, he falls out of favour. Charged with treason, partly for putting out a palace fire by urinating on it, he is sentenced to be blinded, escapes to Blefuscu and finally gets home.

Part II: Brobdingnag. On his next voyage Gulliver is left behind on a land where the grass is as tall as trees and the people are giants. A farmer exhibits him for money, and the farmer's daughter Glumdalclitch looks after him. Later he is sold to the queen, lives in a little "travelling box" and fights wasps and a monkey. When he proudly explains European politics and gunpowder to the King of Brobdingnag, the king is horrified rather than impressed. A giant eagle finally carries off his box and drops it into the sea.

Part III: Laputa and other places. Attacked by pirates, Gulliver is rescued by Laputa, a flying island whose rulers love music, mathematics and astronomy but cannot use them for anything practical. At the Grand Academy of Lagado, researchers work on schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers and softening marble for pillows. On another island he talks with the ghosts of famous historical figures, and on Luggnagg he meets the struldbrugs, who never die but go on ageing and are treated as legally dead at eighty.

Part IV: The Houyhnhnms. Now a ship's captain, Gulliver is abandoned by his mutinous crew in a land ruled by the Houyhnhnms, calm and rational horses, where filthy human-like creatures called Yahoos run wild. He comes to admire the horses and to see all humans as Yahoos with a little reason. The horses' assembly decides that he is a danger and sends him away. Back in England, he can hardly stand his own family and spends hours every day talking to the horses in his stable.

The main characters

The story has only one constant figure: Lemuel Gulliver himself, a practical, observant and rather gullible man who reports everything with the same calm precision. That flat, trustworthy-sounding voice is Swift's trick. Gulliver describes absurd things as if they were perfectly normal, and his own opinions slowly harden as the voyages go on. He is surprised by the scheming of the Lilliputians at the start, but by the end he sees the Yahoos as an accurate picture of humanity.

Around him, each country offers a different kind of mirror. The Lilliputians are proud, petty and obsessed with rank. The King of Brobdingnag is a sensible giant who judges Europe harshly. The Laputians are so lost in theory that servants must flap them on the mouth and ears to make them notice conversation. The Houyhnhnms are reasonable and honest, yet they calmly expel Gulliver without much thought for him. Swift also gives Gulliver a friend in almost every land: the kind girl Glumdalclitch in Brobdingnag, and at the very end the generous Portuguese captain Pedro de Mendez, who rescues him even though Gulliver now considers him just another Yahoo.

What is the satire aimed at?

Scholars usually describe three broad themes. The first is a satirical look at European government and at petty differences between religions; the egg-cracking war is a parody of religious and political feuds. The second is a question: are people born corrupt, or do they become corrupt? The third revives an old argument between "ancients" and "moderns", which Swift had already joked about in an earlier work.

The book is also built with care. Each part reverses the one before: Gulliver is huge, then tiny; the countries are complicated, then simple, then scientific, then natural. And the points of view mirror each other, because Gulliver judges the tiny Lilliputians as vicious and scheming, and then the King of Brobdingnag judges Europe in exactly the same way. The Laputa episode mocks the Royal Society and science that never asks whether it is useful, and the rebellion of the city of Lindalino against the flying island was an allegory of Ireland's protest against a British coinage scheme, which is partly why that passage was left out of early editions.

Some readers have even seen the book as an answer to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, published seven years earlier. Where Crusoe shows one man rebuilding civilisation alone on an empty island, Gulliver keeps arriving in established societies. Swift even names the captain who invites Gulliver on his third voyage Robinson. Finally, there is the question of misanthropy, a hatred of humankind. Early critics such as Swift's friend Bolingbroke complained about it, but several later scholars argue that Gulliver's final disgust with people should be read as comic rather than as Swift's own bitter message.

Why it still matters

Gulliver's Travels remains one of the most famous classics of English and world literature, and it is still the most printed book by an Irish writer. It has been called a Menippean satire, a children's story, early science fiction and a forerunner of the modern novel, and it has been adapted for films, television, radio and the stage, from a 1902 silent film by Georges Méliès onwards.

Its biggest legacy may be in the dictionary. Lilliputian has entered many languages as an adjective meaning small and delicate, and Brobdingnagian appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a word for gigantic. The Oxford English Dictionary also traces yahoo, "a rude, noisy, or violent person", back to Swift. Even computer scientists borrowed from the egg war: the terms big-endian and little-endian, for two ways of ordering bytes in memory, come from the Lilliputian sects who disagree about which end of an egg to crack. The joke is that the choice is technically trivial but still splits systems into incompatible camps.

How to read it today

If you have only met the children's version, start again with Part I in full and notice how much political detail the picture books leave out. Then read Part II and pay close attention to Gulliver's conversations with the king, because that is where Swift turns the joke around and points it at the reader. Part III is the loosest and most episodic, so it is fine to read it in pieces. Save Part IV for when you have time to think, since it is the darkest and the most argued about. A modern edition with notes will explain the political targets, but you do not need them to enjoy the jokes. Swift's plain, careful prose is also good practice for intermediate English readers: the sentences are long, but the vocabulary is concrete and the narrator never hurries.

Learn with Gulliver's Travels: English words and phrases

Word or phrase	Meaning	Example
Lilliputian	very small, or petty and unimportant	They argued over a Lilliputian detail.
Brobdingnagian	enormous, gigantic	The new stadium is Brobdingnagian.
a yahoo	a rude, noisy or violent person	Some yahoo was shouting in the street.
to vex	to annoy or worry someone	The delay vexed every passenger.
big-endian / little-endian	two ways a computer orders bytes	This file format is little-endian.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a silly argument you have seen, using "Lilliputian" and "to vex".